Lady Chatterley’s Nature

 

Lady Chatterley’s Nature

 

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is clearly obsessed with nature. Nature is lovingly described; most of the action takes place in a wood; animals (pheasants, a dog) are among the dramatis personae. The text is replete with naturalistic description. Nature is set over against industrial civilization in the form of collieries, as well as intellectual civilization in the form of works of fiction and pictorial art. Mellors represents nature; Sir Clifford represents predatory capitalism and intellectual refinement. Mellors is a gamekeeper who lives in a wood in a small cottage and hut; Sir Clifford lives in a grand country house with servants. Mellors roams freely through wood and world, while Sir Clifford is confined to a wheelchair (the result of an industrialized war). There is a tremendous amount of discussion of the evils of civilization and the healthy cleansing power of the natural world. The author is clearly on the side of nature.

            This is the context in which to view the most salient and notorious aspect of the novel: its sexual explicitness. Why did Lawrence insist on this? It didn’t even exist in the first version he wrote, and it would obviously prevent the book from being published, as well as generating enormous critical disapproval: so why did he choose to go there? Two suggestions may be made. One is that he relished the technical challenge of writing explicitly about sex—how is the writer to do it, in what vocabulary, in how much detail, to what effect? The other is that he believed not writing about sex explicitly in a novel about adultery was simply cowardly, caving in to an irrational taboo (cf. Joyce’s Ulysses). No doubt both these motives were operative and both are fully justified, but I think the reason goes deeper and is more thematic. It is that Lawrence wanted to treat human sexuality as a fact of nature, as a natural biological phenomenon. He wanted to depict it as he might depict the behavior of the pheasants or the dog Flossie—as we might say, scientifically. He was a great describer of nature, and this was an area of the natural world that had yet to be described. In other words, he wanted to stress the continuity between nature as a whole and the part of it constituted by human sexual behavior (including sexual anatomy). So we are treated to a naturalist’s description of lovemaking between Mellors and Lady Chatterley, right down to penis and vagina. The words “fuck” and “cunt” are not shied away from. Thus sex belongs to nature, which is a Good Thing in Lawrence’s worldview. And it has to be said that he does it remarkably well: that is the marvel of the book—how well he brings off this literary feat. Has sex ever been written about so evocatively, and straight out of the gate too? We come to see sex as part of the natural history of humankind alongside eating and drinking. The body emerges as a site of pre-civilizational innocence and splendor—nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide or euphemize. The body, for Lawrence, is deep. It knows things. In order to convey this message the author needed to engage in some serious corporeal description. He didn’t want to shock; he wanted to recognize, to reflect. He wanted sexual realism. That is the underlying reason for writing about sex in the way he did—to make the novel realistic, not idealized or cowardly or simply false to the facts. There is nothing titillating or pornographic in the way he depicts sex (it is tame by modern standards, though still powerful); he simply gives you the nuts and bolts, the way things actually are (or were at that time).

            Take his use of the word “crisis” to describe orgasm (he also uses that word). Yes, he is going to talk about male and female sexual climax (“coming off”, as the book quaintly says), but the word “crisis” injects a curious ambivalence into the description, producing a kind of literary double take: how is something so good like something generally disagreeable? It also enables the writer to avoid dull and repetitious sexual language that might evoke the wrong kind of response (Lawrence is actually a very moralistic writer). How is it possible to derive the dubious joys of pornography from this odd word? Or consider the famous passage about entwining flowers in Connie’s “maidenhair”: here we see a literal joining of nature and the sexual organs, as if hair and flowers are of the same stuff. Lawrence’s underlying theme is sounded loud and clear: sex and nature are one. And if one is beautiful, so is the other. This is not about playing naughty games with the gamekeeper in classic British “Carry On” style—there is nothing remotely funny about it–but rather an attempt to free sex from its conventional associations and return it to our organic nature. The flowers, the pheasants, the wood, and the lovers—all belong together in the natural scheme of things. And all contrast with the horrors of industrialized working-class life and the dry stiffness of the British aristocracy. It is to be noted that God is never mentioned in the book, and surely that is not an accident: nature worship takes God’s place. The problem Lawrence is unable to solve, though the book shows he was well aware of it, is how to integrate the advantages of industrialized society with the primordial attractions of nature. Money may be bad, as the book continually insists, but do we really want to go back to a world in which money does not exist? And how are comfortable houses to be built and health improved and starvation avoided? It might be nice to run naked in the rain once in a while, as the lovers do, but do you really want to be drenched all winter long?  Still, in that primitive little hut in the woods Mellors and Lady Chatterley can revel in the dream of pristine nature: they can call on their sexual nature to join them with the rest of nature, albeit briefly.

 

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Deontological Consequentialism

 

 

Deontological Consequentialism

 

Our ordinary moral discourse contains a large number of rules or maxims that concern the effects of actions on people and animals. Here is a sample list: Don’t be cruel, Don’t be stingy, Help strangers, Treat others kindly, Don’t be a bully, Respect other people’s feelings, Don’t hit people, Don’t torture people, Treat children gently, Be patient with the elderly, Don’t drive aggressively, Be considerate, Don’t keep people waiting, and so on. These are broadly consequentialist: they concern the results of actions: they regulate how our actions affect other beings. If we ask why we should obey them, the answer will involve the kinds of effects actions will have on others, both physical and psychological. Their form is similar to other rules of conduct such as prohibitions against lying, stealing, promise breaking, cheating, etc. Morality consists largely in such rules—hence the attraction of deontological ethics. It would be wrong to equate the effect-oriented rules with classical utilitarianism: nothing in these rules logically implies that we should maximize happiness and minimize suffering. That is at best an attempt to generalize over the many rules in question, and it is vulnerable to well-known objections (which I won’t rehearse). Nothing in the acceptance of such rules commits one to a consequentialist theory of the classical kind—though the rules might be thought to provide support for such a theory. It is entirely possible to hold to these rules as part of morality and not buy into classical consequentialist theories. That is, it is possible to be a deontological consequentialist: morality is centrally concerned with consequences but that concern is properly expressed in a collection of rules that are not to be reduced to mere felicific outcomes. One might be a pluralist about the rules, holding that they can’t be subsumed under more general principles (such as W.D. Ross’s duties of non-malificence and beneficence). One might also be skeptical of the idea that outcomes fall into two neatly defined categories—pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness. Or one might have no particular views about human and animal psychology. The effect-oriented rules could be taken as irreducibly various and not subsumable under any broader set of concepts (cruelty, say, would not be regarded as simply causing pain—what about the dentist?). So there is nothing in adherence to these rules, or insistence on their importance, that necessitates a consequentialist morality in the classical sense. We can take account of consequences within an entirely deontological framework; indeed, that seems like a natural way to proceed. Deontology is not opposed to consequentialist thinking, if that thinking is properly interpreted in terms of rules of conduct, possibly irreducibly various.

            We thus don’t need to accept a mixed moral theory, part deontological and part classical consequentialist; we can be deontological across the board. Morality doesn’t have two big departments uneasily joined together (compare quantum physics and classical physics); it is unified, homogeneous. We might decide to group the multiplicity of rules in various ways, thereby achieving some simplification of morality: we might divide the totality of rules into rules applying to (i) wrongs of effect, (ii) wrongs of contract, and (iii) wrongs of intention—or something of the sort. But we stick to a rule-based deontological scheme (and isn’t the injunction to maximize happiness and minimize suffering itself a type of very general moral rule?). What we don’t do is seek to derive moral principles from facts about good and bad states of the world viewed independently of specific rules of conduct. We stick closely to moral thinking as we actually find it. And isn’t this the psychologically realistic approach? Children are not taught abstract utilitarian theory but specific rules of conduct that can be absorbed and committed to memory. These are the motivational maxims that enable someone to operate morally in the world without burdensome calculation. Of course, they don’t remove all moral conflicts and quandaries, and they need general intelligence and judgment if they are to be used successfully, but they constitute the solid atoms of moral thought—the directives we rely on in our day-to-day lives. The injunction not to drive aggressively, say, is an extremely useful piece of advice, though it may not be readily subsumed under a broader principle (“Don’t do potentially harmful things”). It is quite true that people are often insufficiently results-oriented, superstitiously clinging to taboos and misguided ideas of sin, but the solution to this need not be wholesale utilitarianism; it can be the recognition that our ordinary moral thinking is full of specific rules that are broadly concerned with the effects of actions on others. Why is our treatment of animals morally wrong? It isn’t because it produces a state of the world in which there is unnecessary suffering—though that is clearly true—but rather that it involves innumerable violations of moral rules that we take for granted in the case of humans: rules prohibiting cruelty, confinement, disrespect, treating animals as means not ends, taking life, being unkind, and so on. The utilitarian calculation understates the degree of wrongness involved in our treatment of animals; a deontological approach allows us to see the full extent of the wrong (compare slavery).

            The way normative ethics is typically presented is that an injection of deontology is introduced to rectify the flaws in a basically correct consequentialist outlook. But we do better to incorporate wrongs of effect into a deontological framework. That is really where they belong, as evidenced by our ordinary moral thinking. Why is it wrong to torment a particular bird? Is it because that will lead to a state of the world in which there is less overall happiness than would otherwise obtain? No, it’s because it’s cruel to torment the bird.  [1]

 

  [1] It is entirely possible to abhor cruelty but not abhor suffering. Life is full of suffering, some of it life enhancing, but there is no excuse for cruelty. It makes sense to eliminate all cruelty but the desire to eliminate all suffering is quixotic at best. We should be in the business of obeying specific rules of conduct not attempting to adopt a godlike perspective on the present and future distribution of happiness and unhappiness. Consequences certainly matter but they don’t matter in the way consequentialists tend to suppose.

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Truly Physical

 

 

Truly Physical

 

If we consult the OED on the word “physical” we find the following as the primary definition: “relating to the body as opposed to the mind—involving bodily contact or activity”. Only the third definition given captures the sense intended by philosophers: “relating to physics or the operation of natural forces generally”. The primary definition might be paraphrased as of the body: to be physical is to involve the human body, to be located in the body, to concern the body—as opposed to the mind, the psyche, the spirit, the soul. This is the sense employed in such locutions as: physical education, physical exercise, physical therapy, physical anthropology, physical abuse, physical appetites, physical examination, physical love affair, and physical beauty. The word “physical” in this use is close to “fleshly”, “somatic”, and “carnal”: to be physical is to consist of (or somehow involve) flesh and bone, blood and guts, muscle and mucous. The organs of the body are physical in just this sense, being precisely organs of the body. The brain is no exception: it is indisputably of the body, one of its parts. The mind, by contrast, is not clearly of the body, which is why it has been deemed immortal, separate from the body, a different kind of thing entirely (not even material). Mark that to be physical in this sense is not to be physical in the sense favored by philosophers: something can be of the body without being fully describable by physics. A vitalist could believe that the organs of the body are not reducible to physics, holding that a special force animates living tissue; or you might think that biological concepts are not reducible to the concepts of physics and chemistry.  [1] We can be quite neutral on the science and metaphysics of the living body while declaring certain things to be of the body—or not of the body, as the case may be. In the past the mind was thought to be not of the body and hence not physical in the present sense: it was deemed immaterial, incorruptible, located elsewhere, not beholden to the body for its existence, and maybe not even causally connected to the body. Thought, in particular, was taken to be non-physical in this sense—not an attribute of the body at all. Thinking is not a bodily process like digestion or breathing  [2]: the soul thinks and it is not of the body. Thus we can coherently envisage a doctrine, viewed as radical, that maintains that, contrary to tradition and maybe even common sense, the mind is physical in the sense we are considering: it is of the body. We can call this doctrine “physicalism”, carefully distinguishing it from the doctrine usually so called by philosophers, i.e. the doctrine that the mind is reducible to the entities and properties described by physics. The former doctrine is not hostage to the fortunes of the latter doctrine; indeed, proponents of it might be hostile to that doctrine, viewing it as false, vacuous, or even nonsensical. Being of the body is not to be equated with being as physics describes things, now or in the future: for it may be held, for various reasons, that there is no merit in the idea that the body is purely physical in that sense. In any case, I wish to investigate the former doctrine in its own right: the idea that the mind is really a bodily thing and not a non-bodily thing—which I will call simply “physicalism”. It might also be called “bodyism” or “somaticism”, but the dictionary licenses using the word “physical” to refer to the doctrine in question. Is physicalism in this sense true?

            It is important to see what physicalism, as so defined, opposes. Take mental illness: a non-physicalist would hold that mental illness is caused by evil spirits or impure thoughts or developmental factors operating independently of the body (including the brain). It should therefore be treated by a priest or a psychoanalyst not by a neurologist. But a physicalist about mental illness would hold that it has causes within the body of a chemical nature and that the appropriate treatment should be directed at the body (drugs, surgery, physical exercise, etc.). Even if the etiology is psychogenic, the illness itself is connected to the brain in discoverable ways and could not exist without the brain’s cooperation (so to speak). Mental illness is not a condition of an immaterial substance cut off from the body but is deeply enmeshed in the body’s biological activity. Thus we have a physical (bodily) account of mental illness as opposed to a supernatural (non-bodily) account. Note that we are not saying that the psychological manifestations of mental illness are reducible to brain states or facts described by physics; it is just that mental illness is body-involving, body-located, inextricably bound up with the body. Let’s even boldly state that we have discovered this to be true by empirical investigation, whatever may be the case with respect to the reducibility of psychology to physics. In the same way it may be said that mood swings and depression are physical phenomena, being occasioned by chemical imbalances and the like; they are not perturbations of an immaterial spirit lurking somewhere in the general vicinity the body. Ditto for hunger and thirst. Emotions in general might be similarly viewed: they involve the body in various ways—flight, approach behavior, butterflies in the stomach, genital arousal, and so forth. Specific parts of the brain are activated during emotional excitation. Emotions are bodily phenomena not disembodied states of a quasi-divine soul: they have a “physiological basis and origin”, as one dictionary says under “physical”. As for perceptual experiences, the physicalist will assert that they are intimately joined to the bodily sense organs and hence “of the body”: seeing is a physical process because of the bodily eye, as are tasting and smelling because of the mouth and nose. We don’t see, taste, and smell in some way removed from our bodily nature: these are physical processes (even if the sensations involved are not reducible to brain states). They are anchored in the body, dependent on it, shaped by it. Hence physicalism in the present sense is true of emotions.

            The case of thought presents more of a challenge to this brand of physicalism, because its bodily connections are not so evident. Here the case for a non-bodily immaterial substance has been at its strongest. This tells us that physicalism of the kind under consideration is not a trivial or empty doctrine—it has polemical bite. It might even be false!  [3] But the determined physicalist is not without resources even in the case of thought: putting aside the existence of regular brain correlates, the physicalist might insist that thought has bodily functions in the shape of behavior, and that it plausibly has an evolutionary explanation that invokes aspects of the organism’s body.  [4] It is the function of thought to control the body’s activity so as to secure the organism’s goals, and thought (it may be suggested) arises from features of the body involved in activity involving the hand and mouth. Evolutionary change builds on prior traits of the organism and thought must have developed from earlier properties of the body—or so it may be contended. So thought is not as disconnected from the body as may appear at first sight: there is thus room for a physicalist account of its origin and function. Thought is physical in the sense that it is of the body and not removed from the body, as religious dogma and dualist metaphysics may require. Logical reasoning, like mental derangement, has its somatic roots, its bodily bedrock, its flesh and blood associations. This is not to say that logical reasoning is reducible to the motions of matter, as the usual kind of physicalism claims; it is just to say that it is connected to the body in significant ways. The mind is thus “of the body” not something existing in splendid isolation from the body, as in traditional forms of supernatural dualism. Its ability to exist in disembodied form is accordingly put into question, making physicalism at odds with religious conceptions. I venture to suggest that we have discovered this to be true by a mixture of empirical investigation and philosophical reflection; and it in no way depends on accepting physicalism in the usual sense intended by philosophers of mind. The two doctrines say completely different things. I would say, then, that the former kind of physicalism is true, uncontroversially so in today’s intellectual climate, while the latter kind of physicalism is not true (or even really intelligible). It is a question whether the attraction of the latter doctrine, such as it is, owes anything to the evident appeal of the former doctrine: some sort of physicalism is true, after all, though not the sort commonly advocated today. Do we hear echoes of the one in the other and mistakenly conclude that it must be true because the other is? And let us note that the dubious doctrine itself makes no explicit reference to the body: it simply announces that mental phenomena can be explained in terms of the concepts developed in physics to deal with the inanimate world—the living body as such is left out of account. Clearly this is an extremely ambitious doctrine going far beyond the relatively anodyne suggestion that the mind is inextricably bound up with the body. Neither form of physicalism entails the other, but both can be expressed using the ambiguous term “physical”–one sense yielding something true, the other sense not so much.

            A glance at the history may be helpful. Nineteenth-century science, particularly biological science, made great strides in understanding the body, including the brain. The mind came to be seen as an outgrowth of the body, fostering the doctrine that the mind is really a function of the body.  [5] This superseded older dogmas founded in religion that sought to place the mind in a separate non-bodily realm. The doctrine I am calling “physicalism” was thus firmly established at this time and only confirmed by subsequent study. This intellectual stream is separate from the metaphysical materialism that goes back to Hobbes: that doctrine was never firmly established and, according to some, never will be (for many reasons). I am simply pointing out that the two doctrines labeled  “physicalism” are quite different, so that the fate of one does not depend on the fate of the other. We can therefore be “physicalists” without being physicalists—the mind is “of the body” while not being “material” (whatever that means). This seems like a good thing because the thought that the mind is in some sense “physical” is surely correct: yes, it is physical in that it is an attribute of the body, bound up with the body, situated within the body. It is not something existing separately, proceeding by its own power, capable of life without a body. Does this solve the mind-body problem? Not in the slightest: in fact it is what is needed in order to formulate that problem. For the problem is how the mind can relate to the body in which it is so clearly enmeshed—there would be no such problem if the mind were simply ontologically remote from the body. There could be a mind problem if the mind had a separate existence, but there is only a mind-body problem because the mind and the body are somehow stuck together. The brain is of the body by virtue of being literally inside the body and made of the same kind of stuff as it, but the mind is not of the body in that way—so in what way is it of the body? All I am saying here is that there is a form of physicalism, properly so called, that is not the same as the doctrine usually bearing that name. The mind truly is physical, though it is not true that it is part of the subject matter of physics. The mind is physical by being biological (somatic, organic) but not by being covered by the science of physics. The old opposition between being of the body and being of the mind has collapsed, with the mind now also regarded as being of the body. In the beginning was the body (not just the body’s deeds); the mind came along later firmly attached to the body. Thus the mind is as physical as the heart or kidneys in that sense (though not in the other sense).  [6]    

  [1] We could be mysterians about the body and yet hold that the mind is physical: the mind is of the body and yet the body is a mystery. I suppose we could even be immaterialists about the body and still believe the mind is physical (bodily)!

  [2] I read somewhere that breathing itself was not always regarded as bodily but viewed rather as an influx of spirits that kept the body alive by supernatural means (or did I dream this?). When the lungs were discovered breathing came to be seen as a bodily function sans spirits.

  [3] From a first-person introspective point of view, the essential involvement of the body in all one’s mental life is by no means apparent, so physicalism in the present sense has some work to do to overcome the deliverances of introspection. It is essentially a theoretical position not one founded in phenomenology; hence it has been a matter of controversy.

  [4] I describe a view like this in Prehension (2017), especially chapter 10.

  [5] I can’t resist mentioning Freud at this point: he is a true physicalist in the present sense because he maps psychological formations onto bodily formations in his theory of the development of the psyche. Thus the oral, anal, and genital stages correspond to psychological maturation: if you want to understand human pleasure, you need to see it as emerging from these parts of the body, according to Dr. Freud. Psychoanalysis proceeds by somatic analysis. Of course, psycho-sexuality cannot be disconnected from bodily organs; it was this connection between sexual appetite and the body that led theologians to seek ways of turning the mind to higher things (up there in the soul not down here in the loins). Sexual desire is unavoidably physical (bodily) desire.     

  [6] I don’t think the view I have described here has an accepted label, or is even recognized as a theoretical option, though it evidently exists in the historical record. I have thought it worthwhile to delineate it and distinguish it from other doctrines that are more familiar. And it is nice to be able to report that at least one version of physicalism is actually true!

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Being Cool

 

 

Being Cool

 

Being cool is something everyone aspires to be, but no one seems to know what it is. Also: is aspiring to be cool consistent with being cool? It isn’t the same as being good or socially desirable or beautiful, though elements of those qualities permeate coolness. It is an odd mixture of the moral, the aesthetic, and the likeable. It is, as has been remarked, a somewhat mysterious quality, elusive, hard to pin down–though there is a good deal of consensus about who has it and (more obviously) who does not. For me it begins with the shoes (and always has): a cool person must wear cool shoes. Then come the pants (or the skirt): this too has to be cool, though I am not so stringent when it comes to leg wear. The shirt or jacket is also judged for coolness (I like only three-button jackets). Then the hair reverts to the feet: a cool hairdo is a must, though the scope for coolness here is limited by the facts of nature (baldness being the main enemy of hair cool). What else must be added? It is generally agreed that independence is central—not following the masses. The cool person has autonomy, detachment, a willingness to make up his or her own mind. This independence covers everything from politics to fashion. It includes taste and judgment—in clothes, music, art, reading matter, comedy, speech, and even posture. It need not involve rebelliousness, though it can involve that; indeed, stridency of any kind is alien to coolness. The cool individual always maintains ironic distance, a sense of humor, a certain playfulness, and a reluctance to get overexcited. He or she is always tolerant and broad-minded (except where the matter of shoes in concerned). Cool headedness is part of coolness—not “losing one’s cool”. A cool person keeps his cool, his amused detachment, and his principled lack of enthusiasm (in the old religious sense). He tends not to say much and he speaks carefully, sometimes inarticulately (James Dean comes to mind). The cool person may suffer but he is not voluble about it—though it may be conveyed by the look in his eyes. Suffering in silence is the mark of cool. The shoes already speak volumes.

            An interesting aspect of the concept of cool is that things as well as persons can be cool. It is a question which of these is logically prior. A cool person wears cool clothes, but the clothes are not cool because the person wearing them is; and similarly for music, hairstyles, speech patterns, etc. Even in intellectual and moral matters the intrinsic coolness of the object is crucial: a cool person is one who favors cool ideas and cool values. Thus we can’t separate the coolness of a person from the coolness of her possessions, styles, and beliefs. If you want to be cool, you have to surround yourself with cool stuff (which may include no stuff at all). There are no cool people living in uncool houses, with uncool musical tastes, and uncool political opinions. For me choice of conversational topic is a sure marker of the cool and the uncool: someone who just mouths platitudes and repeats clichés is the epitome of the uncool, while someone who picks up on something unusual stands a fair chance of passing the coolness test. Of course, someone who is trying his hardest to be cool is not going to make the grade: one must not aim to be cool. Ingratiating oneself is also unlikely to qualify one as cool, though when done ironically it can do the trick; irony is always conducive to coolness. Naturally, writing about coolness, or claiming it for oneself, is death to coolness—but then again the cool person is happy to take a holiday from being cool. Not being cool can sometimes be part of being cool. You begin to see why coolness is so elusive, unpredictability being of the essence.

            One of the big problems faced by coolness these days is its commercialization. In the good old days very few people were cool and the concept itself hardly existed, but the marketers latched onto coolness as a selling point long ago (sometime in the 1950s). Now we are programmed to be cool and desperate to get our share of it: not being cool has become a source of shame and insecurity. So coolness has lost its minority appeal: it no longer sets a person apart. New ways must be found to assert one’s coolness. Fashions, in particular, spread like wildfire, so sartorial coolness can only be maintained for short periods. I remember when bell-bottoms came in around 1964: I was one of the first to wear them in my hometown of Blackpool and was looked at askance by many a straight-panted passer-by. It was cool for a while, but before long your Dad was wearing bell-bottoms. Ditto long hair and side burns. It has now become almost impossible to be cool in one’s mode of dress, because the clothing manufacturers are onto new trends so quickly. Rap music was cool for about twenty minutes, but then it was swallowed up by the fashion-entertainment industrial complex. Capitalism and cool are not natural allies. I have noticed that biker gear has not been commercialized in this way, probably because not many people ride motorcycles, so it is possible to retain some measure of cool by adopting the biker look (even fat old guys can pull it off). But in general it is hard now to generate new forms of cool that have not been debased by capitalism: you really have to go out of your way to find pockets of cool that you can dip into. Accordingly, coolness has become rarefied and difficult to detect; it is too easily exploited for commercial gain. Still, it is good to keep trying to find new varieties of cool and adopt them. Cool has always been creative and now we need to be creative about cool itself. I have some ideas but I’m reluctant to share them, because of the aforementioned bastardization.      [1]

 

Colin McGinn       

      [1] Clue: they involve playing with the ideas of diversity and inclusiveness, the latest rigid orthodoxy. I also think Minnetonka shoes are pretty cool viewed through an ironic lens that is not avowedly ironic. And Buddy Holly is cool again, especially his sentimental stuff.

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Personal Pronouns

 

Personal Pronouns

 

It has often been observed that there is something funny about “I” referentially speaking yet we use it all the time. I would say that we don’t know what we are referring to: we don’t know what the self is. This is an old story: philosophers have had a difficult time saying what the self is, even to the point of having no satisfactory word for it. People used to speak of the “spirit” and the “soul”, but this is now deemed suspect and spooky; today we prefer “person”, “subject”, or just “self”. None of this verbiage provides any clue as to what we are talking about, however. Is the referent of “I” a body, a brain, a part of a brain, a center of consciousness, a sequence of connected mental states, a primitive person, or nothing at all? The self is a mystery: we don’t know what it is. Yet we talk about it all the time (and think about it too)—the word “I” is always on our lips. You might think that we could define the self as “the bearer of conscious states”, but what is this bearer—is it a body or a brain or a center of consciousness, etc.? Given our ignorance of what it is, shouldn’t it be difficult to refer to it successfully? Some have said that we are acquainted with the self, as we are acquainted with pain or the color red; but if so, it is an acquaintance that provides no illumination as to what we are referring to. Do we introspect the self? Apparently not, as Hume famously observed. True, we know that it exists (at a given moment anyway): the Cogito supplies us with grounds for a bare existential claim. But this is cold comfort given that we don’t know what it is that so indubitably exists. Descartes thought he knew that the self is a thinking thing at least, but again that doesn’t settle what kind of thinking thing—it could be a brain or an immaterial substance or just a loose conglomeration of ideas. Still we happily bandy the word “I” about, as if we grasp clearly what it is that we are designating. We even have a semantics for it (content and character and all that); we just don’t know what kind of entity “I” refers to. The self is just whatever it is that “I” refers to. By contrast, we don’t think that pain is just whatever it is that “pain” refers to: we know quite well what pain is. The self is a stark enigma.  [1]

            It is often supposed that this is a peculiarity of the first-person pronoun, but that is not true. The same point applies to the other personal pronouns: “you”, “he”, “she”, “they” etc.: in each case we are referring to entities whose nature eludes us—the very entities that use ”I” to refer to themselves. I don’t know what I am and I don’t know what you are, or her over there. I don’t even know what it is when I refer to my pet lizard’s self with that demeaning pronoun. All these are words we use to talk about things whose nature we don’t grasp; and I don’t mean we don’t grasp this nature deeply—I mean we really don’t know what kind of thing we mean when we use these words. In a clear sense, we don’t know what it means to say “I am hot” or “She is smart” or “You are funny”. Do we really understand these sentences? True, they have a use, but that is all they have–they have no clear ontological content. No proposition is intelligibly conveyed by them, since we don’t know what the subject of the proposition is. Whatever meaning they have, it doesn’t convey the nature of the thing denoted. The sense is not a mode of presentation of the reference, if that means it enables the speaker or hearer to grasp what kind of thing is denoted. Since these expressions are at the heart of ordinary language use, we can say that our grasp of meaning falls far short of knowledge of the reference of some of our most common expressions. The mystery of the self thus infects linguistic understanding, rendering it at best partial. We are like people referring to colors but who have never seen any: such people would refer to things whose nature they don’t grasp. We know about things that are closely associated with selves, namely mental states, but the self itself is an unknown quantity—an I-know-not-what. Reference to the self thus proceeds in the absence of knowledge of the referent (though of course we know many things about selves).

            Why don’t we know the nature of the self? What is it about the self that precludes knowledge of its nature? I don’t think we know the answer to that question either; indeed, our ignorance seems distinctly odd considering how close we are to our own self (it isn’t as if selves exist on the far side of the moon). We ought to know the self much more intimately, but in fact we have to admit epistemic defeat in the face of the self: nothing in our self-knowledge reveals the kind of thing that the self is. The personal pronouns seem merely to point without specifying what kind of target they are pointing at. They operate in such a way as to compensate for our natural ignorance of the self rather than to express our knowledge of the self (as many acts of reference do). I think their peculiar semantic character should receive more attention.  [2]

 

  [1] It would be wrong to suppose that our ignorance of the self is like other sorts of philosophical ignorance such as not knowing the correct analysis of knowledge, or the metaphysical status of color, or whether “good” expresses a primitive property. Our ignorance of the self is far more radical than that: we really don’t know what order of thing we are dealing with. Hume was right: we have no concept of the self such that its general nature is revealed by that concept. This is why a person unlettered in philosophy can be made quickly to accept that he or she is ignorant about what a self is. This is ground-floor ignorance, not ignorance of high-flown philosophy. Compare color: a blind person is far more ignorant of color than a sighted theorist trying to come up with the right analysis of color. Similarly, our access to the self reveals almost nothing about what kind of thing it is: we are effectively self-blind (though self-obsessed).

  [2] The connection between meaning and knowledge has been explored but not the connection between meaning and ignorance—ignorance of a very basic sort. Somehow language had to cope with the deep-seated ignorance we labor under in the case of the self, and it came up with the apparatus of personal pronouns (and associated expressions). It converted deep ignorance into a viable system of reference. How did that happen? How did language manage to latch onto selves in an epistemic vacuum? 

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Tennis Sublime

Tennis Sublime

 

I can’t let what happened at the US Open this year pass without comment. First we had the transcendent victory of Emma Racunadu over her equally transcendent rival Leyla Fernandez. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so sublime in sports: the skill, the style, and the determination. Just look at Emma’s return of serve! She didn’t drop a set in ten matches. Leyla was equally phenomenal and the match was closer than the score indicated. Together they have transformed the tennis world, and perhaps more than that. Pure joy! As for the men’s final, that was sublime in a different way: to see Novak Djokovic lose like that was itself a sublime moment in tennis history (despite robbing him and us of the calendar Grand Slam). Medvedev simply outplayed him with a remarkable display of defense and attack. Note the way Novak congratulated him at the end of the match and in his acceptance speech: true sportsmanship. It was two days of quality and purity such as we seldom see these days (no Americans were among the players). I return to the court with a new spring in my step.

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9/11

I do sometimes wonder whether the appalling degradation in American culture, morality, and intelligence that we have winessed in the last twenty years (including in universities) was caused by the horrific events of 9/11. At the time I feared that the American reaction to these events might exceed in harmfulness the events in question. Can there be any doubt that American paranoia has increased markedly because of that day?  

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Is Shape Physical?

 

 

 

Is Shape Physical?

 

Shape is included on the traditional list of primary qualities, but that doesn’t settle the question of whether it is physical. Indeed the question is seldom raised: is the shape of an object a physical property of it? Nor is it an easy question to answer—largely because of vagueness in the word “physical”. Is geometry a physical science? It is not usually so described, since it deals in abstract objects. Such objects are ideal: perfect circles, perfect rectangles, etc. No physical object (so called) exhibits these properties, so it seems reasonable to say that perfect shapes are not physical. Shapes are mathematical abstractions imperfectly exemplified by physical objects. We apply geometry in physics, but the objects of geometry are not themselves physical entities (in so far as we know that means). Moreover, there are no laws of shape recognized in physics, as there are laws of gravity and electromagnetism: shape doesn’t act as a force producing motion. A physics textbook doesn’t have a chapter on the laws governing shape. Shape is irrelevant to gravity and electromagnetism: the mass of an object is relevant to its gravitational force but the shape is not. Physics would be essentially the same if every object had the same shape. So there seems every reason to deny that shape is physical. But does that imply that it is mental? Not at all, and the idea seems obviously wrong (short of generalized idealism). Shape is neither mental nor physical. It may be causally consequential but it is not thereby a physical property. Someone who believed that the world is fundamentally geometrical would not ipso facto be a physicalist (or materialist). Nor would it be correct to say that size, number, motion, and dimensionality are physical properties: they too belong on the mathematical side of things. Maybe it is necessary truth that anything that has such properties is a physical thing, but that by itself doesn’t entail that they themselves are physical properties (the same might be said of colors). One is then left wondering what indisputably is a physical property, if shape isn’t one. Is mass a physical property? But mass is defined in terms of inertia, which is a dispositional mathematical property (measured by how much force is needed to initiate motion). What about electric charge? But that too is dispositional and mathematical, and has historically been regarded as clearly non-physical (like gravity). Is it perhaps that no property is physical but that objects are what fall under that (alleged) concept? But in virtue of what—don’t we need some viable notion of a physical property? The very idea of the “physical” starts to slip through our fingers once we focus hard on these questions. It is entirely conceivable that the whole subject called “physics” has no intelligible notion of the physical—and that this is no objection to the science known by that name. Here we reach a conclusion that has persistently threatened the would-be philosophical physicalist: we simply have no workable general notion of the physical. Shape might have seemed to provide at least a paradigm of the physical, but that has turned out to be a frail reed. All we are left with is the idea that a physical property is what the subject called “physics” talks about, but that is a variable and pragmatic matter. We have no clear idea of what a physical property is intrinsically—unless we decide to stipulate that everything is to be counted as physical, the term being equivalent to “real”.

            I say all this to make a metaphysical point, viz. that we should stop trying to divide the world up into the physical and the non-physical. We can talk about what is mind-dependent and what is mind-independent, but we should drop the assumption that anything can be usefully described as “physical”. This means that falling under that term is no measure of ontological primacy or clarity: we can’t contrast other types of putative property with physical properties and hope to formulate a useful distinction. We can’t characterize mental or moral or mathematical properties as “non-physical” and hope to join a genuine metaphysical debate: for there is simply no such thing as the category of “the physical”. We might have supposed that shape would give us a firm foothold, but shape turns out not to be a good candidate for fixing the notion of the physical. The word “physical” has an everyday use (or several such uses) but as a theoretical term it lacks any clear definition, as has frequently been pointed out. That is why we hesitate when asked if shape is physical—as we do when asked if color is physical (or beauty or moral rightness). Let me put it more forcibly: if we can’t say whether shape is physical, we may as well retire the term from serious theoretical employment. It’s like asking whether shapes are holy: the term belongs to an outmoded theoretical framework and survives mainly as a term of approbation. Are circles more holy than rectangles? Are circles less physical than irregular figures? Such questions have no meaning, because “holy” and “physical” lack determinate content. I would say that shapes are clearly not physical if we mean by “physical” something like “tangible and concrete” or “relating to the body” (as the OED has it): for shapes are abstract, and they are not peculiar to the body. Nor are they physical in the sense that they are perceived by the senses: they may sometimes be imperceptible to the senses, and they may never be perceived as they really are. Shapes are just not intuitively physical (though intuitions about the concept of the physical are notoriously slippery). So the world contains properties that are not mental and not physical, and these properties are among the most salient in our experience. We can intelligibly ask whether everything real reduces to the standard list of primary qualities, but that is not the same question as whether everything real reduces to the physical—which is pretty much vacuous. I can imagine a “shape-ist” metaphysics in which geometrical form is taken to be the most basic property in the universe, but it would be misguided to describe this as a form of physicalism. Maybe everything comes down to the motion of shaped objects, but it is not helpful to describe this as a type of physicalism. The doctrine known as “physicalism” survives largely on the lack of clarity in the term: we should abolish it and speak directly of specific kinds of properties such as shape and color. Whether these properties count as physical is an empty question best ignored.  [1]

 

  [1] The familiar (and good) point that gravity is not physical according to traditional notions of the physical (deriving from mechanism) is the usual way of questioning the utility of the term “physical”; my point here is that even shape poses problems for that term. In what sense precisely is shape to be deemed physical? Would Plato and Pythagoras so characterize it? It is hugely tendentious to count circularity as a physical property and is not remotely warranted by tradition—you may as well declare that beauty is a physical property because physical things (whatever that may mean) have it.   

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