PTSD

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PTSD

I am 76 and I suffer from PTSD. In fact, I have two doses of it. One is medical: cancer and its treatment, dating from 2023. The other is psychological, dating from 2013, and concerns my departure from the University of Miami. I have no wish to discuss either situation and indeed generally avoid discussing either of them (I would like to expunge both from my memory). But I would like to say something analytical and therapeutic, in case it may help someone else and to clarify my own thoughts on the subject. In my experience, this condition is characterized by a chronic apprehensiveness—that there may be a recurrence. It feels as if the world might suddenly give way beneath your feet for no discernible reason. You never know what might happen and you can’t stop it from happening. All you can do is ride the wave as best you can. There is an initial shock and then a drawn-out aftermath. It is like being hit on the head from behind and concussed. You are constantly looking over your shoulder. There can be intense anger, a sense of outrage. Some people around you behave well, others badly (incredibly badly). You go into survival mode. Sleep is an ordeal. What is particularly troubling is the accumulation of aftershocks over a longish period of time. It never seems to be finished, and you have to think about it—your life depends on it. Your life feels threatened. Small things like car accidents get magnified. Pet deaths hit you hard. People close to you suffer too, through no fault of their own. It is not so much post-traumatic as traumatic.

How to deal with it? There may not be a uniform formula, but I can talk about my own case. I did things I valued and spent time with people I liked. I kept away from people and things I didn’t like. Here I was fortunate. I wrote and read, played tennis, played music, threw knives, swam, sang. In particular, I wrote articles for this blog: these are my answer to PTSD, medical or psychological. This gave me an escape from the ongoing psychological torments of trauma. I dedicated myself to daily tennis, because I needed to make a physical recovery. Slowly and steadily, I regained normality—I mean, over a number of years. It took work and concentration. I was lucky in some ways: I didn’t die and my mind wasn’t permanently damaged. Of course, I bear the scars (I will show you them if you like) and they will never go away. There is a reason people are called “survivors”: it isn’t victory but sheer persistence. You don’t beat it, but it doesn’t beat you. Is there anything good about it? Not that I can see, though I suppose it does concentrate the mind (like the death penalty). And it really is about death: will it kill you or will you come out on the other side? Am I a better person for it? I don’t think so, perhaps slightly worse (I have less tolerance for idiots—you see what I mean?). I think it is good to recognize PTSD for what it is and face up to the challenge; there’s no use denying it. I have no uplifting positive note to end on.

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Persuasion and Imagination in Philosophy

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Persuasion and Imagination in Philosophy

Persuasion clearly plays a large role in philosophical practice. We do it by means of logical argument based upon generally accepted premises; we don’t tend to marshal new evidence. In consequence of this we encounter a good deal of refutation, or at least resistance and rejection. We try to persuade people and respond to their objections. We are trained to be good at it, with some better than others. We also make liberal use of the imagination: we imagine possible scenarios and construct thought experiments. Do these activities have counterparts elsewhere? Indeed they do—in human life and in other species. People and animals act persuasively all the time, and also use their imagination. We philosophers are employing basic biological traits. What kinds of persuading and imagining are most common and salient in human and animal populations? I take it that I will surprise and shock no one if I cite sexual varieties of these talents: animals persuade other animals to mate with them, and human beings (I don’t know about animals) engage in sexual fantasy. Attempts at procreative persuasion may be met with rejection and resistance, just like philosophical arguments. Sexual imagination can be more or less ingenious and can be performed alone. It is a not implausible theory that imagination in general stems from sexual imagination, though the biological function of such imagination is obscure (private practice?). A person might, on occasion, imagine a sexual act and then try to persuade someone else to do it with them. Persuasion and imagination are clearly basic human traits, and sex is just as clearly written deep into them.

The point I am laboriously leading up to is that (you guessed it!) these two traits lend to philosophy an erotic edge—a sexual vibe. All that persuading and imagining, performing and fantasizing! I hereby offer the following compelling proof of this bold conjecture: you can “proposition” someone for sex and you can also do it when delivering a philosophy paper (“I would like you to accept the following proposition”). You are trying to get their assent. You are trying to persuade someone to believe that p, and you are trying to persuade someone to agree to F (you see what I did there). When you invite your audience to imagine a state of affairs in a philosophy talk, you are asking them to do something resembling sexual fantasy. The same faculty is being activated. If your talk is about the philosophy of sex, you might ask them to imagine merely possible ways of having sex. The sexual connotations of persuasion and imagination will not trail far behind, contributing to the sexual aura of the activity. Socrates was always propositioning people in the marketplace. Kant was a tireless seducer (of opinion). Russell had a highly alluring patois. Sartre knew how to turn on the dialectical charm. Wittgenstein knew how to mesmerize. Of course, we suppress these connotations normally, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that they operate somewhere in the background. The mind is susceptible to natural affinities. They can be added to other ways in which sex and philosophy intersect, as I have discussed elsewhere.[1]

[1] See various papers on this blog. The social psychology of philosophy should not be ignored: theatrical performance, charisma, humor, style, competition, intellectual fashion, peacocking, charm. In Plato’s Symposium, the assembled individuals relax on couches, eating and drinking, and proceed to give rousing speeches on love, aiming for persuasion, employing imaginative examples; the atmosphere is thoroughly sexualized. Socrates is the star turn and he turns in an erotically charged performance in front of his would-be lover Alcibiades. This is the model for many a philosophical “symposium”.

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Linguistic Structures

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Linguistic Structures

We are familiar with the three levels of linguistic structure: semantic, syntactic, and phonetic. But what is the relation between them? What determines what? Take the semantic and syntactic levels: does semantics determine syntax or syntax determine semantics? Which came first? Which is basic? Did meaning exist first and then grammar supervene on it, or did grammar come first and meaning piggyback on that? It is evident that there is no meaning prior to grammar—no semantic structures that lack corresponding syntactic structures. Everything meaningful is syntactically expressible; there is no meaning in our heads that eludes expression in the grammar also in our heads. All meanings (propositions) have sentence forms that express them. So, it may seem that syntax wears the pants; it determines the structure of meaning. But can syntax exist without semantics? That is a harder question, since sentence structure seems possible in the absence of meaning, as in nonsense sentences. But it is not clear that syntax is entirely semantics-free, because traces of meaning subsist even in nonsensical sentences (“Twas brillig and the slithy toves” etc.). Doesn’t a string of sounds count as syntactic only because it suggests some sort or degree of meaning? Not just any arrangement counts as a grammatical sentence. Semantics and syntax seem interdependent, though it is clear that linguistic meaning requires syntactic categories and rules. This means that semantics is limited by syntax; meaning can’t exist in isolation from syntax. There are no semantic structures that exist without syntactic rules, i.e., rules of combination. There are no meanings that are indeterminate as to syntactic category: there cannot be a meaning that doesn’t know if it is noun-like or verb-like. Rules of combination are not superimposed on meanings but inherent in them.

What about the phonetic or articulatory level? This is usually treated as separate, quite extrinsic to syntax and semantics. It is an add-on. But if that were so, it would be possible for meaning and syntax to exist in the absence of a suitable articulatory apparatus. Is that really possible? Here we must tread carefully. It is not a necessary condition of meaning and grammar that a vocal apparatus should exist—noises coming from the mouth—because there can be silent sign language. Both of those articulatory systems have considerable resources that extend to all syntax and all linguistic meaning; they don’t fail us with respect to some sentences of human natural languages. But what about inner speech (so-called)? This is meaningful and well-formed but not dependent on external physical signals. True, but it is dependent on inner articulatory machinery—whatever that may be. There has to be some internal medium that embodies the syntax and semantics of inner speech. And that medium must impose limits on syntax and semantics: human languages must be limited by human articulatory capacities. You can’t mean what you can’t say—in some articulatory medium. No one possesses meaning and grammar but no means of articulating them. Linguistic reality presupposes articulatory ability. There is no unspeakable language.

But now, the articulatory organs are species-specific and biologically constrained. Our vocal organs (and hands) are limited devices, as must be our internal means of articulation; very resourceful, to be sure, but not godlike. Let’s just focus on the mouth area: breath, tongue, teeth, oral cavity—this is what we use to vocalize syntax and semantics. Neither more nor less. But not all creatures possess such an apparatus; and if they don’t, they can’t speak like us—they can’t mean like us. Thus, phonetics constrains meaning via syntax. You can’t mean what you can’t articulate. Our vocal apparatus is the sine qua non of our language. Other speakers may have lesser or greater articulatory capacity (birds, whales, Martians), but our language is beholden to ourvocal apparatus. We can only make so many sounds, at such and such a speed, within a certain pitch range, and distinguished by such and such vocables. If this were greatly reduced in the human species, our language would be reduced too. Our “semantic scheme” is limited by our articulatory powers; really, these powers determine the scope and limits of syntax and semantics. They are the foundation of language, the indispensable infrastructure. A human language is what this infrastructure permits. But it is limited and species-specific—like the eye or limb. Language does not transcend bodily reality. It is rooted in anatomy and physiology.

Human language is discrete, digital, and combinatorial—separate words that join together to form sentences. It is not continuous, analogue, and non-combinatorial (like trees in a forest or mountains). This is because of our contingent vocal apparatus.[1] It is logically possible that a creature should speak a language that is analogue not digital and refuses any sort of lexical combination. It could still mean. But we have evolved to speak under the constraints of our vocal inheritance, improving no doubt with time but not transcending their origins. To the extent that our language shapes our concepts, then, our conceptual scheme is partly fixed by our vocal organs—the range of sounds they can produce. The same will be true of any linguistic community that communicates by means of hand signs. This is a rather radical conclusion, because it grounds meaning and even thought in facts about articulatory organs, e.g., tongue movements. The human tongue limits what we can mean and think! Our tongue is the key to our species superiority—not by itself, obviously, but crucially. In the beginning was the tongue (it occupies a large part of the brain along with the lips). The linguistic turn is the tongue turn.[2] For syntax and semantics are shaped by the tongue (inter alia) as it interacts with the oral cavity. And the tongue is a remarkably agile organ, capable of great speed and finely organized movements. It deserves more credit, but it is largely hidden. In speech acts, the tongue is the main engine of voice production, and yet it is never mentioned by theorists. In evolution an adaptation typically relies on traits already possessed, and language must have done the same; this always constrains the new trait. In the case of human language (but not necessarily Martian language) natural selection picked the tongue to do most of the heavy lifting, along with the lungs, lips, and mouth. The eating apparatus was recruited to do double duty, enabling meaning to get a foothold; so, our language owes a lot to our organs of food consumption. Meaning is connected to food via the mouth. The tongue is involved in eating as well as speech, so it forms a bridge between language and food. We speak and mean with our organs of ingestion. Saliva is involved in both (try speaking with a dry mouth). This is the evolutionary biology of language. We have the tongue to thank for our language-mediated species dominance (this includes the tongue part of the brain).[3]

[1] We can ask what our pre-linguistic vocal apparatus was for before it got coopted by the language faculty. Presumably, it was used in mating, warning, and competition, like animal voices in general (particularly apes). It will then bear the marks of these early functions: murmuring, shouting, and raging. We still do these things with our voice, but also use it to discuss philosophy, etc. I like to think that the murmuring and mating function was carried over to the first uses of language as we know it. All speaking is flirting.

[2] Of course, the word “tongue” is another word for a language, as in “mother tongue”. We could call linguistics “tongueology”. Spanish has “lengua” for tongue, Italian “lingua”. The OED gives us: “the fleshy muscular organ in the mouth, used for tasting, licking, swallowing, and (in humans) articulating speech”. We could add “making (spoken) language possible”. Odd to think that fleshy little muscle could be so momentous in human life—“the gift of tongues” as it says in the Bible (Acts 2).

[3] I will refrain from discussing the role of the tongue in osculation and other interpersonal activities, except to note that it is skilled in several types of communication. Someone should write a book on the philosophy of the tongue. The tongue is a vital organ in most animals, but we are the only animal that uses it to express our thoughts (it may even make thoughts possible in us as things actually are).

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Is Philosophy Erotic?

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Is Philosophy Erotic?

Plato certainly thought so: the Symposium is all about sex and philosophy, Eros and Logos. He believed that the two things are deeply intertwined but that the connection is obscure.  This is another iteration of the mind-body problem: the erotic body and the intellectual mind. Plato thought that the connection indubitably exists but that it is a mystery what the connection is—and he was right about that. It is not at all obvious, to put it mildly, that sex and philosophy hook up in some deep (or even superficial) way; on the contrary, they could not be more different. Sex is animalistic and corporeal while philosophy is godlike and spiritual. What have the genitals (the seat of sex) got to do with the brain (the seat of reason)? How can the one be the other? To be sure, we love philosophy and we love sex, but these seem like completely different kinds of love—what could unite them? How can love of logic be a case of love of body (anatomy and physiology)? Perhaps we can see a connection or overlap if we accept Plato’s philosophy: in philosophy we seek knowledge of the Good, a Form of inestimable value, and in sex we seek something we find especially good, the beautiful body (the form) of another human being. If we personify the Forms, likening them to gods, we can see how being attracted to them is like being smitten with another person—we want to “get with” both, passionately, intimately. But what if we don’t accept Plato’s theory of the Forms and the glowing sexiness of the Good? Then the analogy, the subsumption, seems to disappear. We could fall in love with the perfect godlike Form of the Good, but not if there is no such thing. Then the erotic conception of philosophy falls flat. Is there another way to vindicate the Platonic theory?

We must begin at the beginning: what is sex anyway? This question is much harder than it seems. You might think it is easy: sex is an activity of the genitals. But this is neither necessary nor sufficient. It is not necessary because the erotic is not confined to the genitals; we also have the lips, breasts, hands, feet, and rear end. And other activities are commonly regarded as having an erotic edge: dancing (ballet, ballroom, hip-hop), cooking and eating, gymnastics, music, painting, pottery, massage, etc. Eros has a hand in things beyond the genitals. It is also not sufficient, because there are activities involving the genitals that are not sexual: urination, medical examination, washing, photographing, and even playing silly games. The genitals are employed sexually only under certain conditions and they are what confer sexuality on the proceedings. It is even possible to experience the erotic without any involvement of the body, as in sexual fantasy; you could engage in this and have no genitals (or even a body). Sex is something more psychological, but what it is remains elusive. For present purposes, I will not attempt any further analysis, except to say that sex is the encroachment of the world on the body and soul—a certain sort of impact or interaction. It is a breaking of boundaries, an invasion of the self, experienced erotically, whatever that is. What we do know is that it is passionate, intimate, enveloping, and pleasant (generally); we are prepared to give up a lot for it. So, let’s just say that sex is erotic and leave it at that; you know it when you feel it. The question is whether philosophy is also erotic, and if so how. We know the erotic is not confined to the organs of reproduction, so it can in principle be true that philosophy is erotic without involving these organs. Maybe philosophy could cause erections in some people, but that is not necessary for it to qualify as erotic. We need something more abstract, more general, more spiritual.

I have two (connected) ideas: one about logic, the other about immortality. Philosophy uses logic to derive conclusions; it is a logic-heavy discipline. But logic resembles procreation in that both involve a purposive sequence of moves leading to a desired conclusion: in logic it is a proposition, in sex it is copulation or babies.[1] The conclusion follows from the sequence; it leads up to it. Entailment is like procreation. Logical argument reminds us of procreation; it is sexy in that way. So, when we hear a logical argument, we are put in mind (perhaps unconsciously) of the sexual act. We can be in the grip of a logical argument and we can be in the grip of sexual passion; both motivate, compel. It is like witnessing a sexual act, or performing one if the logical action is solitary. You can watch someone else do it or you can do it yourself. Logic is mesmerizing, as sex is—they both get your attention and hold onto it. So, the method of philosophy resembles the method of orgasm (or baby) production. There is an orderly sequence, a desired end-point.[2] But this is not the primary point of similarity (though it should not be underestimated): the crux of the matter turns on the connection to immortality (a Platonic theme). For both involve immortality through reproduction implicating other people. We long to live beyond our allotted span, to survive our biological death; sex and philosophy make this possible. Sex does it by natural genetic reproduction; and let us remember it concerns the soul as well as the body—we want our soul to go on. Our children are our means of achieving immortality. Philosophy does it by means of teaching: linguistic intercourse not genital intercourse. You pass on your ideas to others who in turn pass them onto others. Plato immortalized himself this way. Books provide a convenient vehicle for intellectual immortality. Sex and philosophizing are both reproductive acts, forays into the future, means of cheating death. They are anti-death. And we love what defeats death. We are passionate about achieving immortality. We strive to make it so. It gets our juices flowing. You want immortality? Then get busy with sex and philosophy! You will love it, I guarantee. Thus, we are erotically drawn to sex and philosophy, whatever “erotic” means exactly (that warm eager absorbing feeling). You love what makes you immortal; it turns you on, gets the motor running. Hence, sexual romance and intellectual romance. The great thing about this explanation is that it appeals to a profoundly powerful human desire—the desire not to die. Your thoughts will go on, in addition to your face and walk.

An objection zooms into view (oh no, things were going so well!): doesn’t the same reasoning apply to things other than philosophy—science, literature, recipes, dance moves, etc.? It does, but this is nothing to get worked up about, because the same desire is answered by these things too. Plato didn’t have our narrow conception of philosophy in mind when he enunciated his erotic view; he meant knowledge in general. All teachers are erotically drawn to their calling, according to the present theory: they all love truth (as they see it) and promulgating it. Education is knowledge transmission across generations. So, does anything distinguish philosophy from these other occupations? Yes, the role of logic: logic itself is erotically charged because of its resemblance to the procreative act, but we can also say that logical argument affords a special kind of immortality. Consider St Anselm’s ontological argument: Anselm himself is alive in this argument; he lives on in it. It isn’t like discovering a particular geographical fact or disease; it’s an aspect of him. He lives on not just an idea of his. To take another example, the soul of Berkeley lives on in his logical arguments; we feel we know him (ditto Locke and Hume). Philosophy is thus more personal than other subjects, more bound up with the self. It isn’t as detached as science or cookery. Also, we instinctively feel that logical argument has a special kind of value, being the very framework of rational thought. We value rationality highly, rightly so, so we celebrate logical productions; they give us a buzz or tingle or throb. We are touched by them, as if for the very first time. We feel Eros swelling inside when we contemplate them. At any rate, for those of us with a taste for philosophy, logic is especially prized and desired. We are like lovers who especially admire a well-turned ankle (not everyone can see why this is so damn sexy). We philosophers love not just truth but logical truth; it gives us a peculiar intense thrill. We find it beautiful, exhilarating. Oh, modus ponens!

Plato was basically right, even though he struggled to identify the erotic component of philosophy (he was too entranced by those glittering other-worldly Forms). Phenomenologically, we feel the tug of Eros in Logos; we feel our mind expanding and warming. We feel that pull, that irresistible attraction. Our interlocutors are our partners in intellectual procreation; our theories are our babies. We have intellectual romances. We enjoy nothing more than a good lecture. Our seminars are like group sex—full of trepidation and triumph (also failure). Winning an argument is like a sexual conquest. We nurture our intellectual offspring. We yearn for the immortality provided by disciples. The atmosphere is charged with erotic tension. It can even get in the way of good old-fashioned sexual intercourse! It can feel like infidelity. It is our beloved yet demanding mistress. Socrates may have been ugly, but he was a marvelous intellectual companion. Talking to him was like having a mind massage, or a bit of rough and tumble, a roll in the intellectual hay. Intercourse with Socrates was always stimulating. You could forget his physical ugliness in the beauty of his mind and come to love him. He was the most desirable man in Athens, to men and women alike. Socrates was Eros personified (and yet he spurned ordinary sex, we are told). The truly erotic exists on the mental or intellectual plane; the bodily kind is a pale simulacrum. At any rate, the truly erotic person finds time for both.[3]

[1] See my “Sexual Logic”.

[2] I like the idea of the sexual Cogito: I copulate; therefore, babies exist (you can supply your own vernacular version). The deduction is actually not that far from the classic Cogito, given its logical shakiness. There is an inner logic to the procreative act. It is written into our genes as much as logic is. We are born knowing how to reason, and we are born knowing how to procreate. Maybe the latter turned into the former at a certain point in evolutionary history. Who knows?

[3] Bertrand Russell is a good example: his love of logic and mathematics and his more human loves. Principia Mathematica is pure pornography. Jim Joyce had nothing on Bert Russell. Fred Ayer was famous for his erotical positivism. Old Ari was noted for his syllogistic prowess, or so Mrs. Ari reports. Philosophy and sex go naturally together, though puritanical types want to keep them apart. Philosophy succeeds sex in human development, but it builds on it, draws from it. Philosophy is sex (Eros) intellectualized.

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Thoughtless Language

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Thoughtless Language

We normally suppose that adding language to an animal mind would enrich it, but might this be the opposite of the truth? Might language subtract from the mind? Might language act like a prison of thought rather than opening up new vistas? Might a cat or dog have a richer mental life than a human? Heresy, I know, but listen, it might be true. Animals have richer mental lives than us from a purely sensory point of view—hearing and smell (dogs and cats), vision (some birds), touch (probably the octopus), echolocation (bats and porpoises). And surely their thoughts (as well as emotions and decisions) are tied to their sensory consciousness. We don’t have this; what we have is a symbolic system consisting of combinable words that evolved comparatively recently in evolutionary history. The fact that this system is capable of infinitely many combinations does nothing to show that it has an expressive power in excess of a nonlinguistic creature, since that kind of productivity is consistent with only a few lexical items and a couple of iterative procedures. What is relevant is the coding power of language in relation to experience: how good is a word at coding an experience? Doesn’t a word bleach out a lot of the reality of even simple sensations? It denotes but it doesn’t express, embody, incarnate. Suppose an animal thinks in sensational terms while we think in verbal terms: it can preserve its experience in its thought contents, while we must make do with a mere word. Doesn’t language leave all that richness behind, replacing it with something much more impoverished expressively? It fails to capture the full reality of what we are experiencing, while in animals that is not the case. The linguistic mind reduces the content of experience, because language is a mere code, whereas animal thought preserves this content. Its thoughts are fuller, richer, more imbued with detail than ours, which have been squeezed into a linguistic format. We will be more prone to think in abstract generalities not concrete differences; we will ignore of lot of what is going on subjectively. Think of the mind of a whale or elephant: not stifled and etiolated by language but open to everything its senses can deliver, which is a lot compared to us. Cognitively, we have become language specialists, but this may well have left a good deal behind; we have a hammer so we think everything is a nail. Animals have no such all-consuming compressive device at their disposal, so they can see beyond it. Their thoughts may be far more capacious than ours, less streamlined and stripped down. Our thoughts may have reached a higher level of efficiency but at the cost of a loss of sensory depth—digital instead of analogue. Our thoughts about smell, for example, will be highly impoverished compared to a dog’s—and that means specific smells as well as the full range of smells. The dog is better at thinking about smells than we are, because we think in words. We are really good at combining these words, but the words themselves are expressively straitjacketed, mere labels. In this sense, language is like a prison that enables the mind to move quickly around inside it but provides no escape from it. We can surely imagine a creature for which this is true, and we look like candidates to be such a creature. To put it simply, animals have better thoughts than we do content-wise (if not efficiency-wise). They don’t think about the world by describing it in symbols but by experiencing it, and experience contains more information than description. Language has only been around for a relatively short time while sense experience goes back billions of years. Human language is therefore as much a curse as a blessing. It has colonized our minds and driven out the old inhabitants, and our mental lives are poorer for it.[1]

[1] I was stimulated to write this piece by my cat Blackie. The other night he began to mount the steps to the attic and paused with senses on full alert—ears, eyes, nose. After hesitating a few seconds, he decided not to bother and turned round, having clearly thought the matter over. I thought: there is a lot more going on in his head when he goes up those steps than what goes on in mine. In my case a sentence might flit lazily through my consciousness, summing up the situation, but in his case his mind was flooded with mental goings-on, sensory and cogitative. I use up my brain up with language, but he has a more direct way of experiencing the situation. Feline thought has dimensions that human thought doesn’t have (of course, the converse is also true). Because of language, human thought is less colorful than animal thought. A language of thought is less saturated with sense experience than sensation-based thought. Linguistically based thought is attenuated and desiccated. What you gain on the roundabout you lose on the swings.

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Sexual Ethics

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Sexual Ethics

What would a sex-based normative ethics look like? It would make the concepts of sex and procreation the central concepts of ethics not the concepts of happiness or duty, as in utilitarianism and deontology. If those theories recommend maximizing happiness and duty-obedience, then sexual ethics would recommend maximizing sex. I rush to add that by “sex” I don’t limit myself to the act of sexual intercourse but rather include the entire procreative process, including child rearing. I include producing babies as well as producing orgasms—what we might call the orgasm-baby complex. We have no single word for this, which is strange (we could call it “sexeration”), so I will stick to the monosyllabic “sex”, hoping that context makes my meaning clear. I am talking about the whole business of reproduction—from soup to nuts, seduction of partner to education of offspring. People generation. Anyway, my question is what an ethical theory would look like that placed the phenomenon of sex at the center: what would it capture and what leave out? How would it relate to the two conventional theories?

The first thing to note is that sex and the family are and always have been at the center of ethics. God himself initiated this ethical perspective: he created the universe in an act of divine procreation and filled it with sexual beings, animal and human. How he did this is left discreetly silent—not with genitals but possibly with his divine hands. In an act of self-excitation (or some such) he gave birth to reality—Adam and Eve and all their descendants, as well as Jesus his own son. God is our Father, after all. He is no stranger to sex in my broad sense; he invented it. He commanded it, instigated it. And obviously he was very good at matters procreative. We are only copying him in our small mortal way. Second, we are told to be moral in all sexual matters: be considerate lovers, faithful spouses, good mothers and fathers. Sexual immorality is deemed bad. Many forms of it are forbidden: incest, bestiality, rape, etc. The family is regarded as sacred, of great value; in advanced religions we are encouraged to treat strangers as like family. Honor thy father and mother; take good care of thy children. Family morality is foundational. Third, the standard ethical theories include sex in their systems, explicitly or implicitly. Utilitarianism emphasizes pleasure and happiness, but sexual pleasure and happiness are surely central, maybe basic (see below): the joys of sex and family life. Suffering is the absence of these in large part. Deontology also contains edicts concerning sex: don’t rape or commit adultery or practice incest or ignore the sexual needs of your partner. Thus, a good deal of morality is taken up with the sexual kind: sex and family are regarded as intrinsic goods; their absence not so good. They help make life meaningful and worthwhile.

But can sexual morality cover the whole of what we regard as morality? Here we will need to exercise some ingenuity, as the other two theories also do if they are to cover the ground. Can it be the whole truth? Can sex even account for hedonistic morality—what about the pleasures of food? Some may claim that the pleasures of eating are sexual, but I don’t think we need to go that far; what is true is that eating is a necessary prelude to sex. You can’t fuck if you don’t eat (don’t do it on an empty stomach). Nor can you provide for your children if you don’t eat. Biologically, the function of eating is to survive till the point of reproduction; after that, you may as well waste away. And eating is clearly bound up with procreation: the candlelit dinner, food on the family table, warding off starvation in times of famine. We may speak of the ingestion-copulation complex. We don’t eat merely to keep alive, or for the pleasant tastes; it is bound up with our life-projects as lovers and parents. Eating is an adjunct to sex. In animals eating is all about reproducing—there is no gourmet dining. Sex is the main course, the main pleasure. Happiness is sexual happiness. It doesn’t get much better than sex. We may as well say that maximizing pleasure and happiness is maximizing sex (including its aftermath in the family). For most of us romantic love is happiness; it isn’t merely peripheral, one fun thing among others. People can’t wait to lose their virginity; eating oysters can wait.

How about moral duties? Stealing people’s stuff is preventing them achieve their sexual-reproductive goals by removing their resources. Lying likewise, e.g., about how to be sexually attractive or what your beloved really thinks of you. Murder is bad because it deprives the victim of the great joys of life. Adultery is bad because it disrupts family life and sexual trust. Promises should be kept because a happy sex life depends on it. It isn’t difficult to bend the usual maxims into a sexual shape. And even if this seems to be stretching a point, we can always argue that sexual morality is the core of morality, the primary case. Ethics is mainly about sex and the family; the rest is peripheral. The primary moral qualities are sexual; anything else is secondary. Procreation is the chief good. It isn’t some general and ill-defined notion of happiness or pleasure (higher or lower?), and it isn’t defined by a series of unrelated commands groundlessly asserted. It’s about the very real and compelling facts of life—sexual facts. It’s about the person as reproductive animal; that is what we really care about, what gets us out of bed in the morning. It’s about our strongest passion and hence most deeply held values. Ethics as a philosophical subject should therefore be focused on this basic case; we wouldn’t be missing much of consequence if we limited ourselves to it. Sexual ethics is ethics, give or take a bit. It concerns the rights and wrongs of our sexual, reproductive, and family lives. Friends are treated as honorary family members, and strangers can be accepted as family pro tempore. Animals can be literally part of the family and affectionately petted, or regarded as members of our extended species family; after all, we are sexually descended from animals. Sexual kinship radiates outward from the familial core. Ethics is what we have constructed to deal with the facts of sexual life in all their complexity and reach. As George Michael once sang, “Sex is natural, sex is good, not every does it, but everybody should”. That is, put more philosophically, an adequate normative ethics will make sex pervasive and pivotal—procreationism is the correct ethical doctrine.[1]

[1] What would be the worst weapon ever invented? One that annihilated the sex instinct: no sexual desire, no copulation, no babies, no next generation, no more humans or animals. To use such a weapon would be the ultimate evil. It makes genocide look mild. You put it in the water and game over. Sex makes the human (and animal) world.

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An Argument Against Panpsychism

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An Argument Against Panpsychism

Panpsychism holds that elementary particles have mentality, attenuated perhaps, but capable of yielding consciousness as we know it. Yet particles don’t generally instantiate many properties—mass, charge, spin, motion, and that’s about it. So, if they also instantiate mental properties, these too must be few in number—say, three or four (or maybe just one). But how do we get the full range of mental properties out of such an exiguous basis? It looks impossible. Therefore, panpsychism is false as an explicative-reductive doctrine. We might decide to espouse it out of whimsical largesse, but it won’t work to explain the existence and nature of the conscious mind as it presents itself. The particle will be too mentally impoverished. To this argument it might be replied that physical objects display a similar variety of kinds at the macro level and yet the constituent particles also have a small number of basic properties. True, but we can bridge the gap mereologically by invoking an agglomeration relation: the particles combine to generate the full range of natural kinds (e.g., animal species). This is perfectly intelligible and indeed we have good theories of how it works (it’s like a jigsaw puzzle). But in the case of the mind this is precisely what is lacking: we don’t understand how a small number of primitives (mental or physical) can produce the full range of mental phenomena. Therefore, the original argument still holds. How could the elementary bits of mentality be arranged side by side so as to produce the manifold varieties of consciousness? We could, of course, declare it a mystery, but then we have abandoned all claim to explanatory adequacy; and that is really all that can be said in panpsychism’s favor, since it lacks any other independent warrant. Realistically, it is hard to see how there could be more than one proto-mental property of particles; but then, the task of generating all of consciousness from this scanty foundation looks impossible.[1]

[1] I think that panpsychism, seductive though it may be, provides only an illusion of understanding, even if true in some form. The same basic problem of emergence keeps cropping up. Still, it is an excellent theory to think about.

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What is it Like to be Gay?

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What is it Like to be Gay?

Answer: I don’t know, and neither do you if you are a straight man. For I have never had the desires or experiences of a gay man; I therefore don’t know what it is like to have such desires or experiences. The case is just like the bat or the blind. Of course, I have some idea of what it’s like to be a gay man, since I have knowledge of heterosexual sex and there is obviously an overlap. Again, it is like the bat case, since I do have the sense of hearing and I know what it is like to navigate through space by means of sense perception. But my knowledge is only partial; there is something about it that I don’t get. Presumably, the gay man feels the same about me: he doesn’t know it is like to be sexually attracted to women (as lesbians don’t know what it’s like to be attracted to a man). We are all aliens to each other in our sexual predilections (and vive la difference!). We don’t need to go to the order of bats in order to make this point. We could make all the same points about the mind-body problem by starting with the sexual preference case. It may be that some supporters of the gay lifestyle will resist my assertion of ignorance, insisting that I do know; but the same could be said by supporters of bat rights—I know what it’s like for them too (some people do say this). The point is that the familiar line of thought applies equally to the gay and the bat-like. And the same point about sexual orientation could be made by going further afield zoologically: do we humans know what it is like to be sexually attracted to an octopus or a warthog or a snake? Doubtful—though we can understand a description of their brains (ditto gay men). The sex cases provide good examples with which to make the point made by reference to bats.[1]

[1] This is another exercise in sexual philosophy: being open to sexual subject matter in the course of philosophical inquiry. I am sure that phenomenological ignorance of the gay mind has fueled intolerance of that mode of life, but that is not a topic I am discussing here. My point is that the argument of “What is it Like to be a Bat?” can be made by a case closer to home (not that its author ever said anything different); it has nothing essentially to do with alien species and strange senses. I note that the author of that paper also published a paper called “Sexual Perversion” so he is not averse to sexual subject matter. He could have decided to write a paper called “What is it Like to be a Pervert?” and made the same points (or a perverted bat).

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