Digressions&Impressions

The irrational and Ignorance in Natural Life Sentences

Notice that nothing in the epistemic argument here suggests that no prisoners should, in fact, spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars. Instead, the point is that rationality requires that we leave the epistemic door open to acquiring new information. Put bluntly, the argument says that it is irrational for the possibility of parole to be taken off the table at the outset of any sentence....

Nearly all of my students at Stateville are serving natural life sentences. At least a handful of them have been incarcerated since they were teenagers, one since he was 14. While I didn’t know any of their decades-earlier selves, their current selves are some of the most extraordinary students I’ve had in my 15 years of teaching. They are painters and poets, mentors and authors, researchers and advocates. They breathe new life into philosophical questions I’ve been asking for the entirety of my career. And yet we tell these men that who they are now and what they have accomplished matters so little to how they ought to be treated that we won’t even bother to consider it. Rationality demands that we do better.--Jennifer Lackey "The Irrationality of Natural Life Sentences," New York Times.

I  warmly recommend Lackey's Opinionater piece (although I was surprised she did not explore the possible role of the existence of the death penalty in motivating natural life sentence);* she raises important questions about the status quo in the penal code while giving a sense of the significance of philosophy to individuals, including prison populations, and the public. By combining her experiences with analysis, she makes philosophy come alive.

I agree with Lackey's conclusion. Even so, I would argue that it's not always irrational to limit (even severely limit), in the present, the scope of decision-making of future temporal selves or polities: promises, contracts, debts, laws, and treaties all do this; as Elster reminds us, Ulysses did it to listen to the Sirens. 

We may engage in such limitation, or self-binding, for all kinds of reasons, but because Lackey is primarily interested in exploring an "epistemic argument," I note that there is an important epistemic reason to limit the availability of new information, or evidence: doing so can (other things being equal--and of course they may not be equal and in the penal system they are definitely not equal) reduce uncertainty. Enforceable contracts and promises are paradigmatic instruments to reduce (epistemic) uncertainty; they allow, for example, for better and less costly planning and also for more reliable causal inferences.  This is true in low and in so-called high stakes environments. In fact, reducing uncertainty may be more valuable in high stakes environments than allowing new evidence to influence operations. This can sometimes involve eliminating any (or severely restricting) any possible role for new information or evidence. (This is basically a variant of Hume's argument for the extremely strict enforcement of the rule of law.) It's only when a practice is overwhelmingly oriented toward truth, rather than some other end, where epistemic doors have to be kept open (and even, then, there will be constraints -- of time, money, etc. -- that may keep doors closed).

Having said that, nothing in the previous paragraph undermines Lackey's idea that there is something really wrong about ruling "out the possibility of ever considering additional evidence" (that may motivate parole) about the cases she is describing. But I worry that couching it in the terms of contemporary epistemology actually misplaces the problem. Lackey's main argument is described in this passage:

But one argument that is surprisingly absent from these conversations is an epistemic one that has to do with us. For natural life sentences say to all involved that there is no possible piece of information that could be learned between sentencing and death that could bear in any way on the punishment the convicted is said to deserve, short of what might ground an appeal. Nothing. So no matter how much a juvenile is transformed behind bars, and no matter how unrecognizable an elderly prisoner is from his earlier self, this is utterly irrelevant to whether they should be incarcerated. Our absence of knowledge about the future, our ignorance of what is to come, our lack of a crystal ball, is in no way a barrier to determining now what someone’s life ought to be like decades from now.

What Lackey is pointing to here are three, non-trivial moral-political & moral-psychological (if not metaphysical) phenomena (that combine for an argument): (i) persons can change dramatically over time -- let's call this the transformation thesis --, and (ii) imprisonment is imprisonment of whole persons and so the whole characters of these persons matters to the justification of imprisonment. In addition, (iii) imprisonment is justified (at any given time) if the incarcerated person deserves it (at that time). I am going to ignore here the fact that Lackey also sometimes seems to presuppose the unity of the virtues (such that in virtue of her students being wonderful in a variety of ways now implies they are not capable of the kind of crimes now -- let's stipulate that they were rightly convinced [something that may well be worth challenging] -- that landed them in trouble).

Lackey's epistemic argument is, of course, not irrelevant to these three non-trivial moral phenomena, but I submit that if natural life sentences are irrational in the epistemic sense it will be so because we come to believe (not just because the brain-science evidence Lackey provides, but also, say, inspired by the work of Laurie Paul) the truth of the transformation thesis and some version of (ii-iii). But (i-iii) are substantial theses that deserve independent scrutiny. In particular, if one is moved by epistemic arguments in favor of uncertainty reduction and accepts the limitation of the scope of future action, then it is not obvious one will be moved by considerations like (iii). For, one thing natural life sentences do is to remove, fairly or not, questions about future desert from consideration altogether at the time of sentencing. Of course, if one thinks this question is removed unfairly  (as it seems Lackey does), then one can argue this. But at this point we have left epistemology and slid into ethics or political theory (or something in that ballpark).

And, in fact, Lackey herself notes that "public attitudes can evolve, moving away from a zealous “war on crime” approach to one that sees much criminal activity as the result of broader social problems that call for reform." This suggests to me that beneath the epistemological argument she is really appealing to a Dewey-Anderson style argument about the nature of a proper democratic culture in political life (recall): no political decision is final, and democratic life is itself an ongoing, experimental learning (or epistemic) process in which policies, including legal policies, are tried out and evaluated in light of experience. This argument has deep roots in American culture (e.g.,Thoreau). Of course, this kind of theoretical argument also appeals to epistemic virtues and epistemic standards, but, again, the force of the stance that Lackey exhibits is not primarily epistemic, but rather political and moral. And it strikes me as a mistake to consider those that reject this political and moral stance as "irrational."

So, to sum up, this post is not intended to challenge Lackey's core insight. There is something deeply problematic about natural life sentences and the unwillingness to be receptive to new evidence that may allow one to reconsider a decision is part of the problem. Lackey is right to call attention to it. But the reasons for it being problematic are not really epistemic, but moral and political.

Why care about labeling the argument? Lackey explicitly notes that she treats her argument as an addition to the existing moral (legal, etc.) arguments; so I do not want to suggest she is pretending to be offering a unique argument against natural life sentences. (And, as it happens, I defend the role of epistemology in political theory in my inaugural lecture tomorrow.) But, even so, there is in analytical philosophy a recurring temptation to treat moral and political issues as problems of meaning, language, or epistemology and, 'when we go public,' thereby, fail to do justice to the public's moral concerns (even if these concerns are flawed); by treating these as "irrational" we use reason to end conversation, rather than opening it up--and this would be an odd result, especially because Lackey exhibits so much courage to generate the right sorts of conversations.

On Axiomatic Political Science; The Conservative's Dilemma

politics admit of general truths, which are invariable by the humour or education either of subject or sovereign, it may not be amiss to observe some other principles of this science, which may seem to deserve that character.—David Hume “That Politics May be Reduced to a Science”

What we had should have never have ended--Jim Croce

That no political settlement is permanent is as necessary that humans are mortal. All known experience confirms these facts. True Conservatism, understood here as a political temperament, accepts this as an axiom and tries to slow the rate of change as far as possible. I distinguish such Conservatism from those more nostalgic programs, often called ‘Conservative,’ that wish to restore the conditions prior to some unwished for change (or worse). It also helps us distinguish those conservatives from those false Conservatives who align themselves with capitalism—a system of social organization that, whatever its virtues, greatly facilitates ("creative destruction" and all that) change.

At first glance there is something mildly ridiculous about treating slow change as an end in itself. Upon further reflection the desire for permanence has something morbid about it – the only known realization of near unchanging-ness is death --, too; or, in a different register, it might evoke union with that only unchanging object: God. This suggests that true conservatism also partakes in some of our deepest longings (which explains the natural resonance(s) between romanticism and conservatism).

Even so, it is undeniable that a stable environment makes planning for all kinds of long-term projects (families, commerce, architecture, renewable energy, etc.) easier. While such prudential considerations appeal to the general temperament of a Conservative, it can also form the basis of a more moral vindication of Conservative philosophy. In brief: if one allows that reasonable expectations generate obligations, including, perhaps, those associated with justice, then one can argue that stable conditions and slowly changing conditions are – prima facie – those circumstances conducive to the flourishing of virtues associated with justice. This is why, in fact, from Plato to Rawls those political blueprints primarily devoted to justice often appear so lacking in dynamism and why a Bismarck could support the welfare state from the start.

But to slow down the rate of change may well require considerable political activity by persuasion and legislation, which can create incentives that support the status quo and which may prevent undesirable changes. And this turns the Conservative to  more theoretical study of the political (as in political philosophy and science) because it needs to understand the causal order in order to know which policies to advocate in order to keep it from changing. Alas, political science teaches the law of unintended consequences (which is one of the reasons behind the first axiom) and, thereby, generates the Conservative dilemma: she wants to slow down change but now knows that some of her efforts will unintentionally facilitate more change. 

On Top of the World

While I was thus dividing my thoughts, now turning my attention to some terrestrial object that lay before me, now raising my soul, as I had done my body, to higher planes, it occurred to me to look into my copy of St. Augustine's Confessions, a gift that I owe to your love, and that I always have about me, in memory of both the author and the giver. I [Page 317] opened the compact little volume, small indeed in size, but of infinite charm, with the intention of reading whatever came to hand, for I could happen upon nothing that would be otherwise than edifying and devout. Now it chanced that the tenth book presented itself. My brother, waiting to hear something of St. Augustine's from my lips, stood attentively by. I call him, and God too, to witness that where I first fixed my eyes it was written: "And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not." I was abashed, and, asking my brother (who was anxious to hear more), not to annoy me, I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain...--Petrarca (1336).

There is a wide difference between admiration and love. The sublime, which is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, and terrible--Burke.

Today's post is an act of escapism after spending a morning serving on a committee that allocates grant money to scientists that have perfected the art of sincere over-promising and diligent accumulation  of strategic publication records; I picked up Cassirer and Kristeller's The Renaissance Philosophy of Man.

I used to associate Mt. Ventoux with the ritualized memorial of the death of Tom Simpson and, more favorably, the awe-inspiring time trial win by Jean-François Bernard in 1987 to be followed by disastrous team-tactics toward Villard-de-Lans. But now I can set those alonside Petrarca's account of his climb* of the mountain which, according to Wikipedia is 1,912 m (6,273 ft). (I read it in Nachod's translation in the Kristeller/Randall volume, but link to another one.) The logician, Buridian, is said to have gotten there first, but Petrarca's account is worth reading if only because of his astute comments about the trickiness of selecting travel companions.

The passage quoted above is near the end of Petrarca's description of his thoughts once he reached the top of the mountain together with his brother and two servants. In fact, the reported thought occurs at the start of sun-set. I am not the first to note that Petrarca, who describes his conflicted will alongside his narrative of the day-long journey up the mountain, echoes the conversion moment in Augustine's Confessions, where, carried along by the chanting kid's voice, which he decides to interpret as a command from God, Augustine picks up Scripture and is inspired to convert to Christianity by Romans 13:13-4, which induces a serenity of heart without doubt [quasi luce securitatis infusa cordi meo omnes dubitationis tenebrae diffugerunt].

Petrarca quotes a passage from the Confessions in which a post-conversion Augustine describes people's hankering after the sublime while lacking self-knowledge.** It is tempting to say that Petrarca treats Augustine as teaching him the significance of the spiritual life.

That's not all false, of course, but it is worth noting that in Petrarca this spiritual journey is re-interpreted as a call to a philosophical life. I don't just claim this just because of the emphasis on self-knowledge. Rather, I recognized (recall this post) Petrarca's quote from Seneca's eight letter (one of those "pagan philosophers"), nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder; for the soul, if it be great, naught is great, which characterizes the greatness of soul of the self-sufficient, even sublime mind--one that attains immortality by skilled emendation or posthumous fame.

The physical, strenuous exercise of the climb prepares the body for a turn to philosophy, that is, the transformation of a weak, unstable mind into one that can face even death with equanimity. That the turn to philosophy is treated as a transformative, Pauline experience in the manner of our very own L.A. Paul is, of course, no surprise as such. But precisely at that transformative moment Petrarca is not just unable to talk with his pious brother (who had been extolled as the perfect climbing companion),*** but his brother's need is a source of possible irritation. Petrarca's account is so beautiful that one might miss the ugliness of the moment in which fellow-feeling is not permitted.

I do not wish to rule out ways that are philosophical yet permit exquisite co-affectivity rather than a withdrawal from human need, that is, philosophical escapism. But not for the first time I am struck by how alluring philosophical escapism can be felt from within and how discordant it can be seen to be from without; Petrarca's poetic-philosophical-confessional shows that mountaineers can indeed see farther.

What words, images, and principles are you willing to die for?

What words, images, and principles are you willing to die for?

That's the question (hereafter 'The Question') after last week's assassination of Charlie Hebdo's editorial staff and cartoonists posed to those of us -- e.g., journalists, academics, cartoonists, publicists, politicians, artists, etc. -- that live by peddling words and images to various audiences. It's not a new question; earlier in the week I called attention to the fate of Socrates, and it has been revived even in the relatively law-abiding, gun-poor environments of Northwestern Europe with the assasinations of politicians (e.g., Olof Palme; Pim Fortuyn), aspiring politicians (Utøya island massacre), and political commentators (Theo Van Gogh).* Such targets -- the victims of let's call them, 'politicized crimes' -- have in common with more ordinary terror attacks that they are 'soft,' that is, that they are relatively unprotected and that the moment of attack is relatively unexpected. But unlike ordinary victims of terror, the victims of politicized crimes draw attention to themselves by their active construction of the public sphere.+ The Question has become ever more acute with the rise of suicide bombers and other politicized killers that are very evidently willing to die for their principles.

The whole idea of legally protected freedom of expression is designed to diffuse The Question. If only the very brave or foolish participate in the public sphere then it is likely that all kinds of insights and positions never get articulated with the care and expertise required to guide the life of and constitute the polity. But this open public sphere requires not just a government to live by its own rules, but also capability and willingness to protect its own public sphere by having a monopoly on violence (and arms). While undoubtedly more can be done to secure safe participation in a public sphere, there is in governments a tendency for policing and security-measures overreach, which, paradoxically undermines an open public sphere and, indirectly, Liberal society.

An exclusive focus on security does not address the reasons why people may wish to kill (and die) for their beliefs. Political terrorists are not random natural facts; they are (if we leave aside the children among them) agents that are animated by a whole host of commitments, feelings, aspirations, and ideologies. That is to say, while undoubtedly there are many security-driven ways of preventing political attacks, these do nothing to undermine and may, perhaps, reinforce the experienced intentional world(s)** of would-be-politicized-killers.

This last point is especially important because many of the politicized killers are not strange, undercover invaders from foreign places. Rather they are home-grown; they have turned militant despite (perhaps because of) being quite familiar with the norms, aspirations, and even rewards of an arms-free public sphere. I leave it to the social scientists to help explain various social sources of militancy among a subset of those born in the European West. But part of the issue is also ideology. The nub of the matter is that evidently our Western normative and social commitments are  displaced at the level of individual psychology among part(s) of the population.

It's at this point of the analysis that nearly all commentators focus on the varieties of militant Islam, which quite evidently generates motivational power to some people to kill and die for its principles. As I noted a few days ago, Justin Smith, an eminent philosophical scholar who lives and works in Paris, has been among the most intelligent and interesting philosophical commentators on the assassination of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. He puts his point as follows:

it's a great shame that political Islamism today perceives an equivalence between the symbolic and the real that make an act of vengeance of this scale seem like a fair trade. I recall that one horrible, amateur film ridiculing Mohammed a few years ago; they interviewed some kid in Egypt whose reaction was: 'Well, how would you feel if we made a movie making fun of, say, Abraham Lincoln?' He sincerely didn't understand that no one would care.

Today when the assassins were fleeing toward their getaway car, they shouted: On a vengé le prophète Mohammed. On a tué Charlie Hebdo.++ One cannot help but think: there is a double confusion here. Not just one but two fictional characters have been mistaken for real people. And twelve real people have been killed as a result.--Justin Smith.

Now unlike most commentators, in his blog posts Smith is clear that Charlie Hebdo offered not just a willingness to die (Stéphane Charbonnier has been quite explicit about this), but as Smith explains (here, here, here), an alternative, life-affirming even joyous and raunchy set of commitments that challenged many forms of powers and ideology (including Islamic ones) at the level of affect as much as reason.

Even so, the passage quoted from Smith contains some missteps. Smith's "political Islam" fails to do justice to the Islamic political movements (inside and outside of Europe) that do not promote or condone (even tacitly) the killing of  folk in the European public sphere. Given that there are political movements in Europe that are extremely intolerant/hostile toward all of Islam (and Smith is clearly no fan of these movements), Smith's wording is unfortunate.

More important, there is, in fact, no opposition between the "symbolic and the real." (There is an opposition between the real and the illusory.) In particular, when we are dealing with social reality, the symbolic and the real can coincide, but need not. This connects to another, more serious misstep in Smith's analysis. Muḥammad is not a fictional character. He was a historical figure who (among other social scripts (recall)) played political and religious role(s) in his own life and thereafter. The symbolic is constituted (albeit non-exhaustively) by such roles. (It is not impossible that a fictional Muhammad could also play such symbolic roles, but that's not my concern.) The symbolic matters here because it's what animates or gives meaning to the experienced intentional world of individuals, including the would-be-killers and those that sympathize with them.

So Smith is absolutely right that the "Egyptian kid" in his example fails to understand the symbolic organization and commitments of contemporary Americans. Having said that, plenty of Americans get very upset about flag-burning; so Smith's Egyptian kid could have found a better example for his case.  The point here is not that every society has symbols it is touchy about (although it is not irrelevant); rather it misses the point to say about such a symbol, 'oh well, it's just fictional.'

Furthermore, Smith is right to note (and we can nod to Nietzsche's analysis of Lex Talionis) that in revenge-killing there is an element of trade that restores a balance within a community. Despite the fact that the killers of Charlie Hebdo's editorial staff and cartoonists do not conform to and violently transgress the laws of the land, their words, if accurately quoted, suggests that they, too, recognize, perhaps implicitly, that they belong to a community in which their victims play a symbolic (even sacrificial) role.

Much to my surprise Smith insists that contemporary Jihadists "are entirely unable to interpret the Charlie Hebdo cartoons." (His ire is also directed at professors at American universities, but I will ignore them here.) This strikes me as confused  about the nature of the symbolic. Images play multiple roles and functions in different symbolic systems/organisations sometimes simultaneously--some philosophers, of course, cannot abide multiplicity of meaning, but if they allow such a possibility cartoons would be on the very short-list. There is no true interpretation of the symbolic. (To avoid confusion: there are symbolic systems, of course, that are governed by truth.) While we can allow that the Jihadists failed to understand all the intended complexities of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, they discerned in some of these images satire (and worse) of their commitments.+++

Finally, it's possible, of course, that one can die because of a mistaken interpretation of one's words, images, and principles. That's the stuff (with a nod to Oedipus) of tragedy. If one participates in the public sphere with highly affective images and words that mistake is probably not unexpected. It is also possible -- I think this happened to Stéphane Charbonnier -- that one dies both for a principle one embraces and for a hostile interpretation of one's work that is offered from a vantage point one does not share.

(here, here, here), including satire.) a genuine alternative, life-affirming joyous even raunchy set of of commitments one that was as challenging to Islam as it was to many other ideologies and political powers.

On Marías and The Suspicion of Language

Anything is possible. (333)

I believe I've still never mistaken fiction for reality, though have  mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything  tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one. Anyone can relate an anecdote about something that happened, and the simple fact of saying it already distorts and twists it, language can't reproduce events and shouldn't attempt to, and that, I imagine, is why during some trials--the trials in movies, anyway, the  ones I know best--the implicated parties are asked to perform a material or physical reconstruction of what happened, repeating the gestures, the movements, the envenomed steps they took...The idea of testimony is also futile...(7-8)

Yet, in these pages I'm going to place myself on the side of those who have sometimes claimed to be telling what really happened or pretended to succeed in doing  so...Unlike those of truly fictional novels, the elements of the story I am now embarking  upon are entirely capricious, determined by chance, merely episodic and cumulative...because in the end no author is guiding them, though I am relating them; they correspond to no blueprint, they are steered by no compass, most of them are external in origin and devoid of intention and therefore have no reason to make any kind of sense or to constitute an argument or plot or answer to some hidden harmony, and no lesson should be extracted from them (nor should any thing be sought from real novels; above all, the novels themselves should not want it)--not even a story with its beginning and suspense and final silence." (9)

The opening pages of Javier Marías (1988) Dark Back of Time (translated in 2001 by Esther Allen) present, in rough outline, two philosophical views on the relationship between language and world and, thereby, truth. On the first perspective, language is incapable of representing the truth (especially events). While these days such thoughts are often associated with post-modernism, the idea was once a common, suspicious perspective on language (recall). It is important to recognize that a suspicion-of-language view is (a) neither self-refuting (as a lot of my lazy friends often insist) (b) nor does it entail skepticism about truth as such (b') because other things -- entities, humans, objects etc. -- are -- as Marías  narrator recognizes at once -- capable of simulating truth to some degree. (In fact, (b') is not the only alternative; some once-famous metaphysicians (b'') locate truth in non-linguistic perfect ideas or perfect forms, etc.) As we learn from Part 3 of Gulliver's Travels, this (b' or, even, b'') is not a very fertile or efficient conception of truth if we wish to do science, or engineer to wage war. But despite much table-pounding, only if we thoughtlessly defer to the authority of science or war, is the suspicion-of-language view refuted.

As an aside, in the novel the human duty not to thoughtlessly defer to the authority of war is presented in a touching retelling of the Christmas truce as an extended meditation on Wilfrid Ewart's The Way of Revelation.

the war lost its control and was disobeyed, and he [Ewart] was there and saw it. To say that it was vanquished would be false and pretentious, but it was sidestepped and even mocked for a moment, and the mockery was maintained even after the hard reminder--or revenge--of all-out warfare (whose primary aim is to exclude and negate whatever it does not enclose or taint)...(156)

Of course, all-out-war is not the only social institution that by enclosing aims to exclude and negate (that vague something that is not enclosed): the institution of property and the practice of (ac)counting function in analogous ways.

Anyway, in addition to appeal to lived experience in which the distorting effects of language are so routine that we better not pay attention to these (if we want to be taken seriously, and other practical consequences), we may also note (with a nod to Deleuze) that it is awkward to insist (often repetitively) that a repetition (as a representing in language inevitably is) somehow is identical to what is represented in the right sort of way, namely, both the representation and that what is represented are stable and undistorted, etc. Even so, it is always a bit tacky, if not an instance of bad faith, to encounter a text that announces the suspicion-of-language-view. For, most texts (including the truly fictional novels) tacitly rely on the norms and conventions that demand from us a foregoing or bracketing of any such superstition.

Why Analytical Existentialism Matters

[Due to technical issues with Typepad yesterday, I am running this for another day.--ES]

Analytical Existentialism is the use of an analytical style to investigate topics that matter to us as human beings capable of feelings and anxieties or joys while doing justice to our first-personal (even phenomological) perspective on these topics (recall this post on Laurie Paul; and this post on Ruth Chang). While Laurie Paul's work has revealed the potential and thrill of analytical existentialism in our times, I was introduced to analytical existentialism around 1991 or 1992 by Jeff McConnell, an instructor at Tufts. If you get a BA from Harvard, a PhD from MIT, and teach at Tufts you are not exactly obscure, but Jeff has published little (this is the only article I am familiar with). I took 'intro to philosophy' and 'existentialism' with Jeff. The 'intro to philosophy' course included Plato's Meno, Descartes's Meditations, Kant's Prolegomena (I think), and a lot of readings from Ammerman's Classics of Analytical Philosophy volume. (We may have also read from the Rorty volume.) In the course on 'existentialism' we read Kierkegaard and Heidegger and such figures, as well as some readings from analytical authors (e.g., Munitz, Nagel, etc.) on topics like 'death,' but the course was really an excuse for Jeff to try out ways to develop the most precise and rigorous was of asking the question 'why do I exist,' (as asked from the first person-perspective). 

I learned that Jeff was working on a manuscript on the topic -- why do I exist? -- by accident; once, I was accompanying John Rawls to his car in the company of Jeff after a key-note that Rawls had given at Tufts. We got lost in the College-Avenue car-park looking for Rawls' car. It was a grey and drizzly day, and I was burning to ask Rawls some questions. (The key one for me was how Rawls would answer the Nietzschean that claimed all value is will to power.) But by the time we had found the car, we were running late for dinner, and all three of us were a mixture of embarrassed, hungry, tired, and contemplative. As we were driving on Mass Ave, Rawls turned to Jeff. (They were both sitting in the front seats, so I was straining to lean forward.) 'Are you still working on why you exist?' 'Yes, Jack," Jeff said, and he added something about how he had made progress on his manuscript. I wouldn't say that Rawls snickered, but I had the distinct impression he chuckled. Quite possibly, it was a warm and generous laugh, but the conversation seems to have ended there (in my memory--for all I know Jeff said a lot more).

The Early Deaths of Philosophers

In the Deutsches Museum, February, 1787, there is a dissertation by a very subtle and clear-headed man, the late Wizenmann, whose early death is to be lamented, in which he disputes the right to argue from a want to the objective reality of its object, and illustrates the point by the example of a man in love, who having fooled himself into an idea of beauty, which is merely a chimera of his own brain, would fain conclude that such an object really exists somewhere. I quite agree with him in this, in all cases where the want is founded on inclination, which cannot necessarily postulate the existence of its object even for the man that is affected by it, much less can it contain a demand valid for everyone, and therefore it is merely a subjective ground of the wish.--Kant Critique of Practical Reason.

I returned to the line above prompted by my re-reading of Beiser's beautiful treatment of the Pantheismusstreit in The Fate of Reason. It's very difficult not to come away from Beiser's narrative without thinking that Wizenmann's untimely death at age 28 (just under the age at which Hume published the Treatise) in 1787 caused great harm to the development of philosophy: every age needs its profound and intellectually honest skeptical voices, of course, but even those most fond of metaphysical speculation appreciate that the great age of German Idealism could have used Wizenmann as its Spinozistic-Humean Gewissen. Then again, the early death of Novalis (one of the patron saints of philosophical blogging), might have prevented an even more mystical strain from developing.

On Sebald, and Self-Perpetuating Compulsions

Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable.… How difficult it is in general to bring the machinery of thought to a standstill.…What I found most surprising in the course of these observations is the awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing. There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it, even at that crucial age when, as Keller remarks, one every day runs the risk of becoming simpleminded and longs for nothing more than to put a halt to the wheels ceaselessly turning in one's head.… Evidently the business of writing is one from whose clutches it is by no means easy to extricate oneself, even when the activity itself has come to seem loathsome or even impossible. From the writer's point of view, there is almost nothing to be said in its defense, so little does it have to offer by way of gratification.--W.G. Sebald, quoted in Troy Jollimore's stimulating review. [HT L.A. Paul]

Alone in my circle of bourgeois scholars, I often find Sebald mildly irritating because he sells an intoxicating mixture of learnedness, nostalgia, and suggestions of depth to be found in imaginative engagement with the details of living --all irresistible to folk like us. I always struggled to express my irritation, but Jollimore helpfully quotes Sebald's preference for "something that is small and self-contained," which is for him "a moral and aesthetic ideal." While I instinctively admire Sebald's aversion against "large-scale things...in architecture or evolutionary leaps," his ideal leaves little room for expansiveness, natural and moral and systematically partakes in the humanistic project of self-domestication (recall). Sebald's moral and aesthetic preferences are a thinly disguised longing for control, even in the face of genuine self-knowledge that such control remains elusive. His is intrinsically a conservative aesthetic that offers a spirited consolation (by withholding ordinary forms of consolation) to those, I fear, that recoil the inevitable excesses in living. Of course, I wouldn't find Sebald irritating if I didn't recognize myself in these longings.

On Fortune

For it is our Stoic fashion to speak of all those things, which provoke cries and groans, as unimportant and beneath notice; but you and I must drop such great words, although, heaven knows, they are true. [Omittamus haec magna verba, sed, di boni, vera]--Seneca, Letter 13.

Seneca signals that he is capable of switching between two linguistic registers. The truth (Stoa) with great words.  And another, more loquacious -- it's a relatively long letter at 993 words -- milder register, which is proper for dealing with psychic turmoil [torquent]. The milder form is proper for the council that Seneca dispenses to his (somewhat recalcitrant) pupil. But Seneca does not say if he will always signal the switch between the two registers.

Now, Seneca does not explain the epistemic status of the un-great register. It's clearly a more worthy register than the axiological framework that governs the values established in the market,  (recall Letter 1; Letter 2) and politics (letter 3), that is, uncertain popular opinion. But the un-great register is fit to describe the consequences, which arise "from uncertainty...delivered over to guesswork and the irresponsible license of a frightened mind," and to offer many practical remedies against it, including the outlines of a rational decision theory in the face of great epistemic uncertainty.  But, oddly enough, Seneca does not claim that the un-great register with its practical advice is itself true or the truth.

Barbarism

Copper prices peaked in about 2010. The bubble seemed to have burst by the middle of 2011. The price did not collapse, but remained robust by historical standards--quantitative easing has worked its magic on commodity prices fueling revolutions and speculative profits (and busts). Amidst globoal turmoil, I cought increasingly frequent reported thefts of copper from the Dutch railroad and electricity companies.

A few weeks ago my dad fell and broke his hip. He is back home and recovering nicely, but I am around his house more often. I found the newspaper clip from 2012 reproduced below among his other papers. The picture shows a grave, some flowers, and a sculpture, sculpted by my dad. After my dad retired, he turned to his original passion, sculpture; he rented a studio, and set to work. Initially, he had modest success with exhibits, commissions, including nice sales. Even so, after about a decade, necessity seemed to ebb away, and when he was kicked out of the studio he did not look for a new one.

Why would a newspaper devote attention to my dad's work?