Digressions&Impressions

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

Newton, Spinozism, and mind/body interaction

Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions, is the same indivisible person. There are parts that are successive in duration and coexistent in space, but neither of these exist in the person of man or in his thinking principle, and much less in the thinking substance of God. Every man, insofar as he is a thing that has senses, is one and the same man throughout his lifetime in each and every organ of his senses. God is one and the same God always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially, for active power [virtus] cannot subsist without substance. In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him, experiences nothing from the motions of bodies; the bodies feel no resistance from God's omnipresence.---Newton, "General Scholium" Principia, translated by Cohen & Whitman (1999), 941-942

The first three sentences of the quoted paragraph were inserted into the  third (and final) edition of the Principia (while the rest was added to the second edition). They have become subject of intense scholarly scrutiny because of the light they might share on the constraints on any possible explanation of the cause of gravity. So, for example, my good friend Andrew Janiak thinks that in the quoted passage there is a hidden premise that 'a substance cannot act where it is not substantially present' and this reinforces his argument that Newton (always) rejects unmediated action at a distance (Hylarie Kochiras has also argued this; in context my work is one of their targets.) Here I want to bracket that debate (but will return at the very end to it), and reflect a bit on Newton's underlying metaphysics of mind and mind-body interaction.

In context, in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, Newton has just asserted that God is eternal and omnipresent ("will not be never or nowhere," (941)) And in the paragraph following the one just quoted he claims that "the supreme God necessarily exists, and by the same necessity he is always and everywhere." (942; emphasis in original) That is to say, Newton's God is immanent in the universe. Quite a few more remarks in the General Scholium suggest this.

And, in fact, as 'the same necessity' suggests Newton's God's relationship to space and time is very tight (I would say an internal relation). Rather than creating space and time, by an act of will, they exist when he exists in virtue of the same necessity. How to think of Newton's modal metaphysics here is no simple matter (and I have devoted some space to it recall here; here; here). In an early text, De Gravitatione, Newton had tried to characterize this relationship in terms of an emanation doctrine, and there, too, it signals that space and time are not created (or so I argue here).

It's crucial to Newton's general argument that space and time are not nothing or merely ideal or useful conventions. (In De Gravitatione he makes a point of emphasizing this. In the General Scholium it's treated as self-evident.) And it follows from this that there are structural features of the universe (space and time) that are as infinite and eternal as God is. My interest is in trying to characterize one of the relationships between sentience and this spatial-temporal structure.

Now, a few paragraphs before  Newton had explicitly denied, and he added a second denial to the third edition, that God is a world soul (940). But a natural reading of the quoted passage at the top is that God is sentient with a soul. (I return to this below.) And such ensouled sentience makes a person. But unlike say, in Descartes' metaphysics, Newtonian ensouled sentience can be spread out in space and time. Yet, like a Cartesian soul, such a Newtonian ensouled sentience does not, despite existing in space and time, itself have parts or is even divisible.

As an aside, my own view is that Newton is a substance monist. For Newton, a substance is a directed source of activity, that is an agent.* (Janiak and I agree about this. But we differ on the monism.) And that the only truly active agent in his metaphysics is God. I grant that Newton uses the plural 'substances' (942) in order to deny, in Lockean fashion, that we have knowledge of their essences (and even less of God's essence). But when he uses 'substances' he means it in the more innocent sense of a 'material entity' not an 'agent.' 

Now, an obvious way to make sense of the contours of Newton's position on ensouled sentience in the General Scholium is that he thinks sentience is a kind of emergent property of matter immanent in nature. And so Newton articulates a kind of property dualism.+ This works well for what he says about human persons. 

In fact, Newton returns to the question of ensouled sentience in his fascinating closing paragraph of the General Scholium:

A few things could now be added concerning a certain very subtle spirit pervading gross bodies and lying hidden in them; by its force and actions, the particles of bodies attract one another at very small distances and cohere when they become contiguous; and electrical [i.e., electrified] bodies act at greater distances, repelling as well as attracting neighboring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the limbs of animals move at command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit being propagated through the solid fibers of the nerves from the external organs of the senses to the brain and from the brain into the muscles. But these things cannot be explained in a few words; furthermore, there is not a sufficient number of experiments to determine and demonstrate accurately the laws governing the actions of this spirit. (943-944)

As Dempsey has argued, building on I.B. Cohen's interpretation of some draft manuscripts while Newton was developing a response to Leibniz (published in 1715 Account), Newton explicitly refers to experiments done by Hauksbee. Here it looks like Newton is sketching how sentience itself is ground in a powerful, "very subtle spirit" that pervades bodies. In particular, the presence of this spirit helps explain the exciting of sensation in beings like us. Now ''spirit" is a fluid (we use it in that sense when we describe liquor as 'spirits'). And for Newton a kind of (subtle) matter. So, this fits with the emergentism I attribute to Newton. (To be sure, I agree with Stein (2002) and Dempsey that Newton viewed this as a research program because we simply know to little about the nature of mind--so my claim is not meant to be doctrinaire, although Newton is an adamant critic of some positions he rejects.)

In particular, Dempsey calls attention to a passage, "if this spirit may receive impressions from light and convey them into the sensiorium & there act upon that substance which sees & thinks, that substance may mutually act upon this spirit for causing animal motions’" (quoted by Cohen in Newton 1999: 282) I agree with Dempsey that Newton thinks this spirit is a key element in mental causation. But the most natural reading of the passage is, I think, that this subtle spirit is a mechanism by which mental causation takes place. It is not obvious that this spirit also helps constitute or ground the substance which sees and thinks.

Interestingly, Dempsey argues it is likely that Newton is "not here endorsing the independent existence of the mind, but rather is distinguishing it from the organs of sense and the brain. What is more, one straightforward explanation of the natural interaction of this spirit and the mind is precisely that the mind and the spirit with which it interacts are quite similar in nature." (Dempsey 2006: 438) And this fits very nicely with my own emergentist reading. But as I note this very monistic interpretation of Newton's metaphysics of mind is rather speculative.

In fact, I often read Newton in Spinozistic fashion in which God is the one and only substance. (This is, in fact, Clarke's position in 1704, which is what made him a juicy target for Leibniz.) And the universal quantifier in the first sentence of the quoted paragraph, seems to suggest that what Newton says about human minds must fit also God's mind: "Every sentient soul, at different times and in different organs of senses and motions, is the same indivisible person." And if this 'every' includes God, this suggest that God is not just immanent nature, but also material (e.g., "motions").

But I have always hesitated about this because in the General Scholium Newton rejects, as I noted above, the idea of God as a world soul and he writes shortly hereafter that God "totally lacks any body and corporeal shape" (942). So, I think it is not obvious that God's sentience is an emergent property of matter. For (a) God's sentience cannot be grounded in such matter, and (b) in various places, Newton seems to suggest that conceptually and temporally God precedes matter. (In the General Scholium that is not explicit, but it is a kind of implication of his claims about the designed nature of the visible universe.)  And so if this is right God's sentience and personhood is not ensouled. But something altogether mysterious.

The passage in which I take him to reject God as the world soul reads as follows:

But, in looking again  He rules all things, not as the world soul but as the lord of all. And because of his dominion he is called Lord God Pantokrator. [Newton adds a note: 'that is, universal ruler.'] For "god" is a relative word and has reference to servants, and godhood is the lordship of God, not over his own body fas is supposed by those for whom God is the world soul, but over servants. (940)

Drawing on early work by Dobbs, Rudolf De Smet & Karin Verelst have convincingly argued that here (and in a few other places of the General Scholium) Newton is echoing Lipsius's attack, inspired by Philo, on the old stoic notion  of anima mundi. The effect of this Lipsian reading is that God remains immanent to nature, but is not ground in body. 

In re-reading the passage, it is not obvious to me anymore that Newton rejects conceiving God as the world soul as such. Rather, he is rejecting analyzing God's rule in terms of the world soul because it does not capture the hierarchical nature of God's dominion.

So, it is possible that Newton thinks God's sentience in the pervasive more subtle (electric) fluid/spirit. Even so, given that Newton is explicit that God "totally lacks any body and corporeal shape" (942). it seems unlikely that we're supposed to read Newton as claiming that God's sentience is ground in, and emergent of a, subtle electric (etc.) spirit.++ So, I don't think it is correct to treat God's sentience in terms of emergent properties (in the way, say, Spinoza's parallelism encourages).**  Even though Newton and Spinoza agree that thought is a something like an attribute of substance.

So, where does this leave us? First, rather than seeing Newton as relying on a principle of local action, he is articulating an account of the relationship between sentience and body. For human sentience this is ground in a kind of emergent quality of body, especially a subtle fluid. Second, God is immanent in nature, and features of his existence can be derived from the study of nature. Ordinarily,** bodies are not hindered by his presence, and "he does not act on them nor they on him." In so far as God does interact with the bodies and spirits in nature this is fundamentally mysterious, as mysterious as his substance. In fact, in a passage that echoes a skeptical trope in Locke, Newton really stresses the fact that we really have no epistemic access, not even analogical, to God's sentience.

he is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting, but in a way not at all human, in a way not at all corporeal, in a way utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colors, so we have no idea of the ways in which the most wise God senses and understands all things. (942)

Third, rather than positing a principle of local action, Newton is developing an account of sentience that may be illuminated by experiments on electricity. But leaves us without any resources to make claims about God's agency.

 

 

On Possible Worlds and Laws of Nature in Newton

Since Space is Divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sort in several Parts of the Universe.  Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 31; Newton 1730: 379-80.

In the Principia, Newton is very careful not to offer an explicit cosmogony. The first edition of the Principia ends with the (Epicurean) suggestion that comets bring the seeds of life from one solar system to another and there is a kind of intimation of a cycle of life (and, by implication, an eternal return of life and catastrophe also familiar from Descartes's philosophy) under the guidance of a providential, but not especially Christian God. He repeats the thought in a famous letter to Bentley, “there might be other systems of worlds before the present ones, and others before those, and so on to all past eternity." (Newton 2004, 102.) The second edition of the Principia, closes with a more explicit (heterodox Chrsitian) theology in the General scholium, where Newton argues that a cosmogony that would explain the existence of the visible universe will have to posit a Designer-God. (I have argued elsewhere that Kant shows you can develop a plausible cosmogony without a designer.) The Queries to the Opticks, provides more detail on Newton's speculative cosmogony. Here I want to offer some reflection on what the quoted passage implies for his views on laws of nature and possible worlds.

First, a note on Newton terminology: the universe can (but need not) be composed of different worlds. Ordinarily when Newton uses 'world' he means thereby to refer to a solar system. Newton recognizes that the universe could be composed of different worlds that coexist (in the General scholium he remarks [recall] on the beauty of the night sky to aliens in other worlds). A 'system a worlds' is a collection of solar systems (we would say, a 'galaxy') that, presumably, share in a uniform motion. For in the scholium to the definitions of the Principia, Newton shows that in order for the First Law to hold for the centre of mass of a closed system of interacting bodies, the Third Law must hold for the interactions among the bodies (for details see my work with Chris Smeenk here ). [In addition, in Corollary 5 to the Laws he makes it clear that the relative motions of a closed system of bodies are not affected if the entire system moves uniformly without rotation.] 

Second, Newton also uses 'world' in a metaphysically richer sense. A world in this sense is constituted and characterized by the kinds of “particles of Matter” and forces that are to be found in it. The matter and forces of a world can be described by laws of nature. Newton's attitude toward matter and forces is realist (they are part of his basic ontology); matter and forces ground the laws of nature, which are derivative: note Newton's "thereby." In fact, Newton's treatment of laws of nature in the passage quoted from the Opticks is compatible with a very deflationary picture of laws of nature (they could be merely calculating devices), but it's also compatible with a less nominalist interpretation of them (that is, they are really existing second causes). Either way, Newton's laws are not primitive or productive in the sense that, say, Maudlin's treatment of laws are (recall).

Third, Newton's empirical, "laws of nature are not necessarily universal laws.+ They only hold of 'worlds' (in the metaphysical sense). Thus, Newton's position is compatible with (a) the universe having more than one kind of 'law of nature' each holding only for a different world (or system of worlds) or (b) the universe having one set of laws of nature that cover all the systems of worlds. In fact, the possibility of (a) helps explain that throughout Book 1 of the Principia, Newton also explores the characteristics of models with hypothetical force laws unlike the ones we find in nature. A universe that is like (a) would require causal disconnectedness among systems of the world (of the sort that [recall] Huygens posited for his alternative vortex-based theory).*

Fourth, the previous paragraph shows that Newton recognized that the empirical support for his laws of nature were limited in a sense. The evidence is biased to this-worldly observations. Below I return to this point when I discuss Newton's third and fourth rules of reasoning which push one to move from claims about matter in this world to the the matter in the whole universe.

Fifth, it is notable that Newton does not argue from God's power to the conclusion that the laws of nature could vary locally, but rather from the nature of space and matter. It's the divisibility of space and the possibility of a (local) vacuum that allows that matter could come in different kinds. (Newton takes Boyle's work on the air-pump and his own work on planetary and comet motions/trajectories to show that empty space is more likely than not.) One may wonder why a space/vacuum and density of matter are related. It turns out, that Newton (see, especially, Proposition 3.6, Corollary 3) relies on the counterfactual assumption that if matter is fully compressed to eliminate all interstitial void spaces, it would be of the same density. [In the second edition this was reworded so as to remove the commitment to atomism (see Biener and Smeenk for more on this).]

Sixth, one may wonder why Newton does not treat the laws of nature as universal. For, the third rule of reasoning reads, "Those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended and remitted and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made should be taken as qualities of all bodies universally." Newton's position relies (as the long commentary on the third rule shows) on the distinction between universal and essential qualities of matter. On my reading (defended elsewhere) essential qualities of matter are for Newton those that are required necessarily for matter to be matter. Universal qualities of matter are metaphysically optional. The third rule is a claim about how matter should be taken within the context of research. That is the third rule offers a  bold generalization from the empirically available domain to domains beyond our experimental grasp. George Smith has explained the epistemic pay-off from doing so (in light of Newton's subtle methodology). For the fourth rule claims that "In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions. This rule should be followed so that arguments based on induction may not be nullified by hypotheses." The fourth rule teaches us that the pay-off to such inductive boldness is the ability to find other phenomena that make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions.

Seventh, it follows that within the context of research, Newton advocates (b) the universe having one set of laws of nature that cover all the systems of worlds; and that within that context the possibility of (a) is not allowed to be used to nullify (say) the universal character of gravity. This is the context that is privileged ontologically. But Newton clearly allows that, in a different register, one can speculate about alternative possibilities that may turn out to be fruitful in the future. That is to say, Newton recognizes (with a nod to Kant, Cassirer, and Michael Friedman) a dynamics of reason that operates alongside empirical inquiry into nature.

Finally, the passage is relevant for Newton's views on modality. Newton treats infinite beings (God, space, time) and finite beings (matter, forces, laws) as subject to different modal rules. In particular, in the General Scholium he argues with the principle that if some effect Y is universal temporally and spatially, then we can infer or posit as the ultimate cause something that itself is necessary in a way that accounts for Y (recall my treatment of Newton and Clarke). But as the passage quoted above, from the Opticks reveals, Newton does not allow the inference to go in the other direction: a necessary existing Being could have created an alternative reality when it comes to finite beings and the laws that govern particular [systems of] worlds.

On Whitehead and Hayek (On Modal Economics)

The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up. Hayek (1945) The Use of Knowledge in Society The American Economic Review, 528.

It's a bit surprising, even after repeated re-reading, to see Whitehead show up in Hayek's argument. Whitehead is describing, what in science studies is called 'blackboxing.' (I suspect the idea can be traced back to Leibniz's remarks on the calculus.) Hayek turns it into a broader point -- not just about technologies, scientific and material --, but about norms, habits, and institutions which become the repository of (or are the) means toward effective problem solving (in a limited domain); these means are not really understood by the folk whose problems are thereby solved. It's not a throwaway remark ("profound significance"). But it would be a mistake to see this only as an affirmation of the significance of tradition (a la Hume).

In the article, Hayek makes us think of markets as epistemic devices: "the price system" is a "mechanism for communicating
information." (527) The information is not, as such, available to anybody, but dispersed: "in a system where the knowledge of the, relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people." (526) There is a lot to be said about the contextual knowledge that Hayek thinks is central to the argument, but here I am focused on the issue raised by Whitehead.. I quote an illuminating passage:

There is hardly anything that happens anywhere in the world that might not have an effect on the decision he ought to make. But he need not know of these events as such, nor of all their effects. It does not matter for him why at the particular moment more screws of one size than of another are wanted, why paper bags are more readily available than canvas bags, or why skilled labor, or particular machine tools, have for the moment become more difficult to acquire. All that is significant for him is how much more or less difficult to procure they have become compared with other things with which he is also concerned, or how much more or less urgently wanted are the alternative things he produces or uses. It is always a question of the relative importance of the particular things with which he is concerned, and the causes which alter their relative importance are of no interest to him beyond the effect on those concrete things of his own environment. (525)

Prices are effects of what may be totality of human causes that relieve any agent from the need to keep track of all these causes. In fact, on Hayek's account the economic agent need not concern herself with nearly all of these causes; prices (the effects), or even just the change in prices, convey all the relevant information for decision. We can understand the relations among prices and price-changes as the phenomena (in the Kantian sense), and we can discern in their underlying causes the unknown noumenal reality (for the economic agent). Here the market is understood as an epistemic device whose inner mechanical operation is not so much a blackbox, but an enigma.

One last thought on the passage. Prices collapse a rich modal structure of possible causes ("anything that happens anywhere in the world that might not have an effect") into a single coarse-grained dimension. That is, while price formation is an extremely useful epistemic device, we should not ignore the fact that it can also obscure bits of reality to those focused on (changes in relative) prices only. (On this picture you can't even really reverse engineer the causes from the effects.) We can understand bonds, futures, and insurance as ways to recapture some of the information about that modal structure, but they do so as imperfect instruments.

 

 

Debating Kant & Spinoza with Boehm (I)

Della Rocca’s only valid case in point is the question “in virtue of what is ‘causa sui’ conceived as existing?” and, to that question, he can answer (if he can) by denying the validity of the question: causa sui, he will say, “is conceived to exist because it is what it is.” Only in the latter case may the PSR’s “invirtue-of-what” question be a bad question, reducible to a genuine misunderstanding.
But, in this light, it turns out that rationalism ultimately assumes the validity of the traditional ontological argument. The question in virtue of what substance is conceived to exist can be dismissed as a mere misunderstanding of the concept only if existence is a predicate, participating in substance’s essence. What needs to be underlined is that at stake is not merely a rationalist argument concerning the theological question of God’s existence. At stake is the viability of the rationalist position itself: Without the ontological argument, the edifice of conceivability and of the PSR falls apart.--Boehm, Kant's Critique of Spinoza, (160)

First a paragraph of (contextual) stage-setting, then I get to philosophy. The main interpretive claim of Omri Boehm's Kant's Critique of Spinoza, which is full of wonderful arguments and insightful unterpretations, is: that (a) in his pre-critical period, Kant isn't just familiar with Spinoza, but that he is a Spinozist (especially in the Beweisgrund); (b) and that in Kant's critical period Spinoza (and the threat of Spinozism) isn't just a central  interlocuter (as a close analysis of the antinomies reveals), but that Kant is a regulative Spinozist. On (a) Boehm's argument nicely converges with my own claims about the pre-critical Kant (especially the Natural History of the Heavens). Our entirely independent arguments offer mutual support. (Isn't that peachy.) I just want to make two qualifications: (i) if Boehm had engaged more thoroughly with Ursula Goldenbaum's work (on Mendelssohn, and her work on historiography) he could have availed himself to more evidence and usefully complicated his story; (ii) Boehm has a tendency to treat the pre-critical  Kant as a stable position rather as, itself, working through, and debating with, many interlocutors (I recommend this piece by Massimi for some of Kant's range). On (b) I leave it to Kant specialists to debate Boehm, although it is worth noting that Boehm's argument also allows -- with self-conscious nods to Jonathan Israel's work [but for reservations see here]-- us to put Kant into a wider eighteenth century context (still surprisingly rare in Kant scholarship).

The philosophical excitement of Boehm's book is to be found -- by way of treating Kant as critically engaging with Spinoza -- in the ways the ontological argument and the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) mutually illuminate each other and, each in turn, debates over, modality, Causa Sui and, ultimately, the status of fatalism and (ahhh) nihilism. This is not just a matter of historical curiosity. Now that species of dogmatic (the technical term is 'knee jerk') metaphysics are back in fashion, including robust defenses of monism and the PSR, the question of nihilism and fatalism may well return as well (at some point). My plan is to engage with some of these rich issues in the course of a number of posts (and itself part of the series on the PSR that I started in context of Garber/Della Rocca debate).

Today, I focus on the “in virtue of what is ‘causa sui’ conceived as existing?” question (see the quote at the top of the post). This matters for the larger debate because if there is a decent Spinozistic answer to that question than transcendental realism is still in the game. My unargued for assumption here is that because Boehm accepts Della Rocca's conceivability focused interpretation of the PSR (seeLærke for reservations), he (Boehm) misses alternative ways to explore the issue.

I start with a low-level move. Boehm writes:

In Kant, naturalistic causality is understood as mechanical, or efficient causality. We naturalistically understand an event if and only if we see how it necessarily follows from another event that precedes it. Arguably, Spinoza favors a similar conception. A thing, A, is said to be the cause of another, B, if B necessarily follows from A (e.g., E Ip16c1; Ip25; II p5). Of course, a mechanistic conception is the hallmark of seventeenth-century scientific naturalism, of which Spinoza is supposed to be a champion. Now if one clings to this efficient naturalistic conception, the notion of a “self-caused entity” is identical to a notion of an entity that is “not caused at all.” For the causal conception that’s assumed in the notion of a self caused entity is entirely different from—in fact, it excludes—the naturalistic-efficient conception. 

I doubt Boehm gets Kant's account of causation right in the first sentence (without, at least, mentioning the role of laws). But let's stipulate he does--he is certainly expressing a Kantian prejudice. (It is odd that after claiming that "the human intellect genuinely grasps how one thing can cause another," (143) there is no mention of Locke and Hume, who undermine the intelligibility and appeal of precisely this mechanical conception.) But in Spinoza (and arguably in Locke) the model form of causation  is the way in which a (hidden) essence produces regular or (all things being equal) exception-less, (visible) effects. That is, in fact, the natural reading, too, of E1p16C1 (and E1p25 & E2p5, although the latter proposition is not explicit either way).* I often warn folk not to read Spinoza as a fellow traveler of the mechanical philosophy or even the scientific revolution (see here). This is not to deny that Spinoza also recognizes the mode-on-mode (billiard-ball) model of efficient causation (E1p28), but it is derivative from the exemplary model (and also has lower epistemic status).

Boehm might respond, gracefully, fair enough, Schliesser, but so much the worse for Spinoza; 'esssence --> effect' is a remnant of a discarded Aristotelian science. But that would be too hasty here. For, first, Spinoza does not rely on final causes/teleology (in this context). Second, Spinoza's 'essence --> effect' is, in part, modeled on (as he himself says in the Appendix 1 to Ethics 1) a formal cause explanation once common in geometry. And we can understand causa sui in such terms. (See this seminal article by Huebner; and anticipations in Viljanen and Schliesser.) Moreover, the way  we understand such a hidden essence can be made compatible with both (the role of laws) in early modern science (and, in the hands of Joe LaPorte, modern science). [There is also historical irony that Boehm's Kantian rejection of causa sui echoes the Scholastic rejection of causa sui when they encountered it in Descartes (and Spinoza).]

Even so, it looks like Boehm still may say that even if the causa sui** can be made respectable, we still have to make existence a first order predicate to make the position cogent. Let's accept that (it is, after all, the natural reading of E1D1). Some other time I'll explore if it follows that in Spinoza we should treat existence as an attribute (as I used to think), or, (as I now think) that (no less dazzlingly) existence just is truth (recall this post). Rather, here I want to close with a Spinozistic, alternative (due to Clarke! [recall]) answer to the “in virtue of what is ‘causa sui’ conceived as existing?” question. For, from the vantage point of the (Spinozistic) PSR, the only proper answer is 'necessity.' Necessity both legitimately ends an explanatory regress and is a proper primitive ground that avoids opening the door-too-easily-to-idealism (as Della Rocca's version of the PSR does) and building a kind of harmony-between-mind-and-world-view (the optimistic side of rationalism) into Spinozism from the start. For, once one shows that something  is necessary, there is no need for a further question (obviously, this can be easily abused in human affairs as a species of ideology, so one should be suspicious of instances of this strategy).

On Necessity in Clarke & Newton (and Spinoza), against Toland....

In his correspondence with (a then very youthful) Joseph Butler, Samuel Clarke writes the following:

Necessity absolute and antecedent in the order of nature to the existence of any subject has nothing to limit it; but if it operates at all (as must needs do), it must operate (if I may so speak) everywhere and at all times alike…. (Clarke’s “Answer to Butler’s Third Letter,” Dec 10, 1713)[1]

To put Clarke’s point informally: absolute necessity has the same impact everywhere and all times and should have the same consequence everywhere and all the time. So, if such necessity operates in some respect, Y, then we ought to expect Y to be homogenous in relevant ways. And if the most fundamental form of necessity operates in all (possible) respects, then we ought to expect general homogeneity.   

This view of necessity turns out to be a non-trivial principle that, surprisingly enough, is shared by Clarke and Spinoza, and, even in considerable part, by Newton. (Recall Newton's claim in the General Scholium (added to the third edition): “No variation of things arises from blind metaphysical necessity, which must be the same always and everywhere.”) I emphasize two features of Clarke’s position. First, according to Clarke necessity is the “formal cause” of God (Clarke’s “answer to sixth Letter to another Gentleman” [published first in 1738]).[2] That is to say, Clarke does not just allow the question, ‘what causes God?’ to be intelligible,[3] but it even has a proper response: in a certain sense, one can say that for Clarke God is the consequence of a species of necessity.[4]  There is, in fact, an unmistakable echo of this doctrine of the relationship between necessity and God in Newton's "General Scholium:" “’Tis allowed by all that the supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists [391] always and every where” (emphasis added). In the quote, Newton insists (i) that God’s necessary existence is common ground among all philosophers.[5] Newton, then, (ii) ascribes to necessity explanatory ‘power’ to help account for (at least some of) God’s properties. It’s this type of explanatory power that is captured by Clarke’s claim that necessity is a formal cause.

Second, Clarke uses the necessity as formal cause of God principle to rule out the existence of multiple substances (Clarke’s first response to Butler, 10 nov 1713, and see Clarke's A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, [hereafter Demonstration] VII). So, like Spinoza [(E1D1 & E1p7)] & (E1p5&E1p7), Clarke treats God as the only true substance.[6] In particular, in order to make credible substance monism, Clarke relies on the idea that absolute necessity does not just have the same impact everywhere and all times and should have the same consequence everywhere and all the time, but also that in the most absolute sense these consequences ‘displace’ the ‘instantiation’ of other hypothetical (but not genuinely possible) effects derived from hypothetical (but not genuinely possible) causes. [7]

If we attend to some of the further details of Clarke’s letter to Butler, we also learn something about the explicit target of Clarke’s argument:

On Rules for the History of Philosophy...or a defense of methodological anachronism

The distinguished historian of philosophy, Peter Adamson (from "without any gaps" fame; the podcasts are a big hit), has articulated "some guidelines encapsulating what I see as good practice in studying the history of philosophy" (quoted from rule 1) on his blog. He is up to the ninth rule as I write this. The rules themselves are an "open-ended encouragement to strive for an ideal which is not practically reachable" (see rule 4; see also rule 8). I very much like this feature of the rules because it encourages us to think of our practice as an open-ended process (and puts the idea of a gapless history in nice perspective). There is a further worthy feature of the rules that is never stated explicitly, but a kind of animating principle behind them: to treat the authors we are studying as serious thinkers in their own right--a judgment that vindicates, in part, earlier readers; for, "any text that has survived to get into your hands has already been through a process of selection by earlier readers," (rule 2).

Before I get to a more principled qualm about his rules, I want to offer one immanent criticism of the first rule: "It's possible for the same idea to appear independently more than once." Yes, this is possible and undoubtedly occurs, and it might generate interesting questions about the conceptual possibility space available to certain philosophers such that 'forced moves' get rediscovered--I call such forced moves: social-conceptual-necessitation. (Having said that, I thought his example of Al-Ghazali and Hume on causation especially poorly chosen; (a) we know that Malebranche was almost certainly familiar with Al-Ghazali through discussions in Aquinas and Suarez [I apologize for forgetting where I first read this!], and Hume certainly knew his Malebranche; (b) until Dario Perinetti has completed his study of the La Fleche library we don't really know what Hume (and Descartes) might have read in his most formative period.) But while I am no fan of a certain kind of lineage-tracing popular among historians of ideas, this rule also has the likely tendency to discourage inquisitiveness. In particular it is very tempting to assume that 'great' thinkers didn't read or read little--some philosophers (Descartes, Spinoza, Carnap, Lewis, etc.) even play with a recurring Meme along these lines.* But we need/ought not trust their self-presentation in these matters. We miss moves in an author if we are unaware of her interlocutors. My concern is not just a matter of getting the context right (cf. rule 4); we literally do not notice if some options/alternatives are quietly foreclosed. It matters, for example, that Spinoza had More's Utopia in his library (and almost certainly read Bacon's New Atlantis); this means he was almost certainly aware of alternative ways to think about, say, gender relations and ways to organize religious-theological pluralism in society (as well as property relations, Biblical hermeneutics, etc.) even if he never went back to Plato. Aware of this, we might upon re-reading Spinoza notice that he has developed resources to reject those alternatives or we might start to see cracks in his edifice (etc.).  [Below I return to rule 1!]

Even so, the rules are problematic, especially because they come with the weighty authority  of an emiment and popular scholar. Leaving aside the fact that Adamson seems to be ignorant of the methodological discussions among other historians of philosophy of the last few years, Adamson never recognizes that there are alternative ways to study the history of philosophy in which some of the vices he recognizes may well be necessary virtues. I'll pick one example: Adamson is extremely concerned to have the historian avoid anachronism (see rule 4, 7, 8, 9). As it happens I have more tolerance for the kind of un-selfconscious anachronism that trained historians of philosophy are taught to reject; such un-selfconscious anachronistic readings of a text can, but need not, be interesting on their own terms ('what axioms in S4 or S5 would Spinoza or Leibniz reject?' can be hugely illuminating both to our understanding of Spinoza or a time-slice of Leibniz and to the modern student of modal logic). But that's not what I have in mind in defending here.

On Historical Necessity and Morality (Art & Propaganda in John Williams's Augustus)

In the matter of passion, whether of love or war, excess is inevitable. Yet I have always been bewildered when, in the ease of peace, men raise the questions of praise or blame. It seems to me now that both judgments are inappropriate, and equally so. For those who thus judge do not judge so much out of a concern for right or wrong as out of protest against the pitiless demands of necessity, or an approval of them. Necessity is simply what has happened.--Maecenas to Livy, in John Williams Augustus: A Novel (70)

You forget that I am artist myself, and know the necessity of asking what to ordinary people would seem the most insulting and presumptuous things. How could I take offense at that which I myself would do, without the slightest hesitation, for the sake of my art? I detect the odor of a moralist. And it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind. And it would be a heavy burden for even the deepest friendship to bear.—Maecenas to Livy (128)—John Williams Augustus: A novel

There was no possibility of virtue without the idea of virtue; and no effective idea of virtue that was not encoded in the law.--Octavius to Damascius (302), John Williams Augustus: A novel

If we allow ourselves the thought, we probably tend to think of propaganda as not-art or, perhaps, as bad art.+ Williams's clever novel reminds us that some of the greatest art (Virgil, Horace, etc.) is, in part, propaganda for what we might call, military dictatorship and empire. In addition, in the second quoted passage above, Williams portrays the chief artist-propagandist, Maecenas, not just as a Spinozistic-fatalist -- with his repeated invocation of necessity --, but as would-be-censor of the historian Livy. It is to Williams's credit that he makes us see both the case for benevolent, imperial dictatorship as well as the price the establishment this extracts not just on the protagonists themselves (notably Augustus and his daughter Julia – ultimate Augustus trades the daughter of flesh and blood for an "adoptive daughter" [the Roman empire], a trade that, in turn, is said to be made legitimate because "acknowledged" by "the adoptive daughter" [that is the laws] (306; as if all trade requires the sanction of law) -- ), but also on the arts (history, poetry, and philosophy).

Few professional historians would claim that they are in the business of judging. In so far as Historicism has won the day (see Beiser's majestic book), historians see themselves as scientists (if not akin to natural scientists than at least as practitioners of their very own special Geisteswissenschaft) and not as moral judges. Obviously, even those that advocate moralism in history would wish to see it consequent knowledge.* Williams's (1972) novel (recall this post) subtly invite us to see constraints and power in (or outside) the margins of works of art, history, and philosophy. Williams's readers were familiar with the McCarthy era, of course, so, perhaps, they need little such reminding. It is an open question to what degree some readers at the time thought the US was, itself, heading -- amidst major disagreements over civil rights and Vietnam war -- toward its own civil war (and to what degree they were tempted to follow the model of benevolent dictatorship). Perhaps, too, Williams makes the reader reflect on the nature of the post US-Civil War settlement (which, after all, is a key feature of Butcher's Crossing (recall my post)).

In Williams's portrayal of Maecenas, art (poetic and historical) is (amongst other things) supposed to be useful. In context, it is entailed that if political circumstances had been different some other art would be useful. The moralist is said to be useless because he can't contribute to knowledge-generation and, less explicitly, change what's happened. Meacenas's argument presupposes not just the Hobbesian idea that within the context of state of nature, there is no justice, but a distinction between two kinds of judges (moralists/artists). Those that judge appropriately with authority (and force) and those that judge – for lack of a better word -- frivolously. By 'frivolous' (recall) I do not mean consequent-free; the novel is very clear that death (Cicero) and exile (Ovid) may well await frivolousness.

Piketty's Modal Economics, or where ideology and historical data meet

The history of income and wealth is always deeply political, chaotic, and unpredictable. How this history plays out depends on how societies view inequalities and what kinds of policies and institutions they adopt to measure and transform them. No one can foresee how these things will change in the decades to come. (Piketty, Capital 35)

In fact, neither economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state interventionism that began in 1945 deserves such praise or blame. France, Germany, and Japan would very likely have caught up with Britain and the United States following their collapse of 1914-45 regardless of what policies they had adopted (I say this with only slight exaggeration.) The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm. Similarly, once these countries had attained the global technological frontier, it is hardly surprising that they ceased to grow more rapidly than Britain and the United States or that growth rates in all of these wealthy countries more or less equalized....Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization appear to have had little effect on this reality, since they neither increased growth nor decreased it. (Piketty 99)

The first quoted passage urges us to take political control ("transform") over our economic destiny (see also p. 234 where Piketty endorses the claim that "political forces were central.") In Piketty's book 'chaotic' tends to be used to describe unstable, ad hoc political decision-making in context of great disruptive, social upheaval (war, inflation, "shocks," etc.). (His 'chaotic' is unconnected to the stochastic view of randomness beloved by mathematical economists.) It's precisely because politics has an influence on the economy that the world becomes unpredictable. The italicized passage is the central dogma of the political historian's craft.*

Yet, in the second quoted passage, Piketty embraces a form of technological determinism on growth in which much macro-policy has no discernible influence at all on growth. I am not claiming that the two passages contradict each other. For, Piketty's position seems to be that (a) macro-economic policy is largely impotent on growth; (b) governments can make macro-economic mistakes (embrace too much autarky; embrace too much capital liberalization (71);+ (c) governments can impact the distribution of wealth; (d) ensuring the diffusion of technology and education is key to long-term growth (71;  572; see also the emphasis on productivity at 234). So, while governments can invest in education (307), the impotence of traditional macro-economic policy on growth is also emphasized in the conclusion: "countries at the world technological frontier--and thus ultimately for the planet as a whole--there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1-1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted." (572)

Clearly, the crucial concept in Piketty's analysis here is the 'technological frontier.' Amazingly enough I have just quoted two out of four mentions of the term in the whole (long) book, and these are the most detailed descriptions of it. Curiously, the term is introduced on p. 97 without a footnote or explanation. It is one of the few places in his book where Piketty assumes a background in economics in his reader. But its meaning is clear from context: (i) a country's (world's) technological frontier clearly limits the possibilities for growth. (As we philosophers like to say, it's a modal concept.) And (ii) growth can be faster toward the frontier than being on the frontier, where a "relatively slow pace" is "characteristic" (97). 

Classical Metaphysical Indeterminacy

As regular readers of my blogs know I am interested in epistemic and metaphysical versions of uncertainty in economics.  A chance encounter with Jessica Wilson a few years ago made me realize that there is a live topic (in analytic metaphysics) on metaphysical indeterminacy. I am blown away by a paper by Elizabeth Barnes & Robert Williams (hereafter B/W), "Theory of Metaphysical Indeterminacy." I never expected to see an elegant account of metaphysical indeterminacy in terms of a "fully classical and bivalent logic and semantics." (2) [Recall this and this.]

To see how they respect such a 'classical' approach, here's one important feature of how they handle metaphysical indeterminacy: "When p is metaphysically indeterminate, there are two possible (exhaustive, exclusive) states of affairs—the state of affairs that p and the state of affairs that not-p—and it is simply unsettled which in fact obtains." (9) Now, to avoid misunderstanding: the unsettledness they speak of here is not epistemic. (Below I return to this.) Note, too, that they rely on modality ("possible"); this is not accidental: they rely on insights from work on modality. In fact, their approach opens up fascinating perspectives on modality. They spell out the modal moves as follows:

[P]ossible worlds are abstract objects which represent (classically complete) ways the world might be...there is a single world which is actualized. The actualized world is the abstract object which represents things exactly as they are in the reality consisting of us and our surroundings.

Once we have the set of all the abstract possible worlds in place, we can carve it up in various ways...What we want to do here is introduce another division amongst the worlds that will single out a new modality—the worlds which are precisificationally possible...There will be more than one world in the space of precisifications just in case there is indeterminacy in reality. (9-10)