issue 159, december 2023 / january 2024 Philosophy Now

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ISSUE 159 DECEMBER 2023 / JANUARY 2024

a magazine of ideas

ŽIŽEK on CANCEL CULTURE

Are We Free To Choose? • Or Is Everything Fixed in Advance? • Materialism, Freedom & Ethics • Starring Spinoza, Hegel, Hume & Strawson the Elder

Can we ever be

truly free? We are all afraid that new dangers pose a threat to our hard-won freedoms. Tracing its connection to everything from capitalism and war to the state and environmental breakdown, Slavoj Žižek argues that the experience of true, radical freedom is transient and fragile.

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Contemporary life is defined by excess A compelling guide to Lacan's idea of 'surplus enjoyment' through philosophy, pop culture, history, politics and more.

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Editorial

Free William? lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes.” If our actions and the whole unfolding of events could even in principle be predicted, can we still say we make choices? The question matters deeply for our sense of who we are and of our place in the world. If all of our choices were predetermined before we were even born, does that make it ridiculous to praise or blame people for the good or bad things that they do? Many therefore argue that determinism would imply the end of ethics. You see why people get worked up about free will and determinism? Our contributors to the free-will special section of this magazine scrutinize these problems from all angles. My colleague Grant Bartley has freely contributed his own article exploring what free will is – complete with accompanying video. Myant Zan considers several versions of the opposing view, determinism, particularly that of Spinoza. However, couldn’t free will and determinism both be true, at the same time? That’s my own view – that they both describe the same phenomena but from different perspectives.But compatibilism, like belief in free will or in determinism, comes in a hundred and one varieties. Nurana Rajabova criticises the compatibilist ideas that the late Peter Strawson developed in his magnificently-titled paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’. Phil Badger takes the ethical football and runs with it by trying to construct a materialist, compatibilist basis for ethics, and Basil Gala looks at the limits imposed on our free choices by our upbringings, our personal circumstances and the habits and addictions into which we can easily stumble. We can break free, he says – but it isn’t easy and we have to really work at it. And then, just as you break free from the heat and dust of the free will debate, yearning perhaps for a less contentious topic, you will find an article on Cancel Culture by the renowned, irrepressible and incisive Slavoj Žižek! Rick Lewis

Keiko U.S. DEPT OF DEFENSE. VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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any years ago, there was a Hollywood blockbuster called Free Willy. It was a movie about a whale called… yes, you guessed it. The choice of name betrayed the studio’s innocence of British slang, for the posters incited friends of mine to fits of giggles. The plot however, was a touching story of a young orphan’s struggle to rescue the whale from an amusement park. Orcas are renowned for their social skills, their intelligence and their literally massive brains. In the amusement park, Willy was unfree in the sense that he could not chose to return to the ocean, could not mingle with other orcas and could not escape the doom that the park owner had planned for him. People respond to the film because we instinctively sympathise with the need of an intelligent creature to be free, to make its own choices in accordance with its own needs and desires. In the film, the role of Willy was played by an orca called Keiko. A few years later, well-wishers and marine biologists joined in a protracted and noble effort to reintroduce Keiko into the wild. Eventually, he was released into the North Atlantic, but it seems he never succeeded in fully integrating into a pod of wild orcas, and continually sought out human company instead, until he died as a result of following a fishing boat too far up a fjord. Was he genuinely free? Philosophers have argued for centuries about the related question of whether human beings (including ones called Willy) are genuinely free. According to existentialists such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, we are all, inescapably, free. Yet our freedom is a burden, because with it comes responsibility for our choices. Our all-too-frequent attempts to deny our freedom and its associated responsibilities are nothing but a particular type of self-deception that Sartre and friends called Bad Faith. We always have choices. Just remember that, next time somebody points a bazooka at your pet rabbit and tells you to hand over all your goodies. While Sartre’s claim of radical freedom can seem implausible in many situations, our own daily experience of living suggests that we are free, at least to an extent, at least most of the time. We constantly weigh decisions both large and small, make choices and then experience the results of those choices, for better or worse. There can therefore be few propositions for which we have more abundant evidence than this: that we are to some extent free. So where’s the problem? Well, another proposition for which we also have extremely abundant evidence is that one thing causes another. That second thing then causes a third and so on. Laplace wrote back in 1820: “An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the

December 2023/January 2024
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Philosophy Now

ISSUE 159 Dec 2023/Jan 2024

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philosophynow.org Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis Editors Grant Bartley, Anja Steinbauer Digital Editor Bora Dogan Book Reviews Editor Teresa Britton Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg Assistant Editor Alex Marsh Design Grant Bartley, Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer Marketing Sue Roberts Administration Ewa Stacey, Alex Marsh

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Editorial Rick Lewis

UK Editorial Board

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News Anja Steinbauer

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Shorts Matt Qvortrup: Football

Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer, Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley

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US Editorial Board

Prof. Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher College), Prof. Teresa Britton (Eastern Illinois Univ.), Prof. Peter Adamson, Prof. Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY City College)

Free Will, Or Not? 8

Spinoza and Other Determinists Myint Zan compares a variety of views 10 What Is Free Will? Grant Bartley argues that it’s conscious choice 14 Criticising Strawson’s Compatibilism Nurana Rajabova casts a critical eye over an attempt to ignore determinism for ethics’ sake 18 Materialism, Freedom and Ethics Phil Badger advocates a materialist-based way of thinking about freedom and morality 22 The Will Is Not Free: You Have to Earn It Basil Gala says you can overcome fate

Contributing Editors

Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) David Boersema (Pacific University) UK Editorial Advisors

Piers Benn, Constantine Sandis, Gordon Giles, Paul Gregory, John Heawood

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Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni Vogel Carey, Prof. Harvey Siegel, Prof. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Cover Image by Alex Printed by Acorn Web Offset Ltd Loscoe Close, Normanton Ind. Estate, Normanton, W. Yorks WF6 1TW Worldwide newstrade distribution: Select PS (+44 1202 586848) [email protected] Australian newstrade distribution: Ovato 26 Rodborough Road Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086 [email protected] The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or editorial board of Philosophy Now.

General Articles

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Saying, Keeping Silent and Showing Slavoj Žižek won’t cancel Wittgenstein 30 Torture and Ticking Bombs Edward Hall holds governments to a count 34 Parrhesia & Philosophy with Children Maria daVenza Tillmanns speaks frankly

Reviews 52 Book: Debating Multiculturalism: Should There Be Minority Rights? by Peter Balint & Patti Tamara Lenard Reviewed equitably by Elaine Coburn 53 Book: The Revolt Against Humanity by Adam Kirsch Reviewed humanely by Ian James Kidd 54 Book: Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher by Laura Beatty Reviewed perceptively by Chad Trainer 56 Classic: Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakeshott Reviewed rationally by Anika Vijapur 58 Film: Doctor Strange, Multiverse of Madness Jason Friend tracks identity across worlds

some of our

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Contributors Elaine Coburn Elaine Coburn is Associate Professor of International Studies and Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at York University in Toronto. Her work is concerned with inequalities and justice, especially with respect to race, gender, Indigenous politics and contemporary political economy. She writes for the Literary Review of Canada.

Slavoj Žižek

FRONT COVER ART BY ALEX

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenianborn philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.

Maria Tillmanns

Regulars

Fun, Poetry & Fiction 25 28 37 57

Philosophy Café Guto Dias The Ides of March Robert Edmondson Simon & Finn Melissa Felder Enlightenment Philos’ Football Team Sarah Rochelle kicks things off poetically 64 Rudolph’s Revenge Samantha Neave’s thriller asks: Will Rudolph disprove Christmas?

17 Philosophical Haiku: William James Terence Green haikus James’s experience 38 Question of the Month: What are the Limits of Knowledge? Find out how much our readers know 41 Brief Lives: G.W.F. Hegel Warren Ward gives us a history of Hegel 44 Interview: Terry Pinkard discusses Hegel with AmirAli Maleki

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51 The Art of Living: The Discipline of Action Massimo Pigliucci doesn’t just do it 62 Tallis in Wonderland: The How & Why of Consciousness Raymond Tallis goes mind on mind

HEGEL BY CLINT INMAN

48 Letters to the Editor

Maria Tillmanns taught at the University of California, San Diego for ten years. In 1998 she received her doctorate from the University of Illinois, with a dissertation on Philosophical Counseling and Teaching: “Holding the Tension” in a Dualistic World. She also conducted a Philosophy for Children programme at two International Schools in the Netherlands in the early 90’s.

Edward Hall Dr Edward Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. He is author of Value, Conflict, and Order: Berlin, Hampshire, Williams, and the Realist Revival in Political Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and co-editor of Political Ethics: A Handbook (Princeton University Press, 2022).

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News AI for Grief The rise of chatbots such as ChatGPT, has fuelled the development of an unusual application: ‘grief tech’. When conversational AI specialist James Vlahos’ father was dying from cancer in 2016, he compiled as many memories as he could and created the ‘Dadbot’. Emulating features of Vlahos’ father, the Dadbot could interact by text, audio, images and video. Building on his own experience of feeling comforted by the Dadbot, Vlahos started HereAfter AI, a company in the US that facilitates for people to upload memories, creating a ‘life story avatar’ with which family and friends can interact. Or as their website puts it, “Preserve memories with an app that interviews you about your life. Then, let loved ones hear meaningful stories by chatting with the virtual you.” A similar company in the UK, StoryFile, made it possible for an 87-year old woman to appear at her own funeral, by using recorded footage from before her death as a basis for the creation of a holographic avatar and conversational AI. Clinicians as well as applied ethicists are involved in debates about the usefulness and moral value of grief tech. Moral philosopher Jessica Heesen, Head of Media Ethics, Philosophy of Technology and AI at Tübingen University, worries that due to lack of legislation in that area, avatars could be manipulated. It would be possible to make the deceased seem very different from how they actually were. You could make them seem like a racist or Nazi. Furthermore, while conceding that grieving is a very individual process, she thinks that it might not be in the interest of the bereaved to have an interactive avatar, as it might make it difficult for them to move on.

• A new (and problematic) use for chatbots • Monkey business with stem cells • Consciousness: Koch loses bet to Chalmers News reports by Anja Steinbauer has joined the prime minister’s team as its first non-human, fully AI member: Ion’s function is to interact with Romanian citizens via its own website and then give the government a speedy analysis of their views on policies and current events. “We hope to reach out to a large segment of the Romanian population,” explains Nicu Sebe, the research coordinator behind Ion and a professor of computer science at the University of Trento in Italy. Ion can also gage which topics are important to people and how they feel about them. Concerns center around the issue of uneven representation, as some voices, namely of those spending a lot of time chatting with Ion, will obviously be amplified, others never heard. And The Winner Is... 1 In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers made a bet at a conference in Bremen, Germany, that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Koch had collaborated with Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick in an attempt to

AI for Politics “My role is now to represent you, like a mirror,” is the first thing Romania’s latest honorary government advisor is reported to have said. Consisting of a mirror-like display shows either text or a male or female face, talking in a serene voice, Ion 6 Philosophy Now l December 2023/January 2024

Good grief bot by Paul Gregory

find the neural correlate of consciousness. On the basis of the theory that every conscious human experience can be linked with the activity of certain neurons, Koch wagered his friend Chalmers that scientists would find a neural correlate of consciousness within 25 years. David Chalmers, now one of the foremost contemporary philosophers on consciousness, took the bet. The winner was to have a few bottles of nice wine. Both scientists agreed on 23 June 2023 on the stage of the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in New York City, that the relevant research is still ongoing and therefore declared Chalmers the winner. Koch recalled that the original bet had been fuelled by drinks and enthusiasm: “When you’re young, you’ve got to believe things will be simple.” And The Winner Is... 2 The thirteenth Ratzinger Prize by the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger – Benedetto XVI has been awarded to Spanish philosopher Francesco Torralba Roselló (Ramon Llull University) for his work in

Shorts researching, teaching and extensively publishing in the fields of anthropology and ethics. He shares the honour and the 50,000 euro prize money with Spanish theologian Pablo Blanco Sarto. Monkey Chimera: Hopes & Horrors Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have created a live-born monkey by infusing stem cells from one monkey species into an embryo of a different species, a scientific breakthrough. The young animal, prosaically called ‘#10’, developed respiratory failure and hypothermia within a few days of its birth and had to be euthanised.“Making chimeric monkeys could facilitate new kinds of genetic and developmental biology studies with more direct relevance to humans,” commented Dr Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist and cancer researcher at the University of California Davis. He noted that there was some suffering for the monkey and added that there are other ethical concerns that cannot be ignored: “How long is it permissible to grow and study a human-monkey chimera embryo? How does one avoid having extensive human brain cells in such a chimera if you study it for long periods or is that permissible in some cases? These questions apply to other types of human-animal chimeras that have been made as well.” Philosophers Disagree on Gaza Philosophers should always try to help improve the standard of public discourse by good quality argumentation, especially when emotions are running high. Various reasoned public reactions by philosophers to the violent conflict between Israel and Hamas and its effect on the civilian population have emerged. An open letter titled ‘Philosophy for Palestine’ has been signed by over 400 philosophers worldwide. (aurdip.org/en/philosophy-forpalestine). Philosopher Seyla Benhabib expressed her disagreement in a public refutation called ‘An Open Letter To My Friends Who Signed ‘Philosophy for Palestine’.’ (medium.com/amor-mundi/an-open-letterto-my-friends-who-signed-philosophy-forpalestine-0440ebd665d8). 45 Oxford academics, 14 of them philosophers and ethicists, signed ‘Open letter on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza’ (academicsongaza.wixsite.com/gazaopenletter). In reply, six Israeli moral philosophers have written: ‘A Reply to the Open Letter on the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza’ (replytoacademicson.wixsite.com/replytoacademicsonga).

Philosophy Shorts by Matt Qvortrup ‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads, about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love. Tracks like George Harrison’s Taxman, written in response to a marginal tax-rate of 96 percent introduced by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the Sixties, are the exception. Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

Philosophers on Football

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he existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus fell out in the 1950s. There are different theories as to their disagreement: politics, women, or other small matters, but few have suggested that the real cause could be football. Albert Camus, famously himself a talented goalkeeper, is cited for the insight that, “What I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” Jean-Paul Sartre was not quite so sure, hence, perhaps, their disagreement. The author of Being and Nothingness observed that “In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team” (quoted in Le Monde, ‘L’autre planéte foot’, 31 May 2002). It seems that existentialists have a thing for football. Martin Heidegger might be best known for his dense work Being and Time, but he was also passionate about Fußball. His biographer wrote how the great philosopher became obsessed with the game around the time West Germany won the FIFA World Cup, in 1974:

“Heidegger by then was a venerable old gentleman, and his former brusqueness and severity had mellowed with the years. He would go to a neighbour’s house to watch European Cup matches on television. His particular favourite [player] was Franz Beckenbauer. [Heidegger] was full of admiration for this player’s delicate ball control – and actually tried to demonstrate some of Beckenbauer’s finesses to his astonished interlocutor. He called Beckenbauer an ‘inspired player’ and praised his ‘invulnerability’ in duels on the field.” (R. Safranski, Martin Heidegger, 1998, p.428).

Sometimes the inspiration goes the other way. Former Arsenal manager

Arsene Wenger (known as Le Prof) was philosophical when he spoke about Le foot, concluding that different playing styles were a result of different philosophies: “If you think about it, the culture of a country is dictated by what they learn in school. We in France have Descartes. His rationalism is the basis for all French thought and culture. In Italy you have Machiavelli, who is also about being rational and calculating” (Daily Mail, 10 Nov 2010). He went on to say that “in England, maybe because they are an island, they are more warlike.” Certainly that impression chimes with Thomas Hobbes’ observation that his English compatriots “are continually in competition for honour, and consequently amongst men ariseth on that ground, envy and hatred, and finally war.” (Leviathan, 1651, p.111) So you need to look at the whole picture. As another philosophical football manager, José Mourinho, said, “Did you read any philosopher? You spent time reading Hegel. Just as an example Hegel says: ‘The truth is in the whole, is always in the whole’.” (Guardian, 31 Aug 2018) Maybe the ‘special one’ (as Mourinho calls himself) should have been a philosophy professor? And maybe some philosophers should have chosen different careers? Jacques Derrida thought so, and confessed he “would rather have been known as an international footballer than a philosopher.” (Palgrave Advances in Continental Political Thought, ed. T. Carver & J. Martin, 2005, p.260). © PROF. MATT QVORTRUP 2023

Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science at Coventry University. His book Great Minds on Small Things is out now.

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Free Will

Spinoza & Other Determinists Myint Zan compares different ways of denying free will.

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he following sentences appear in a letter written by the great Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (16321677):

“Further conceive, I beg, that a stone while continuing in motion should be capable of thinking and knowing, that is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of his own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and it would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined” (Letter to G.H. Schaller, October 1674).

These three sentences in Spinoza’s letter determine (pun intended) that he was a philosophical determinist. Without distorting Spinoza’s message, we could rephrase it this way: “If a stone in motion were to have human-level consciousness, then the stone, like some humans, including philosophers, would think that it is moving out of its own volition and free will, although it isn’t.”

Baruch Spinoza, possibly? This portrait discovered in a Paris art sale in 2013 is believed by some to be Spinoza. It is dated 1666 and attributed to the Dutch painter Barend Graat. If so, it is the only portrait painted of Spinoza during his lifetime.

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If one fastforwards from the late seventeenth century to the late twentieth century, in a lecture in March 1990 the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking also expressed an opinion about free will (see Chapter 13: ‘Is Everything Determined?’ in his 1993 book Black Holes & Baby Universes). Hawking argued that the concept of diminished responsibility in British criminal law should be abolished. Under this legal concept a few defendants’ criminal culpability, and hence their punishments, can be reduced, in certain exceptional circumstances. Even more rarely, they might be held legally ‘not guilty’ if the law or the Courts assume that these defendants do not have adequate comprehension of, or control over, their actions. The concept of diminished responsibility can also be seen in the rare cases where criminal defendants are found ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’. The thrust of the thinking behind Hawking’s proposal to abolish this legal concept of diminished responsibility is that since all the actions of all human beings are determined (that is, predetermined), why give special preference to those criminal defendants having the defence of ‘diminished responsibility’? Hawking seems to be saying, “Don’t accept only a few criminal defendants’ claims that ‘We could not have helped ourselves’, because other criminals, indeed all human beings, cannot help themselves in all their actions, either.” However, in Great Britain the doctrine of diminished responsibility has not been abolished; nor, as far as this writer is aware, has the doctrine been abolished in former British colonies, from Australia through India and Malaysia to Zimbabwe. I’d ask, if Spinoza were to come back, would he agree with Hawking’s version of philosophical determinism? Further, after studying modern criminal law and criminology, would he agree with Hawking’s suggestion that the legal doctrine of diminished responsibility be abolished? I venture to suggest that there may be shades of differences between Spinoza’s and Hawking’s deterministic philosophies, but they’re not that far apart. Both hold that free will is an illusion. On the other hand, Spinoza’s and Hawking’s metaphysical determinism is very different from and incompatible with the metaphysics of Augustine and Calvin. Calvinistic vs Augustinian Predestination John Calvin (1509-1564) was a seminal French/Swiss theologian of the Protestant persuasion. One of Calvin’s theological doctrines was his concept of ‘predestination’. In short, only those who believe in Christ can be saved, but the Christian creator deity has, in his discretion, chosen in advance who to save by leading or allowing them to believe in Christ. From my understanding of this, Calvin seems to have meant that whether or not a person believes in God was pre-determined by that God. Hence for example, if the atheist Richard Dawkins has chosen not to believe in God, and indeed to be critical of the idea or ‘construct’ of God, that non-belief of Dawkins (and one would add, of millions of others worldwide) was also pre-determined by the deity himself.

Free Will This is a very specific type or application of the denial of free will. A comparable (though not necessarily similar) special pleading can be seen in varying degrees in other dogmas and ideologies, some of whose tenets may otherwise be opposed to Calvin’s ideology. Non-belief in God was the will of God himself according to Calvin. In a different-but-not-that-different assertion, Marxists might assert that inbuilt ‘class biases’ lead people to oppose Marxism. A few Freudians might also state that those who disagree with Freud and his theories are showing psychological ‘resistance’. And a few radical feminists’ catch phrase is that many people, including many females, most liberal and cultural feminists, and almost all males, institutions, religions, political ideologies and philosophies, are dominated by, or suffused with ‘male constructs’ they themselves had no part in constructing or deliberating upon. Neither Calvin nor Spinoza were privy to these philosophies, which emerged a few centuries after their deaths; but indeed, Spinoza’s concept of Deus sive Natura (‘God, or Nature’) was itself a radical departure from the Abrahamic concept of the personal deity – so much so that Spinoza’s Amsterdam synagogue expelled and anathematised him for his unorthodox philosophy. Spinoza’s God, and his ‘intellectual love of God’, is not related to Calvin’s predestinationism. Though both Spinoza and Hawking were philosophical determinists, the identity of the ‘determiner’, so to speak, was not Calvin’s deity – nor the deity of the Catholic theologian Augustine of Hippo (354-430), either. Augustine preceded Calvin and Spinoza by about 1,200 years and 1,300 years respectively. In one of his essays in the book The Night is Large (1996), Martin Gardner claimed that according to Augustine, ‘’God stands above time and sees the past, the present and the future.’’ From my recall of what I read in Augustine’s Confessions (397), there were passages to that effect, whereby every instant is like an eternal present to God. But to one such as me, outside of the theological traditions of both Calvin and Augustine, this query comes to mind: Does God have the power to change the future, the present, or even the past? Superimposing Calvinist theology over the Augustinian, a further query is: Can and does God change his mind (so to speak), and ‘reverse’ his choice as to whom he confers salvation, and who (let’s not mince words now) he condemns to damnation? Spinoza almost certainly would have been familiar with aspects of Augustinian and Calvinist theology, even if in the four books about Spinoza by four different authors this writer has read, he does not recall reading specifically about Calvinist and Augustinian philosophies. Yet when Spinoza died there were about 160 books in his library. Were there, in that library, the Latin originals of Augustine’s Confessions; the works of Calvin; and Latin, or Dutch, or Portuguese, translations of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations? It is said that Marcus ordered that his diary, which later become Meditations, be destroyed. If that was so we should be grateful that his subjects did not abide by their Emperor’s orders. In contrast, the ‘gentle’ Spinoza must have had an eye on posterity, perhaps even (perish the thought!) posthumous fame and recognition, when he took the trouble of hand copying his correspondence, expressing not even a hint of a wish that it be destroyed after his death. There are many shades of differences between the theologies of Augustine and Calvin, since the former was a Catholic

theologian and the latter a Protestant one. As a philosophical determinist, Spinoza did not accept free will. Apparently, though, one traditional shared response of Christians to the existence of evil is based on the concept of free will. But in this writer’s opinion, free will is somewhat anomalous or problematic in light of the concepts both of Calvinistic predestination and Augustinian divine foreknowledge. If human life is fixed by God, how can free will operate? Makkhali Gosala’s Amoral Fatalism The ancient Indian philosopher Makkhali Gosala, who died around 425 BCE, preceded Augustine by about 800 years, Calvin by about 2,000 years, and Spinoza by about 2,100 years. One notable aspect of Gosala’s philosophy is his fatalism. According to scholars, Gosala’s views are mainly known through statements made in the texts of a couple of religions dominant in his times, Buddhism and Jainism. Apparently both the Buddhists and Jains of Gosala’s time considered him, if not a deviant, then at least entirely outside their traditions. Gosala seems to have espoused the view that human beings are preordained to suffer. He discoursed about the futility of human effort, and denied the consequences of good or bad deeds. Gosala even denied the operation of karma, which idea was already long-established in Indian philosophy and theology. Karma can generally be defined as consequences in both present and future lives of present volitional actions and those volitional actions from past lives. Variations on the idea can be found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. A few Buddhist texts indicate that the Buddha himself condemned Gosala’s views as the ‘meanest’ or ‘most low-based of the doctrines among the many preachers of many sects’ of ancient India, more than 2,500 years ago. The denial of the consequences of volitional action can be designated as ‘fatalism’ in both ancient Indian and contemporary contexts. His isn’t the predestinationism of Calvin, which is based on the Creator’s will, nor is it ‘predestination’ in the Augustinian sense of God already knowing what will happen. To the extent that this writer can discern, Gosala did not say that fatalism emanated from the will of the Creator. Ostensibly, the fatalism is just there. Spinoza denied free will, but he was not a fatalist in the mould of Gosala, nor an espouser of predestination like Augustine or Calvin. Unlike them, Spinoza did not attribute his determinism to God, but rather, because everything that happens takes place through natural laws. And while Makkhali Gosala, because of his fatalism, did not enjoin moral efforts, this is not the case in the moral philosophy of the determinist Spinoza. Indeed, many philosophers and other admirers of Spinoza throughout the world are of the view that he was one of history’s most moral philosophers. This to me is only an apparent paradox in the deterministic philosophy of Spinoza. © DR MYINT ZAN 2023

Myint Zan is a retired Professor of Law from Multimedia University in Malacca, Malaysia. He established in perpetuity the Myint Zan Prize in Philosophy of Science for undergraduate students at the Australian National University. The inaugural Myint Zan Law and Philosophy Lecture at ANU was delivered by Judge Hilary Charlesworth of the International Court of Justice in August 2023. December 2023/January 2024  Philosophy Now 9

IMAGE © MILES WALKER 2023 PLEASE VISIT MILESWALKER.COM

Free Will

What Is Free Will? Grant Bartley wants to know what the problem with freedom is all about. o answer the philosophical riddle of whether people have free will, we first need to understand what free will is, or at least, what it would be. My goal here is to work out what free will must be if it does exist, and along the way, try to demonstrate that it must exist.

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Some Choice Jargon An attempt to define ‘free will’ might reasonably start by defining ‘freedom’. I will use the definition that freedom is the capacity to explore possibilities. This isn’t the only good definition of freedom, but it works well with the rest of what I’m going to say. By this definition, someone is free to the extent that they can explore possibilities or options, and even a simple animal, or even a bacterium, is free insofar as it can explore the possibilities presented by its environment. But the freedom of bacteria is relatively limited. Creatures capable of thought can explore not only their immediate physical surroundings but also the world of ideas. This freedom to 10 Philosophy Now  December 2023/January 2024

explore ideas is also not unlimited: the outer borders of that freedom are the limits of our imaginations. The power of the will in the term ‘free will’ might be reasonably defined as the power of enacting choices or decisions made by a mind. We could say, wills make choices, so free wills make free choices. So, just by these definitions, free will is choice enacted by a mind from possibilities. Free will means a mind causing a state of being from options. So even just by defining the words, we understand that free will is conscious causation. The trick is to understand what this means. What is supposedly being caused by consciousness, from what options, for instance? Our definition of freedom as ‘the ability to explore possibilities’ fits well with the fact that free will involves choice, since to choose is to decide between possibilities. And certainly, in terms of the freedom of intelligent agents, before there can be freedom to act, there must be the freedom to think. Choice must first mean that to some degree we choosers choose our own thoughts. You choose what to think, or what you want to do, before you

Free Will cells being predetermined from the beginning of time, our mental responses are nevertheless still choices, because these illusions of causation would be the choices we would make if we were actually free to make them (or something like that). Metaphysically, rather than politically speaking, I’m a libertarian. I believe in free will. That is, I believe there is autonomous mental deciding, at least as far as circumstances allow. Put another way: as a libertarian, I think my choices, although constrained and given direction by circumstances, are not determined by circumstances, or ultimately, by anything but my mind. Even though we’re constrained, there’s always at least options of thought we can choose between. Indeed, even if my thinking were beyond my control right up to the point of the choice itself, this wouldn’t stop the moment of choice itself being free. And as long as the moment of choice itself is free, there’s free will. So we can further define free will as an ability to specify mental contents which is not absolutely determined by external circumstances. I call such power ‘sovereign choice’; so free will is the capacity for sovereign choice. It means, for your choice to be free, nothing must ultimately determine the choice in the moment of choice except you. Determining Against Determinism So let’s now consider the most popular reason to not believe in free will: determinism. As I’ve already hinted, there are varieties of determinism. Strong or hard determinism is the doctrine that every physical event in the universe, including in the brain, is caused by preceding physical events; alongside the doctrine that there are only physical causes, not distinct mental ones, either because they say there are no distinctly non-physical minds (that view’s called physicalism) or because minds have no feedback into the physical world (that view is called epiphenomenalism). But there being no mental causation affecting our brains, either through physicalism or epiphenomenalism, would mean that what appear to be choices are mere illusions of choice. So strong determinism says there is no choice, only predetermined brain activity – along-

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enact any such choice. So what I’ll primarily mean by ‘choice’ is your specification of the contents of your mind, at least to some extent, with ‘choice’ only secondarily referring to any actions that may result from the mental deliberation. Thought comes before action, otherwise we’re not talking about rational choice but rash impulse. Indeed, if we don’t choose mentally before we act physically, we’re not talking about choice at all, we’re talking about an automatic reflex or response: a reaction or an impulse. So before any truly chosen bodily movement can be enacted, there must be a choice to move. This includes moving your mouth to speak. With this in mind, I’ll define choice primarily as the conscious specification of your next mental contents, such that your willing is your conscious specification of the next contents of your mind. Alternatively put, free will means the ability to choose one set of mental contents rather than others, potentially followed by action resulting from that choice. But free will is the capacity to specify one’s next mental content from a range of possibilities, and only consequently about enacting this choice physically. What might the freedom to choose our contents of mind involve? And does this sort of mental causation actually happen? First, this idea of choice makes sense only in terms of a mind being aware of ideas or options to choose from. Anything not a deliberate, conscious choosing between options I don’t think is properly called ‘choice’. So, strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as ‘unconscious choice’. By definition, when we talk about subconscious or nonconscious brain activity, we’re talking in terms of only physical causes, not in terms of any direct influence of conscious will. Nonconscious brain signal processing is not choice, but something which happens automatically, biochemically. Most of the brain’s activity isn’t directly associated with the making of conscious choice, and so is automatic in just this way. Next, sometimes our decision-making is choice, that is, mentally deciding between alternative possibilities present to your awareness. But your mind doesn’t always explicitly present you with multiple choices from which to choose. Sometimes no distinct options are present to your awareness, and you must cause your next contents of your mind on the basis of the present content, through intuition or imagination. This is not choice, so much as making a decision. Nevertheless, I think a lot of your willing means you choosing from ideas emerging out of the background of your awareness and presented as vague possibilities. Here you dismiss or affirm options as they arise in your awareness. For example, you’ve just got off the train and walked out of the station: you’re thinking about what to do next: there are various ideas being suggested more or less prominently to your mind at this point. As you opt for one of these possibilities – just to think about doing it – it expands into becoming your next conscious thought – your response to your current desire to move. Metaphysically speaking, someone who believes there is free will, that is, that there is as we’ve defined it, ‘autonomous mental content determination’, is called a libertarian. On the other hand, a promoter of the idea that there is no real free will is called a determinist, because for them all your so-called ‘choices’ are predetermined by previous events. For the hard determinist, free will is an illusion; there’s only the inevitable flow of physical events causing other events, and your mind somehow emerges from that. Besides the libertarian and the determinist, there are compatibilists, who believe that despite all the activities of our brain

December 2023/January 2024  Philosophy Now 11

Free Will side the illusion of thoughts making a difference to what that brain activity would be, which we call ‘free will’. Strong or hard determinism is distinct from weak or soft determinism. Weak determinism puts external causes for our choices of our thoughts and actions in less absolute terms. So, rather than saying our thoughts are physically predetermined, it says that our choices are all influenced by external events. For instance, a weak determinist might say that someone is a criminal because of experiences that made and make him what he is. In the most immediate sense, this might refer to his addiction to crystal meth, for instance – but this was itself provoked by a violent upbringing and being moved from home to home... Soft determinism is undeniably true. Our individual characters are all to a significant degree the result of factors beyond our control. These include our genes; our family circumstances; the number of siblings we have and whether they are older or younger; our cultural environment; and the specific set of personal experiences unique to our lives. Let us be absolutely clear that to affirm that people have free will does not imply that their freedom is unlimited. Even the most ardent libertarian allows that our choices are somewhat constrained, even to some extent directed, by factors beyond our consciousness, including the accidents of history which have made us what we are. What gives us free will is that, even given all the factors coercing or otherwise influencing our decisions, there’s still room for the making of choice not absolutely determined by these influences. Whatever forces act upon someone to influence or constrain their choice, free will means there is nevertheless a degree to which they choose a thought simply because they choose it. Again, free will requires only that the moment of choice itself must be free. Some freedom at the moment of choice is not often denied on the weaker determinism, in which case we say that external factors are mere influences on our choices. Free will is only denied on the strong determinist account, in which choice, or any idea of your mind causing anything, is only an illusion. However, the idea that there’s no mental causation – the idea that human beings do not have free will – is a bad assumption which cannot be justified. It can’t be justified because strong determinism is false. To establish strong determinism as plausible, for a start, a whole batch of evolutionary questions about consciousness need to be answered, such as, If conscious causation is not real, why did consciousness evolve at all? What would be the function of awareness if it can’t change behaviour? How could an impotent awareness evolve if it cannot change what the brain’s going to do help the human body or its genes survive? A related but slyly different questioning is, If there’s no choice, why did the appearance of choice evolve, so that the mind consistently misinforms itself of its own power? What exactly is being selected for there? Since determinism cannot answer these questions, we can know determinism is false. Or we can at least say we have good reasons to distrust strong determinists until they can give good answers to such basic evolutionary ideas. Determinism is also contradicted by every experience of making a choice you’ve ever had. But why would you discount that evidence unless you’ve already made up your mind it doesn’t count? Determinists unjustifiably ignore the evidence of our experience of choice because they want to put their metaphysical assumption that all causation is physical above that evidence. On the contrary, I would say our experience of choosing is too 12 Philosophy Now  December 2023/January 2024

authentic to plausibly be an illusion. So what if we can’t yet say how it works? Evidence is not evidence because we can explain it; it’s evidence because we can’t just think it away. This is the case with the experience of choosing, everpresent in our waking lives. The onus is on the determinist to show why this doesn’t count. They must prove free will is an illusion, not just assert it is. Determinists have a big problem with morality, too. Ethics needs free will. How can we blame a burglar or a murderer if his burgling or murdering is the result only of causes he didn’t himself choose? Perhaps, you might suggest, this shows that morality itself is an illusion. But I would say if you don’t think that things such as rape, torture, the killing of innocents, racism, sexism, and many other evils, are actually morally wrong, then you are either lying or a sociopath. So another argument for choice can be put in the form of the logical syllogism called modus tollens. It goes like this: If strong determinism is true, there is no such thing as moral responsibility. But there is such a thing as moral responsibility. So strong determinism is not true. Compatibilism is so called because it maintains that free will is compatible with strong determinism, which in turn implies that moral responsibility is compatible with strong determinism. Compatibilists argue that although our actions are entirely predetermined, we are nevertheless moral agents because our ‘choices’ are justified by reasons. But to me compatibilism is the wolf of determinism in a sheepish guise of moral respectability, assigning moral responsibility based on the mere illusion of choice. But this is would be responsibility an illusion couldn’t have. Thinking that we’re choosing when we’re not doesn’t make us responsible for our acts, any more than we’d be responsible for them if we were hypnotised into doing them. There too we’re thinking that we’re choosing our actions when we’re not. For these reasons, the onus is on the determinist to demonstrate that physical causation is the only causation, before presuming there’s no such thing as mental causation, ie will. Neither Determined Nor Random Real choice must be reasonable choice. In order to be a choice rather than some arbitrary impulse, free will must operate under the influence of considered reflection. Acting for no reason, or where reason is of so little influence as to make the choice practically arbitrary, is equivalent to behaving randomly. We could say, irrationality and random impulses are functionally and ethically equivalent. On the other hand, in order to be free, choice must also not be absolutely determined by anything, including reasons. If our reasons determine our decisions, we’re not in control, our reasons are. But for free will, it must be you, freely operating your will. This is why I call free will sovereign choice. Determinism by reasons we might call ‘logical determinism’. So we need our choices to be not completely without reasons, otherwise we’d be talking about only a random response to stimuli. But we also need to avoid saying that our choices are determined by reasons. Rather than either extreme, we can say that free will must be informed by reasons but not necessitated by reasons. To be free, your mind must not be forced to its decisions by the ideas it’s employing; but reasons nevertheless must influence your choice, even persuade it. Or, as Gottfried Leibniz put it: “The free substance” – the will – “determines itself by itself, following the motive of the good recognized by the understanding, which

Free Will inclines it without necessitating it” (Theodicy, 1710, my emphasis). He means that reason inclines the mind towards a good choice, but its choice is not necessitated by reasons. We might say that in choice, your mind is the pilot of your will, and your thoughts and reasons are the wind to which you set your will’s sails. What Free Will Involves So your choice of next mind state being free requires that nothing ultimately causes the choice except you willing it. We could say, a choice is not a choice unless it is made by the chooser at the moment of choice. In other words, you make the choice, and nothing causes you to make the choice other than the fact that it’s your choice. In more jargony terms, at the moment of the decision, the choosing must be ‘causally undetermined’; or, for your will to be free, your choice must be an uncaused cause. That is, the cause of your willing is your willing it, and nothing else. Moreover, since choice, if it exists, must involve mental activity that is not physically determined, choice must in some sense be independent of the physical activity of the brain. Generally put, to not to be determined by the system of physical causes we call the physical world, choice must be made independently of that system. In other words, choice must be non-physical. The idea that free will must operate independent of physical activity to a degree was as far as I know introduced by Immanuel Kant. Kant calls the will ‘transcendental’ – by which he partly means that for it to operate, will must be not part of the causal system of the physical world (The Critique of Pure Reason, 1781). Things get even more complicated. I’ll assume that it’s noncontroversial, even to you, that everything that happens in the human mind has a precise physical correlate in brain activity: a specific set of neuronal activity accompanies each specific set of mental contents, be they thoughts, experiences, or choices. If we define a ‘brain state’ as a given set of neuronal activities at a given time, while the ‘mind state’ is the mental contents at that time, this means a specific brain state underpins each specific mind state. So precise brain states accompany each aspect or moment of choice made by a mind. But this in turn means that a conscious choice of the contents of one’s mind must simultaneously be a choice of one’s brain activity. In other words, if you really choose what to think, you must thereby also set the neuronal activity physically underpinning the thinking you choose. Specifically, a choice by an embodied human mind has to direct the right neurons and synapses to fire in the right way. We can see this clearly if we consider a choice to act. Since voluntary movements of your body are demonstrably controlled through your brain, it’s undeniable that willing to do something must mean one set of neuronal activity being activated in the choice rather than another. You might ask, how could any voluntary movement of your body be enacted without influencing the part of the motor cortex that controls that physical movement by stimulating the right muscle contractions – for instance, moving your mouth to smile? So the determination of the right neural activity must be the starting point for the physical effects of any choice of movement for an embodied mind. To be effective in the physical world, the choices you make in your mind must cause specific neurons and synapses to fire, eventually sending signals along your nerves to stimulate your muscles to contract, and so cause your body to move in the way you will it to move. But even the case of just thinking, that is, choosing

or specifying only thoughts, also requires the right brain activity to be specified – the brain activity that will neurologically underpin the chosen thoughts. Daydreaming, for instance, involves images, memories, and language, all through the brain. You can perhaps see why this might pose a problem for free will, since it seems to require mind over matter in the brain. How can a choice by a mere immaterial mind affect the physical workings of its brain? I don’t have the space to get into this deeply right now, but to put my answer briefly, I think your choices can affect the state of your brain through indirect quantum observation. This has nothing to do with quantum indeterminism. Indeterminism, meaning randomness, could never be choice. Rather, my idea involves the creation of quantum reality through observation. You will probably have heard that quantum observation determines physical reality at a sub-atomic scale. I’m saying that this fact provides a possible mechanism for choice in the brain. The idea is that in choosing, the mind indirectly observes certain quantum states of the brain, and in this way selects them. I’ve made a video about this if you want to know more. The link is at the end. Summary What is free will? Allow me to summarise my choice of ideas. Freedom is the capacity to explore possibilities, and will is mental causation in action. This aware causation frequently involves a choice between mental possibilities. Free will is therefore primarily, or we might say definitionally, an ability to make mental choices between possibilities. Further, your will being free requires that the choice isn’t fully determined, either by prior states of the brain, or by reasons; but neither can choice be random. Rather, real choice happens when a mind, seeing options to make a choice between, or perceiving a situation it must make a decision about, after deliberation, makes an ultimately otherwise uncaused choice. In this sense, free will is an uncaused cause. It is the capacity for sovereign choice. In other words, you make the choice, and nothing ultimately causes you to make the choice other than the fact that you choose it. Choice being undetermined by reasons does not necessarily mean choice is unreasonable. There may be plenty of ideas and thoughts informing your decision; yet ultimately, your choice is not absolutely determined by the reasons your mind deliberates with any more than it’s determined by physical events. Rather, for choice to be free – that is, for there to actually to be free will – it must be the case that you sovereignly choose given enough information for your choice to be ‘rational’ or ‘reasonable’, or at least, involving awareness to an as-yet-unspecified degree. So free will is sovereign choice. But what’s that? It’s a mind autonomously specifying, first, its own contents. The bottom line is that free will is free mental causation – either of just the mind’s contents, or also provoking the body’s actions. Insofar as you can mentally cause things to happen, that far you have free will. If you say there is no free will, you’re basically saying there is no such thing as conscious causation. But what makes you think that is the case? Why, in particular, would consciousness exist if it doesn’t do anything? © GRANT BARTLEY 2023

Grant Bartley is the Editor of Philosophy Now magazine. His videos on consciousness and free will are free to watch at tinyurl.com/BartleyFreeWill. December 2023/January 2024  Philosophy Now 13

Free Will

Criticising Strawson’s Compatibilism Nurana Rajabova is wary of an attempt to dismiss determinism to keep free will. he belief that human beings have moral responsibility is used to judge people based on their actions, then to reward or punish them accordingly. But is this just? This question becomes unavoidable when the theory of determinism enters the discussion. Determinists claim that every event or occurrence in the world, including human desires, thoughts, and acts, are predetermined by physical laws of cause and effect. In such a world there is no space for free will, since any person’s action at any time could not have been different, if all the physical conditions causing it remain the same. As there is no human free will, say the determinists, there can be no moral responsibility either. At the other end of the axis stand libertarians who also view the two phenomena as incompatible, yet the theory they reject is determinism, as they believe that humans do possess free will. Therefore, assigning moral responsibility is justifiable according to their view. In-between these two positions are the compatibilists, who claim that determinism and moral responsibility are not mutually exclusive after all. Different compatibilists explain this with different arguments. In this article, I will only examine one such argument, made by Peter Strawson in his seminal paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 48, 1962), with the purpose of seeing whether it does resolve the centuries old puzzle.

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Strawson’s Argument Before we get into the specifics of his paper, we should note that Strawson has a slightly idiosyncratic compatibilist position. Unlike other compatibilists, he does not identify as a determinist. In fact, he denies that he even understands the thesis of determinism. Instead he argues that even if determinism were correct, that still would not take away our sense of moral responsibility, since for Strawson the question of the justification of moral responsibility is internal to “the general structure or web of human attitudes and feelings” (‘Freedom and Resentment’). To demonstrate this point, Strawson puts aside ideas of moral condemnation, approval, and the like, which are commonly used in the debate over free will and determinism, and instead invites his readers to focus on something much simpler and common to all human agents, that he calls ‘reactive attitudes’. These are the emotions people experience when involved in interactions with each other, and include resentment, contempt, sympathy and gratitude, among many others. Strawson speaks of these emotions as a natural part of human psychology. For instance, if somebody does me wrong, it is only natural for me to feel resentment towards them. Or if I am assisted in one way or another, I will naturally develop gratitude towards the person who did me the favor. Strawson further notes that such emotional responses are not only applicable in our relationships 14 Philosophy Now  December 2023/January 2024

with others, but also in our responses to ourselves. The feeling of guilt we have when we recognize our own wrong action is a prime example of this. By drawing attention to this common human psychology, Strawson argues that we all possess these reactive attitudes as a human disposition and as a “fact of human society.” He then argues that this is indeed an indication that ascribing moral responsibility is a justified practice, since doing so is simply one of our natural reactive attitudes. It’s not only justified, it’s inevitable, we might say. Strawson then inquires about the influence of determinism on such responsibility. He asks rhetorically, “Would or should the acceptance of determinism lead to the decay or repudiation of all such attitudes? Would or should it mean the end of the gratitude, resentment, forgiveness and of all essentially personal antagonisms?” He expects that the answer is ‘no’. Strawson now mentions some exceptional cases where we modify our reactive attitudes and choose to look at things more objectively, or, to use his own words, where we choose to move away from ‘participatory reactions’ to ‘objective attitudes’. He reduces such attitude changes to two cases: (1) When a person did something by accident, with no ill will; and (2) When we judge that a person isn’t an appropriate target of any reactive attitude because they lack some relevant capacity – say a child, or someone with severe mental illness. Nevertheless, he argues that even “when the suspension of such an attitude or such attitudes occurs in a particular case, it is never the consequence of the belief that the piece of behavior in question was determined… In fact, no such sense of ‘determined’ as would be required for a general thesis of determinism is ever relevant to our actual suspensions of moral reactive attitudes.” In other words, the idea of determinism is irrelevant to the application of our reactive attitudes. Therefore, for Strawson, we cannot seek an answer to the question of moral responsibility in the metaphysical realm. For this reason, he criticizes both determinists and compatibilists equally for over-intellectualizing the subject. He says, “The optimist’s [compatibilist’s] style of over-intellectualizing the facts is that of a characteristically incomplete empiricism, a one-eyed utilitarianism. He seeks to find an adequate basis for certain social practices in calculated consequences, and loses sight (perhaps wishes to lose sight) of the human attitudes of which these practices are, in part, the expression. The pessimist [determinist] does not lose sight of these attitudes but is unable to accept the fact that it is just these attitudes themselves that fill the gap in the optimist’s account. Because of this, he thinks the gap can be filled only if some general metaphysical proposition [ie free will] is repeatedly verified, verified in all cases where it is appropriate to attribute moral responsibility.” (‘Freedom and Resentment’, 1962)

Peter Strawson (1919-2006) by Gail Campbell, 2023

We can summarize Strawson’s argument this way: Point 1: Moral responsibility is real and derives solely from the fact that humans possess reactive attitudes. These attitudes would remain even if determinism were proven true. Point 2: Therefore, inquiry into the truth of determinism in a metaphysical sense is unnecessary, because the acceptance of determinism in the metaphysical sense would not in any way undermine our practical sense of moral responsibility. In what follows I will address both these points to see whether they really put the debate about free will and moral responsibility to rest.

Assigning Moral Responsibility Admittedly, the natural human disposition to react to interactions, to which Strawson draws attention in his first point, is an undeniable reality. It’s a quality humans carry as both embodied and social beings. We have evolved to have bodily reactions and mental processes that ultimately serve the evolutionary purpose of our preservation, and our reactive attitudes are part of that. Interestingly enough, studies show that human bodily reactions do not occur only in response to physical stimuli; they can also happen in relation to ‘moral things’. The anterior cingulate cortex is a part of the brain that activates to produce disgust when a human is presented with rotten food (a function which evolved to keep people from harmful food). It turns out that the same area of the brain also gets activated when a person witnesses an December 2023/January 2024  Philosophy Now 15

Free Will event they deem morally repugnant. This is just one quick example supporting Strawson’s point that the natural human disposition is to react to moral stimuli. However, the question I want to ask is whether the reactive attitudes (in other words, our emotional responses) are enough to confer moral responsibility. For the sake of brevity and clarity, I will explore this question by analyzing it in only one case, that of death, yet one could explore the same question in almost all types of human emotionally reactive experiences. In the first scenario I’ll refer to death caused by non-living beings, such as natural events (e.g. earthquakes) or inanimate objects (e.g. water). I will take the case of a child drowned at sea. The sorrow caused as the result of this incident will undoubtedly be beyond description for people related to the child, and may well also raise other emotions, such as anger and hatred. It is possible for the mother to hate the sea for taking her child away from her. But despite the extremity of the pain, and the anger and hatred, no one will be able to hold the sea morally responsible, because the sea has no agency. A lack of agency immediately makes a claim of moral responsibility non-applicable. In fact, thanks to the lack of agency and intention, one’s whole conception of the event changes as we take the act altogether away from the object and instead bring it to the agent that was harmed in the process. Thus, in this specific example, instead of saying the sea drowned the child, we say the child got drowned in the sea. The reason is because the sea has no agency. After all, the sea was not acting in any other way than being a sea. Also due to this lack of agency, we more often relate such experiences to fate or to the flow of the processes rather than blame the particular thing that appeared as the immediate cause. It follows therefore that our sense of moral responsibility is not based solely on our emotional reactions. It is also based on our judgment, which requires some other criteria for moral responsibility to be applicable – the first and foremost being the judgement that agency is present. So despite the pain and negative emotions an event may raise in us, those emotions do not immediately yield the ascription of moral responsibility to the cause of the event. In our second scenario we’ll consider a death caused by an animal. Let us take a case in which a child dies as the result of a dog attack. The result being the same – the loss of the child – this will raise a similar degree of pain in the mother. This strong pain again may naturally raise feelings of anger or hatred. The mother may even develop a sense of vengeance toward the dog. But again our question is whether the emotion arising as a reaction to this event is enough to hold the dog morally responsible. In this scenario, unlike the first one, there is some agency. A dog is a doer of its own actions. Yet, experience tells us that dogs, perhaps all animals for that matter, cannot be held morally responsible, because they lack sufficient cognitive capacity to understand the moral dimension of their actions. Once again we see that the reactive attitude deriving from the incident does not immediately justify the attribution of moral responsibility. In short, our reactive attitudes do not justify ascribing moral responsibility to beings with insufficient cognitive capacity to see moral distinctions. Before we move on, I want to briefly mention the practice of putting down violent animals. Some might argue that this is the result of ascribing moral responsibility to 16 Philosophy Now  December 2023/January 2024

animals, but I would say that it rather for the purpose of getting rid of the danger than from a sense of justice. Now, in the third scenario, I refer to a similar incident, but this time caused by a human agent. Once again, the death of the child causes the same pain, and the same emotions or reactive attitudes. Yet here we immediately see the sense of claims of moral responsibility. However, even in such a case, the assigning of moral responsibility is not a straightforward consequence of the emotional reactions, and requires some other criteria to be met. Given that a human being is already viewed as a moral agent, we can say that one of the criteria for moral responsibility is immediately met. However, this is not enough. In fact, our sense of moral responsibility also requires a relevant intention. So if the mother knows that the killer never intended to harm the child, that the incident was purely an awful accident, then at a personal level she may forgive him. At the social and legal levels, intention may not have such a resolving effect, although it may result for instance in a reduced sentence. A real-life example like this happened a few years ago in my home town. A grandfather, while parking, not seeing his little grandchild playing behind the car, accidently hit him, and as a result the child died. This is indeed one example that clearly shows the discontinuity between moral responsibility and our reactive attitudes. The grandfather was held accountable on a legal basis, because he met the two main criteria of legal accountability, which are, a wrong action committed by a moral agent. Therefore, the reactive attitude towards this man happened to be more one of pity than resentment. Because everyone familiar with the story knew that he did not have any intention to harm the child. Needless to mention the cognitive ability of a human actor will also have a great effect on claims of moral responsibility. For instance, if a killer has a serious cognitive disability, such that they really can’t recognise what they’ve done, their victim’s family may take a more forgiving position in consideration of their lack of understanding. However, in this case too measures will be taken by legal institutions, not so much for punishment as for the purpose of reducing the potential danger. We can see that despite the fact that the degree of pain and the initial emotional reaction remains the same in all three scenarios, these reactive attitudes do not themselves fully justify the claim of moral responsibility. That claim is based purely on rational judgement, and requires the fulfilment of three criteria: agency, intention, and adequate cognitive capacity. Accordingly, in response to the first point of Strawson’s argument, I conclude that the natural human disposition for reactive emotional attitudes towards events happening to them or around them cannot on its own justify the ascription of moral responsibility. This is because ascribing moral responsibility is not based on emotions. Rather, it is based on judgement. The Metaphysical Assumption of Free Agency Now I’d like to turn to Strawson’s second point, where he dismisses the importance of the influence of metaphysical views on our ascription of moral responsibility. Think of the experience of watching a movie with a strong emotional content, where some great tragedy or injustice unfolds. While watching this movie, sitting indifferently is not usually possible. Just like in real life, we feel emotions, and the

Philosophical Haiku emotions we feel towards these movie characters are similar to the emotional reactions we experience in our daily lives. We feel anger towards the bad guys, and sympathize with the good guys. We wish we could help them. However, there is an important factor that needs to be taken into consideration here. We feel strong emotions while watching the movie only when the actors play it so well that they almost make us forget the fact that their scenario is written by a screenwriter. Thus, while watching the movie, we implicitly view the characters as free agents and the direct cause of their own actions. But if the actors fail in their acting, there is no way that we will feel those same strong emotions, even though the scenario is the same. The insistent knowledge that they are only acting based on a script written for them weakens our emotional reaction. In addition, our resentment, sympathy, or any other type of emotional response, stops when the movie ends. It’s possible that for a short while after we may carry a certain emotion. However, the moment we are able to make a distinction between the actors and the roles they played, and realize that they had no choice but to follow a script, then our view changes and becomes emotionally neutral. This again shows the relationship between our judgment-based attitudes and free will. In a similar manner, in real life, our reactions towards people, including our ascriptions of moral responsibility to them, come from our seeing them as free agents who directly cause their own actions. In other words, it’s plausible to argue that our ascription of moral responsibility derives from a metaphysical view of people as free agents with intention and the ability to act otherwise. The moment agency is taken away from them, our moral reaction ceases. Therefore, I would argue that people’s views about metaphysics – specifically whether they believe in free agency – are embedded in our moral judgements. A good example of this would be people with a strong belief in divine determination, also known as fatalism. In cultures where such beliefs are dominant, it’s not unusual to come across people who are muted in their ascriptions of moral responsibility. Oftentimes, such people can seem rather neutral or passive, both in their reactions to the acts of others, and their own. For instance if they have happened to help someone, they modestly decline praise and gratitude for their action, as they do not see themselves as the cause of the good that happened to others, but only as a mediator. They say they were simply a means in the whole process. Generally speaking, those who believe in fate or some other form of cosmic determinism do not react to events like those who believe in free agent causation. In short, we can see that a belief in determinism absolutely plays a role in defining our reactive attitudes, and consequently our sense of moral responsibility. In the absence of a belief in free agency, our claim for moral responsibility as well as our reactive attitudes may be considerably weakened. Therefore, unlike Strawson, I think that the metaphysical problem of free will and moral responsibility is still a genuine problem, and does not derive from an over-intellectualization by philosophers. On close examination, Strawson’s dismissal of the significance of determinism proves to be unjustified.

illiam James was both a man of science and a philosopher. As a man of science he was particularly curious about human psychology, while as a philosopher he contributed to the development of pragmatism, in order to reject the weirdness of the then-popular absolute idealism. Truth, pragmatism says, consists in useful ideas. An idea is useful if it allows us to make predictions about future experiences: for instance, the idea that if you stick your hand in that flame it will get burned is true, because it’s useful. In James’s words, truth is ‘what pays by way of belief’ – you could choose not to believe that the flame will burn your hand, but that would be stupid and it wouldn’t pay to do so. This might all seem obvious, but in the realm of epistemology (how do we know what we think we know?) it was rather a big deal. By temperament, James was also much given to pondering God, faith, and human freedom. Disconcerted by his inability to establish that he had free will, James fell into a deep funk. He only emerged from his melancholy when he came across the works of Charles Renouvier (18151903). The Frenchman taught that we are free because we can choose what ideas we will allow to affect our behaviour. This was good enough for James: we may not be able to prove that we have this power, but we can choose to believe we have it – thereby exercising what he called ‘the will to believe’. Interested as he was in the science of psychology, James liked to experiment with drugs (that was his excuse, at least). A key discovery to emerge from these investigations was realising that by taking nitrous oxide he believed he could understand what Hegel had written. This seems to me an eminently pragmatic approach to reading him. If nothing else, you’ll at least have a laugh and that doesn’t happen often when reading Hegel.

© NURANA RAJABOVA 2023

© TERENCE GREEN 2023

Nurana Rajabova studied philosophy and is interested in questions of philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand.

William James by Alice Boughton

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY/PUBLIC DOMAIN

c. 1907

William James (1842–1910) The will to believe Deliverance from bondage The pragmatist’s balm

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istock.com/ChrisGorgio

Free Will

Materialism, Freedom & Ethics Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls. want to begin this article with the assumption that reality consists entirely of physical things and the forces which bind them. That is to say, I will assume the truth of materialism: the idea that the only things that ultimately exist are matter, energy, and physical forces. I will argue that this is consistent with a ‘materialistic compatibilism’ which preserves some sense of freedom and responsibility, and that this implies a positive conception of political and social liberty. You might wonder what on earth might possess me to want to start with something like that, but as I unpack it, I hope you’ll see that it makes sense.

I

Reality Consists of Physical Things A materialist view of the world might strike you as characteristically modern and Western. In fact, it isn’t quite so modern, as Democritus was talking about reality consisting of ‘atoms and the void’ 2,500 years ago. You might be itching to tell me that the idea is not originally a Western one, either. Nevertheless, let’s acknowledge that, for most of history, most people have lived with an explicitly dualist understanding of reality: they’ve thought that the world consists of what we might call ‘lumps of stuff’ on the one hand, and minds, spirits, or souls on the other. Yet what a great number of us think these days is that consciousness is not some non-physical thing, but something physical which emerges from the processes of the brain. All of this is, of course, hugely controversial, and the philoso18 Philosophy Now  December 2023/January 2024

pher David Chalmers for instance has vigorously defended a form of what is called ‘property dualism’, which suggests that while physics has managed to explain all manner of natural phenomena, it will stumble and fail to find a purely physical account of consciousness. Consciousness is, for Chalmers, a unique example of what he calls a ‘strongly emergent property’. In the other corner of this philosophical heavyweight contest stands Daniel Dennett. Dennett’s position is that while consciousness is presently mysterious, the physical sciences will yield its secrets in good time. All of this is very interesting, but the important point for us is that even Chalmers does not question that consciousness emerges from the physical brain (he says that it ‘supervenes’ upon it) but only that we can never understand how it does so. No matter; the fact that you can radically alter my consciousness by hitting me over the head or drugging me suffices to demonstrate that my mind is, somehow or other, bound up with the operation of my brain. As we shall see, we know quite a bit about what parts of the brain do what, and this knowledge is going to be very important to us in what follows. Compatibilism and Responsibility Compatibilism is the idea that the materialist picture of a causeand-effect universe can be reconciled with the intuition we have that we are free and responsible for our actions. The reason why many consider this a stretch isn’t hard to understand. If my con-

Free Will sciousness is the mere by-product of physical forces, then everything that flows from it is equally a product of those forces. Indeed, the atoms and molecules in my brain are there because of a chain of causes going back to the Big Bang. This position is called ‘hard determinism’, and seems pretty consistent with the ‘atoms and the void’ universe I defend. ‘No minds or spirits’ frequently equates, on this view, with ‘no choice’, but I want to modify that conclusion. The most famous philosopher to be sceptical about floaty metaphysical stuff yet also try to maintain a notion of moral responsibility was David Hume (1711-76). For him, the issue is not whether our actions are caused (they must be, since our actions would be unpredictable otherwise), but the origins of the causal chains involved. Broadly, if the causes of our actions are to be found within our own personalities or characters, we can be held responsible for them. This sounds reasonable. If I rob because I am greedy, then my greed is the cause of my actions and I am responsible for them. On the other hand, if I rob someone because you have threatened me with violence if I don’t, then the origin of the causal chain lies outside of me and I am not responsible. However, this kind of thinking, which equates freedom with a lack of coercion, flies in the face of what we now know about the origins of what Hume called ‘the passions’ and their role in motivating behaviour. Exploring these issues has, it turns out, profound implications for the role of philosophy in our lives, as well as calling into question the sufficiency of Hume’s conception of freedom as non-coercion. Hume rightly considered that the passions, or in modern terms, our emotions, are essential for understanding human motivation. As he famously put it: “Reason is and only ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office but to serve and obey them.” He was rightly scathing about Kant’s idea that bloodless reason could motivate action. We now know that our emotional responses have their source in the limbic system deep in the brain. Anger and fear reside in our amygdala, while the reward centre of our brains is the ventral striatum. The frontal cortex, just behind your forehead, by contrast, is both the rational instrument by which we work out how to satisfy our desires, and the source of plenty of rationalisations of them. Hume was good at recognising our tendency to go in for such rationalisations, but, I’d suggest, a little too sniffy about the role of reason as a moderator of our urges. I say this because we also know quite a bit about how the ‘impulse control function’ of the frontal cortex can be either nurtured or neutered. Specifically, people with a damaged frontal lobe tend to be very bad at impulse control. Damage to the frontal cortex can be the result of head

‘‘

Reason is and only ought to be

the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office

’’

but to serve and obey them. David Hume

trauma (a good reason not to let children play high impact sports), neglect, abuse, poor diet, or a lack of certain micro-nutrients including lithium, or due to environmental pollution by, amongst other things, lead and nitrous oxides. Not surprisingly, exposure to these things seems correlated with relative poverty. Moreover, social inequality itself may be a major trigger of the production of the stress hormone cortisol, which is the key neurotransmitter for the amygdala and the chemical enemy of serotonin (see Wilkinson and Pickett, 2011). Serotonin is the ‘fuel’ of the frontal cortex and the impulse control associated with it. In short, what the development of neuropsychology has done is to extend the causal chain so we don’t have to stop our explanation, as Hume did, with the individual’s personality. We now know quite a bit about what makes us the way we are, including understanding certain genetic predispositions. This has profound implications for ideas about responsibility and freedom. Hume’s view of freedom as lack of coercion was too simple. We can say that, to the extent that a person has a fully functional frontal cortex, they have good impulse control and so are responsible for their actions. This is the materialistic compatibilism I referred to at the start of the article. My frontal cortex is, largely, the reason that the flash of anger I feel when you rear-end my car doesn’t turn into a physical assault upon you. If I lack such frontal cortex function, I may well pose a danger to others and this may justify intervention to prevent me causing them harm. It does not, however, justify retribution being visited upon me for any supposedly ‘wilful’ wickedness, as my action is now beyond my wilful control. A Positive Conception of Political & Social Liberty The tendency to equate freedom with a lack of coercion has a long history and some complex motivations. John Stuart Mill (1806-73), who was much influenced by Hume’s compatibilism, explicitly states at the beginning of his famous 1859 essay On Liberty that it is not going to deal with issues pertaining to the ‘‘so-called liberty of the will’’ but instead with civil or social liberty. He tells us this as a point of clarification, but as scholars such as John Skorupski have suggested, Mill’s occasional nods to paternalism in terms of state intervention belie his claims to see liberty in purely negative terms (that is, as non-coercion). Specifically, he acknowledges that certain social goods, such as education and free debate, are prerequisites for the growth and development of the individual ‘‘according to the inward forces which make them a living thing.’’ He even goes so far as to suggest that the state should fund such education for those who can’t afford it, although he worries about the state limiting what might be learnt in school. This is one reason why Mill is sometimes held to be at the crossroads between ‘classical’ or ‘negative’ liberalism, and its ‘progressive’ or ‘positive’successor. Other philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), have an even more tortured relationship with the positive/negative liberty divide. Kant famously defended the death penalty on the grounds that in not executing the murderer we fail to treat him as a properly free agent who is fully responsible for his actions. Animals might act out of automatic responses and ‘passions’, but human beings have the capacity for rational reflection, and their will is the origin of their actions. But Kant’s morality was based on the dualist rejection of materialism in December 2023/January 2024  Philosophy Now 19

Free Will favour of the claim that the human will acts from outside the physical (‘phenomenal’) world. Nevertheless, some philosophers, such as Isaiah Berlin, worried that Kant had opened up space for a corrosive idea. If the part of us that’s governed by physical causes is, as Kant suggested, our animal passions, it follows that reason, and so free moral decision-making, involves the part that isn’t. Yet equating freedom with reason opens up the possibility of saying that some people are more rational and hence more capable of exercising freedom than others. If I decide you are less rational than me, it might lead me to treat you with mercy; but it might lead me to treat you as a lesser being. For Berlin, who had personally seen the horrors of the supposedly ‘rational society’ that emerged from the Russian Revolution, this was the road to ‘personal re-education’ by way of the Gulag. In ‘materialising’ rationality by making it synonymous with frontal cortex function, I might for some have made the situation even worse. Being rational is, on my model, a developmental process, and how far we attain our rational potential is dependent on all manner of contingencies (Bernard Williams talks about this in terms of ‘moral luck’). If this is the case, and freedom is something I value, it looks like there could be a rationale for all kinds of interventions in people’s lives to maximise their freedom by cultivating their rationality. Berlin must be spinning in his grave.

CARTOON © PHIL WITTE 2023

Rawls, Freedom & The Public Good While I’ve argued that non-coercion is insufficient as an account of freedom, I am not saying that it is unnecessary. This thought should reduce Berlin’s posthumous rotations to a minimum. I certainly think that some choices in our lives are quite beyond the legitimate reach of the law or of state action to curtail them. To Mill, these choices are our ‘private’ or ‘self-regarding’ ones. The big questions here relate to which kinds of choice should qualify for this category, and what justification we might find for leaving some things off the list. The philosopher who

helps us most with this is, arguably, John Rawls (1921-2002). In his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, Rawls sets up a dynamic struggle between abstract principle and what Hume and Adam Smith called our ‘moral sentiments’, in order to help us decide which principles we might reasonably agree to be constitutive of a just society. Not surprisingly, Rawls picks a version of what he calls ‘the liberty principle’ as being of primary importance to a just society. Rawls does not argue, as the utilitarian Mill did, that liberty is good because it leads to good consequences – although it might incidentally do so. Instead, in a Kantian manner, he claims that as rational beings we are bound to claim a certain amount of liberty for ourselves, and justifies this by arguing that, as rational beings, we are capable of self-government. However, on pain of contradiction, we have to grant the same liberties to all who share the same capacity for rational choice. Later I’ll be more specific about what should be on the list of things about which our liberty is absolute, but Mill and Rawls have already done the heavy lifting. For his second principle, Rawls goes for a more explicitly utilitarian idea, arguing for a principle promoting the general welfare of the community. This so-called ‘difference principle’ is that we should only allow inequalities to the extent that they benefit the least well-off. Here Rawls invokes some common-sense psychology, to claim that better outcomes for all will result from providing some incentives for the creative and industrious. In a later work, Justice as Fairness (1985), he modified this principle to suggest that it’s subordinate to maintaining ‘equality of opportunity’ for all. In making this amendment, Rawls was being mindful that staggering levels of inequality might be excused on the grounds of maximising incentives, and that, over time, such inequalities might become entrenched, actually to the detriment of the general welfare he sought to promote. One of the things I find exciting about Rawls’s method is that it generates what he calls a ‘lexical ordering’ of principles – an order of priority – in which we can see two great ethical traditions being reconciled. The ‘liberty principle’ is based on the idea of a Kantian absolute principle of justice (a so-called deontological principle); while the ‘difference principle’ is based on the utilitarian idea that aggregate benefit should be considered ethically significant. If you’re in any doubt that utilitarian consequences should be considered, kindly contemplate the mess Kant gets himself into with his absolute principle that we should never lie – even to an axe murderer who asks us the hiding place of his intended victim! In the spirit of Rawls, I’ve lexically ordered a couple of principles myself. Here they are: 1. Respect the autonomy of autonomous beings in regards to their large scale concepts of the good To translate this, I mean that we should leave people uncoerced to live their own lives in accordance with their own deepest beliefs and commitments, so long as they show the same respect to others. (Some other choices we might make are off-limits to interference for the opposite reason: for instance, taste in interior design is too trivial to regulate.) 2. When it is consistent with the first principle, we should aim to minimise suffering

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Free Will John Rawls by Woodrow Cowher

This is a principle of so-called ‘negative utility’, since it’s about avoiding pain rather than maximising pleasure. But the minimisation of suffering may well mean interfering in what we might call ‘medium or small scale’ choices, and certainly in the choices we make on behalf of, for example, children in our care. I’ve gone into the reasons for ordering these principles in this way and explored their implications in articles in earlier issues of this magazine. But suffice it to say that my principles would allow voluntary euthanasia for competent adults, but not involuntary euthanasia; the compulsory wearing of seatbelts, but not the prohibition of hang-gliding; and the levying of taxes to pay for public goods, but not the imposition of the sexual morals of the majority on the rest. There is plenty more to discuss here, but let me introduce a third principle: 3. When it is consistent with the first two principles, we should try to maximise the autonomy of potentially rational beings. This principle acknowledges that rationality, and the freedom that comes with it, involve a developmental process. We don’t let children make huge decisions about their lives, at least not without guidance and support, and we expend significant effort getting them to the point where they’re able to do so. I’ve resisted any temptation to go beyond a materialist account of our ethical impulses, but this raises two questions I’d like to address: first, how to explain the origins of those impulses; and second, what a continued role for philosophy might be if such an explanation can be given. Hume observed that our instincts often tend to be sympathetic rather than self-interested, noting, for example, how great an effort people make to avoid treading on the toes of others in a crowd. This was perhaps a problematic observation in an era which conceived of human beings as naturally wicked, and it continues to be so for us if we are gripped by the modern idea that evolution makes us necessarily selfish. But there is a plausible evolutionary reason to expect physically feeble big brained

apes like us to be kind to others – or at least, to others we see as members of our own group. Communication and co-operation offer big advantages in terms of surviving and leaving offspring, so it’s no surprise if we evolved to exploit this. A few of us might be psychopaths, but, in general, that’s not a combination of traits that is going to keep the human species in the evolutionary game. Moreover, I’d speculate that both the dutybased urge to fairness towards others, as well as the utilitarian insight that we should maximise group welfare, are part of this evolutionary heritage. The remarkable research of Karen Wynn at Yale, for example, suggests that even young babies react strongly against those who are unfair to others (see Paul Bloom’s Just Babies, 2013). Other research by Harvard’s Felix Warneken shows toddlers being naturally ‘pro-social’ (‘Precocious Prosociality: Why Do Young Children Help?’, Child Development Perspectives Vol.9, No.1, 2015). Meanwhile, social psychology demonstrates our tendency to prioritise the collective interests of what we see as our group over those of others, but also the ease by which our sense of what constitutes that group can be ‘hacked’, so that what Peter Singer calls the ‘circle of concern’ can be expanded. (Amongst other things, this might give us a very good reason to get young people involved in cross-cultural, collaborative, pro-social activities.) These insights into the evolutionary origins of our moral sentiments have other implications. They suggest, for example, that the efforts of so-called ‘intuitionist’ philosophers such as G.E. Moore to explain morality as involving a special kind of ‘moral perception’ were thoroughly misguided. Another concern, for some at least, is that a purely evolutionary explanation of morality means that while we might explain human morals by such means, we have to give up on their philosophical justification. This is, I think, an unfounded worry. Given that we have the moral instincts we do have, both for fairness to the individual and for collective welfare, it is our job to construct a consensus which can serve as the best proxy for moral truth we can manage. The fact that this ‘overlapping consensus’, as Rawls would put it, is based on a shared human psychology, means that there should be some limit to idea that our values are relative to particular cultures. The process of construction will involve all kinds of mental toing and froing between ‘hard cases’ and our instincts; but reason, focused through our frontal cortex, is the ideal foreman of that building work. This construction of a moral consensus is one continued role of philosophy, and I believe it should have a place in the lives of every student in every educational institution in the world. (For more, see Stephen Law’s book, The War for Children’s Minds from 2006, and my own attempts to encourage thought in my own students, ‘A Way of Thinking About Ethics’ in Philosophy Now, Issue 53, 2005). Far from being on the retreat in the face of materialism, philosophers should embrace it, and in doing so, be recognised as providing the same service that Socrates claimed to perform for the citizens of Athens. We are here to make people think. Training people in thought is not sufficient to enable us to reach the kind of harmony that we aspire to, both with others and with ourselves, but it is necessary. © PHILIP BADGER 2023

Phil Badger studied social sciences, including economics, psychology, and social policy with philosophy. He teaches in Sheffield. December 2023/January 2024  Philosophy Now 21

Free Will

The Will Is Not Free: You Have To Earn It Basil Gala on what it takes to free ourselves from our formative factors. “It matters not how strait the gate,       How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate,       I am the captain of my soul.”

he poet William Ernest Henley, one-legged, frequently sick with tuberculosis, wrote: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” It was a striking assertion of free will. Habits and addictions seem to bind up us and people around us, inevitably controlling our acts, keeping us prisoners, unable to escape our innate character or environmental influences. Jim was a talented handyman who worked for my brother and me on our buildings a few years back. He could do original construction or repairs from the foundation to the roof, including plumbing and electrical. In his forties, he looked boyish and gentle as he bustled about, feverishly knocking things together. He earned a good income, but lived in a garage and drove an ancient pickup truck, which he was constantly fixing. One day in his garage home he took his own life with a shotgun. We found out he had been on the drug speed (an amphetamine), using nearly all his earnings to feed his addiction. Jim apparently killed himself to escape the prison of his habit. Was that an act of a free will, or an inevitable result of his heredity and environment? A dear family friend is 76, with a heart condition, but still working at a job that stresses his system, climbing ladders to roofs. He loves the casinos on the reservations. A successful family man, intelligent and hardworking, he sometimes declares: “I’ve quit gambling; I’m not going to the casinos anymore.” His long-suffering wife sighs and says nothing. She knows he means well, intends to quit his vice, but is unable to do it. Brains, even genius, do not guarantee freedom from bad habits. Orson Welles was surely a bright man, but his addiction to food and wine turned his body into a mountain of fat as he aged. He was also a strong man, but he died prematurely at 71 years of age. Such cases lead many people to believe we are not free to act in accordance with reason, that our behavior is instead the inevitable product of our heredity, our genes, and the environment in which we grew up. I agree that our will is not free: I think the freedom of the will must be earned – and reason alone will not lead us to this freedom. Knowing what to do intellectually is not enough. True, animals possess small intellects and display little free will, and our will developed along with our intellect as we emerged from an animal condition. We learned to reason as to what is best to do for our own welfare and that of those we love, and how to do the right thing to achieve our thriving. If you need surgery to prolong your life, you’ll submit to it, though it may be

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painful. Similarly, you say no to a tempting pleasure, if you know it is harmful; or, you should say no, anyway. You might note though that most people don’t like to say no to their passions and habits. If you want a good bet, bet that people will not change their ways. For most of us, every day is Groundhog Day: we repeat our established activities, the motions and habits we have acquired as a result of our genetic tendencies and early learning without awareness or deliberation, in an unchanging cycle. In this we are but automata, inevitably executing the instructions and the loops coded into a multitude of internal programs. Most people who are overweight remain so even after diets and advice from weight control clinics. Statistics show that 95% of those who lose weight at a diet center regain it all, and more, within two years. And growing up in a city slum, with poor parents, seems to lead inevitably to a dismal life of failure, prison, or early death for the children. Did I say ‘inevitably’? We all know of stories when a child raised in poverty and deprivation grew up to rise to big success. My dissertation advisor at the University of Southern California, Dr Richard Bellman, thought by many to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize, grew up in a poor Brooklyn neighborhood. Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin, studying by the light of the fireplace. How did these people shake off the influence of their early environments, rising to prominence? And how about the one-in-twenty dieters in the statistics who got the weight off and kept it off? Escaping Fate Let’s not focus on the great majority of people, who go through their lives insensitive to opportunities, but on those who, like the Buddha, awaken to possibilities of action the majority cannot even see. Some, like Saul on the road to Damascus, see the light, are shaken to the core, and become different, and able to change the world around them. So is it the grace of God that descends upon a tormented soul on very rare occasions, to provide a miracle of healing, a key out of the prison of vice, to a higher existence? In the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step is to declare trust in a ‘higher power’ for psychological healing. Souls doomed to apparently unending suffering from alcoholism, drug addiction, or depression, suddenly convert to health and happiness. I am not, however, searching here for the rare grace of God. I am thinking about the processes of will that change a character, a life, and a destiny. And we know from many observations of human lives that some people will achieve extraordinary successes at whatever they undertake, sometimes in the face of tremendous odds against them. Reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791), you may get some ideas how Franklin

Free Will

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acquired so much wealth and fame as a businessman, inventor, scientist, writer, statesman, and social lion, starting from very humble beginnings. Other people have told similarly amazing stories of escaping from poverty. Such people were successful because they exercised their will to achieve what they thought was right for the own lives and the lives of others. Yes, the freedom of the will is philosophically debatable; but turning to a practical viewpoint, let me ask you this: are you more likely to be effective in your life when you believe you’re free to choose and act, or when you’re feeling powerless, bound by fate? Kurt, another handyman of my acquaintance, was smart and fast in his work. He could have become a licensed contractor with ease. But he was born to a blue-collar family and his father died poor at age 56. Whenever I tried to motivate Kurt to advance himself, he invariably said,

“I’ll die like my father, early in life and poor.” Such fatalism does not help one succeed. Freedom & The Will Philosophers have been arguing about human destiny and freedom for thousands of years. I can see why. Whatever you decide to be the truth about the will, the consequences for religion, morality, and legality are serious. If the will is not free, we should not ascribe sin or crime to actions, or punish the guilty person, since they are not ultimately responsible for their actions. If you are heavily addicted, and not free to choose – from alcoholism, other drugs, or some other obsessive-compulsive condition – you are sick: you’re not fully responsible for your acts. You should not be blamed or be expected to correct your behavior, but be given treatment in a clinic or hospital by expert psychotheraDecember 2023/January 2024  Philosophy Now 23

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Free Will pists. Similarly, if your will is not free, to be born into a poor family lacking education opportunities means that you cannot rise above your station and status. Society wastes time and money teaching you thrift, hard work, saving, and investment. “Aha!” you say, “but some people are born with genes or combinations of genes which drive them to greater effort” – or perhaps it was a special teacher, friend, or relative who inspired those poor souls to excel, shaking off their unpromising heredity and environment. That’s still cause and effect, you insist, and free will had nothing to do with their success. I may concede to you this point now. To proceed, however, let me begin where perhaps I should have started, with an analysis of terms: What is freedom? What is the will? First let’s talk about freedom. Some objects have only one degree of freedom, like a train on a track, which can move either back or forth, constrained by the rails. Other objects, like fourwheel drive cars on the open road, have two degrees of freedom, moving around in any direction on a surface. An aircraft, on the other hand, can fly in all three dimensions, and so has maximum freedom of movement. You say, but we’re not discussing mechanical freedoms. True, but mechanics is a good starting point. After all, Newton’s laws of motion gave a strong impetus to the idea of determinism, the inevitability of cause and effect in Nature. Now, however, the indeterminism of quantum mechanics, and especially Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, modify Newton’s laws, making determinism in any absolute sense an obsolete notion. But if you prefer, let’s talk about people. Who is freer, a prisoner, or the (wo)man in the street? You will agree that the person outside the prison walls has more freedom, although perhaps a true philosopher can be free in spirit while imprisoned. Another case then: who is freer, the master or the slave? You’ll have to say the master. And between the employer and the employee, who has more liberty? You must agree that in general the employer, because he or she gives the orders, which the employee must follow or lose their job. Who are freer, those living in a dictatorship or those in a democracy? Citizens of a democracy can usually travel freely, even outside their own country, with some restrictions speak as they wish, and write and publish what they want, and are generally speaking not afraid of being put in jail for their views. But are any of these people completely free? Surely not. For instance, in a democracy we are not allowed to violate the rights of others or do harm to other people. So, freedom is never absolute, but always a relative quantity. Nevertheless, some freedom is better than none. Secondly, what can we say about the will, free or not? I define the will as that function of the mind which allows humans to act contrary to their desires – which they may do if their reasoning indicates that to do so is necessary for their own good or the good of those they love. Thus, by an act of will you submit to painful surgery when your doctor explains that the procedure is necessary for your health. An animal is not likely to do this, even if you could communicate this truth well to it. You may also rationally, wilfully abstain from a pleasure, such as sex or some food greatly desired, to avoid hurting yourself. But do you? Do you abstain from pleasures because they are harmful? Perhaps, if you’re not addicted to them from past engagements. But even if you are addicted, you may act deliberately to

forego the pleasurable activity. But even if your will is strong and you can avoid harmful pleasures, are you going to do that every time you are tempted? Surely not. Sometimes you will succumb to your desires because you’re not concentrating on your resistance: you are tired, distracted, or too relaxed or intoxicated. Nevertheless, you have sometimes fought temptation successfully. You will recognise this feeling rising inside you, leading you to fight for what is right. I experience it as assertiveness, aggressiveness, or even cold anger. As the Greeks would, let us call this feeling thymos: a quiet intellectual anger guiding you to behave sanely, for the safety of your body or spirit. Like all faculties, thymos gets stronger if it is exercised regularly, with gradually increasing intensity, and for a sufficiently long time. There is a free will then – sometimes – whenever there is an intellect telling us the consequences of our actions, and we are roused to guide those actions to virtuous behavior. When we follow the right course, maybe it’s only because we have a desire for health, order, or justice, or something else which produces in us a desire stronger than our lower instincts. This is not free will, but rather, a push by a different desire to determine our behavior. I’m not merely suggesting that we replace one desire that leads to harm with one that prompts what is good. Doing so is a simple technique, which works well in many situations to improve behavior. Instead, I’m proposing that in order to act on our free will, we act on abstract or intellectual grounds, putting away desire completely during our period of deliberation. Can I give clear examples of such abstract grounds for acting freely without the motivation of desire? I am not sure I can. Even if you act purely for justice (to take one abstract principle), it must be because you desire justice. Or suppose you decide to do a good deed because it will decrease disorder in the world and promote life. Can such a goal be said to be free of desire? It cannot. But suppose now that you put aside the satisfaction of a present desire to achieve some future benefit you visualize as probable. Even though such a benefit may be tied to a desire for future benefit, a desire so defined is worthwhile, and free, because from two or more choices you pick the one which will enrich your life in the future, which is the tougher decision. So I offer you such freedom of the will as exists for some people, some of the time, occasionally leading them to succeed when others fail; maybe moving them to a higher level of consciousness, above their animal ways, to truly human behavior. It’s not a total kind of freedom, as René Descartes describes in Passions of the Soul (1649), where he writes: “the will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained.” By contrast, I define a type of free will for our modern world of quantum physics, where events may be probable but are never certain. This relative (not absolute) will is enough. It is enough to give, over time, enormous power to those who possess it, to alter their own characters, and to influence people and events, thus creating destiny for themselves and the world around them. This relatively free will is a combination of intellectual reasoning and the emotion of thymos. And willful people are like shepherds, leading the less willful on the path of good or evil. And so the world takes shape, beautiful or ugly. © DR BASIL E. GALA 2023

Basil Gala is a writer and speaker with a PhD from the University of Southern California. December 2023/January 2024  Philosophy Now 25

Saying, Keeping Silent & Showing Slavoj Žižek on Wittgenstein and Cancel Culture. “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.” (‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921

n this final proposition of his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein prohibits the impossible. But why should one prohibit something that is already in itself impossible? The answer is relatively easy: if we ignore this prohibition, we produce statements which are for Wittgenstein meaningless, just as speculations about the noumenal domain are in

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Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. (The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan qualified the prohibition of incest in a similar way, claiming that its result is to render the impossible possible: if incest has to be prohibited, it means that it is possible to violate the prohibition.) There is, however, an ambiguity in Wittgenstein’s proposition, which resides in the double meaning of the German nicht ... kann. It can mean either simple literal impossibility, or a deontic (moral) prohibition: ‘You cannot talk/behave like that!’ The proposition can thus be read in the radical ontological sense intended by Wittgenstein himself – that there are things impossible to talk about,

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such as metaphysical speculations – or else in a conformist moral sense: ‘Shut up about things you are not allowed to talk about!’ But the ethical imperative is the very opposite of this conformist ‘wisdom’. Horrors like the Holocaust or the Communist purges or colonial disasters cannot be passed over in silence (as happens in today’s China). We have to bring them out. The tautological cynical wisdom, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ is the opposite of this ethical injunction, since, on the ethical reading it means: Even if you know you cannot keep quiet about it, do not talk about it, since talking about it would pose too much of a threat to you. What, then, about the literal tautology? ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ defines poetry: poetry is an attempt to put in words what cannot be said – to evoke it – and this holds precisely for traumatic events like the Holocaust. Any prosaic description of the horrors of the Holocaust fails to render its trauma. This is why Adorno was wrong with his famous claim that after Auschwitz poetry is no longer possible: it is prose which is no longer possible, since only poetry can do the job. Poetry is the inscription of impossibility into a language: when we cannot say something directly yet we nonetheless insist in speaking, we unavoidably get caught in repetitions, postponements, indirectness, surprising cuts, etc. We should always bear in mind that the ‘beauty’ of classic poetry (symmetric rhymes etc.) comes second; that primarily, poetry is a way to compensate for the basic failure or impossibility of communication. But this is not Wittgenstein’s last word on communication. Already in the Tractatus he introduces another term which works as the opposite of ‘saying’ (Sprechen), namely ‘showing’ or ‘displaying’ (Zeigen). So we can also say: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, dass zeigt sich. (Whereof one cannot speak, that shows itself.) The inversion of this statement, Was man nicht zeigen kann, darüber muss man sprechen ‘What one cannot show, thereof

but it is this very failure to deliver his message of love in a perfect way that bears witness to its authenticity. In his very failure to speak about his love, he shows/displays his love (although we can, of course, also intentionally fake such failures). We are dealing here with Wittgenstein’s version of ‘there is no meta-language’: the idea that a speech act cannot include into what it says its own form, its own act. Jon Elster articulated this feature in his notion of ‘states that are essentially by-products’: “Some psychological and social states have the property that they can only come about as the by-product of actions undertaken for other ends. They can never, that is, be brought about intelligently and intentionally, because the attempt to do so precludes the very state one is trying to bring about. I call these ‘states that are essentially by-products.’ There are many states that may arise as by-products of individual or aggregate action, but this is the subset of states than can only come about in this way. Some of these states are very useful or desirable, and so it is very tempting to try to bring them about. We may refer to such attempts as ‘excess of will,’ a form of hubris that pervades our lives, perhaps increasingly so.” (‘States that are Essentially by-products’, in Ludwig Wittgenstein

one must speak’ is a vulgar commonsense notion, since it reduces ‘showing’ to the obvious meaning of ‘what is evidently present in front of us’, which can be exemplified by seeing one’s exterior. The argument is then that focusing on how a person appears ignores the deeper spiritual truth of this person – the truth which can only be rendered by words describing it. Against this line of argumentation one should focus on the elementary Hegelian question: not ‘What is the secret beneath appearance?’, but ‘Why does a thing need to appear in the first place?’ In short, Wittgenstein’s ‘showing’ has nothing to do with ‘appearing’ as opposed to what’s hidden. Rather, his ‘showing’ is the form of appearance that is ignored when we focus on what appears. Wittgenstein follows here Marx and Freud, who both claim that the true secret is not Beyond what appears, but the form of appearing itself: the commodity form, or the form of dreams, in Marx and Freud respectively. The difference between zeigen (showing) and schweigen (keeping silent) is that while schweigen is an act (I decide not to speak, which implies that I am already within the domain of speech – a stone does not ‘keep silent’), zeigen happens involuntarily: it is a by-product of what I am doing when I speak. I don’t (and cannot) decide what to show. This insight (formulated by Wittgenstein in many versions, like ‘what can be shown cannot be said’) should not be read as a hint towards some ineffable deep Truth beyond words. Rather, what cannot be said is fully part of saying – it is the form displayed by saying; it is what we do by saying something. To Wittgenstein’s own example of ‘honesty’, we could add ‘dignity’: Talking about your own dignity or honesty does not make you dignified nor honest. Rather, honesty and dignity can only be shown/displayed by doing – by acting as an honest or dignified person. This recalls what I often refer to as the ‘Hugh Grant paradox’ (referring to the famous scene from Four Weddings and a Funeral). As the hero tries to articulate his love to the beloved, he gets caught in stumbling and confused repetitions;

Social Science Information, vol.20, no.3, 1981.)

Among many examples offered by Elster, (like “Good art is impressive; art designed to impress rarely is.”), one should mention the topic of authenticity and sincerity: “The terms of sincerity and authenticity, like those of wisdom and dignity, always have a faintly ridiculous air about them when employed in the first person singular, reflecting the fact that the corresponding states are essentially by-products… Naming the unnamable by talking about something else is an ascetic practice and goes badly with self-congratulation.” (Ibid) Elster mentions here the ‘unnamable’, which brings us back to Wittgenstein: we might say, sincerity and authenticity cannot be named, they can only be shown/displayed by way of practicing them. This lesson deals a heavy blow to the cult of authenticity which has pervaded our culture from the 1950s onwards, and which has been given a new push by the trans-ideology: ‘Be true to yourself; don’t be afraid to assume what you feel you are’. According to Bertrand Russell (in his Foreword to the original English edition of the Tractatus), Wittgenstein managed to say quite a lot about the unsayable. Following this famous quip, could we not say that Elster also manages to say quite a lot about a dimension that he proclaims ‘unnamable’? However, this reproach misses the point. Of course we can talk about what a speech act shows or displays, but not in the first person: I cannot designate myself as authentic, as having dignity, etc. If I do this, I undermine my authenticity or dignity, which can only show itself in how I act. The statement ‘there is no meta-language’ should be understood in this precise sense: I cannot include my position of enunciation (which may display dignity) into my own enunciated content. And does something similar not hold for both poles of today’s global political space, authoritarian nationalism and Cancel Culture? On September 29, 2023, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov “indicated that Moscow is prepared for discussions concerning Ukraine, provided they take into account the situation on the ground and Russia’s security interests” (‘Lavrov: Russia December 2023/January 2024
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open to talks, but only if Ukraine meets these two conditions’, on msn.com). Which means: “We are prepared for peace negotiations, provided Ukraine accepts that territories occupied by Russia are part of Russia, and provided it radically changes its politics… In short, provided Ukraine capitulates.” The Western liberal approach is often problematized along the same lines by anti-colonial critics, who claim that for Western liberals, democratic exchange is formulated in terms which secretly impose the logic of Western democracy-and-freedom, so that joining liberal pluralism effectively amounts to a capitulation to Western values… Lavrov asserts the logic problematized by anti-colonial critics in its purest form. In Wittgensteinian terms, Lavrov speaks about negotiations, but what he shows/displays with his speech is the very opposite of negotiation – a brutal exclusive enforcing of one’s own position. Along the same lines, I can easily imagine Hegel having a repeated intellectual orgasm when bringing out the (for him) obvious reality of the reversing of inclusivity and diversity into a procedure for systematic exclusion. As he might ask, “How long can parts of the liberal Left keep maintaining that ‘Cancel Culture’ is but a phantom of the right, as they literally go round cancelling gigs, comedy shows, film showings, lectures and conversations?” (Quoted from ‘Banning free speech in the name of inclusivity and diversity is the Fringe’s sickest joke’, by Suzanne Moore, msn.com). Cancel Culture is permeated with a ‘no-debate-stance’: not only a person or position is excluded, also excluded is the very debate itself, the confrontation of arguments for or against exclusion. Hegel would have mobilized here what Lacan called the gap between enunciated content and the underlying stance of enunciation. In other words, he would point out, you argue for diversity and inclusion, but you do it by excluding all those who do not fully subscribe to your own definition of diversity and inclusion – so all you do is permanently exclude people and stances. In this way, the struggle for inclusion and diversity has given birth to an atmosphere of Stasi-like suspicion and denunciation, where you never know when a private remark of yours will lead to your elimination from the public space… Don’t we get here an extreme version of the joke about eating the last cannibal?: “There are no opponents of diversity and inclusion in our group – we just excluded the last one…” So in Wittgensteinian terms, while Cancel Culture speaks about diversity and inclusion, it shows/displays a stance of extreme exclusion. Such an inversion of inclusion into exclusion also obeys a deep Hegelian dialectical reversal, namely, the transposition of an external threat into immanent antagonism – as was perspicuously noted by Elster apropos the notion, fashionable today, of democracy under threat: “We can reverse the common dictum that democracy is under threat, and affirm that democracy is the threat, at least in its short-termist populist form” (‘Some Notes on ‘Populism’’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 46, no. 4, 2020). Exactly as in the case in Cancel Culture, the threats to inclusion and diversity are inclusion and diversity themselves, when they are practiced in a way that shows/displays extreme exclusion.

The Ides of March Robert Edmondson Today I wish to contemplate A very interesting date; A date that even now can chill The blood and joyous spirits kill. A date that still has arcane powers To sabotage our happy hours. A date that still rings down the years To frighten ultramodern ears. In every life are many tides That ebb and flow but on the Ides Of March, a time of sudden death For Caesar, with his final breath. A famous and successful life Concluded by a colleague’s knife. His end became a fate foretold ‘Impossible to break the mould’. The soothsayer’s doom-laden phrase “This date will be your End of Days Your fate’s decided by the gods You cannot fight against such odds.” Repeated twice within the play By Shakespeare of that tragic day “Beware the Ides of March“ – no chance To change the movements of the dance. Would any of us wish to know The date on which we have to go? This ignorance we may condone. Some truths are better left unknown Predestination or Free Will? Just thinking of them makes me ill. So live life fully and besides Stop worrying about the Ides!

© SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK 2023

Slavoj Žižek is, among other things, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University, and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Department of Philosophy. His latest book is Freedom: A Disease Without A Cure. 28 Philosophy Now
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© ROBERT EDMONDSON 2023

Robert Edmondson is a retired biochemist living in Dorking, Surrey, with interests in folk music, photography and natural history, especially insects.

Back by popular demand... The Ultimate Guide Philosophy Now ISSUE THREE: MIND

What’s really going on inside your head? The hard problem of consciousness Zombies, robots and Chinese rooms

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THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Recently reprinted, Issue 3 of our Ultimate Guide series brings together the best articles on philosophy of mind from Philosophy Now magazine. Its 116 pages colourful pages are divided into five chapters: ‘The Mind-Body Problem’; ‘The Problem of Consciousness’; ‘Science and Mind’; ‘Inside the Mind’; and ‘Thought Experiments’. Full of profound questions and intriguing theories, it gives a clear and valuable introduction to one of philosophy’s most central topics. Available from our online shop: philosophynow.org/shop

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Torture & Ticking Bombs Edward Hall is sceptical about this infamous ethical example’s usefulness. hilosophers love thought experiments, and few have been as influential in contemporary moral and political philosophy as ‘the ticking bomb’. The idea was famously employed by Michael Walzer in his seminal treatment of the problem of dirty hands (Political Action, 1973), and has been the topic of heated discussion ever since. Walzer considers the case of a newly-elected politician asked to authorise the torture of a captured rebel leader who knows the location of a number of bombs that have been hidden in buildings around the city. If they detonate, they will cause enormous suffering. According to Walzer, in this case, the politician should violate the moral prohibition against torture, even though they accept that ‘‘torture is wrong, indeed abominable, not just sometimes, but always.’’ The unfortunate reality is that political leadership sometimes demands morally tragic decision-making, and leaders who refuse to authorise torture in these circumstances display a dishonourable kind of squeamishness unbefitting their role. The ticking bomb is commonly invoked to justify torturing terrorist suspects, and the thought experiment pervades media discussion of this issue. It has also been invoked by holders of high office. For example, when giving evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament, a number of prominent British politicians, including former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Theresa May, and former Senior Ministers Phillip Hammond and Amber Rudd, invoked ticking bomb scenarios in defence of the possibility of authorising torture and other forms of cruel and degrading punishment, under some circumstances. However, the suggestion that the ticking bomb scenario justifies the use of torture in emergency situations has been subjected to penetrating criticism. The work of Henry Shue is especially informative here. In Torture in Dreamland: Disposing of the

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Ticking Bomb (2006), Shue argues that the ticking bomb case suffers from two central flaws as an example for ethics: idealization and abstraction. Idealization involves adding positive features; abstraction, eradicating problematic ones. Together they ensure that the ticking bomb scenario makes the decision to torture unrealistically straightforward. First, the ticking bomb idealizes by supposing: (1) That the authorities have detained the right person; (2) That torturing the detainee will result in the prompt and accurate revelation of the information they desire; (3) That the torture will be a rare one-off. Ticking bomb also involves problematical abstraction because it ignores that: (4) The institutionalisation of state torture is a necessary condition of torture having the potential benefits the pro-torture advocates promise. With regard to point (1), the ticking bomb scenario assumes the detainee is not merely suspected of having the information the state desires, but definitely has it. In practice, however, the state will suspect that the detainee knows about an attack that may be forthcoming. And uncertainty and probability are not minor details here: What is the moral truth about torturing the wrong person to get information? The second assumption is equally strained. One cannot assume that the right information will be promptly forthcoming. Torture victims collapse and pass out, becoming unable to provide information. And many tortured subjects lie, falsely informing on adversaries to settle feuds. Others say anything they think their tormentor wants to hear in the hope this will make the pain and humiliation stop. The reality is thus that, at best, torture delivers noisy information, if not outright falsehoods. Further, the sheer unreliability of the information almost inevitably ensures the falsity of the supposition that torture, once sanctioned, will be rare. If state authorities have convinced themselves that a serious attack is imminent, and the person they’re torturing does not provide the information they desire, they’re likely to turn to the next-best suspect and torture them in turn; and so on. The State Institutionalization of Torture The fourth point is perhaps the most important. Shue notes that unless torturers are properly trained they are unlikely to be competent at extracting information from detainees. It follows that any viable regime of state torture is going to necessitate a torture bureaucracy. Rather than thinking about torture as an isolated event, then, we must consider torture as a state practice. When we think in these terms, a host of further troubling ques-

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It Doesn’t Work Anyway Beyond these basic problems of idealisation and abstraction, a growing body of research suggests there is vanishingly little evidence to think that torturing to prise valuable information from a detainee will work in the manner the ticking bomb case supposes. Rejali maintains that neither technological advances nor science have yet been able to offer general rules for how to break detainees to elicit reliable information. The work of the neuroscientist Shane O’Mara explains why this is unsurprising. According to O’Mara, the assumption that torture will work to elicit valuable information in ticking bomb scenarios is a relic of “introspectively derived, and empirically ungrounded psychological and neuro-biological beliefs that are fundamentally and demonstrably untrue” (Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Investigation, 2015). The default assumption is that inflicting severe pain is an efficacious way of getting detainees to reveal what they know. O’Mara maintains that, on the contrary, there is ample evidence to suppose that the infliction of severe pain, and the attendant fear and stress that comes with it, has the opposite effect. The ticking bomb asks us to consider what we can do to stop a bomb exploding in the immediate future. Yet, according to O’Mara,

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tions arise, not least (as David Luban stresses in Truth, Power, and Law, 2004), the question of how much trust we should place in agents of the state and their lawyers not to test, and go over, the limits of whatever laws and conventions politicians adopt to regulate torture. We cannot ignore what we know about institutions and bureaucracies when we consider arguments about the permissibility of authorising state torture. And what we can reliably predict is going to happen is extremely discouraging. First, it is decidedly unrealistic to think that people who have volunteered to become trained in the art of inflicting pain and violence on other human beings will intuit (or care) exactly where to morally draw the line when considering what torturous methods are beyond the pale, or who should be tortured. Nor is there much reason to think that, even if official rules and regulations are in place, they will be studiously obeyed by the sorts of people who apparently want to torture others – who will be the sort of people applying for the role. On the contrary, as Darius Rejali painstakingly shows in his history of torture, Torture and Democracy (2007), the clear real historical evidence is that whatever regulations are in place will be exceeded. So even if strict regulations were in place that purport to determine when torture can legally take place (only in relevant genuine emergencies), and how torture should be carried out (with as little brutality as possible), assuming that supervision will be strict and that the chain of command will be followed does not comport with what we know about bureaucratic organizations.

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it is probable “on the basis of what we know about the neurophysiology of pain, that there is no technique for inducing pain that is sufficiently severe so as to cause a well-conditioned and well-prepared individual to rapidly want to reveal information without being able to resist for sufficiently long before the brain and body go into a pain-induced shock or dissociative state.” If one takes a longer-term perspective, the possibility of torture producing effective information is even less encouraging. O’Mara’s central claim here is that imposing extreme stresses on detainees profoundly changes the accessibility of their memory over time in ways which make them less able to retrieve and share memories. Supposedly less painful enhanced interrogation techniques like prolonged sleep deprivation and waterboarding are also profoundly counterproductive, for similar reasons. So even if we leave aside the issues of idealization and abstraction, the scientific research has profound implications for the idea that the ticking bomb thought experiment inexorably reveals that authorising torture is sometimes the right thing to do, all things considered. The philosophical point that Walzer’s paper on dirty hands actually delivers, provided one buys his argument, is that in grave emergency situations, political leaders should authorise actions which would violate serious moral constraints and prohibitions if doing so would stop a disaster from occurring. However, this says literally nothing about which actions should be taken. The supposition that torture, specifically, is in that class of actions, is unjustified, and, when we consider the empirical literature, unsustainable. So even if one accepts that emergency situations like the one Walzer describes reveal the limitations of rigid forms of duty-based ethics, it is simply fallacious to suppose that this delivers a pro-torture conclusion for real-world policy. That political leaders should sometimes dirty their hands may well be true; but it does not follow that authorising torture is sometimes the right thing for political leaders to do, as the ticking bomb scenario supposes. I can put this point more polemically: the ticking bomb scenario isn’t really about torture – philosophers just think it is. In the ticking bomb, torture is a placeholder for any sort of immoral but effective action. When we, in the classroom or in our writing, continue to employ ticking bomb scenarios to interrogate the ethics of torture, we imply that torture is effective, even though the available empirical evidence strongly suggests otherwise. That’s an immorality all of its own – and so one that teachers of moral or political philosophy should avoid. © EDWARD HALL 2023

Edward Hall is a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Sheffield. With the support of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, he is currently writing a book on contemporary forms of state-sanctioned cruelty. This article was previously published in the online journal of the Prindle Institute for Ethics.

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Parrhesia &

Doing Philosophy with Children

Maria daVenza Tillmanns considers the need for freedom of speech for children. ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…’ (The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1787)

he term parrhesia first appeared in Greek literature in the Fifth Century BC. It took on many different meanings, but generally it referred to the notion of speaking freely and frankly. The most famous exam-

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ple of frank speech in ancient Greece is perhaps when Alexander the Great visited Diogenes of Sinope and asked him what he wanted, wishing to grant him a favour. Diogenes replies by asking him to move a little to the side, in order to stop blocking his sunlight. More broadly, parrhesia refers to speaking one’s own sense of truth in the face of power. As (possibly) Voltaire so poignantly states: “If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.” In other words, it isn’t for you to question or criticize those who have power over

you. In Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia (1983), Michel Foucault says that “parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth for which he is willing to risk his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy” (p.5). There was also a form of parrhesia devised to give a person the license to speak freely without fearing for his or her life. For example, to combat flattery received as a result of one’s status, granting parrhesia was a way for a person of consequence to learn the truth from someone in a subordinate position without this being considered insubordination. For example, a sovereign who has power but lacks truth will grant parrhesia to one who has truth but lacks power, such as a court jester or a councillor. There is another sense of parrhesia, which Plutarch discusses in his treatise The Education of Children (c.100 AD). This parrhesia is when one expresses oneself freely through a bold and ignorant arrogance. This becomes nothing but ‘‘sheer vocal noise’’ by ‘‘putting confidence in bluster’’ (Discourse and Truth, p.24). What makes parrhesia negative in this sense is the lack of mathesis – of learning or wisdom. For parrhesia to be positive, it must be linked to intellectual formation and moral fortitude through good education. For Socrates, this means overcoming self-ignorance, and is why it’s so important to ‘know thyself’, as the speaker’s personal relationship to truth endows them with self-knowledge. And in knowing the truth about oneself, one is better equipped to know the truth more generally. This cycle increases one’s self-knowledge, as well as one’s knowledge of the truth. Self-scrutiny then, is a form of exercising or practicing parrhesia with one’s self, be it to undercut self-ignorance, as Socrates pointed out, or self-delusion based on self-flattery, as Plutarch pointed out. The importance of self-knowledge is being able to stay close to oneself without being dependent on forces which can negatively influence one’s relationship with oneself. In other words, independent thinking ultimately depends upon self-knowledge. This is also the point the physicist David Bohm makes when he talks about needing to become aware of our thinking as a movement in order to become less identified with our unexamined habits of mind or thought patterns. This enables us to witness our thoughts and feelings, instead of simply having and reacting to them. This form of self-scrutiny enables a shift to take place from “a more identified first-person perspective to a witnessing third-person perspective of the very contents of our mind and consciousness” (‘Bohmian Dialogue’, O. Gunnlaugson, Journal of Dialogue Studies, Vol.2 No.1, 2020, p.26). Creating self-awareness also helps bring our logos - our thinking - in line with our bios – our lifestyle. As Foucault states in Discourse and Truth: “Similarly, Socrates’ basanic role – that of ‘touchstone’ - enables him to determine the true nature of the relation between logos and bios of those who come into contact with him” (p.37). (The Greek word basanos means ‘touchstone’, which was a black stone used to test the genuineness of gold by examining the streak left on the stone when ‘touched’ by the

gold. Similarly, Socrates’ basanic role enabled him to determine the true nature of the relation between the life and thought of his interlocutors. Socrates won’t let his listener go until he has thoroughly put all his ways to the test.) Thinking About Fairness With Children In the case of children, the bios-logos relation is still intact: in children there is no discrepancy between how they live and how they think. Since children, especially young children, operate from this integrated bios-logos mode of being, their way of questioning is also grounded in a bios-logos understanding of the world. This is why doing philosophy with children can greatly improve philosophy in general, as most Western philosophy is logos-based (One may want to make an exception for the existential philosophers, who were also focused on lived human experiences). In his book, Filosoferen met kinderen op de basisschool (Doing Philosophy With Children In Elementary School), Berrie Heesen shows how doing philosophy with children is a form of parrhesia – of speaking freely – in that it encourages children to speak up, straight from their own experiences, their own thoughts and feelings (p.43): to speak from their whole being, holding nothing back, saying everything as they see it. They speak frankly as they understand the truth about the world to be. It is only later, as we mature, that we tend to lose this close relation, causing a split between logos and bios. It is my contention that doing philosophy with children when they still have this close relation between thinking and living allows them to become aware of that relation through selfscrutiny, enabling them to maintain their self-possession and the basis for truly independent thinking. Discussing complex and perplexing issues with children also fosters learning and wisdom, good reasoning and thinking skills, as well as moral and ethical thinking skills. In other words, parrhesia creates mathesis. However, as Darren Chetty points out – correctly, I believe – providing children with a forum to express themselves freely may be easier said than done, given the fact the forum provided frequently operates from within what he calls a ‘gated community’ of inquiry (‘Racism as ‘Reasonableness’’, Ethics and Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, p.1, 2018). For Chetty, the ‘gated community’ refers to an acceptance of ‘reality’ without ‘‘historicizing, examining and challenging prevailing notions’’ of what constitutes reality. For instance, as long as white supremacy constitutes our basic understanding of reality, we’re operating in a gated community. It’s not enough to question thoughts and assumptions if that doesn’t mean venturing outside of the gated community. Our question is whether doing philosophy with children could function as a kind of basanos or touchstone which tests the degree of accord between a child’s life or bios, and his or her thinking, or logos. Let me give some examples of my own experience of doing philosophy with children to get an idea as to whether it can fulfill this touchstone function in some way. After a prompt has been given in class, such as reading a picture book and posing a question about the story, children then discuss what the story means to them. For me, the key to starting the discussion is to ask children an aporia question, meaning one where they are at a loss or perplexed (aporia means ‘puzzlement’ or ‘wonderment’). Many of Plato’s dialogues for instance leave us with a sense of aporia whenever we come to a seemingly December 2023/January 2024
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insoluble impasse in a philosophical inquiry. What we thought we knew, we have to admit we do not know. Yet even while not knowing we may become increasingly aware of what it means to be courageous, for example, even though we cannot explain it rationally. We develop a deeper understanding. In fact, to start with an aporia question helps to bring children into a place of parrhesia, since they now have to speak from what they truly believe in order to address the perplexing problem. When a bewildering question arises, they have nothing to go on except their own sense of truth. And in the process of discussing these perplexing issues with their classmates, the children develop a deeper understanding, based partially on what others have said. So the children learn to integrate others’ perspectives, and to develop a broader view of the topic under discussion. Here’s an example of using aporia questions to prompt children to speak frankly about how they see and understand things. After reading a picture book to the class, we would discuss the story in a circle on the floor, centered around questions the story would elicit. Consider issues around the story ‘The Club’ in Grasshopper on the Road (1978) by Arnold Lobel. Grasshopper is going down the road when he sees a bunch of beetles carrying signs that say that they love morning. When they see Grasshopper, the beetles ask him whether he likes morning, and he says he does. The beetles are thrilled and make him part of their ‘We love morning’ club. They give him a wreath and a sign to carry. But things go terribly wrong when Grasshopper announces that he also like afternoons, and night is very nice too. The beetles are shocked and rip the wreath from him and take away his sign: ‘‘Nobody, nobody who loves afternoon and night can be in our club!’’ And so Grasshopper continues on down the road alone. The first question is whether it’s okay for the beetles to throw Grasshopper out of the club. The children have different ideas about this; some say yes, because it’s the beetles’ club and they make the rules. Others believe that the beetles should leave Grasshopper in the club, because he does love morning, after all. But the aporia question is, Is it fair to throw Grasshopper out? Even if the beetles have the right to throw Grasshopper out of the club, should they? The children often decide it’s not fair, if the beetles didn’t tell him about the rules to begin with. They made him a member of the club because he loved morning, and threw him out when he said he also loved afternoon and night. Grasshopper didn’t have a say in any of this. Then again, Grasshopper could have figured out that the beetles only loved morning, because their signs said they loved morning – although, they might have carried ‘We love afternoon’ signs in the afternoon, and night ones at night… The children generally concluded that the beetles were rude and unkind to Grasshopper. Being rude is not fair. A further aporia question is, What would be fair? One child proposed that one beetle might take Grasshopper aside and explain the rules of the club to him, and then makes sure Grasshopper is treated with respect, whether he stays or leaves. A third aporia question is, How do we know something is fair? That can only be answered in a real life situation by the way someone decides to act according to what they think is fair. For some, retaliation is fair. 36 Philosophy Now
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In a third grade classroom we were discussing the notion of fairness, and one pupil questioned whether it was fair that she was asked not only to clean her own room, but her brother’s as well. She may conclude that it is in fact fair for her parents to expect her to clean his room as well, based on the values her family has. But she may also question these values. The point here is not that when questioning her family’s values she decides to no longer to abide by them, but that she has the ability, or awareness if you will, to question these values in the first place. This gives her a sense of empowerment and self-esteem – a sense of ownership and of being in charge of her own life. It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with her parents’ values per se. She may well abide with those values. However, this does not entail a contradiction. What it does entail is that there are multiple ways of looking at things, and multiple ways of considering what makes something fair or not. Staying on the subject of fairness, one pupil considered that being rude was itself not being fair. He applied the notion of fairness not just to whether it was fair or not to oust someone from the club, but to how it was done. This example shows how the reasons being presented might apply to the larger picture of what it means to belong to a club. Are we entitled to treat someone we believe does not belong in our club poorly, or even rudely? Is that fair? As Bohm would say, this ‘‘goes into the process of thought behind the assumptions, and not just the assumptions themselves.’’ Dragons & Giants In Lobel’s Frog and Toad Together (1972), Frog and Toad want to find out if they’re brave. Looking in the mirror doesn’t really tell them, so they decide to climb a mountain to find out. While doing so, they come across a snake that wants to eat them for lunch; they are suddenly in the path of an avalanche of rolling stones; and on the mountain top, a hawk sweeps over them. All these encounters terrify them. Finally, having reached the top of the mountain, they run back down as fast as they can, back to Toad’s house, where Toad crawls under his blanket and Frog hides in the closet. They stay there for a long time, feeling very brave together. The question is, are Frog and Toad brave? Many children will initially say that to be brave you cannot be afraid. Since Frog and Toad are afraid, they cannot be brave. The aporia question is, Can you be brave without being afraid? If you’re not in the least afraid, what makes you brave? If you’re not afraid of dogs, are you brave when you see and go past them in the street? Children are often puzzled by this question and often don’t find a way out of the dilemma until they come up with the idea that an element of danger plays a role in being brave. The snake presented an element of danger, as did the avalanche and the hawk. One child commented on this that if you’re not afraid, you don’t know the danger you are in. Another aporia question is, Are Frog and Toad brave when they decide to jump out of the way of the snake, the avalanche, or the hawk? It seems not. But it raises the question of Frog and Toad being foolish rather than brave if they were not to jump out of the way. A third aporia question has to do with how we know we are foolish or brave when dealing with what’s dangerous. This ques-

tion can only be truly answered by someone in real life through the way she decides to act in a dangerous situation. And is the act truly brave, or simply foolish? What makes these questions aporia questions is that they seem counterintuitive. On the face of it the questions don’t seem to make sense. Children are at a loss, until they figure out, for example, that what lurks below the apparent paradox is an understanding of what it means to be brave in real life. Reason alone says that you cannot be brave and afraid at the same time; but real life tells you that without being aware of the danger and the fear that comes with it, you cannot be brave. I proceed by asking the children to give examples of when they were brave, so connecting our discussion to what it means to be brave as we think about it (logos) to being brave in real life (bios). Some mentioned that they had to be brave on their first day of school, or when they had to stand up to a bully, or when they first learned how to swim. In all these examples, children described how they had to overcome some initial fear: fear of failing, fear of the unknown, fear of someone acting stronger than they were. In this sort of way, children become aware of how their thinking and being are related. It is the format of discussing issues which matter to them that gets the children actively engaged. Their ‘will,’ as Dr Montessori would say, is engaged with the reality around them, and through activating the will, consciousness develops (The Secret of Childhood, Maria Montessori, 1966). Without an active sense of self-awareness, the child cannot exercise self-authority and acquire self-possession. The child cannot ‘know herself’. However, if the connection with the self is lost as a result of ‘breaking the child’s will’, so is her ability for self(-willed)-authority, self(-willed)-scrutiny, and true independent thinking. Alice Miller refers to this practice of the denial of parrhesia to children as ‘poisonous pedagogy’: it is efforts to break the child’s spirit in order to establish adult power ‘for your own good’. But when self-esteem is lost, so is one’s ability to listen to the voices of others and to accept them as equals. Montessori therefore stressed the importance of actively engaging the child’s will in the learning process. Demanding obedience robs the child of her inner authority, needed to guide her in her activities. This creates dependency, and ultimately a need for conformity. The child cannot act on her own volition. It is no surprise then when children lack self-esteem in these circumstances. In Plato’s Chariot Allegory in his dialogue Pheadrus, the soul is composed of a charioteer and two horses – one horse being reason, the other more unruly horse being passions. In a high school class where the teacher decided to discuss the Allegory of the Chariot, I asked the students, “If the unruly horse was considered a ‘bad’ horse, why was it not better to eliminate that horse all together? What service did this horse render, after all?” This is a question I would also like to now pose to the reader… Consider, for instance, the influence of your bios on your logos, and vice versa. When doing philosophy with children, they experience that their thoughts and feelings matter; that they are essential in the learning process. And if their own thoughts and feelings matter, so do those of their peers, who deserve to be listened to and accepted as equals. In the process, children learn to speak from their hearts and minds, knowing that they will be taken seriously.

by Melissa Felder

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Some opinions are better than others, and children are generally quick to admit that, “Oh, what Tracey said made me change my mind.” This is self-scrutiny and freedom of speech at work. © DR MARIA DAVENZA TILLMANNS 2023

Maria daVenza Tillmanns is a former President of the American Society for Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy (ASPCP), and currently practices philosophy with school children in San Diego. An earlier version of this article appeared in the International Journal of Philosophical Practice December 2023/January 2024
Philosophy Now 37

uestion of the Month Q

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What Are The Limits of Knowledge?

Each answer below receives a book. Apologies to the entrants not included.

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o answer this question, first ‘knowledge’ must be defined. It is difficult to determine exactly what constitutes knowledge, so even this presents a limit to knowledge. We might identify various forms of knowledge, such as declarative knowledge (knowing that), procedural knowledge (knowing how), personal knowledge (of experience, emotions) and shared knowledge (true ideas widely accepted in communities and cultures). Sir Karl Popper developed a theory of three worlds, in which World 2 is all subjective (personal) knowledge, while World 3 is all knowledge existing independent of individual minds, such as stories, theories, mathematical constructs, scientific concepts, cultural beliefs, and intellectual creations. However, categorising knowledge into types does not tell us what it means to know something. One widespread philosophical definition of knowledge is Socrates’ idea of ‘Justified True Belief’ (JTB). This holds that to know some proposition p, the knower must believe that p is true, p must be true, and there must be good justification (good reasons, evidence, or argument) for believing p to be true. However, the problem with JTB is that justification is difficult to establish with certainty. This is shown in Gettier cases; Edmund Gettier demonstrated that some justifications for true beliefs may be a matter of luck, so that an apparently good justification for a true belief may be actually bad; for example, a person declares that it is 2pm (belief), and it is in fact 2pm (true), but his belief is based on seeing a clock that happens to have stopped ticking at 2am (justification). The core of the problem is knowing for certain that our justifications are good enough. This presents a limitation to our concept of knowledge itself. Popper famously defined the limits of knowledge obtained through empirical (scientific) methods: his ‘falsification’ hypothesis states that genuine scientific theories can be falsified, that is, shown to be false. No matter how many white swans we observe, the claim ‘all swans are white’ requires only one black swan to falsify the claim. So, the only certain statement here is that ‘It’s possible not all swans are white’. Popper argued that our negative findings stimulate further enquiry, leading to further knowledge. Thus, according to Popper, knowledge is always incomplete. In which case, the quest for knowledge is surely limitless. As Einstein is quoted as saying, “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” MARTIN BARGE, LONDON

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e plus ultra is Latin for ‘nothing further beyond’. It is said to have been inscribed on the Pillars of Hercules at the western end of the Mediterranean, then the boundary of the known world, as a warning to ships to sail no further. In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant invokes the Pillars of Hercules for the boundary of knowledge and warns that the ‘no further’ must be placarded on the Pillars of Hercules that “nature has erected, so that the voyage of our reason may proceed only as far as the continuous coastline of experience reaches.” Before Kant, the assumption was that knowledge must con38 Philosophy Now




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form to objects of sense experience. Instead, Kant argues that the objects of sense experience must conform to the cognitive faculties of the mind of the experiencer. The world as given to our experiences is dependent on the structure and activity of our minds. For instance, the fact that we cannot perceive anything that exists outside of time or which has no extension in space indicates that time and space are fundamental forms of perception that must already exist as innate structures for the human mind. The mind must also have preconscious categories of understanding and synthesis that apprehend and reproduce the raw data of sensory experience and recognize their features according to a conceptual framework. And since everything we perceive is filtered through the forms of space, time, and other categories of understanding, we can never really ‘know’ the actual (noumenal) world – the things in themselves – but only experience how they appear to us through these categories. So these categories are the necessary conditions of all experience. Since human beings can know reality only by using the human conceptual framework and cannot step outside the limitations of our experience, our knowledge is inevitably limited. Therefore, as Kant said, we must not continue the voyage of our reason beyond the shores of experience, and cease all attempts to gain knowledge of such things as the intrinsic nature of the universe, the existence of God, self, free will and immortality. Going further will be perfectly hopeless, as we will be lost at sea. NELLA LEONTIEVA, RANDWICK, NEW SOUTH WALES

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he first recipient of a PhD in Art Education in the UK was also its first professor in the field. The award represented a new area of knowledge, not covered by its separate components. But this sort of recombination of fields is far from unprecedented. Indeed, knowledge continues to grow and expand within unitary areas, within combined ones, and across both. Melvin Bragg, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, recently referred to this “greatest age of expanding knowledge, a tumult of erupting knowledge.” Its expansion supports the contention that there is no foreseeable limit, at least to what we can know, unless we reach a point where all that we can know, is known. Beyond this there exists knowledge that we can apparently never know, because we are inextricably constrained by our limited capabilities. For Kant, the world in itself, the noumenal world, is beyond us. Kant has an analogy of ‘irremovable spectacles’ of space and time through which our perception is enabled. Nevertheless, technological extensions to our sensory capacities, via scanning and computational augmentations to our reasoning and calculating may enable us to access knowledge exceeding that typically associated with human capability. Thus knowledge may become limitless, with a limitless increase of technologically-enhanced senses, with evermore refined degrees of resolution, and perhaps even extending beyond limitations of human categories of understanding. COLIN BROOKES, LOUGHBOROUGH Limits of Knowledge?

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he quantity of knowledge that can be recorded is limited by the resources for data storage (including our brains), which, however large they become, are finite. A more philosophically interesting question is: are there kinds of knowledge denied to us? One famous assertion that it is so is Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” However, this claim is in one sense false: there was a time when that ‘whereof one cannot speak’ was literally everything – and yet here we are speaking about all kinds of things. Better to say, whereof one cannot speak, one must devise new terminology. One could argue that Wittgenstein’s claim was not meant to be taken so literally; but the reason why it isn’t literally true hints at why such attempts to define knowledge limits are presumptuous: we can’t know what new thought tools and media humanity will develop. Since emerging as a species, Homo sapiens has developed language, writing, logic and mathematics, diagrams, things to see the very large and very small, and more. All these qualitatively extend our ability to think far beyond what was possible for the earliest humans, who would not even have been aware of themselves as thinkers. New tools are being invented all the time which may influence what knowledge can be recorded and transmitted. To give one example, in his essay ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’, Thomas Nagel suggested that to objectively explain subjective experience, you would need to be able ‘to explain to a person blind from birth what it was like to see’. Fifty years later, researchers are working on techniques for direct brain stimulation for helping the visually impaired. Once these tools have reached maturity, you would not need to explain sight to a blind person, you could just give it to them. If there are limits to knowledge, the only way to know that is to reach them by continuing to step into the unknown and finding out what’s there. PAUL WESTERN, BATH

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ur knowledge is limited by many factors, including brain capacity, our sensory apparatus, the language we use, our experience, and our imagination. Our brain capacity affects the speed at which we can process information and recognize patterns, which limits our mathematical ability. Mental capacity also affects our linguistic ability, on which our ability to think critically depends. If we have no words to express a concept, we cannot think about that concept. George Orwell recognized this in 1984, in which the government tried to eliminate critical thinking by introducing ‘Newspeak’. Our sensory apparatus determines our perceptions and perspectives, but our perspective can be extended using tools such as telescopes, microscopes, and spectrometers. Yet as Kant correctly stated, even using these instruments, we cannot know an object itself, as our perception of an object is always distinct way of representing an object. Even our ability to imagine is limited by our experience and existing thoughts, ideas, and concepts. New ideas usually arise from re-arranging the ‘known’ in different ways. For example the Romans knew about toasting bread, but had no conception of electricity, so that they could not imagine an electric toaster. Using our sensory apparatus, tools, ability to detect and analyze patterns, linguistic ability, critical thinking and out imagination, we can scientifically increase our knowledge of our world. However our scientific knowledge is constrained by the above limitations, as well by the limits of technology. RUSSELL BERG, MANCHESTER

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here are two primary ways in which knowledge can be limited. The first involves information that is comprehensible

Limits of Knowledge?

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to us but which there’s no way to obtain. For instance, we will almost certainly never know what Julius Caesar ate for breakfast on his seventh birthday. But if some oracle told us that it was bacon and eggs with soldiers (or a Caesar salad), that would be easily understood. There’s mathematical knowledge of a similar nature. The knowledge of Caesar’s breakfast is in principle obtainable. However, it is completely impractical to obtain this knowledge. On the other hand, some knowledge is unobtainable even in principle. There are, for example, events occurring so far from us that, due to the expansion of the universe, no information from them can ever reach us. Light (or other information) emitted from these events will always be getting farther away from us. The second type of limited knowledge concerns information we cannot even comprehend. Our minds are either too limited, or perhaps there is no explanation available. Possible examples of incomprehensible knowledge include: (1) The explanation of consciousness (as suggested by Colin McGinn); (2) The nature of free will; (3) The fundamental question of why there is something rather than nothing. At least we are aware that these are problems. Perhaps there are even facts of which our minds cannot comprehend any aspect. There is no way of knowing what these facts concern, much less the facts themselves: in which case I can perhaps be forgiven for not giving an example. RICHARD STANLEY, CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA

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ecause knowledge accumulates over the totality of subjects over time, one is inclined to say that knowledge is unlimited. I will give a simple approach to substantiate this statement. Consider the simple statement: ‘S knows that p’ . Then: if ‘S knows that p’ (e.g. ‘Laura knows that it rains’) then S knows one proposition – hence has limited knowledge. The first extension of this statement is to replace p with a finite set of propositions, (p1, . . ., pk). If ‘S knows that (p1, . . ., pk)’, then S knows a set of propositions, hence has limited knowledge. Now suppose we also have a finite (n) set of subjects, (S1,. . . Si,. . . ,Sn). Then: if ‘Each subject Si knows a specific finite set of propositions’, we can say that (S1,. . . Si,. . . ,Sn) knows the union of these finite sets of propositions, or that ‘(S1,. . . Si,. . . ,Sn) knows that (p1, . . ., pm)’ , that is, knows a finite set of propositions, hence has limited knowledge, even though this is greater than for any one individual. Of course this group knowledge can be very large. Many subjects together know many things. We can also say that the totality of subjects knows the union of these specific unions of propositions. Or, using h as the number of members in this union, then ‘The totality of subjects knows that (p1, . . ., ph)’. This knowledge is still limited, because h is not infinity. Yet the totality of subjects existing at any moment in time (the world) knows a huge number of things. But by absorbing the sets of propositions from all previous totalities and all totalities to come, the number of propositions arguably approaches infinity. Totalities change over time, propositions are accumulate over time. Therefore we have, now and in the future, unlimited knowledge. TEIJE EUVERMAN, ROTTERDAM

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he limits of knowledge aren’t difficult to ascertain: all that we require is a precision on what the word knowledge signifies. Knowledge can be defined as ‘information or data received by the conscious mind’. Information without a recipient is simply part of the stuff that makes up our cosmos; alongside energy and matter, it is fundamental. But once the sentient mind apprehends information, it is transformed into knowledge: data that can be used creatively. The limits of knowledge are therefore tied into December 2023/January 2024
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the limits of mind and the limits of information. But we are unable to say where the limits of mind may lie. All we might say is that there should be an upper limit to what a human mind can comprehend – and it is here that we may then draw the limit of knowledge. But information also has an upper limit: all that exists, across space and time. Once this is fully reflected by a mind, knowledge has come to its completion. So knowledge comes to its end in omniscience – the apprehension of all that exists. Yet whether there was, is, or ever will be a mind that can have all knowledge is suspect. Some of the more speculative physicists have argued that this may be realised as artificial intelligence advances to its maximum and harnesses the energy of galaxies. Such ideas appear in the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and Olaf Stapledon. Many religions have proposed God alone (usually a God who transcends the Universe) as being omniscient. It is interesting to consider whether the apprehension of such a God of those aspects of reality that transcend our cosmos would be knowledge in the sense we’ve defined it. It provokes us to also consider what information and mind might themselves be based on. But with God, language itself starts to become suspect; these are just some indications of the frontiers of what we might ask. ANTHONY A. MACISAAC, PARIS

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nowledge will reach its limits when there is one last question to ask and someone to ask it. Isaac Asimov provided a better way of responding to this question than I could, in his short story, ‘The Last Question’ (1956). The story concerns the question, ‘What will happen when entropy ends the last star in the cosmos?’ A computer called Multivac is asked it, but, unfortunately its answer is, “There is, as yet, insufficient data for a meaningful answer.” Over the next billions of years, Multivac evolves in hyperspace, but always supplying the same answer to the question. As the last star dims, the last intelligent life – an ethereal entity – asks again, and receives the same response. The entity then joins with Multivac, which has gathered all the knowledge gained from trillions of years in the cosmos. When the last star dies, Multivac still has this one answer to provide. Eventually, after aeons of thought, Multivac finds the answer. With no one to report the answer to, Multivac decides to demonstrate; and so says, “Let there be light!” As long as one question that has never been answered exists and there is an entity that can ask the question, the limits of knowledge have not been reached. I think the very last question would have to be: Can we understand how all the pieces of the jigsaw fit together? I therefore propose the limits of knowledge are reached when everything is known and understood. Or would it be? And would the answer to that final question tell us why it was all created in the first place? RICHARD TOD , DESBOROUGH, NORTHANTS

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ome people think that language determines the limits of knowledge, yet it merely describes what we know rather than limits it, and humans have always had the facility to create new language to depict new knowledge. There are many types of knowledge, but I’m going to restrict myself to knowledge of the natural world. The ancient Greeks were possibly the first to intuit that the natural world had its own code. The Pythagoreans appreciated that musical pitch had a mathematical relationship, and that some geometrical figures contained numerical ratios. They made the giant conceptual leap that this could possibly be a key to understanding the Cosmos itself. Jump forward two millennia, and their insight has borne more fruit than they could possibly have imagined. Richard Feynman 40 Philosophy Now




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? made the following observation about mathematics in The Character of Physical Law: “Physicists cannot make a conversation in any other language. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in. She offers her information only in one form.” Meanwhile, the twentieth century logician Kurt Gödel proved that in any self-consistent, axiom-based, formal mathematical system, there will always be mathematical truths that can’t be proved true using that system. However, they potentially can be proved if one expands the axioms of the system. This infers that there is no limit to mathematical truths. Alonso Church’s ‘paradox of unknowability’ states, “unless you know it all, there will always be truths that are by their very nature unknowable.” This applies to the physical universe itself. Specifically, since the vast majority of the Universe is unobservable, and possibly infinite in extent, most of it will remain forever unknowable. Given that the limits of knowledge are either infinite or unknowable in both the mathematical and physical worlds, then those limits are like a horizon that retreats as we advance towards it. PAUL P. MEALING, MELBOURNE

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nowledge has been defined as ‘justified true belief’. This is a philosopher’s view of knowledge. I would like to consider what we know and don’t know in a more basic, practical way. First, we can have no real knowledge of the future. We may make informed guesses, even accurate predictions, but this cannot be counted as knowledge. Equally, although we know the broad sweep of the past, the everyday detail is largely unknown to us. We have reports of things that happened, were done and said, but this covers an infinitesimal part of the history of the world. Even the fine detail of what is happening around us today is largely unknown to us. In sum, our episodic knowledge is very limited. It is more fruitful to consider what the limits are to what we know about the nature of reality, the physical laws which underpin it, and the entities that play a part in it. These are known unknowns that stand at the current limits of our knowledge. Some of the theories in need of more supporting evidence or explanation are dark matter, dark energy, string theory, quantum gravity, the multiverse, consciousness... Will full accounts of them be for ever beyond our reach? In some cases, there may be practical difficulties which mean that we will never obtain conclusive experimental evidence. Strings, if they exist, are incredibly small; Brian Greene said that a string is to an atom as a tree is to the universe. Thomas Hertog further said that “You would need a particle accelerator as large as the solar system to probe scales that small.” Yet, all hope is not lost: the LIGO detector was able to detect a change of one-thousandth the size of a proton in its 4-kilometre length caused by a gravitational wave! And AI with quantum computing may make lighter work of finding evidence and explanations. So will we eventually know everything there is to be known, or will there be an unfolding succession of unknowns, going on for ever like the extension of pi? Fortunately, we have five billion or so years before the Earth is engulfed by the Sun to find the answers. MICHAEL BRAKE, EPSOM, SURREY The next question is: How Can We Achieve World Peace? Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Email the Editor. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 10 February 2024. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address.

Limits of Knowledge?

Brief Lives

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) Warren Ward looks at the history of a man who looked at the history of the world.

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.W. F. Hegel was the leading figure in the nineteenth century movement known as ‘German Idealism’. These idealists had responded to Immanuel Kant’s work in a manner that Kant would never have approved. Kant believed that although the external world existed beyond our experience of it, we could never know it as it is ‘in itself’ – we could only ever know the world as shaped by our minds to give us our experiences of it. Hegel built on this conclusion to argue that the only thing we can therefore be sure of existing is the consciousness with which we experience the world. So he rephrased the world in terms of consciousness – which is what ‘idealism’ means. Paradoxically, the most significant legacy of Hegel’s work has been his influence on Marx, a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. That was because Marx was captivated by Hegel’s use of Heraclitus’s idea of ‘dialectic’ to explain how society has unfolded throughout history – of which more later. Hegel’s Early Stages Hegel was born at a highly significant time in history, just as the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire was coming to an end. And, within twenty years of Hegel’s birth, the barricades and muskets of French revolutionaries would sweep aside a millennium of medieval feudalism to usher in new foundations of democratic republicanism that endure to this day. These dramatic events would leave a lasting impression on the young Hegel, and greatly influence his ideas. Hegel started his schooling early. His parents sent him to a German school in his home town of Stuttgart when he was three years old, and then to a Latin school when he turned five. When Hegel was eleven, his much-loved mother died of ‘bilious fever’. Immediately after his mother’s death, Hegel developed a speech impediment that stayed with him for the rest of his life. At fourteen, showing much academic promise, he attended Stuttgart’s Gymnasium Illustre, where he was schooled in the classics, ancient and modern languages, physics, and mathematics. When he turned eighteen, Hegel’s father enrolled him in the Tübingen seminary, hoping he would follow in the footsteps of uncles who had respectable positions as pastors. But Hegel found theology unbearably tedious. He was more interested in philosophy, and at the seminary he made two friends who shared this enthusiasm, Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin. Schelling would become another leading light in the German Idealist movement. His star would shine earlier, but in the end Hegel’s would shine more brightly. Hölderlin would become one of Germany’s most revered Romantic poets, and a celebrated leader of the Sturm und Drang literary movement. Hegel was only nineteen when he and his comrades heard the sensational news of the French Revolution: that France’s ruling aristocracy had, almost overnight, fallen by the will of the people. They were exhilarated that the ideas of their philosophical heroes Kant, Voltaire, and Rousseau were inspiring the French nation into a radical new society, and fervently hoped it would

spread eastwards (it didn’t). After completing his five-year course at Tübingen, Hegel eschewed opportunities to work as a pastor, and instead took up a position as a tutor for one of Berne’s wealthiest families. Hegel’s new employer boasted an extensive library, and Hegel worked his way through its collection of classic and contemporary texts. It was here that he came across Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). Its detailed and comprehensive account of the fate of Europe’s greatest empire would become a major source of inspiration for his work. In January 1801 Hegel received an invitation from Schelling to join him in Jena. Although Schelling’s invitation didn’t include the sort of paid academic position Hegel was looking for, it did bring him into the embrace of a forward-looking academic community brimming with new ideas. Overseen by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jena’s university was becoming renowned as a centre of post-Kantian idealist philosophy, Weimar Classicism, and German Romantic literature. Jena was also a place of romance for Hegel, too. At the age of thirty-seven he started an affair with his landlady, Johanna Burkhardt, who soon fell pregnant with their son, Ludwig. Aware that he would soon have another mouth to feed, Hegel worked away every night at finishing his first major work, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (The Phenomenology of Spirit). It proposed a new theory, now called dialectical idealism, which contended that the evolution of society throughout history is shaped by gigantic, invisible, often contradictory forces. As if to underline this theory, on 13th October 1806, Napoleon’s armies entered Jena – just as Hegel was putting the finishing touches to his manuscript. With Jena in ruins and no work in sight, Hegel moved to Bamberg to take up employment as a newspaper editor. He left baby Ludwig and Johanna behind, promising he would return to marry her as soon as he was able. In April 1807, Hegel published The Phenomenology of Spirit in Bamberg. This monumental work had arisen out of several sources of inspiration: Hegel’s study of history, his observations of the French Revolution, and his reading of Kant’s conclusion that the real world could never be truly known. As I said, like other German idealists, Hegel believed that the only thing we can be sure of is the consciousness with which we experience the world. Hegel integrated this idea into his historical thinking, to say that history is the process of consciousness coming to know itself. In the Phenomenology, he traced how, over the ages, societies had become more sophisticated, human culture inching closer to what Hegel saw as the ultimate state of self-knowledge. He predicted that this process would eventually culminate in human society becoming perfectly self-aware – a state he called Absolute Spirit. When it was first published, The Phenomenology of Spirit stimulated only a modest response in philosophical circles and the wider reading public. This was no doubt partly due to its turgid and difficult-to-read style – a style that would characterise all of Hegel’s work. In the months following its publication, however, as readers untangled and deciphered the awkward prose and better grasped December 2023/January 2024




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Brief Lives Young Hegel by Clint Inman

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Brief Lives the ground-breaking ideas, appreciation of the work grew, as did Hegel’s reputation and standing in the academic and wider communities. With this increasing fame, Hegel soon forgot about Johanna and Ludwig languishing in Jena, and began to look for a wife more in keeping with his newfound status. In 1808, Hegel was offered a prestigious position in Nuremberg as rector of its leading high school. It was here that Hegel met Marie von Tucher, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a respected Nuremberg patrician. Although Johanna tried to disrupt their wedding preparations, Hegel proceeded, unperturbed, with his plans to marry into the higher echelons of society. He was now making some social progress of his own. In the years after Hegel’s wedding he had a burst of productivity, publishing his second highly acclaimed work, The Science of Logic, in three volumes from 1812 to 1816. This work helped him achieve his long-awaited goal of appointment to a professorship of philosophy. And after two years at the University of Heidelberg, he was offered an even more prestigious position at the University of Berlin. The Culmination of Hegel When Hegel arrived in Berlin in 1818, it was the capital of the biggest German state, Prussia; the fourth largest city in Europe; and a thriving centre for music and the arts. Berlin society welcomed the famed philosopher and his elegant young wife with open arms. At forty-eight, he had reached a peak in his career. The Science of Logic had further expounded on his central idea in The Phenomenology of Spirit, to say that reality is not only shaped by the mind, it is mind. It cemented his reputation as one of Germany’s boldest thinkers since Kant. Hegel’s lectures were wellattended, and became the talk of Berlin; his stutter and obscure manner of speech, ridiculed by some in the past, was now seen as part of the larger-than-life philosopher’s charm and intrigue. On hearing news of Johanna’s death, Hegel rescued his illegitimate son from an orphanage to take him into his family along with the two sons that Marie had borne him. Ludwig, however, did not fit into Hegel’s wealthy bourgeois household, and Hegel felt torn between his duties to his wife and her sons (who weren’t that fond of the new addition to their family) and his obligations to Ludwig and his late mother. Indeed, Hegel’s personal life was now beset by dialectical tensions akin to those he wrote about in his philosophy. In 1821 Hegel published his third major work, The Philosophy of Right, which laid out his thoughts on political philosophy. He argued that law was the cornerstone of the modern state. He was disappointed that this book was interpreted by many as demonstrating sympathies with the right-wing Prussian monarchy. Meanwhile, his life at home was becoming increasingly disrupted by conflict with Ludwig, whom he eventually ejected out of the house and disowned after he found him stealing money from the family kitty. Ludwig enlisted with a mercenary army in Amsterdam, and sailed to Java to fight in the colonial wars. In 1831, along with everyone else in Prussia, Hegel found himself alarmed by reports of a cholera pandemic tracking across Asia towards Europe. When the first case of cholera hit Prussia that August, all slaughterhouses, schools, and other public buildings were closed, and royal orders were given for all coins and mail to be fumigated with smoke or sulphur. As more cases were reported, the King issued a decree that all affected houses in Berlin were to be quarantined. Hegel and his family packed their belongings and

moved to the safety of Kreuzberg, just outside Berlin, where a family friend allowed them to rent out the top floor of their home. The epidemic raged for months in Berlin as Hegel and his family waited it out in Kreuzberg. Although Hegel remained nervous about the cholera spreading to their new location, these months were a time of quiet and precious respite for the family. Marie referred to their temporary living space as die Schlösschen – their little palace – and during these weeks Hegel whiled away leisurely days in the house’s back garden playing chess with his sons, reading the newspaper, and, as ever, writing philosophy. After officials declared the epidemic was over, the family moved back to their home in Berlin. But the ageing philosopher didn’t feel secure, despite assurances from authorities that the danger had passed. He complained to Marie that the dirty Berlin air made him feel “like a fish that had been taken out of a fresh spring and thrown into a sewer.” As it turned out, the philosopher’s gloomy premonitions were not misplaced. At 11 a.m. on Sunday, 12 November 1831, only a few days after he had arrived back in Berlin, Hegel was struck with a severe attack of abdominal colic. The next day his condition deteriorated: he was no longer able to urinate, and started wildly hiccoughing. Later that afternoon, his family found him motionless and not breathing, his face a stony grey. A doctor was called, and duly pronounced the death of the city’s latest cholera victim. Hegel would never receive the news that a few months earlier his twenty-four-year-old illegitimate son Ludwig had been found dead on a battlefield in Batavia. Post-Hegelian Conclusions At the height of his fame, Hegel was seen as the thinker of his age, spokesman par excellence for post-revolutionary, post-Napoleonic Europe. After his death, Hegel’s students hurried to transcribe his lectures, believing he was one of the few men who grasped the changes sweeping Europe, as the church and aristocracy gave way to Napoleon’s vision of a more egalitarian, humanistic society. Even after his death, the ebb and flow of Hegel’s influence resembled the moving tides of history he described in his philosophy, as his followers split into two opposing camps: the Left Hegelians, who believed further revolutionary changes were needed, and the Right Hegelians, who ardently defended the Prussian monarchist state. One of the more radical young Left Hegelians was a young man called Karl Marx (1818-83). Marx transformed the next century’s political landscape with his ideas on how Europe should respond to the challenges and inequities posed by the rise of capitalism and mass industrialization. Today we refer to these ideas as ‘Marxism’ or ‘Communism’, but Marx called his theory ‘dialectical materialism’ in acknowledgement of the fact that it was directly inspired by Hegel’s dialectical idealism. Although Hegel’s rather mystical philosophy is out of keeping with the scientific, materialistic worldview that dominates today, his interest in understanding history has had a persisting influence, not just in continental philosophy, but more broadly in academic and popular thought. © WARREN WARD 2023

Warren Ward is Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Lovers of Philosophy: How the Intimate Lives of Seven Philosophers Shaped Modern Thought (Ockham Publishing: 2022). December 2023/January 2024
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Terry Pinkard Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington DC, talks to AmirAli Maleki about how Hegel can help us make sense of modern social, cultural and political hot topics.

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What is Hegel’s view of freedom? His ideas about freedom have to do with four different questions. First, what is freedom? Second, what is its role in history? Third, how important is it? Fourth, what does it take to actually be free? To take up the first issue: Freedom has three components. To be free is to be at one with oneself – what Hegel calls in German Beisichsein. One is at one with oneself when self-consciously acting out of a law that’s part of one’s own nature – acting according to ideas and principles of one’s own, not principles arbitrarily imposed from without. This aspect of freedom involves being independent, but independence is often mistakenly identified with freedom itself, instead of being recognized as merely a component of freedom. Genuine freedom for Hegel involves not only independence, but also a kind of structured dependence on others. All three of these components – being at one with oneself, independence, and structured dependence – have to be in play for there to be full freedom instead of partial or even self-undermining freedom. Hegel thought this was easy enough to understand in practice, although difficult to grasp in theory. In particular, saying that freedom involves both dependence and independence might itself look like a selfundermining contradiction. However, the dialectical aspect of Hegel’s system tells us that what looks at first like a simple contradiction here is better understood as tensionfilled moments of a greater whole, a totality. Hegel says that the free person is independent of others but is also in a form of dependence on others. He notes that we see this easily illustrated in relationships like friendship and love. In mutual love, I can be who I am in all my individuality, I can be an independent person; but I am capable of this only because of the recognition I receive from the beloved. (Sufi poets were especially good at expressing this dialectic.) I give myself over to the Other, so I am dependent; but in making myself dependent, I achieve the full recognition of myself as an independent individual, as does the Other in this relationship. There is a danger to this, which lies in the fact that these components can, in social circumstances that are not fully rational, come apart from each other because of dialectical tensions. For example, it’s easy enough in certain situations to think that the only true freedom is complete independence, but this always results in relationships that totter between mastery and servi-

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tude. The reasoning goes that if I am to be completely independent, I must make others dependent on me – and of course, they have the same thought in reverse. All relations of mastery and servitude that are aimed at personal independence fall apart since the masters end up being dependent on the servants recognizing them as independent, even though they want to be independent of all such recognition! So relations between masters and servants (or slaves) throughout history have been fraught with difficulty. Ultimately, the relationship can be held together only by force, since only a little reflection shows how senseless this relation between mastery and servitude really is. Genuine freedom – being at one with oneself and independent in one’s own individuality by virtue of being dependent on others in a certain way – is only really possible within the totality called Geist in German or Spirit in English. Hegel defines Geist as “an I that is a We, and a We that is an I”, where both are real. In a fully realized form of life, this would be a situation in which all of us are the unique individuals we each are by virtue of being recognised as such by others in our community. We depend on those others having civic virtue, whereby each of us cares that the others are as free as we are, and where the rules, institutions and practices all fit together to produce a society in which each ‘I’ is independent through participating in such a communal life. The idea of Spirit is itself an example of the kind of totality that is by its essence always in a creative tension with itself. When things go wrong, the whole comes apart, and, in one case, all we have left over is a disjointed collection of I’s who form no real community – no real We. In these cases of atomization, we have what Thomas Hobbes called “the war of all against all”, in which, as he put it, all life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Or, in the opposite kind of case when things go wrong, all individuals are made subordinate to some overarching super-We that is partial and one-sidedly collectivist, where all individuality is extinguished and stirred into the pot. Examples of this include extreme nationalism, one-party dictatorship, and the like. In those cases, the state becomes a master seeking independence, and the people are merely its servants. Both of these cases are deficient actualizations of Spirit, and because they are so one-sided, are also basically unlivable. Unlivable social relations inevitably unravel. Interview

Interview Second, freedom is crucial in history because Hegel thinks that it provides the underpinning for historical progress. In Hegel’s best-known and most radical theory, when we look back over history, what we see is progress of the consciousness of freedom among peoples. In the beginnings of humanity, only a few people – the ‘masters’ of their time – were aware of themselves as free in the sense of independent. They were constrained only by other masters, and not by the wishes of people below them. This condition was always unstable, even though such relations of mastery and servitude lasted thousands of years. Yet over time, Hegel argues, the disenfranchised of the world gradually came to see their disenfranchisement not as the natural order of things, but as a set of humanlyconstructed limitations built around an unjustifiable inequality of freedom. Hegel’s modern world differed from all other periods, in that all have come to view themselves as free and see any lack of freedom in their lives as caused by unjustifiable institutions and practices, not by the nature of the world itself. (Hegel was nineteen when the French Revolution happened.) Third, how important is freedom? For Hegel, it is of absolute importance. Life has many goals, not all of them compatible, so in most cases we have to make tradeoffs. But above all worldly aims is the aim of living your own life, not a life commanded to you by an Other. For Hegel, freedom is not a matter of trading off some goods for others; it’s more like the recipe for a just social order. In tradeoffs, you take less of one good in order to have more of another, even though you’d like more of both. But in Hegel’s recipe for a mature society, you’re not trying to have more of all the goods, but rather, to get the goods arranged in such a way that freedom is more fully actualized. Just as in baking a cake, one does not want more flour and more sugar, one wants the right balance between sugar and flour. This is, moreover, not a self-centered freedom, because in an equally achieved freedom, we are each individually free only because all the others around us are free. We must therefore take care to keep the mediating institutions and practices around us functioning properly, so that we can each lead our own lives. In the unjust relation of master and servant, the master realizes he can be free only if the others, the servants, are not free. But in a social and political relationship where genuine freedom is actualized, each Interview

realizes he or she can be free only if the others are equally free. As Hegel says, once this idea of freedom has got into people’s minds, nothing can force it out again. The ruling orders can repress the idea, but they cannot suppress the yearning for freedom. Over time, despite the repression, the injustice of unequal freedom becomes unbearable. When that happens, people aren’t drawing philosophical conclusions as much as saying to themselves: “We can no longer be those people; we must change our world and become who we are.” This, so Hegel thought, was more or less the story of the modern world. One of the more curious claims Hegel makes is that one is free only when one selfconsciously knows that one is free. There were, he thought, entire historical communities that were not free because they did not know it. One is free when one is being oneself, acting according to a law of their own nature. To be free, one must thus have a conception of what it would mean to be at one with oneself. So as long as a person thinks he or she is dependent in some fundamental way on others, who thereby have the right of command over them, they are not free because they do not know they are free. They become free only when they become aware that whatever constraints have been imposed on them must be justified to them. And to think that you do not require this justification from others is not to know that you are free – and thus to not be free! And as we can see, this exact universal demand for justification is what characterizes the modern world. What was the role of the state in Hegel’s thought? Is government a natural thing from his point of view? Government, Hegel thinks, arises originally out of the need for people to coordinate with each other about important matters – food, shelter and the like – and to provide common defense and to share burdens with each other when the times become hard. That much, we might say, is ‘natural’. But that won’t necessarily justify the form of government we have. For that, we need to understand that governmental institutions were built by us, even though we almost always never built them fully self-consciously or with clearly defined aims in mind. But, being built by us, they can be unbuilt or transformed by us. And so whichever way it goes, our government institutions require justification by us. In addition to government, there is also

the state. Although Hegel thought it went back to antiquity, the state is actually a relatively modern invention. For most of history, people did not think of themselves as members of a state. Instead, they were the subjects of a prince or king, or subject to rule by some organization of elites. But as progress in the consciousness of freedom began to emerge in the collective selfunderstanding of various peoples, they began to think of their lives as united together under abstract ideals more than as being subjects of a prince. This way of being together – as a We that is an I – came to be called a ‘state’. By Hegel’s time, even an absolutist ruler such as Friedrich the Great of Prussia (1712-86) had proclaimed that he was only ‘the first servant of the state’. Hegel picked up on this and saw the state as the unity of the people as citizens – as co-members of a social and political formation. Once again, his view was that it was only as a co-member of such a formation that one could be a free individual. Only in a set of institutionally and practice-oriented dependencies could we even be the kind of agents who have a right to chart the course of their own lives. The Hegelian state is thus a unity in which co-members set the extent of the power that some will inevitably have over the lives of others. In pre-modern states, elites – usually religiously-backed elites – had the power to set the limits of their own power over others. In modern democracies, that can no longer count as legitimate, because all are entitled to participate in the setting of the extent and limits of such power. What was the role Hegel had for the people under the government? Are they completely dependent on the rulers, or not? The relation between the government and the people exhibits the same tension we saw in the way Hegel handles all of the issues of Spirit – in terms of the potentially tense unity of the ‘I’ with the ‘We’. Those who want to see what Hegel thinks in particular about this question should read the long section §290 from Hegel’s 1820 work Philosophy of Right. There he makes it very clear that a proper comprehension of the unity of a political community strongly requires that the people must have their own sphere of authority independent of government and state authority. He is very suspicious of arrangements that for reasons of speed and

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efficiency centralize authority in the office of a prime minister or president, and thus centralize the state. He is even critical of the workings of the Prussian state in his own day, when he speaks there of recent ways in which all organization has come from ‘above’, when what it needs is more input from ‘below’. Such state centralization goes hand in hand with the coming apart of society into a kind of atomism of unorganized individuals. When the various spheres of society are atomistically unorganized, it can even seem ‘rational’ in a distorted way for the people at the top to centralize all power in their own hands for reasons of efficiency or ideological control. Hegel’s views on this are strikingly similar to those put forward in the twentieth century by Hannah Arendt in her account of how totalitarianism gets a foothold in modern societies. Only when the people in a society have been so atomized do they then lack the kind of independence-independence that would otherwise put a brake on such state centralization. Are there similarities between Hegel’s system and today’s liberalism? Did Hegel fundamentally believe in something like liberalism? The relation of Hegel to liberalism is difficult to pin down, because it’s difficult to say exactly what counts as modern liberalism. Keep in mind too that the word ‘liberalism’ itself was only coined in the early nineteenth century, even though since then the term has been retroactively applied to earlier thinkers, such as John Locke, who did not use the term to describe his own political philosophy. In the early nineteenth century ‘liberalism’ was usually taken to mean laissez-faire free market politics – a commonly held position back then, and one to which Hegel was fundamentally opposed. He would be even more appalled at the twentieth and twenty-first century’s ‘neo-liberalism’, with its subservience to the already wealthy. As he put it to his students in 1824-1825, those who say that we should not interfere with the market since it will eventually correct itself if left alone, are just like those who say that when a plague starts to rage we should let it run its course. If we do, Hegel noted, hundreds of thousands will be dead, most of whom could have been saved. As John Maynard Keynes retorted to a similar claim about the free market righting itself in the long run: “In the long run, we are all dead.” Hegel also had misgivings about the way in which the liberal economic policies of his 46 Philosophy Now




day tended to atomize society and thus create the space for centralizing authoritarian governments to grab more power for themselves. In this, Hegel might well be called the first ‘post-liberal’ thinker. On the other hand, as Edmund Fawcett has suggested in Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton, 2014), we can take a more expansive view of liberalism as structured around four very general ideas: the inevitability of social conflict, a necessary suspicion of accumulated power, the belief in social and political progress, and the need to respect individuals as individuals. If so, then Hegel is certainly a liberal sympathizer of sorts. What are the effects of Hegel on today’s politics? In other words, does today’s political world depend on Hegel’s thought? When Hegel published the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) in 1820, he was laying out what he called, in the German title of the book, the Grundlinien – the baselines of a philosophy of legality. To lay out the baselines is like drawing the lines on a football field or a tennis court. It means that whatever disputes there are to be about what is to count as right, they must be carried on within the lines he lays out. In effect, what Hegel was arguing was that, by 1820, the baselines of the modern world have been fairly well laid out. He was also arguing that these baselines had also reached their final form of development, although they had not reached their final shape – just as one might say that the development of the institution of the Emperor in ancient Rome had reached its final form by roughly 50 BCE (with Julius, then with Augustus, Caesar), such that changes in it later on were only peripheral changes to its shape; or that the status of the Emperor in China had reached more or less its final form in the Ming Dynasty. Hegel could similarly say of various modern (to him) institutions, that they were now, at least in outline, in their final shape, too. The world had become anchored in certain abstract rights to life, liberty, and property, and in a moral worldview that was not restricted to distinct communities or cultures, but was to range over humanity at large. These two baselines were, however, still only abstract, and in order to be made real they required a set of institutions that translated them into practice. These institutions were, he thought: nuclear families based on affectionate marriages; a civil society with a large market-

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driven element, in which work was carried out in terms of a market for jobs, not just in terms of patronage positions; and finally, a constitutional monarchical state of free and equal citizens. So it was not a system of princely domains; marriages were not to be arranged in terms of dynastic claims or membership in a clan; and modern legality was to be justified in terms of how well it satisfied people’s unavoidable claims to be treated as free and equal. Since Hegel wrote that, the world has undergone tumults, revolutions, wars, and pandemics, and has witnessed a technological progress that people in Hegel’s time would have found nearly impossible to imagine. However, we still find his appeal to human rights, to a moral sense that is more than just the customs of a particular community, and to affectionate marriages, to a bustling market life of jobs and bosses, and a state that cares to promote and to defend the freedom and equality of its citizens, more or less reflects the way our political discourse is still carried out. What has changed, is rejection of the idea that the European ways of working out these problems is somehow binding on the rest of the world. This is another way of saying that the demands of freedom and equality have thoroughly upended the old assertions of European hegemony. What we also find in our world is that the tensions that are part of our modern totalities put them under pressure of coming apart; and we see the state taking on a kind of independence of its citizens so that it ceases to regard them as citizens but more as atomized individuals, of whom it is the master. Or, to see morality as less about the rights of humanity as a whole, and more about how some can become judgmental masters over others. Or, about how religion can become a top-down moralizing judgmentalism, intent on replacing a bottom-up practice of love, friendship, reconciliation and forgiveness. Or, about how markets, rather than being vehicles for promoting and defending freedom and equality, are really rewarding elites and promoting them into the realms of the super-rich. When the whole is pulled apart, the parts cease to be anything like constituent moments, and become more like willful wayward fragments pretending that they and not the others are the real totality. Hegel has no guidance for what we are to do when the parts start to come apart and become disordered elements of a detotalized totality, recombining in all kinds of socially pathological ways. What he offers Interview

Interview us – which is what only philosophy can offer us – is a way of thinking about it. He offers a way of thinking about how social development can go right and how it can go wrong, and, most particularly, how it can go wrong even within the baselines of modern right and legality. Kant described orientation in thought as like trying to find one’s way around a dark room. You’re searching for something to hold onto. In the darkness of what the future holds, we look to philosophy to give us some markers. But we still have to find our own ways into the light. Is Hegel an individualist? Can his philosophy be reduced to individualism or collectivism? It depends on what you mean by an individualist. If you mean by ‘individualism’ the idea that the structures of the ‘We’ are only those formed by compacting together a set of individuals and their attitudes, then he is of course not an individualist. For example, a language is not simply the sum-total of what everybody who speaks the language has said. A language such as English carries its normative or defining structure within itself; but it’s still true that if there are no English speakers, then there is no English language. In speaking a language, the individual manifests the language in a concrete way, and the language shows itself in the speech-practices of the people who speak it. And Hegel says that language is ‘the existence of spirit’ – in other words, spirit cannot exist outside of human linguistic practices. Yet the language and the speakers of the language relate to each other in a nonadditive way: language is ‘non-individualist’ in that sense. However, if you just mean by ‘individualism’ the idea that individuals have interests and rights that the state must respect, so that the state must treat all individuals with equal respect, then Hegel is indeed an individualist in that more limited sense. What’s the difference between the modern state and the ancient state? And what lessons for today can be learned from Hegel’s thoughts about the state? There are two differences between the ancient state and the modern state that are crucial for Hegel. First, the Athenian state was small, so it could have a direct democracy, with every citizen himself voting on each crucial issue. This was a good thing. Modern states are too large and too complex to have direct democracy, so they’ve devised systems of representative government in order to function. Second, the Interview

Athenian state had no ‘civil society’ between itself and the family. (In fact, our modern English term ‘economy’ comes from the Greek words for ‘household’, oikos, and ‘law’, nomos.) The idea that people in a family could have a separate sphere of life that was outside of the family but not yet part of the state (say, of work in an occupation outside of the family) was unavailable to the ancient Greeks, but is it is an essential component of the baselines of modern life. In my opinion, Hegel is the prophet of a new world religion. But my question is, what’s the connection between the state and religion in Hegel’s thought? Does he believe in the separation of religion from politics, or something else? Hegel is very, very clear on the relation of the state to religion. He’s worth quoting at some length about this. On the idea that the modern, ‘Western’ separation of church and state is a bad thing, Hegel says in §270 of the Philosophy of Right: “Hence so far from its being or its having been a misfortune for the state that the church is divided, it is only as a result of that division that the state has been able to reach its appointed end as a self-consciously rational and ethical organization.” When the state as the center of legal coercion – which is necessary for enforcing the laws – and possessing a monopoly on violence through its police and army, is fused with religion, the result, Hegel says, is inevitably fanaticism and the falling apart of civil life. Religion, philosophy and art are the three ways in which what Hegel calls ‘Absolute Spirit’ functions. Absolute Spirit is Spirit – that is, self-conscious individuals communally organized – thinking about what ultimately matters to self-conscious and ultimately mortal individuals. Religion is therefore for Hegel an absolutely essential element of human life properly lived. But to give some of the religious people all the coercive, violent powers of the state is to invite them to become no longer co-citizens, but masters over the rest of the population, whom they will now treat as servants of their own views. This was, thought Hegel, one of the very bitter lessons of the European wars of religion during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which cost millions of people their lives and which should be avoided forever. To those who say that the separation of church and state is a terrible thing for religion, since it might make it look as if religion is not really part of the Absolute Spirit,

Hegel says in the same section: “this division is the best piece of good fortune which could have befallen either the church or thought so far as the freedom and rationality of either is concerned.” Religion flourishes where freedom flourishes. Where freedom does not flourish, religion debases itself into fanaticism and violence. Last question. In your opinion, what need is there for reading German Idealism in today’s world? And what’s the right way to study it? Also, please tell Iranian thinkers how they should walk in this direction, and how to use Hegel to explain the current conditions of their society. I am Iranian myself. The German Idealist thinkers lived in a world undergoing really seismic political, moral, and social transformations. Most of the great figures in it were born into one world, lived their youth in a world in transformation, and died as the new world that had been in the process of becoming was beginning to solidify. Kant started grappling with this when he was already old. Hegel, Schelling and the others got underway with the project when they were only in their twenties. In some ways, we, both the young and the old, seem to be living in a similar set of circumstances. Hegel’s generation got lots of things right, and they also got a lot of important things wrong – and the same will of course be true of us. However, Hegel and his generation presented the most selfconscious, even courageous, attempt to, as Hegel put it, grasp their own times in thought. The idea that we’re free was certainly driving the thinking of the great German Idealists as the essence of their times. If we read them in the proper spirit, as fellow actors in a changing, confusing, even fearful, world, that is nonetheless full of opportunities for progress, we can perhaps better understand our own thoughts on our world and our own discomforts with it. In one sense, we now live in the great sociopolitical backwash the German Idealists created. We will be able to find our own way in it only by recognizing that, and in absorbing their views into our own, and thereby inevitably changing them – hopefully for the better. • AmirAli Maleki is a philosophy researcher and the editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the field of political philosophy PN and hermeneutics.

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Letters When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up. Email me at [email protected] Keep them short and keep them coming! A Pool of Philosophical Reflections DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 158 Eldar Sarajlic claims that “We do philosophy when we perceive how things are in the world.” This is too weak, as it fails to distinguish philosophy from science. Better to understand philosophy by contrasting it with science. Science is about things, or how things are in the world; whereas philosophy is about how we think about things. And since we use concepts to think communicable thoughts, the dominant method in philosophy is conceptual analysis. This idea of philosophy was prominent in the mid to late twentieth century, but fell out of favour amongst those who viewed conceptual analysis narrowly, as ‘ordinary language philosophy’. But it is much deeper than how we use words; or perhaps a better metaphor is, ‘more elevated’: philosophy is a meta or second order pursuit. So the philosophy of history is about how we think about past events; philosophy of mathematics is about the concepts used in mathematics; and so on for other first order disciplines. And metaphysics is how we think about reality. EDWIN WILKINSON LINLITHGOW, SCOTLAND DEAR EDITOR: I think Dr Jeuk’s article, ‘What Happened to Philosophy?’ in Issue 158 describes obstacles to effective philosophy (and other disciplines) that have been in plain sight for decades. Jeuk outlines how three structural aspects of modern academic practice work to stifle thinking: overspecialization, obligatory consideration of what’s considered ‘the current debate’, and the ‘single principle’ argument. Professional academics feel pressure to be published in respected journals. But those journals, and other publishers, have adopted these conventions so strictly they’re now inescapable requirements. I want to introduce systems thinking in support of this argument. Dr Jeuk 48 Philosophy Now

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uses the term ‘systematic’ (methodical) but I suggest ‘systemic’ (relating to a system as a whole) is more helpful. It’s how the three aspects he cites work as a system, interacting with each other, that makes them so pernicious. Like many systems that have evolved rather than been designed, the system acts negatively, in this case imposing a straitjacket on thinking. For a field that contributes to the betterment of humanity, this practice is inane, if not insane. There is every likelihood we have more great minds at work around the world now than were at work at any point in history. We need to set them free. GRAHAM LEGGETT, WEST SUSSEX Arendt versus Anti-Semitism DEAR EDITOR: Georgia Arkell’s pertinent illustrations of Arendt’s insights on totalitarianism in Issue 158 can be augmented by Arendt’s own words: “Any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than almost anything else” (Arendt to Mary McCarthy). As the first post-modern political theorist, Arendt may have rethought the nature of political action, centring on the paradoxes of human rights and how they could be politically guaranteed, the tensions between rights and institutions entrusted with their protection, and the balance between nation, state and ‘national consciousness’. Yet as a legal analyst, Arendt was skilled in the art of manipulating evidence in her various identities: Jewish, liberal-democratic, socialist, Marxist, humanitarian academic – but her reducing Heidegger’s Nazi year to ‘an error of judgement’ was truly ‘banal’! But she also wrote, “I cannot get over the extermination factories... What happens when human beings are stripped of the right to have rights, no law existing for them and cut off from the world of the living?...The concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested... An organised attempt was made

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to eradicate the concept of the human being.” (Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, 1996, p.140). For Arendt, the European Jews of her parents’ generation were politically inexperienced, underestimated anti-Semitism, sought social acceptance and assimilation instead of securing their political and legal rights, and did not understand a political party that put itself above the law (p.319). In Aufbau, 26/12/1941, she wrote: “Ever since the birth of political anti-semitism, Jewish theoreticians have been preparing the Jewish people for defeatism... No one has ever found a political answer that addresses anti-semitism, and Weizmann’s statement that the answer was to build up Palestine has proved to be a dangerous lunacy.” (Jewish Writings, 2007) And in a 1942 article ‘A Way Toward the Reconciliation of Peoples’, she concludes: “AntiSemitism turned out to be the agent of destructive fermentation for the entire European world.” She also warned of disastrous consequences for all marginalised peoples: “Conditions of radical atomisation jeopardise meaningful freedom”, and deduced there was no protection for Jews involved in bad bargaining via Jewish Councils or Zionist emissaries: “The notion that we can use our enemies for our own salvation has always been to me the ‘original sin of Zionism’.” (‘The Jew As Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, 1944). Antisemitism, as she predicted, was related to paranoia, millennial fantasy, homicidal hatred, and political cynicism. She concludes: “Anti-semitism, imperialism, totalitarianism... have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee, a new political principle in a new law, whose validity must comprehend the whole of humanity.” MIKE BOR, LONDON Entertainment, Ancient & Modern DEAR EDITOR: There were several articles I particularly enjoyed in Issue 158. However, the one that really got me thinking was ‘Nostalgia, Morality & Mass Entertainment’ by Adam Kaiser. I have often

Letters been bemused by the popularity among adults of cartoonish movies, especially those of an excessively violent nature. Mr Kaiser makes a good point when he explains that one reason for this childish amusement is that adults prefer not to think about the deeper issues of life and death: “Audiences want to immerse themselves in a simpler world.” Since I am currently reading Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness, I was pleased to come across a footnote of hers on p.15 in which she makes a similar point. She believes in delving earlier than Christianity’s beginning, going right back to the Ancient Greeks. Should one read Greek tragedies, one could “see how well the Greeks articulate intuitions and responses that human beings have always had to these problems.” Ideally, though, one would not only read these enlightening dramas, but also be privileged enough to see them portrayed on stage. Self-knowledge and emotional understanding could be much better achieved in this manner, than by viewing some of the current popular productions. Only in a Utopia, methinks… MARNIE MCGRATH CHILLIWACK, BRITISH COLUMBIA Additional Maths Problems DEAR EDITOR: In ‘Solving the Mystery of Mathematics’ (Issue 157), Jared Warren gives an admirably lucid and at least initially persuasive defence of ‘conventionalism’. But his defence raises some puzzling questions. Speaking of what he calls ‘conceptual truths’ such as ‘bachelors are unmarried’, he says that “the rules of language are the source of [their] truth” then going on to say that mathematics should be understood in the same way: “Our conventional rules for using mathematical terms like ‘number’, ‘zero’... determine our mathematical concepts. Conventional rules are the source of mathematical truth.” However, we need to ask which is the language whose rules are supposed to make ‘bachelors are unmarried’ true? It cannot be English, since that truth about bachelors would remain just as true even if the English language had never existed. Equally it cannot be true in virtue of the rules of any other language. In short, there is no language whose rules make it true that bachelors are unmarried. What is true, is that a truth a given sentence in English (in 2023) expresses, is deter-

mined by the rules of English (in 2023). But the truth which is thereby expressed owes nothing to any facts about English (in 2023). Parallel remarks apply to Warren’s account of mathematics. The mathematical truth that 1+1=2 cannot arise solely from the rules governing our use of mathematical signs, since we can change those rules at any time without in the least affecting the underlying mathematical truth. Even if the human race had never existed, and had therefore never formulated any rules governing mathematical signs, 1+1 would still equal 2. The rules which we have created for the uses of our symbols ‘1’ and ‘+’ and ‘2’ determine which truth we are expressing if we say ‘1+1=2’: but the truth of what we say is not dependent on those rules. Warren rightly stresses that mathematical truths are eternal, necessary, and objective; but our linguistic conventions are none of those, and therefore cannot be the source of those eternal truths. NICK EVERITT, NORFOLK DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 157, Jared Warren seeks to Solve the Mystery of Mathematics through conventionalism. He is wonderfully wrong. Wonderful, because he writes with panache. But let me illustrate why he is wrong, or rather, only half right – which fails to meet his purpose of demystifying mathematics. As he says, conventionalism “is the idea that mathematical truths are a byproduct of our linguistic conventions.” He goes on, “Our rules determine what we mean and what we mean alone determines what is mathematically true.” So what’s wrong – or half-right – with that? Imagine you’re a passionate advocate of metrification. You start with angles: ‘This business of 360 degrees in a circle is so messy, let’s make it a neat 100 degrees’ you think. Suddenly, there are 25 degrees in a right angle. Provided we all agree, there is no problem. Buoyed with success, you go on to the ratio between the diameter and circumference of the circle. ‘“This is even more messy!” you exclaim. “Pi is such an awkward number. So let’s change our convention and make pi a nice round metric number: say, ten.” But dear oh dear. However many of us agree with this change (even if it’s all of us), we are stuck. Maths will no longer work, pure or applied. The value for pi as we specify it, is only true within the base 10 system. We

have a different way of representing its value within a binary or duodecimal system. That much is a conventional truth. But whatever numbering system it’s expressed in, the underlying value of pi just is what it is – whatever we think, and whether we’re there to think it or not. JON CAPE DEAR EDITOR: Thank you for the article on mathematics in Philosophy Now 157. More specifically, thank you to author Jared Warren for asking the important question of what math is and what abstract, human-concocted notions we imagine when we refer to mathematical concepts. It’s a good question, worthy of exploration. However, I take issue with his referring to math as a ‘mystery’. Looking back through history, we can clearly see why languages were invented, how they’ve evolved, and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. Imagining an abstract thought is not a mystery; rather, it’s a human superpower. Math was invented as a language so we could communicate with each other about quantities. Languages created by humans are not meant to be universal, even if the concepts they attempt to communicate are universal truths. Just so, math as a language can enable individuals to communicate abstract concepts, like the number four. So his claiming math to be ‘mysterious’ is akin to referring to the English or the French languages as ‘mysterious’. RAHUL DHINGRA, BARCELONA Back To Reality DEAR EDITOR: My sincere thanks to Will Bynoe on his succinct and perceptive summary of John Austin’s philosophy in Issue 157. However, struggling through Austin’s book Sense and Sensibilia for a second time last year, I was struck by how his fascinating and painstaking analysis of foibles and interesting distinctions in English were seldom explicitly marshalled towards any conclusion. In the book, Austin is arguing against A J Ayer’s claim that we directly see sense data rather than objects. In the case of illusions and hallucinations, says Ayer, there may be nothing in the real world corresponding to what is perceived, so something else – sense data – must be the object of perception. One chapter of Sense and Sensibilia is devoted to the distinctions between ‘look’, ‘appear’, and ‘seem’. These words associ-

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Letters ated with illusions often have no implication of non-existence. Indeed, if I say it seems as if someone is speaking to me, or it appears to be so, it may actually be the case that someone is speaking to me. One might expect Ayer to disagree, but if someone says ‘I only seem to be hearing voices’, then pretty clearly I am implying these voices’ nonexistence in the world outside my head. Ayer is suggesting all our perceptions are like this and not directly of something real’. This is reasonably clear in the case of delusions and hallucinations, while not in that of illusions, as Austin repeatedly emphasises. In summary, when Ayer says the objects of hallucinations are not real we know he means they do not relate to anything in the world. The distinction between a delusory and a real pink elephant in this context is crystal clear. Austin’s discussion of the uses of the words ‘seem’, ‘appear’ and ‘looks like’, together with that of ‘real’ is (I so want to say ‘seems’) largely irrelevant to the argument. Nonetheless, as Bynoe states, Austin’s pursuit of words that contrast with such philosophical terminology as ‘real’ is an invaluable first step to clearing away the scrub. My worry is that Austin seldom then rolls up his sleeves to deal with the substantial issues which remain. PETER W. KEEBLE, HARROW, LONDON DEAR EDITOR: I’m a medical doctor and emergency physician in Costa Rica, and an eternal reader of your magazine. I want to write to you about the unknown. It’s the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars who otherwise would wither with boredom. Yet every effort to get out of our comfort zone generates an overwhelming resistance that attacks our perception of reality every time we try to modify it. It is a part of our nature to feel uncertainty, even bewilderment, in the face of the unknown. In the Timaeus, Plato introduces the term noúmeno, which designates the object of intellectual knowledge, or what is accessible only to the understanding. It represents everything that cannot be perceived in the tangible world of sensations and which can only be reached through reasoning. As Kant argued, outside its representation in our way of perceiving it, the thing in itself is not the object of our senses, so is not of our direct knowledge. Frequently doing activities with a 50 Philosophy Now

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high level of challenge stimulates the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, which happens to be the control center of the white matter tracts in the brain, in addition to suppressing the activity of the amygdala, which is strongly associated with an increase in the ability to face complex situations, or resilience. This turns the ACC into an interface between cognition and emotion, which allows humans to regulate those functions for efficient and assertive responses for achieving goals. The cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman takes as his starting point the idea that reality may not be just as we perceive it. He says the world consists first, of conscious agents and their experiences. These can be modelled and empirically explored in the normal scientific way, using theories that explain the biology behind the conscious mind. Hoffman proposes on this basis that each individual perceives an illusion which is in turn a multimodal user interface with the world. Reality does not resemble what represents it. Instead our ‘interface’ is formated in way useful to you, the user. When we actively and intentionally embark on transforming reality, it is impossible to evade the personal transformation that also occurs. Raising consciousness towards the universal infringes that uncomfortable pain so attached to the action of ‘changing skin’. Yet we overlook it, giving rise to biases in our self-reflection – biases that could influence the language with which we interpret ourselves and others. This is why contemplation of each scenario becomes absolutely indispensable, to get out of unconscious patterns of thought. How can we then ensure that our thoughts and introspections are free of bias? And to what extent can self-contemplation lead us to the summit of Maslow’s pyramid: that is, to self-realization in all its meaning? It is precisely where the questions and the brainstorm arise that raises the level of consciousness enough to be able to discern and reflect on the ideas we generate, increasing our cognitive revolution and reshaping the learning process to be able to position ourselves as individuals at the center. This is how we change paradigms; this is how we become fully reflective entities; this is how we advance in life, because this is how we manage to turn free will into something more than intellectual, but rather, something tangible in our actions.

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Applause to you and to all of us who choose the path of self-knowledge, changing our skin voluntarily, exposing vulnerability, embracing the unknown, annihilating comfort, and taking the reins of free will through the elevation of consciousness by personal growth! DR ELENA VEGA, COSTA RICA DEAR EDITOR: One thing that has bothered me for years now is that all serious philosophy seems to have abandoned the need for reality. This can be seen in Schrödinger’s cat in the box. As long as the box remains closed, we cannot possibly know whether the cat is alive or dead, or even actually in the box. The only really useful philosophic comment is therefore: ‘‘Open the box!’’ In the real world, a comparable condition might be two human groups, one saying, “Those people are communists and therefore bad,” and the other saying “We are communist and therefore good.” More to the point is how each group treats people. What they say about themselves and each other is just a diversion from the practical reality. Can we not therefore try to create a philosophical practice that emphasizes reality? Certainly it would be difficult, but it could lead to something better than purely theoretical exercises. RODERICK REES, WOODINVILLE, WA Both Philosophical & Vegetable DEAR EDITOR: I’ve just started an MA on Existential Coaching. The fiction about Heidegger’s Onion in 157 was an inspiration to our class, raising an interesting debate and generating a poem from the Carrot’s perspective: Kierkegaard’s Carrot To understand, to self-reflect, The carrot’s journey we can’t neglect. While onions cry to join the soup’s embrace, To blend into that mingled space, The carrot turns with steadfast grace, “I make choices to find my place.” No stew to join, no pot to share, In its solitude it has no care, No chef or recipe to guide. The carrot makes choice from deep inside. “I’ll be a juice!” it declared with pride, Pressed, pure essence, self-actualised. I can learn from this concealed root, And have hope in my existential pursuit.

LAURA BIRNBAUM, LONDON

The Art of Living The Discipline of Action Massimo Pigliucci tells us how to practice forebearance.

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pictetus of Hierapolis (50-135 CE) began life as a slave and ended it as the most renowned teacher of philosophy in the Roman world. Talk about going from rags to riches! Yet the little we know of his lifestyle indicates that despite his fame, Epictetus lived a simple life until the end. When he was old he adopted a friend’s child who would have otherwise likely died; and his main concern was not to make money but to teach young Roman aristocrats how to become better human beings and future leaders. One of the reasons we still study Epictetus two millennia later is because of his threefold curriculum in practical Stoic philosophy, the so-called disciplines of Desire, Action, and Assent. Last time we looked at the theory and practice of Desire. Let’s now turn to Action. ‘Action’ here specifically means behavior toward our fellow human beings – arguably the major concern for social creatures like us. With very few exceptions, we simply must interact with other people, be they our partner, children, friends, colleagues, or strangers. Such interactions are crucial for our own wellbeing, as plenty of scientific research shows. It follows that to learn to behave appropriately with others will be a major cause of our own happiness as well as of society’s thriving. But what does it mean to behave ‘appropriately’? In Greek the word is kathe
kon, which means both duty and rational action, or in other words, the kind of thing that one reasonably ought to do. We are, therefore, not talking etiquette but ethics. And that’s the sort of thing Epictetus meant to teach his students by way of his Discipline of Action. His starting point, as a Stoic, is that we ought to live in accordance, or in harmony, with nature. To Stoics, this means to live prosocially and reasonably, since sociality and reason are the two defining characteristics of Homo sapiens. Of course, there are many ways to act reasonably and proso-

cially, but there are also many ways to fail at one or both. Hence the necessity of reflecting ahead of time on how to behave in a kathe
kon fashion, and of practicing such behavior on a regular basis. Speaking of practice, consider the following excerpt from Epictetus’s Manual, Section 4: “When you are about to take something in hand, remind yourself what manner of thing it is. If you are going to bathe, put before your mind what happens in the bath – water pouring over some, others being jostled, some reviling, others stealing; and you will set to work more securely if you say to yourself at once: ‘I want to bathe, and I want to keep my will in harmony with nature’, and so in each thing you do. For in this way, if anything turns up to hinder you in your bathing, you will be ready to say: ‘I did not want only to bathe, but to keep my will in harmony with nature, and I shall not so keep it, if I lose my temper at what happens.’”

Here’s how I practice the situation described, and hence the Discipline of Action: I go to the movies. You see, I’m one of those people who really, really gets annoyed when someone disrupts the moviegoing experience. After all, I paid good money to sit quietly in the dark for a couple of hours and enjoy the latest flick. But as I’m sure you’ve noticed, these days there is almost always someone who has not read the memo, let alone read Epictetus. You can bet that in the middle of the movie, that person – usually located in one of the seats in front of you – will feel the urge to turn on his phone; and will, in fact, act on such urge. He absolutely has to text someone, or post something, or whatever else people do with their phones during a movie in a cinema. I used to get seriously irritated at this behavior. On a few occasions I have even shouted at the perpetrator – to no effect, of

course. In other words, as Epictetus put it, I’ve ‘lost my temper at what happens’. The result, predictably, has been not only that I ended up not enjoying the movie, but that I put myself in a condition of disharmony with (my human) nature. I behaved both unreasonably and antisocially. So these days, before I go to a movie theater I re-read the above passage by Epictetus. I prepare my mind by telling myself that I have two objectives: one, to enjoy the movie; two, to keep in harmony with (my) nature. The first objective is not up to me, as it depends on what other people will or will not do. But the second objective is entirely up to me. And damn it, I’m determined to achieve at least one of those objectives! In practice this means that if someone does disrupt my movie experience by way of a mobile phone, I am ready with a series of possible courses of action. I can decide to: (i) Politely approach the person and ask him to turn off the phone; (ii) Look for the manager and ask him to deal with the situation; (iii) Do my best to ignore the distraction; (iv) Walk out and watch the movie at home on my large screen television. Which option I choose depends on my mood and on what I think may work. But the one option that is not on the menu is getting angry and acting like a jerk. That would be unreasonable and antisocial. Your turn: Which situations do you encounter in your life that could benefit from Epictetus’s Discipline of Action? © PROF. MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI 2023

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and The Quest for Character: What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our Search for Good Leaders (Basic Books). More by him at newstoicism.org

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Elaine Coburn navigates differences, Ian James Kidd

Debating Multiculturalism: Should There Be Minority Rights? Peter Balint & Patti Tamara Lenard HOW DO WE NAVIGATE cultural differences in multicultural societies? This question is the subject of heated public debates. What clothing is appropriate for a public swimming pool, say, or for swearing-in during a citizenship ceremony? Should publiclyfunded schools give instruction promoting just one religion? How should the state adjudicate among citizens who have radically divergent values on issues such as abortion? In Debating Multiculturalism: Should There Be Minority Rights? (2022), political scientists Peter Balint and Patti Lenard argue vigorously about how states and societies should answer such questions. As the title suggests, they are especially concerned about minority rights in the context of diversity. They address debates about a wide range of cultural differences, and remind us that these differences are often profound, going far beyond varying traditions around food and dress. People disagree about questions like the right to a medically assisted death, for instance: whether or not it is ever allowable; or, for instance, only allowable in specific, well-defined circumstances. Given deeprooted moral differences over real-world issues such as these, how can we live together in multicultural societies? Balint takes the liberal view, that what’s required is tolerance. To achieve this, states should aim at neutrality, which can take various forms. The state can support all religions, by, for instance, choosing to subsidize all forms of religious schooling. Or the state may support no religious perspective, and instead ensure that all schooling is secular. Both approaches meet the criteria for a neutral, and hence tolerant, state. The importance of achieving such neutrality is that it gives no specific favour or disfavour to any particular group, whether it’s the majority or a minority. But there are limits to state neutrality, as Balint acknowledges. A just state cannot be neutral when confronted with ways of life

that harm others. The state cannot sanction violent extremisms, for instance; nor can it be neutral about safety measures that protect people – for example it needs to put in place laws that forbid driving under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. Generally put, the state must neutrally protect the rights of the majority and of minorities to distinctive lifestyles, but only when these lifestyles are consistent with justice, interpreted primarily as the avoidance of harm. Like states, citizens too have responsibilities to be tolerant. For moral reasons (religious or secular), we might strongly object to another’s views on, for instance, medically assisted death or abortion. Balint argues that such objections are perfectly acceptable in a multicultural society. In fact, he argues that profound differences on such questions are characteristic of a truly diverse society. We can maintain our profoundly divergent views and still be tolerant, he says, by refusing to act on our objections and repulsion. Whatever we believe, a tolerant society demands that we act as if we’re indifferent to others’ opinions and values. Such ‘active indifference’ is easier and therefore more practical than demanding mutual appreciation from those holding strongly contrasting views,

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especially on divisive moral questions. There are important advantages to tolerant states and citizens. Above all, Balint argues, they enhance freedoms for all citizens, not just for minority groups. He provides the example of Orthodox Jews’ religiously motivated refusal to vote on Saturdays. Given this commitment, if an election is held on Saturday, they will be deprived of the right to vote. Instead of creating laws granting Jews specific minority rights to vote on another day, the neutral state can for instance allow for voting over several days. This improves the freedom of all citizens, including citizens who work on Saturdays, and not just Orthodox Jews. Similarly, whatever our personal views on the attractiveness or religious importance of beards, we enhance everyone’s freedoms if we are actively indifferent to whether or not people wear beards. Like the neutral state, the citizen who is indifferent in action amongst those of different opinions while holding onto their own values and preferences, is desirable, because her tolerant practices are freedom-enhancing for all. In her defence of minority rights in multicultural societies, Patti Tamara Lenard rejects these arguments. She argues that such accounts do not address dilemmas that arise

Book Reviews

MATT HSU'S OBSCURE ORCHESTRA GROUP. PHOTO G PLANETRECIPE 2022 CREATIVE COMMONS 4

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responds to rejections of humanity, and Laura Beatty hunts for a lost thinker. In Classics, Anika Vijapur revisits Michael Oakshott’s critique of rationalism in politics.

Books in the real world. She observes that in many (likely most) societies, people from minority cultures are routinely treated with less respect than those from the majority culture. Their voices have less authority in public spaces, which compromises their participation in political and social life. But creating the robust shared public life necessary for meaningful democracy, Lenard maintains, demands the active participation of all citizens, including those from minority cultures. Special rights should therefore be granted to people from minority cultures if they improve political inclusion, which she understands to mean substantive participation in all aspects of public life. In Canada, for instance, observant Sikhs in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) receive an exemption from the standard issue hat, because you can't wear a turban and a stetson at the same time. This exemption, specific to the Sikh minority, is justifiable to Lenard because it removes an obstacle that would otherwise exclude observant Sikhs from the RCMP. One advantage to such exemptions is that they contribute to a shared national culture that actively appreciates the differences. In Canada today, Lenard observes, the RCMP turban is widely embraced as a symbol of Canada’s welcoming multiculturalism. And developing a public appreciation of diversity is beneficial to cultural minorities, in that it encourages their inclusion in various aspects of political life. Lenard argues that cultural minorities require other special rights too. Language minorities, for instance, must have the right to the translation of political, medical, and legal materials into their own language. Such translation is necessary for such minorities to access basic political, medical, and legal goods, and so fosters vital inclusion, across different realms of public life. ‘Assistive’ minority rights such as the right to translation may have beneficial consequences for the broader public, too. The sharing of public health information in many languages during the pandemic, Lenard observes, helped to ensure that regulations limiting the spread of Covid were broadly known. This supported the health of those in the majority, as well as of those speaking minority languages. However, some assistive rights are more controversial. Affirmative action policies are widely debated, for instance, since they provide preferential ways for minorities to access education, employment, and so on. Lenard maintains that affirmative action policies are necessary in a context where minorities have been systemBook Reviews

atically excluded from powerful social and political positions. Affirmative action helps remedy this injustice by helping cultural minorities be fairly included. So as a minority right, affirmative action responds to realworld inequities and helps to remedy them, improving the inclusion of cultural minorities. However, there are some cultural minorities that do not seek greater inclusion into the broader community. Some Amish communities, for instance, pursue isolationist policies. What of their minority rights? In determining what the rights of isolationist minorities should be, Lenard argues for a careful consideration of potential harms. Amish families’ demands to exempt children from education for farm labour should be respected, she argues, since ‘forcibly intervening’ to mandate children’s participation in schooling causes significant harm. Amish children should not, however, be exempted from labour laws that protect them from particularly dangerous forms of farm work. This is the sort of way that special rights for minorities must be carefully balanced against the potential for significant harms in those rights. There are broad benefits to respecting minority cultural values in isolationist communities, Lenard argues. Such respect fosters the trust that’s necessary for cooperation between the minority and the majority culture. Given that isolationist cultural movements are never entirely autonomous, this trust therefore fosters a more inclusive political life. Lenard argues for politically inclusive multicultural states that support minority cultural rights and celebrate cultural differences. Balint meanwhile makes the case for a tolerant, neutral state, and for citizens who practice active indifference to those with whom they disagree. But it is a strength rather than a weakness of the book that Balint and Lenard do not try and settle their differences. They offer no resolution, but instead, offer the different principles underlying their opposing views, so helping us to think in new ways. In the polarized times in which we live, their dialogue is a salutary reminder that we can respectfully disagree. If we are to live together in culturally diverse societies, such carefully argued debate is one good place to start. © ELAINE COBURN 2023

Elaine Coburn is Associate Professor of International Studies at York University in Canada. • Debating Multiculturalism: Should There Be Minority Rights?, Peter Balint & Patti Tamara Lenard, OUP, 2022, £19.99 pb, 320 pages

The Revolt Against Humanity by Adam Kirsch ADAM KIRSCH IS AN AMERICAN poet, biographer, literary critic, a faculty member at Columbia University, and a widely-published public intellectual. The Revolt Against Humanity (2022) appears in the Columbia Global Reports series of wellproduced, novella-length essays on contemporary political and cultural themes. The theme of this book is the dispiriting judgement that ‘‘the end of humanity’s reign is imminent, and that we should welcome it’’ (p.10). Humanity’s beset by the climate crisis, ecological destruction, the possibility of nuclear war, and other existential risks that in the worst-case scenarios threaten our species’ existence. This pessimistic anticipation is expressed by a diverse range of voices – “engineers and philosophers, political activists and would-be hermits, novelists and palaeontologists” (p.10) – as they respond with exultation, despair, or sober determination. The Revolt Against Humanity explores these attitudes to and visions of our potentially imminent demise in a consistently clear, wellinformed way, without the excesses of many of the writers it discusses. Rather, six erudite, clear, and concise chapters explore the issues raised by the serious prospect of the end of human life, at least as we know it. Systematic reflection on the end of humanity only really became popular in the twentieth century, when it became clear that science and technology gift us the power of self-destruction. Environmentalists and others started to imagine ‘a world without us’ (the title of a 2007 book by Alan Weisberg). But Kirsch is more interested in attitudes towards the possibility of our demise, as not everyone is alarmed by it, and many profess to delight in it. Chapter One identifies two contrasting sources of ‘the turn against human primacy’ (p.11). Anthropocene antihumanism takes on board familiar environmentalist litanies such as the destruction of ecosystems, but abandons the environmentalist’s ‘meliorist’ conviction that we should try to stop it. For antihumanists, our self-destruction is both inevitable and to be welcomed, however bitterly, as a ‘sentence’ we’ve passed on ourselves. But I think this needs clarifying: are they talking about the destruction of humanity, or of certain forms of human life? Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander’s book This Civilization is Finished (2019) for instance argues that consumerist, carbon-intensive

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human civilization is finished, even if other, better, kinds of civilization might succeed it. Anthropocene antihumanists regard science, technology, and human ambition as expressions of the hubris that spells our doom. By contrast, transhumanists see these phenomena as the means of our salvation: the human world cannot continue, and must come to an end, but its successor will be a world of ‘post-humans’ – engineered superbeings who are physically, morally, and cognitively superior to Homo sapiens – so ushering in an age of ‘Humanity 2.0’, which must mean actual humanity’s dethronement and the start of a post-human age. For Kirsch, antihumanists and transhumanists share ‘‘visions of a humanless world’’ – one ‘‘from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so’’ (p13). He then invites us to see them as ‘‘new way[s] of making sense of the nature and purpose of human existence’’ (p13). The existential threats we face are not products solely of our worst side, but also of our better side – our curiosity about our world, for instance, and our desire to live in comfort rather than misery. Perhaps the most prominent threat to humanity is climate change, which Kirsch sees as a convergence of our ‘acknowledged vices’ of hatred, greed, selfishness with the pursuit of ‘‘aims that we ordinarily consider good and natural’’, such as ‘‘prosperity, comfort, increase of our kind’’ (p.19). Readers who expect Kirsch to call for radical activism will be surprised and perhaps disappointed. Instead he expresses honest pessimism: even modest climate goals are unlikely to be met – too little has been done, too many tipping points passed (p. 25). Leftliberal critics such as Naomi Klein or Jedediah Purdy might be right in calling for curbs to the power of corporations and greater social and economic equality, but neither are likely

to occur in the time available to civilisation. Moreover, optimists must reckon with the depressing history of our moral failings. Purdy is right that we lack the necessary capacities for ‘self-restraint’: this is echoed by Kirsch’s recognition that the “ultimate political challenge is to limit… the scope of human appetites” (p.26). By rejecting implausible scenarios for doing so, Kirsch offers an interesting neglected alternative, which we might call quietism. Inspired by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine’s Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009), and according to the principle that ‘‘action is not always more effective than inaction’’ (p.31), Kirsch commends less dramatic responses of small, personal acts of withdrawal, moderation, and careful stewardship. Chapter Four tackles antinatalism and other ‘pro-extinction’ positions. Kirsch calls out the ‘outrageous’ rhetoric of some of these writers, like the one ‘deeply saddened’ that plague and war have not already finished us off (pp.43, 47). But like Claire Colebrook, Kirsch argues that pro-extinction ideas should not be dismissed as ‘inadmissible’, given ‘‘human brutality and life-destructiveness’’ and ‘‘our malevolent relation to life’’(p.47). But he notes that any moral case for human extinction – such as David Benatar’s anti-natalist arguments – will be “unlikely to prevail, on account of the very selfishness it bemoans” (p.43). So, unfortunately, the voluntary ending of humanity is unlikely to happen (as Benatar openly admits). The prospect of our involuntary end or catastrophic disruption is far more likely. Unlike the writers who casually call for mass suicide or mass human die-offs, Kirsch is sensible and compassionate, and remains sober-minded in the fifth and sixth chapters, which provide a clear discussion of varieties of transhumanism. For Toby Ord and others, humanity has power, but lacks the moral

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capacity to handle it wisely, because we are ‘‘morally and physically circumscribed.’’ To gain the necessary moral maturity, we need what Kirsch dubs ‘species transformation’ (pp.54-55). But such transformations are fantastical and merit the criticisms they receive. This includes the blasé conviction that human beings are endlessly plastic creatures who may be moulded just as one wills. Calls for ‘transformation’ may be exciting, and chime with the moral ethos of our times; but the word ‘radical’ has pejorative senses, too. The book ends on a sober note: we are obviously incapable of the necessary ‘‘drastic forms of human self-limitation’’, since most of us are too ‘‘committed to preserving the species status quo’’ (pp.90-91). Kirsch concludes that “the revolt against humanity casts doubt on the goodness of the human species and its whole history” (pp.9495). It’s difficult to disagree. © IAN JAMES KIDD 2023

Ian James Kidd teaches and researches philosophy at the University of Nottingham, and is writing a book on misanthropy. His website is ianjameskidd.weebly.com • The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, Adam Kirsch, Columbia Global Reports, 2022, 104 pages

Looking for Theophrastus by Laura Beatty IN THE MID-FOURTH CENTURY BCE, Athens was between its peak as an imperial power and its decline into one more of Alexander the Great’s colonies. The prosperity of Athens’ Periclean age was a century in the past, and had been followed by a twenty-five years war with Sparta, resulting in Athens’ defeat. The renowned Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were by then playwrights of the past. Philosophy was a comparatively late bloomer. Socrates was executed in 399 BCE. Plato’s Academy, which has been called the first European university, was established about a decade after Socrates’ trial. Roughly twenty years after the Academy started, Aristotle, then in his late teens, left his native Stagira for Athens to study under Plato. While at the Academy, Aristotle became acquainted with a younger student, Tyrtamos, from the Greek island of Lesbos. Aristotle eventually dubbed him ‘Theophrastus’, which means ‘Divinely spoken’. He not only became Aristotle’s student, but also Aristotle’s successor at the Lyceum, the school Aristotle founded in Athens around 335 BCE. Book Reviews

Books THEOPHRASTUS © SINGINGLEMON 2009 CREATIVE COMMONS 2

Found him

Theophrastus is probably most famous as the author of the Characters, a sketch of thirty types of person; but he also made contributions to botany comparable to those Aristotle had made in zoology. Theophrastus’s botany was thorough enough that, as recently as the eighteenth century, the taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus employed his botanical writings as his starting point. Laura Beatty’s Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher (2022) is not an academic work intended for scholars or specialists. Rather, in her own words, it’s “in the tradition of a thieving magpie,” aspiring to “look at the past not as a discrete and separate place, but as something vitally connected to today.” As such, her goals are more literary than philosophic: she’s more interested in contextualizing Theophrastus by depictions of the original atmospheres and activity of his life than she is in explaining the details of his philosophy. “Theophrastus,” she muses: “I’m still trying to find you, still looking for things as you would have seen them” (p.98). According to Beatty, while Aristotle was fond of systems, Theophrastus was enamored of variety. Theophrastus’s “instinctive vision of things seems to be that they are more random, more varied and more unpredictable than systematization will allow” (p.59). The world of plants and the world of humans are closer to one another for Theophrastus than for many other philosophers: he referred to the earth being in heat, and to seeds having pregnancies; or a plant’s Book Reviews

growth can be lazy, forward, hubristic, or sullen (p.88). And his botany includes plants’ medicinal properties, as well as how to prepare the ground, plant, and prune them. In the third quarter of the fourth century BCE, Macedonia posed a military threat to Athens. Aristotle, having known Macedonia’s King Philip personally (Aristotle’s father was physician to Philip’s father, King Amyntas II), was suspected of Macedonian sympathies, so he thought it prudent to depart Athens. As legend has it, it was at the invitation of Hermias, ruler of Atarneus, that Aristotle, Theophrastus, and a certain Xenocrates, made their way first to Assos in the Troad and then out to Mitylene on Lesbos, where they immersed themselves in zoological and botanical research. But the idea that Theophrastus accompanied Aristotle to the Troad and back to Lesbos has never been historically substantiated. Nor has it been confirmed that Theophrastus then accompanied Aristotle when Philip summoned Aristotle to tutor his son Alexander. But such considerations do not deter Beatty from imagining in rich detail the nature of such sojourns. To the extent that Looking for Theophrastus takes us on a tour that is merely an imaginative reconstruction of the events in Theophrastus’s life, this book is historical fiction. The evidence does suggest that Theophrastus valued his works on botany more than his Characters, but it is clearly his Characters that most interests Beatty. She is convinced that “there is something in the Characters that has always appealed to the novelist” and that “the Characters were commandeered by rhetoricians who saw the usefulness of the character study as an attribute of persuasive speaking or writing.” After covering the fate of the manuscripts of the Characters throughout the centuries, she seeks a “line that I can throw securely back and along which I can haul Theophrastus into the present. I stick to its stepping stones, through the early Christians to Chaucer and through Chaucer to the novel, to George Eliot.” This search for Characters makes for a thirty-page excursus. Philip invited Aristotle to Pella to educate his teenage son in 343-2 BCE. My favorite part of the book is where Beatty details the differences between a life of zoological and botanical research in Assos, and courtly life with Philip of Macedon. On the latter she reflects “Everything is power and politics, and everyone is trying to be noticed. I can’t help worrying about Theophrastus. You won’t like it, I can’t help telling him. It is everything you don’t believe in” (p.113)… “You mustn’t mind not knowing who your

friends are because everyone now is caught up in this tide of self-interest and advancement” (p.131)… “The philosophers were busy, not just with their teaching and writing and researching, but also absorbing a different set of conditions; life under an active and expansionist tyranny” (p.136). Among the developments Beatty depicts in rich detail are the mixed feelings in Athens about Philip’s selection of Aristotle to be Alexander’s tutor, and the turbulent politics of Philip’s imperial designs. When Alexander was ascending to power, the role for Aristotle and Theophrastus became unclear. Athens was sufficiently anti-Macedonian that their safety there would be dubious. And as for Theophrastus’s final fate, ‘the evidence runs out’. At this stage in Beatty’s book the headiness of her prose can be a bit much. She ponders: “history, however it’s told, isn’t the same thing as a living person  if a person is what you are trying to find. Nevertheless, there is a feeling, sometimes, that if it could be established, if it could be made solid enough, history might work as a backdrop, against which something more shimmering, like a person, might be thrown into visible relief” (p.152)… and so on for eight pages, culminating in the words: “You have to feel the past’s resistance to the present build and build until suddenly, in some thought or turn of phrase, like a flash of lightning rooting itself in the ground, Theophrastus will leap the divide. Just for a split second, there he will really be, with all the strangeness and brilliance of how he was in his own time, intact” (p.160). I do not pretend to have fathomed these words. Beatty’s musings may sometimes be overdone, but in fairness to her, Looking for Theophrastus ought to be assessed in light of the modesty of its declared aims. Beatty disclaims any aspiration to having scholars or specialists as her audience, and makes no pretence that her objectives are more philosophic than literary. Her contextualizations of Theophrastus are rich and entertaining. With that said, Beatty has not only provided us with a book of potential interest to the literary set, but also a book of value to scholars and specialists during their more recreational moments. © CHAD TRAINER 2023

Chad Trainer is an independent scholar engaged in a study of the history of philosophy. He is the author of Reflections on Russell: Musings on a Multidimensional Man. • Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher, Laura Beatty, Atlantic Books, 2022.

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Classics Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakeshott UPON READING MICHAEL Oakeshott’s (1901-90) Rationalism in Politics (1962), it was almost impossible for me not to agree with every criticism he had of rationalism in modern politics – at least at first glance. Oakeshott starts by listing the characteristics of a rationalist – someone who thinks that truth is accessed solely through reason – many of which characteristics are paradoxical. For instance, a rationalist’s often deep distrust of any kind of tradition screams of hypocrisy as he himself sets out to create his own universality for whatever social behaviour he espouses. When I read this, I couldn’t help but reevaluate how I’ve viewed traditions my whole life. Much like a rationalist in this regard, I have been quick to shun most traditions as regressive, and tried to question everything. But Oakeshott redefined how I perceive traditions: they equip us with knowledge we cannot simply gain any other way, and they evolve, too. This leads to the second part, where Oakeshott differentiates between technical knowledge, which is formulated in rules, and practical knowledge, which is gained through experience, and often passed down orally instead of being formally recorded. A simple example would be raising a baby. This cannot be learnt merely through reading parenting books; it’s learnt through what our elders teach us and the experience of parenting itself. As Oakeshott points out, although these two types of knowledge are distinguishable, they cannot exist separately, even though rationalists often only pay attention to technical knowledge and try to ignore practical traditions. The rationalist insistence of purging the mind of all cultivated opinions in order to gain ‘reason’ became a real thorn in my side, and I started taking more stock of the nuances that practical knowledge has taught me. I read this book as a part of a syllabus on Justice, so naturally, I tried to apply rationalist thinking to questions of justice. To think of jurisprudence, for example, in rationalist terms, would require that every case presented in court can have a potential ‘rational’ solution: that we can work out the guilt or innocence through reason alone. Past cases would have no bearing, and the judge’s reviewing of former cases would have no influence on the final ruling. But this is obviously not true, as no case exists in a legal vacuum. This is in fact my biggest problem

Michael Oakeshott, author of Rationalism in Pipe-Smoking

with rationalist ideology – that everything is assumed to exist in a vacuum of thought lacking traditions and precedents. The race to find an infallible technique for knowledge makes rationalists susceptible to what they fear most: forming mental habits through a rigid system that does not allow for improvement and evolution. Thus the rationalists fail in their primary goal of creating an infallible technique of inquiry. When you keep demolishing the floor – in this case, cumulative experience, including knowledge of past mistakes – how will you build the house – that is, build a system better than the one you lived in before? Even as I criticized the rationalists, I couldn’t help but recall how my friends and I have adhered to rationalist ideas almost unconsciously. The post-Renaissance period led to the percolation of rationalism through every political and social sphere in the West, in fact, spilling over into the former European colonies as well (I’m writing from India). And rationalism has only grown stronger over the past four centuries, to the point that most of the colonized consider Western ideals of rationalism as standard and modern, and their own traditions as backward. We pride ourselves for being educated enough to think with a ‘free mind’. However, it would be an exaggeration to say that everyone thinks as extremely as a rationalist. Most of us use ‘pure reason’ with healthy skepticism. So I also started doubting the intensity with which Oakeshott critiques rationalists here. I don’t think that every aspect of rationalism is bad. Some people may not be able to grasp

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what past experience yields, and so do need guidelines or a technique that will help them maneuver through life. Rationalism in some spheres, such as moral education, can also be a good thing, if ingested in small doses. It is good to question the practical knowledge you’ve gained, to evolve. At the same time, one must appreciate the value of traditions – just as Oakeshott is trying to emphasize. After reading this book I took a walk, then spoke to my friends and family, trying to understand if Oakeshott was perhaps a bit too harsh in his critique; if there’s a compromise to be made here. I felt as if Buddha’s principle of the Middle Path is the most fitting when it comes to choosing an ideology for yourself. By contrast, Oakeshott and the rationalists seem to exist at two extremes, clinging on to the credible features at either end. So I finally found Oakeshott too polemical to lean more towards him, as I do believe that a healthy amount of rationalism is also important. The formulation of a basic technique of inquiry is good as long as you can leave room for improvisation and improvement. Just as Descartes was aware of the limitations of his own rationalism, so someone will be a healthy and wise rationalist if he has enough self-awareness to recognize the shortcomings of his position, and enough space in his mind to solve those shortcomings through utilising different methods. Then, with any luck, rationalism in politics will take a turn for the better. © ANIKA VIJAPUR 2023

Anika Vijapur is pursuing a degree in International Relations at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi. Classics

The Enlightenment Philosophers’ Seven-A-Side Football Team Sarah Rochelle It were Berkeley’s idea to develop a team, To be the team captain had long been his dream; He knew he’d have trouble assembling his squad, But, being a bishop, he trusted in God.

John Locke tackled then, and resumed the attack With his own style of play, and sent the ball back To George Berkeley, who dribbled it on to Spinoza, Who signalled for Kant to come a bit closer.

For t’position of keeper he thought of Descartes; It were him, after all, who had made a head-start In solving the puzzle about what we know: If we think, we exist; and that must be so.

Kant readied himself to receive a high pass; Prepared for an ideal ball, but the mass Of the ball on his head seemed to him more than real A thing in itself – noumena he could feel!

For full-backs he thought first of Baruch Spinoza, A bit of a rebel, a bit of a poser, But solid in holding that all of us should Make our own way through reason to find what is good.

This thought contradicted his long-held belief; He stumbled – and though hesitation was brief, The other side took up the chance that they saw To reach the enlightenment goal and to score!

Then Gottfried Leibniz would be strong in defence; For him God was perfect; he argued from hence That the world we are in is the best it can be, And what God allows us is what we can see.

George Berkeley cried out, “Come on lads, get a grip, You know you can do more than just stumble and trip; Our ideas on knowledge may not all agree But reason’s our strength and we’ll win yet, you’ll see!”

For wing-forward, Berkeley first thought of John Locke: He’d be swift in attack and well able to block. His obedience to t’captain would always be there As long as t’captain’s demands remained fair.

The other side reached the enlightenment end. But Spinoza tackled, the ball took a bend. An opponent appeared to make use of his hands. Descartes cried, “There’s no cause for doubt, t’foul stands!”

The other wing-forward could be David Hume, Tho’ his irreligion had made Berkeley fume. Hume could use his impressions to follow the play, And then form ideas that might help win the day.

The free kick was given which Spinoza took; He sent it to Leibniz who darted a look At John Locke before turning and heading to Hume Who had run to the wing, where he’d plenty of room.

And right at the front, then, Immanuel Kant Though Berkeley’s perception of him was quite scant. He believed things that we think that we know Depend on us mentally conceiving them so.

Hume kicked it to Kant, who was nearing the goal: The enlightenment team was now on a roll. The referee, running up, looked at his watch; And Kant knew this one chance he must not now botch.

The game had begun, and Berkeley kicked off, But he missed the ball, and giving a cough, Said, “It’s not really there – we should have asked God To attend to our game and all of the squad.”

He was onside, the ball at his feet, and he saw That reason alone now would not help him score. The team’s universal approval was set – His imperative kick reached the back of the net!

So he said a quick prayer before sending the ball In a high backward pass to Descartes in goal. Descartes, in two minds, sent the ball to his right, But Locke wasn’t thinking, and lost it from sight.

The team celebrated the traditional way With kisses and hugs, then Berkeley said, “Hey! We deserve some refreshment, I’ve got some right here. It’s my healthy tar water, the drink that brings cheer!”

Leibniz picked it up and prepared for a throw, His knowledge innate about where it should go; He aimed it to Kant, but he didn’t share Leibniz’ space, time, or ball, and so it went spare. The other side lost it, but then so did Hume, For he tripped on the thought that he could not assume That the ball always would reach the back of the net: ‘No principle says past behaviour is set.’

© SARAH ROCHELLE 2023

Sarah Rochelle is a social scientist, musician, and writer of philosophical poems, as featured in the book Eh-Up! Rhyme and Reason: An Alternative Guide to the History of Western Philosophy, available at Amazon. She can be seen and heard at notequalpress.com

December 2023/January 2024
Philosophy Now 57

Film

I

n the 2022 superhero film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda Maximoff (played by Elizabeth Olsen) completes the frightening transformation from hero to villain that she began in the Disney+ show WandaVision (2021). Now possessed by the Darkhold, a mystical book that corrupts the mind of those who use it, Wanda is fully unleashed as the evil and incredibly powerful Scarlet Witch. She can alter reality with her mind, and she is willing to perform unspeakable acts for the sake of her imaginary (or alternative universe) children. Yet through the film’s depictions of its villain’s many gruesome deeds, it poses a philosophical question about personal identity: is the Scarlet Witch actually Wanda at all, or is she now a different being entirely? In a previous film column here (on WandaVision, in Issue 152), I articulated a concept I call the ‘identity algorithm’. This is the idea that the key to anyone’s identity is the unique decision-making matrix encoded into his or her brain activity through the combined influences of their genetics and their vast web of personal experiences. These two influences interact in complex ways to produce an individual’s unique thoughts and actions when faced with new situations. Since one’s identity algorithm (a.k.a. personality) is always evolving and changing due to the continual impact of new experiences, you might expect this theory to conclude that the Scarlet Witch is Wanda, simply with an updated version of her brain identity algorithm as a result of her exposure to the Darkhold. Yet I do not believe this to be the case. I want to argue that the Scarlet Witch is not in fact Wanda Maximoff. To explain why, let’s take a look at a real case study discussed by neuroscientist David Eagleman in his article ‘The Brain on Trial’ (Atlantic magazine, 2011). In 1966 Charles Whitman, one of the first mass shooters in American history, murdered fourteen people in Texas before being shot dead by the police. In a suicide note found afterwards, Whitman revealed that he had previously sought psychiatric treatment, because he suddenly felt overcome by “overwhelm58 Philosophy Now

l

Jason Friend hacks your identity algorithm. ing violent impulses” that he feared he could not control. Indeed, the psychiatrist herself noted in her account of the session “that something seemed to be happening to him and that he didn’t seem to be himself.” As it turns out, the psychiatrist’s choice of words was exactly right, for Charles Whitman was not himself. His autopsy produced a startling discovery: he had a massive brain tumor. An external force had imposed itself upon his brain, causing it to produce thoughts and decisions radically different from those that would have occurred otherwise. While Wanda’s situation is pure fiction, it parallels Whitman’s grim reality in a philosophical sense. Just as the brain tumor had taken hold of Whitman’s brain algorithm, so the Darkhold deforms Wanda’s algorithm in monstrous ways. While she is under its spell, she is literally not herself. What about the Wanda we saw previously in WandaVision? While her actions are not yet murderous, as they become in Multiverse of Madness, she already commits immoral acts, including abducting a town full of people and forcing them to become puppets in her fantasy. (Ironically for these innocent citizens, Wanda is essentially an external force that corrupts and takes possession of their identity algorithms.) However, since this earlier version of Wanda is not yet under the spell of the Darkhold, it seems that the Wanda in WandaVision must truly be Wanda Maximoff. Yet I would argue that this is not the case either, for Wanda’s identity has already been hacked, by a force much more frightening than the Darkhold, since it is all too real: serious mental illness. As WandaVision makes clear, Wanda has been seriously traumatized by the violent losses of her parents, her brother, and her husband. While no medical diagnosis is offered up by the show, it seems reasonable to surmise that Wanda is in the throes of PTSD, and that her use of magic to create a fantasy world is her attempt to self-medicate. Notably, Wanda never receives the psychiatric treatment she actually needs, and, at the very end of the series, when her fantasy world falls apart, she turns to the Darkhold. In this light the Darkhold seems

December 2023/January 2024

more like metaphor than mysticism – a symbol of untreated mental illness run amok (this is nodded to in the ‘Madness’ of the film’s title). My suggestion here is a controversial one: that in the grip of the severest forms of mental illness, such as untreated PTSD, or extreme cases of schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s, the victim of the disease actually loses her identity and effectively becomes another person entirely, since her hacked algorithm responds to the world in fundamentally different ways than her previous and actual self would. While the loss of identity is frightening to contemplate, it does raise the question of whether it can ever be recovered after such severe psychological disruption. Is it possible for such a heavily afflicted individual to ever ‘become one’s old self again’? The good news is that this sometimes seems to be the case. Rather as malware can be removed from the code it infects and controls, so proper therapy, medication, and other treatment have the potential to restore a human being’s identity. Patients with wildly distorted identities have had their tumors removed, and then shown remarkable turnarounds in their thoughts and actions. While Wanda may have permanently lost her self as the Scarlet Witch (or may not have – Marvel loves resurrections), hope still remains for Doctor Strange. Strange(r) to Himself At the climax of Multiverse of Madness, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) chooses to use the Darkhold himself to save the world from the Witch, reasoning that the noble end justifies the terrible means. Of course, as so often the case with such consequentialist thinking, there is a terrible price to be paid: at the end of the film it is revealed that Doctor Strange, newly equipped with a demonic third eye, is now himself possessed by the Darkhold. In defeating the Scarlet Witch he has transformed himself into a new threat to the world; a threat just as great as the one he has just extinguished. As Nietzsche put it in Beyond Good and Evil, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.”

He cites several experiments to support this view, the most famous of which dates back to the 1970s. When unsuspecting participants in that study entered a phone booth, they’d sometimes find a dime planted by the experimenters in the return change slot. Outside the booth, an actor awaited; and when the subject exited the booth, the actor would clumsily drop a pile of papers. Intriguingly, the experimenters found that a massive 85% of people would help pick up those dropped papers if they had found a free dime while only a measly 4% would help if they had not! Other experiments have shown large shifts in human behavior caused by such trivial acts as holding a cold drink or smelling something pleasant such as baking bread. In light of this data, Appiah argues for a ‘situationist’ view of character, which says that people have no consistent underlying identity but are instead constantly being swayed to behave in particular ways by the environment around them. This idea would seem truly damaging to the notion that every individual has an identity (algorithm) or set character; for how could that be true if the presence or absence of a mere dime can cause so many different people, with their supposedly unique brain algorithms, to act in such uniform ways? While such experiments do reveal important glitches in our identity algorithms, the claim that they undermine the very notion of personal identity is overblown. If Peter Parker is a procrastinator, Wanda the Witch a workaholic, and Stephen Strange a slacker, their brains will produce trendlines that will over time clearly diverge from each other.

Film Even though a random factor in one situation, such as the scent of danger, might cause all of them to finish a certain task in a timely fashion, this shared outcome would be the exception, not the rule. This type of small situational hack is quite different in both scale and duration from the wholesale transformation of an identity caused by severe mental illness. However, suppose now that someone decided to study the glitches in our identity algorithms, then used the insights of behavioral psychology to manipulate how masses of people act. Further suppose that giant social media corporations were deploying their own algorithms for such a purpose, and that these algorithms were continually getting better at influencing the decisions of millions of people. Such hacking of our identity algorithms would be much more intentional, systematic, and persistent than the occasional influence of random situational factors. In such a world, the smartphones in our pockets could very well become the Darkhold for our minds. © JASON FRIEND 2023

Jason Friend has an MA in English from Stanford University. He teaches literature and philosophy in California.

FILM IMAGES © MARVEL STUDIOS 2022

Just as a brain tumor can sometimes be successfully extricated, perhaps it’s also the case that the spell of the Darkhold can someday be broken? Yet even if this happy turn of events does take place in a future film, it is not quite true to suggest that Strange would then return to his ‘old self’, since the very experience of having temporarily lost his identity to the Darkhold would certainly cause his identity algorithm to change. Perhaps the next time he’s faced with an equivalent ethical dilemma, Strange’s algorithm will reach a different conclusion, deciding for instance not to meddle with dark magic no matter how high the stakes. Yet, while the experience of having had his identity hijacked might one day shift Doctor Strange from a consequentialist to a deontological morality – from a ‘seek good consequences’ to a ‘do the right thing’ approach – this shift would in no way jeopardize his identity. A deontological Doctor Strange would still be Doctor Strange, since his new outlook would be the result of natural thought-processes. Yet what if, in the strangest twist of all, the most widespread threat to continuing identity is posed neither by mystical possession nor by the very real specter of severe mental illness, but by the smell of baking bread? In ‘The Case Against Character’ in his book Experiments in Ethics (2008), Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests that our identities are being hacked all the time. Appiah argues that small, seemingly insignificant factors in any given situation can have disproportionate influence on our decisions and actions.

December 2023/January 2024 l Philosophy Now 59

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The How & Why of allis T in Wonderland

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f the many mysteries in which our existence is wrapped, three seem especially resistant to being transformed into soluble problems: why there is something rather than nothing (the origin of stuff); how the material world gave rise to organisms (the origin of living stuff); and how organic life came to be aware of itself and its surroundings (the origin of conscious stuff). Physicists, who routinely go, even dance, where others fear to tread, sometimes imagine they have an answer to the first mystery. According to Lawrence Krauss in A Universe from Nothing (2012), the universe may have arisen out of nothing in virtue of an instability in the quantum vacuum that somehow delivers a preponderance of stuff over antistuff. This seems closer to creative accounting than a plausible creation story. As for the second mystery – the emergence of living stuff in a dead world – a succession of theories, and numerous experiments replicating the conditions prevailing when life is thought to have begun, have brought us no closer to a coherent story of the origin of organisms. Yes, we can propose plausible mechanisms as to how molecules associated with life, such as carbohydrates, nucleic acids, and proteins, might have arisen. What is not at all clear is how these could have generated the dialectic between relatively stable structures and the interactions necessary to maintain those structures seen in the most elementary organisms. (For a discussion of this, see my piece ‘The Soup and the Scaffolding’, Philosophy Now, Issue 83.) For some philosophers, the third mystery – the origin of consciousness – seems closer to solubility. The solution, we are assured, is to be found in evolutionary theory. Consciousness gives organisms an advantage, and more or better consciousness gives them greater advantage. So the passage from the first twinkle of sentience to the rich and complex awareness of subscribers to Philosophy Now can be explained by natural selection acting on spontaneous variation favour62 Philosophy Now




Consciousness Raymond Tallis says the mysteries haven’t been solved. ing the survival of mutations that are more conscious than the competition. Start Making Sense There are at least two problems with this putative explanation of the emergence of consciousness: the ‘How?’ question of the origin of sentience (that is, of the experience of sensations) in the first place; and the ‘Why?’ question regarding the advantages that are supposed to come with being conscious, and the greater advantages that higher levels of consciousness confer. I shall deal with the ‘How?’ question presently. I want first to address what seems like a nobrainer: the advantage of being a conscious organism rather than a self-replicating bag of chemicals innocent of its own existence. It is important not to start near the end of the story, with complex, sophisticated organisms such as higher mammals. Creatures of this kind clearly rely on being conscious of their environments for locating food and water, identifying mates, avoiding predators, and rearing their young. If your life depends on conscious navigation through the world, it is a good idea to remain conscious. If I lose consciousness, and there’s no-one else to take over my care, I am doomed. But to begin with creatures like us is to start in the wrong place. Many of the faculties people cite in response to the ‘Why consciousness?’ question emerge only after consciousness has evolved to such a high level of sophistication, allowing, for example, the conscious entertainment of (explicit, bespoke) possibilities, which will fine-tune responses to situations; selective, voluntary attention; and motivation (as when bodily events are experienced as painful or pleasurable.) No. We must begin at the beginning: by asking, for example, what survival value is conferred on a photosensitive cell in virtue of its organism being aware of the light incident upon it. And the answer appears to be: ‘none’. This is equally the case with more complex organisms. Would a tree be more likely to flourish if it were aware of the light incident upon its

December 2023/January 2024

leaves? The unbreakable habits of the physical world that connect processes in a photosensitive cell with events promoting the survival and functioning of an organism would not be tilted more in the organism’s favour if the latter were conscious of that light. Indeed, the highly improbable but entirely physically law-abiding nonconscious processes that led ultimately to the generation of that cell must dovetail perfectly with the physical processes necessary to keep it going long enough to replicate. Generation and survival must be both equally aligned with the grain of the insentient material world. If there’s no reason to believe that the sentience of primitive organisms would give them an edge over the competition, there is no starting point for the evolutionary journey to the sophisticated consciousness we see in higher organisms like you and me; no basis for the assumption that making processes within and around the organism explicit to it will enhance the ability of that organism to manipulate them to its advantage. After all, the most successful organisms, in terms both of species endurance and of influence on the planet, are the nonconscious cyanobacteria, which have been around for 2.5 billion years. This is a striking challenge to claims about the evolutionary benefits of consciousness and, indeed, to the criteria of evolutionary success by which we judge the benefits associated with this or that variation. Higher Criticism Of course, being conscious at a higher level brings with it apparent advantages. This is obvious in the case of action at a temporal distance from a goal, guided by anticipated possibilities informed by experiences made explicit through being recalled, or in other words, being able to think ahead. Stan Klein has argued for the advantage of “freeing the organism from its neural mooring and positioning it within phenomenal space outside of the brain” (‘Going Out of My Head: An Evolutionary Proposal Concerning the “Why” of Sentience’, Stan Klein et al, Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Prac-

tice, forthcoming). This ability to consider the wider world may well be advantageous; but we may also reasonably assume that it appeared a long time after the appearance of the first sentient organisms, and evolutionary processes cannot rely on deferred benefits. The same counterargument applies to other benefits ascribed to higher levels of consciousness. Complex sensory (‘phenomenal’) experience may, for example, be a prompt for recreational activity – by which I mean activity that goes beyond useful activity narrowly construed. Yet such explorations may ultimately deliver extra functional rewards – new skills, new technology. It is therefore no coincidence that Homo ludens (‘playful humanity’) is Homo faber (‘humanity the maker’). This has been suggested by Axel Cleeremans and Catherine Tallon-Baudrey: “Under our hypothesis, consciousness would have evolved and been selected because it adds an important degree of freedom to the machinery of rewardbased behaviour: behaviour that seems purposeless from a purely functional perspective nevertheless has intrinsic value.” (‘Consciousness matters: phenomenal experience has functional value’, Neuroscience of Consciousness, (1) 1-11, 2022.)

GALAXY_BRAIN_FEMALE © JON MANNING 2021 PUBLIC DOMAIN

But even if this kind of sophistication came packaged with the first smidgeon of sentience – and manifestly it doesn’t – it is still not clear that responses to the environ-

ment would be more useful, giving the sentient organism an edge over its insentient competition, if it is made explicit by being experienced as being ‘out there’. The possibility of getting things right brings with it the possibility of getting them wrong. While natural selection may favour those organisms that get things right more often than they get things wrong, it is not clear that sometimes getting things right and sometimes getting them wrong, sometimes correctly judging, and sometimes misjudging, will overall give the organism an advantage over organisms that mechanically respond to the natural world. Mechanisms expressing the unshakeable uniformities of nature cannot make mistakes. What’s more, any benefits that come with consciousness are very costly, if one believes in a biological account of consciousness. Nervous systems are metabolically very greedy, and require a good deal of protection. And in the case of exotic megafauna such as us, the longer life expectancy associated with consciousness requires a vast and complex support system beyond the brain. Importantly, none of this was available at the beginning of life, nor in the first several billion years or so of evolution. Full-blown agency (greatly magnified by the collectivisation of consciousness as seen in human beings) arrived very late in the biosphere, possibly only with the higher mammals. The most plausible advantages of consciousness – still not entirely plausible – are found only in organisms that have emerged recently in the evolutionary story. Concluding Thought When we reflect on what is made possible by consciousness, we tend to overlook what is achieved in the absence of consciousness. Unconscious mechanism was sufficient to deliver the long and tortuous passage from lifeless chemicals to conscious organisms. Nothing in our portfolio of voluntary actions can compare with what is achieved through the processes that have synthesised us out of those zygotes from which our intra-uterine journey to the howling, nappy-filling apple of our parents’ eyes began. Moreover, if we had consciously to do most of the things that make our continuing life possible (breathe, keep our hearts beating, etc), we would not survive beyond the moment of our birth. In short, what is delivered by nonconscious happenings makes conscious agency seem small beer. It is therefore far from obvious that consciousness would have survived beyond its probable beginnings as unicellular sentience on the grounds of any advantage it

allis T in Wonderland might confer on an organism. Even if any explanation of the ‘why’ of consciousness withstood scrutiny, the ‘how’ would remain unexplained. None of the evolutionary mechanisms invoked to explain the increasing complexity and versatility of living creatures – accounting for the passage from micro-organisms to primates by natural selection operating on spontaneous variation – tells us how living tissue acquired consciousness, and, in the case of some creatures (you), a sophisticated self-consciousness. So even if consciousness did confer an advantage from its very beginning as microtwinkles of sentience, it is not clear how those twinkles could emerge from insentient matter. The ‘Why’ of evolutionary advantage would not deliver the ‘How’. Natural selection can operate only on what is already available. Evolutionary processes that lead from simple, unicellular organisms to exotic megafauna are in theory understandable in physical, chemical, biochemical, and biological terms. Those that lead from insentience to sentience, and from sentience to sophisticated consciousness, cannot be understood in this way. So while it may be handy to have sophisticated consciousness, this handiness is not an explanation of its emergence. After all, there are other faculties that would be even more handy – such as the capacity for an organism faced with a predator to dematerialize, then rematerialize a kilometre away. The theory of evolution goes some way towards delivering the ‘Why’ of the emergence of certain novel features of organisms during the 3.5 billion years that have passed since life first appeared on Earth. Comparative advantage in the competition with other species and conspecifics does not, however, account for either the ‘Why’ or the ‘How’ of the emergence of consciousness. The three mysteries of our existence remain intact. © PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2023

Raymond Tallis’s latest book, Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City will be published in conjunction with Philosophy Now in early 2024.

December 2023/January 2024
Philosophy Now 63

Fiction

Rudolph’s Revenge Samantha Neave tells a good old-fashioned tale of Christmas scheming. ot many people know that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a keen philosopher. He is known throughout the world as Santa’s favourite reindeer, and as legend has it he is a sweet and bashful helper, his red nose lighting up the night sky at the helm of the sleigh on Christmas Eve. But at the North Pole, where everyone has a better grip on the deer himself, he has a reputation for quick appraisals, a dry, cynical humour, and a sharp wit. Most of the other deer think he makes a brilliant companion down at the Seal & Otter, and the elves find him endearingly cheeky. And under all the bravado and sarcasm lies a genuine curiosity for knowledge and thirst for thought. Of all the deer at the North Pole, Rudolph is indeed the most well-read, and is recognised to have a keen eye for spotting flaws in a train of thought, as well as producing varied and inventive thoughts of his own. Perhaps this is what contributed to his brilliant academic resume and led to his stint as an honorary member of the elves’ debating team (he does love to argue his point, especially after a glass of carrot juice). So the other deer, the elves, even the Santa Impersonators who are whisked south for the holiday season, love him, because outwardly, he’s just a frank, fact-dispensing, lovable, Christmas-loving rogue. But that persona couldn’t be further from the truth. Unfortunately for Santa, Santa is the only one who knows the truth. *** Two years on from Santa rallying the elves for his new website venture, Rudolph sat alone in an igloo at the Pole’s Western border, staring out of a small porthole at the bears in the distance, waiting. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War lay neatly on his desk. It was almost time to kick his Plan B into action... He took a sip of cold water, contemplating patiently. Finally, there was a knock at the door. “Yes,” he murmured. Then, looking round to discover that the door hadn’t opened, he concealed his irritation with a calm but raised: “Come in!” “Sorry I’m late!” The Easter Bunny hopped in, squeezing snow from his long ears and shaking violently. “There was a delay on the Northern Line, then all those damned Impersonators started jostling me as they headed south... No respect these days...” “What happened to your coat?” Rudolph asked politely, feigning concern. “Ahh... I got in a fight with a beluga whale. It’s okay, I don’t think she followed me.” “Have you got what we need?” The Easter Bunny unclipped his briefcase. Rudolph noticed a large, beluga-whale-snout-shaped dent in its side. “Drink?” Rudolph offered pleasantly. “No, no thanks, I have to dash after this. Strikes are making things so awkward for all of us, you know...” But as the Easter Bunny rabbited on about irrelevant nonsense, Rudolph fazed out and reached for the contents of the briefcase, smiling and nodding at his visitor. ‘Ahh! – There…!’ he thought. ‘This is the key... a barrage of books by some of history’s greatest thinkers… This will

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throw Santa off course, once and for all!’ He flicked through some pages, considering, ‘What if I could manipulate the entire workforce into re-thinking their loyalty to ol’ Saint Nick? I could have a quiet word with them about their freedom – or lack of it!... Or – what if I set Santa an impossible paradox to solve? Surely that would stump his limited brain so much that he’d be bound to capitulate to a myriad conflicting thoughts, leading to his timely demise!’ Rudolph grunted a low laugh to himself, then paused suddenly over a mix tape he and Santa shared back in the day which had accidentally made its way into the case. If anyone had been looking, they might have detected a touch of mournfulness on his face... But nobody was looking – at least nobody apart from the Easter Bunny, and he was lost in his own pointless meanderings. Which now came to a halt. Rudolph looked up, and noticed the Easter Bunny had stopped chattering away and was instead frozen to the spot, twitching his nose, focused entirely upon the ceiling. THUD. “What was that?” the Easter Bunny asked, anxiously. “Oh nothing,” Rudolph brushed aside his companion’s fear: “Just a polar bear.” “A polar bear!” The Easter Bunny exclaimed, his fears not at all allayed. “Quick! Where’s your panic room?” Rudolph sighed. He almost wished that irritating little robin who dropped by sometimes were here instead. At least he had an IQ north of sixty. “There is no panic room. Igloos don’t have panic rooms...” THUD. “Are you sure it’s not Santa?” The Easter Bunny tried consoling himself with this unlikely idea in true Ostrich syndrome style: “I mean, that would be better, wouldn’t it? Maybe he’s come to visit. On your rooftop. A little before Christmas. For a sherry, perhaps?” THUD. “Nope. Definitely a polar bear.” Rudolph closed the case and sat back down by the breeze emanating from the porthole. He glimpsed a little snow fall off the roof, and the last of four huge paws heave itself up as the polar bear clambered again over his ice-bricked house. He continued staring out of the hole while the Easter Bunny, shivering now in terror, watched as a long claw appeared through the roof. “He’s coming in! I’m off!! I’m off, Rudolph! Don’t worry about the money, I’ll accept a cheque through the post!” And off the Easter Bunny dashed. Rudolph shouted after him: “Watch out for the stampeding seals...” As the ceiling hole enlarged and the large paw reached down into the igloo, Rudolph smiled. “Afternoon, Barnaby! I hope you’re able to join me for a sandwich this time?” A ferocious roar echoed down from above: “I’ll be having more than a sandwich, you arrogant deer!” Barnaby snorted as he fumbled blindly around the room with his paw. “Okay then – you leave me no choice!” Rudolph shouted, and whistled. A parliament of snowy owls immediately flew over

Fiction RUDOLPH © MRYGG 2011 CREATIVE COMMONS 1

Rudolph hatches a cunning plan

from the nearby pines and carried the surprised bear off. “Stick to ice-skating!” Rudolph chuckled, then returned all his attention to the small library contained in the case. *** Meanwhile, a robin was winging his way north-east. He flew over a multitude of rivers, ice, and igloos, until he made it all the way to Santa’s abode. He perched on the gate and tweeted. Santa noticed his newly arrived companion as he went out to do his recycling: “Hello, little one! How are you today?” “He wants to see you,” the robin replied. Santa reached into his pocket and held out a pink palm full of seed and berries: “Who?” The robin delicately grazed upon the mix: “The Philosopher.” Santa scratched his head. “That doesn’t really narrow it down around here, I must say...” “He of Rare Acclaim.” “We have a celebrity? A philosophical celebrity?” Santa was doubly disbelieving. “He Who Hates You.” “Ahh!” Santa’s face fell into a crumpled, wistful ball of sorrow. “What does Rudolph want?” “To see if your wisdom is as far-reaching as your generosity,” the robin replied: “If your intellect matches your reputation!... If your belt reaches all around your stomach…” “Look, would you mind not talking in riddles? I can’t quite keep up... What does he want?” “How should I know?” the robin shrugged: “He just pays me to relay messages.” “Does he pay you by the word?” Santa withdrew his hand, and the robin flew onto an icy shelf, fluffing his feathers as he preened. “I wish… Well, what shall I tell him?” Santa stared into the distance, westwards. After a while, sighing, he said sadly: “Tell him I’ll ready the sleigh.” *** It took a while for Santa to reach Rudolph’s abode in the pitch black, as it was the winter solstice and he had no lamp or red

nose to guide the sleigh. After a few wrong turns, he finally dismounted, and, patting each of the deer in turn, instructed them to fly around a little to keep warm while he was inside. He didn’t expect to be long. As the sleigh took off and he turned his attention towards the large igloo he noticed a trail of smoke wending its way towards the stars from a hole in the top. Santa rang the bell, noting a wreath of holly decorating the door. He heard a slight shuffle, the holly wobbled, and the entrance opened. Rudolph greeted him enthusiastically: “Santa! How good to see you!” His visitor frowned a little. “Hello, Rudolph.” Santa wiped his feet on the mat as the reindeer grinned his welcome and motioned for him to come through. “Have you lost weight?” Rudolph smiled. “Err... maybe a couple of pounds,” Santa muttered despondently. He really didn’t want to get embroiled in Rudolph’s trickery again. Rudolph tried his charm still: “It suits you.” “Nice chimney,” his old friend commented, motioning to the smoke curling out of the hole in the roof, as well as the flakes of snow occasionally falling in. The reindeer gritted his teeth and grimaced nicely. “Unfortunately, the roofers can’t make it ‘til the day after Boxing Day. Though I must say, I am enjoying the warmer temperature in here now!” he laughed, indicating his newly-lit log fire. Santa observed the water trickling down the sides and dripping from the top. “The walls are melting.” There was an awkward silence. “What’s this all about, Rudolph?” Santa sighed finally. He knew where all that hate mail to the website had been coming from, though he had no proof. “Well…” Rudolph drew over a seat for his former friend, and took out two glasses. Santa slumped into the chair and waited glumly. It wasn’t his wont to be depressed, but he couldn’t stop his thoughts from racing in a downward spiral ever since the robin had come to deliver his invite earlier. “I wanted to run a few things by you, Santa, seeing as you’re the North Pole’s pin-up boy for success!” Rudolph chuckled. “Hardly,” his companion replied gloomily, studying Rudolph’s frail frame, noticing with concern that he hadn’t been eating enough lately... Rudolph never ate when he was scheming. The red on his nose seemed duller, too – as if all the joy, hope and peace had flown out of it. Instead a muddy crimson lump just stood there. Rudolph placed the jug of mulled wine on the table, and then started to pour, but Santa covered his glass with his hand, objecting, “I’m flying… So, how can I help you?” Rudolph poked and fanned the logs in the fire a little, then he smiled and slid the case across the table: “I’ve been working on something. It’s a philosophical proof, but it could be revolutionary. I was just wondering if you’d take a look at it for me?” “I don’t know anything about philosophy,” Santa sighed, trying to push the case back across the table, but Rudolph was persistent: “But Santa, you don’t need to. Honestly, it’s just a few words and a little logic. And who better to ask about these things than yourself? The way you’ve turned yourself around these past few years is…” – he emitted a delicate laugh – “quite amazing. Since you launched the website your thought-processes are teeming with logic! Please, just take a look?” “Very well.” Santa sighed once more and unclipped the case on the table. Books by Kant, Schopenhauer, Sartre and NietDecember 2023/January 2024
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Fiction zsche all popped out at once. Santa picked them up and started leafing through them, thinking, ‘How is anyone meant to comprehend this stuff – let alone agree with what they wrote?’ But it was no use – trying to read these works was very depressing. Such heavy reading always made him very sad. Baffled, and making a mental note that he should ask for his money back on that speed-reading course, he replaced the books and rummaged around the case a little more. “Where’s the philosophical proof you mentioned?” he asked, still searching. “Sorry – here all along.” Rudolph placed a hoof into a pocket, then, pulling it out, slid a piece of paper towards Santa. It read: Rudolph Reindeer’s Anti-Christmas Proof by Contradiction 1) Suppose that happy reality exists. (Reading this, Santa smiled to himself: “Yes, that’s right, happy reality really does exist...”) 2) Reality is only determined by concrete events. 3) Happy reality is determined by concrete events [from 1,2]. 4) Happiness is only determined by thoughts. 5) Thoughts are not concrete events. 6) Therefore, happy reality is not determined by concrete events [1,4,5]. 7) Therefore, happy reality both is and isn’t determined by concrete events [3,6]. This is a contradiction. 8) Conclusion: Therefore, happy reality does not exist. Therefore, Christmas is a scam.

Santa read and re-read it. At first he was confused: it seemed to make sense when it was laid out like this, but still his gut told him it wasn’t true. He became briefly despondent: what if his joy had never been real? What if it was based on wishful thinking? Finally, he was annoyed. “What is this, Rudolph? What are you trying to do? You can’t break me. I’m stronger now...” His host looked surprised. “Break you? No! I was just wondering what you made of the proof?” “It’s rubbish! I don’t agree with it at all!” “Nothing like a bit of debate, Santa,” Rudolph smiled wryly. “Which bit don’t you agree with?” “All except Point 1. It’s all just drivel. A collection of words masquerading as an intellectual argument. It’s nonsense!” “But don’t you agree that thoughts are not concrete?” “In what sense?” Santa retorted, incensed: “I think they’re very real. Thinking is how I know I exist! Read a bit of Descartes!” “Friend of yours?” Rudolph shot back bitterly. He hadn’t counted on this reaction: Santa was meant to get depressed, not fired up! The deer’s nose grew brighter, until soon it was blood-red. He shouted, “Then again, what do you know about philosophy? Or friendship, for that matter! I don’t know why I bothered asking you, of all people!” Santa was shocked into silently staring at the smoke wafting up through the hole in the roof. Rudolph pressed on: “You know, when I first worked for you, I thought, there’s a man I can respect. We were different, sure, but I always knew that you – aaargh!” Rudolph screamed as a large paw grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and jammed him against the inner roof until the ice gave way and he disappeared out the top. Horrified, Santa rushed outside: “Rudolph!” he exclaimed – then he caught sight of the reindeer dangling at his captor’s mercy, his hooves barely scraping the icy surface of the igloo’s 66 Philosophy Now
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roof, the polar bear’s jaws wide open. “Wait! Wait, my friend!” he addressed the polar bear – who turned, glowering: “What?” Barnaby snarled. “It’s just... I thought you might like some sauce with that?” The bear looked puzzled. “And a knife and fork. A beer, perhaps? Might warm you up...?” “Now you come to mention it,” the bear pondered, “I am quite cold. And despite what my friends think, I am rather refined. A knife and fork will do nicely, thank you.” He continued lifting a petrified Rudolph further off the rooftop as the deer stared into his growling jaws. “Wait!” Santa persisted: “Aren’t you part of that ice-skating troupe?” Barnaby turned once more, irritated: “I’m trying to have dinner here, Santa.” “I know, I know, but – fantastic display last week, by the way – at all restaurants affiliated with us, well, you and your friends can eat for free!” Barnaby looked puzzled once more. “But I can eat for free – right now!” Santa looked around surreptitiously, then lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper: “You should know, it’s off. The whole herd. They’ve caught, errr... a horrible disease, SARS or something. Horrible! Are you up to date with all your jabs?” Barnaby looked from Santa to Rudolph, then dropped Rudolph, who fell so fast that he crashed through the hole in the roof, plummeting straight into the flames below. “Eat for free, you say?” Barnaby asked. Santa smiled at the bear. *** Once Barnaby had meandered off towards his troupe, free lunch vouchers in paw, Santa rushed into Rudolph’s igloo and got out the first aid kit. “You’re an awful liar,” Rudolph grumbled as Santa tended to the burns on his legs. “You’re welcome...” Santa sniffed the air: “Is that venison I can smell??” Rudolph couldn’t suppress a sad smile. “Where did it all go wrong for us, Santa?” “I don’t know,” his old friend replied, equally sorrowfully. “Why did you change, all those years ago?” Rudolph didn’t have to think for long: “It was the hypocrisy of it. That in every song, every story, we’re so close, you and I; and yet the reality is...” Santa waited patiently. Rudolph turned his eyes up towards the ceiling and sighed in exasperation: “It was all false PR. You sacked me!” He sounded genuinely wounded. Santa frowned a little: “But Rudolph, I only suggested we part ways at work because we were so close... My authority was becoming untenable.” As Rudolph’s mistake dawned upon him, he stole a glance at Santa. His old friend smiled, and said softly: “Happy now?” Rudolph nodded ever so slightly. “And no more tricks; this… this is real?” Santa asked. Another barely perceptible nod. Santa slapped his knee and roared with laughter: “So happy reality does exist! I knew it!” © SAMANTHA NEAVE 2023

Samantha Neave graduated from the Open University, and enjoys reading and writing poetry, philosophy and fiction.

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