Nietzsche attacks Kant! Wins endorsement from Oprah.

 Update: Kant’s campaign advisors respond.

Time Magazine’s cover story for their December 3 issue is a fascinating summary of recent work in understanding the biological and evolutionary basis of morality.

“The deepest foundation on which morality is built is the phenomenon of empathy, the understanding that what hurts me would feel the same way to you. And human ego notwithstanding, it’s a quality that other species share.”

This research, which includes animal studies, investigations into the neurobiology associated with moral behavior, and child development studies, suggests that human beings have a genetically encoded moral compass that has emerged through eons of evolution.

This research is in its infancy and there are limits to how much science can tell us about moral conduct. However, if the research stands up to scrutiny, there are a variety of widely held myths that must be set aside.

Myth #1 would be the pernicious belief in original sin–the doctrine that human beings are inherently corrupt and can lead morally good lives only through God’s grace. Apparently, the capacity for morality is as deeply embedded in human nature as the capacity for savagery.

Myth #2 is the belief that, because evolution prescribes  ”survival of the fittest”, evolution has designed us to be self absorbed moral cretins eager to slay anything that piddles on our property. Instead, apparently, “fitness” is in part bound up with the capacity to recognize and respond to the vulnerability of other human beings.

Myth #3 is the idea that becoming moral is a matter of overcoming our animal nature, an idea for which we have Christianity and Kant to thank. Apparently, to be moral we ought to embrace our animal nature–an idea for which we have Nietzche to thank.

Myth #4 is related to #3–the idea that becoming moral is a matter of becoming more rational and less emotional. Apparently, it is rational to embrace at least some of our emotional responses.

This biological and psychological research reduces the plausibility of Kantian and (some?) utilitarian moral frameworks. It enhances the plausibility of Aristotelian ethics and the ethics of care because both revel in the goodness of being animal.

Thanksgiving is nearly upon us; its time to think about gratitude and food. Truth be told, my thoughts are seldom very far from the topic of food. I suppose there is an issue about whether fluffy mashed potatoes are better than creamy. I prefer fluffy but I don’t yet have a philosophical argument for this preference. So I shall leave discussion of the right method of making fluffy mashed potatoes to other media. (See here) However, gratitude raises some philosophical questions worth asking this time of year.

Gratitude is an emotion and, like other emotions, has what philosophers call an intentional object. Our emotions are about something. We don’t just feel fear–we fear something. We are not simply sad, but sad about something. Similarly, we are not just grateful but are grateful for something and feel gratitude toward something.

Our ordinary uses of the word “gratitude” suggest that the object of gratitude is another person. Gratitude expresses appreciation for a benefit received, and that suggests that something must have been the giver of the benefit and must have intended it as a benefit. Moreover, if our expressions of gratitude are to make sense, it would seem that we must express them to something that can recognize and appreciate the gratitude. The only thing that seems to qualify is another person.

To whom are we expressing gratitude at Thanksgiving? Believers in a personal God (Christians, Muslims, Jews, some Hindus, etc.) have a ready answer to this question. A God who listens to prayers, is capable of love, and has intentions has the necessary personal characteristics to be a recipient of gratitude, and if the religious narrative is correct, is surely deserving of it.

But what about non-believers (agnostics, atheists, Buddhists) or those who believe in an impersonal God, such as some Hindus, Taoists, etc. Does it make sense to give thanks to an impersonal God, or the universe, or nature? These impersonal beings have no intentions and lack conscious awareness. They neither intended to confer benefit on us nor recognize our attempts to give thanks. Is giving such thanks a coherent idea?

There are many people who do give thanks to impersonal objects. For instance, practitioners of yoga (with its roots in Hinduism) report intense feelings of gratitude and direct them towards nature or Being. But what is the structure of this feeling? What is the object? Of course one can pick an object like the sun toward which to express gratitude–surely the sun benefits us. But it’s just a ball of gas with no intentions or ability to receive our thanks. We can rejoice in its existence and appreciate its usefulness and beauty, but that is not the same thing as expressing gratitude.

My own view about gratitude is this. As human beings we are vulnerable creatures and when that vulnerability is lessened we naturally feel intense relief and celebration. The abundance we celebrate at Thanksgiving is a symbol of the mitigation of our vulnerability. But the object of gratitude is not some impersonal force. By themselves, the forces of nature confer no benefits on us. Without a human society that enables us to manage nature, the sun’s rays or a rainstorm’s moisture are cruel, blind impresses that would quickly snuff out human existence.We survive because of the existence of other persons both past and present who cooperate in ways that allow us to benefit from nature

The people sitting around our Thanksgiving tables are people we depend on and they deserve our gratitude. So do the people who continue to live only in our memories. But these concrete others are also symbols. They are symbols of the vast networks of anonymous others that make our abundance possible. Human beings who do their best everyday, who work hard, play hard, and take their responsibilities seriously. They make our abundance possible and deserve our thanks.

Of course, we don’t have personal relationships with all of these anonymous others. But they are persons who strive to add value and are conscious of doing so and who can acknowledge and receive thanks. And surely they are less abstract than the impersonal divinities of the Asian religions or the personal God of monotheism. Unlike the benefits conferred by deities, we can trace the causal lines of influence and explain the human excellence that puts food on our tables, energy in our homes, and information in our books and on our computers.

As we sit around the table at Thanksgiving, we see in the faces of family and friends the anonymous others who make our lives possible. Though anonymous they are not impersonal and are an appropriate object of gratitude.

Bob Dylan, in Chronicles, the first volume of his memoirs, discusses his early influences. In commenting on the collection of classic literature of some Greenwich Village friends with whom he was staying, Dylan sensed:

“an overpowering presence of literature…you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness.”

That is about the best description I have seen of the aim of undergraduate education, especially the study of philosophy–to overcome the seductions of incuriosity and laziness. 

Is there a standardized test to determine when this occurs?

Sometimes Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) seems more useful than at other times (although he saw it as a permanent existential condition of relating to the world, and not as an exceptional situation)–or perhaps it is just a very useful metaphor: Here we are, in San Diego, in the midst of the Firestorm 2007, with fires burning to the north, and fires burning to the south, waiting to see if we will have to evacuate. It is a reality that is thrust upon us, or we are “thrown” into it, we have to react in some way or other, and all we can do is choose how to relate to it. We have neighbors who choose to ignore it, taking a chance that postponing to deal with evacuation issues will pay off, if there is no mandatory evacuation—but then they are gambling with the risk of total loss. Are they fatalists, or just oblivious? Does it give them peace of mind, or is it a prime example of bad faith? All over Southern California people have made such choices over the past 48+ hours. Some chose to ignore the peril; others packed up well ahead of time. Some of them can now return to undamaged homes, and others have nothing to return to. I’m not saying that one choice is necessarily wiser than the other, at all times—the anguish of packing up may be disproportionate to the actual danger level. Four years ago we were evacuated under similar circumstances; our house was saved by fire fighters, and we only had to spend 36 hours away from home. So it looked, and felt, like a happy ending story—but it left us changed forever. Because in the five hours before we were evacuated, we had been packing up, filling two cars with as much as we could of the things that meant the most to us—which was about a fifth of everything in the house we cared about. So we had to make some choices, about our priorities. What do you bring, if you’re a family with pets, and two cars, other than  each other and the absolute necessities? We, the scholars, gaze in panic at our library, collected over 30, 40, maybe 50 years, annotated books, dog-eared old friends—which books do we bring, and which do we leave behind? Some of us have music collections, CDs, LPs, maybe even 78s, each one acquired with pride, or inherited. We all have family photos, and they are heavy and take up a lot of space. Maybe we have family keepsakes, worth nothing on eBay, but a world of value to us. Old Uncle Ed’s wonderful painting of a horse in a meadow, Grandma’s high school diploma, Great Grandma’s quilt, the kids’ boxes of artwork…and some of us are true collectors, holding pieces of culture from another time in trust for the future. The mantra is these days, “Don’t worry about your house and possessions, they can all be replaced!” And indeed, some people’s possessions are replaceable, every one of them—the flat screen TV, the faux suede couch, the newly remodeled kitchen. But not everything can be replaced; some things are, objectively, the last ones or the only ones of their kind,. Some things contain the essence of who we are, things that reflect our shifting self-images as we have grown and changed. Preparing for evacuation becomes an existential exercise: Who are you really? What, among these stacks and piles of things accumulated over the years epitomizes you more than anything else? What might—if the two carloads end up being everything you own on this planet—you later reproach yourself for having forgotten, or deselected? Things that can be turned into cash? Things you love? Things that are unique? Things that meant something to loved ones who are no longer alive? Because as much as we’d like to think that we’re exclusively cerebral, it just ain’t so. We’re physical beings in a physical world, and we like stuff…

            And yet, this agonizing existential exercise is certainly preferable to the scenario where you don’t have time to make any choices at all: the 5-minute warning of the mandatory evacuation, the “Nothing but the clothes on their backs” kind of situation. And being able to keep two carloads of stuff plus loved ones and pets is by far preferable to losing everything. Yes, we can agree on that. And people around town this evening aren’t just philosophizing about this, they are living their losses and their choices. But as a human experience, the “thrownness” (in a loose sense) of the evacuation situation brings certain things into relief: The choices that we make, if fortunate enough to have a few hours of warning, can perhaps give us a brief glimpse into a deeper self—the part of us we choose to carry into our future.

Philosophy has a difficult relationship with popular culture. According to Stephen Asma, that is not because of a cultural bias toward old, dead, white guys or an elitist disdain for matters that ordinary people find interesting. Instead, it is because philosophy:

“is in an extremely self-reflexive relationship with its own history, and it requires highly disciplined, systematic, abstract conceptualization, a skill that does not come easily to most people.”

He argues that books such as those in Open Court’s series on popular culture and philosophy (e.g. The Simpsons and Philosophy) do not really enlighten the reader about pop culture, but provide enjoyable access to perennial philosophical issues. Pop culture is in service to philosophy, making the medicine go down easily, rather than philosophy in service to pop culture.

His snarkish (and I think mistaken) comments about Cultural Studies suggest that he thinks there is something superior about philosophers rigorously sticking to core philosophical issues and analysis even when rooting around in the sediments of popular taste.

But why cannot disciplined, systematic philosophical thought help make sense of ordinary life? After all, science requires disciplined, systematic thought but there are lots of examples of bestselling books on science that illuminate some dimension of our lives. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Stephen J. Gould’s books on evolution, Chaos by James Glieck, Oliver Saks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat are among the many popular books on science that immediately come to mind.

Why is their no similar list in philosophy? (Harry Frankfurt’s Bullshit is an exception, but the title sells itself.)

I suspect it is because popular science books do not try to get readers to do science–they report and tell stories. Why is there no parallel in philosophy? Is it because philosophers don’t like to report and tell stories?

When will people stop making arguments like this?

“But the materialists have two problems. Their certainty of victory is, for the moment, a leap of faith. There is no clear scientific consensus on how the brain produces the higher functions we call being human. And, second, the great mystery, the ultimate hard question, remains: How does matter produce mind, how can it? Irrespective of religious belief, immaterialism cannot easily be dismissed. What is the nature of what I am thinking and feeling now? To tell me that it is all a by-product of my brain is to tell me nothing. What I am is at least as real as the chair I am sitting on, and what I am seems to be immaterial.”

This is simple nonsense. The fact that a research program is relatively new and incomplete is not evidence that some alternative hypothesis must be true–especially when there is substantial evidence supporting the research program and no evidence supporting the alternative hypothesis.

Cognitive science and neuroscience continue to make empirically testable hypotheses and have explained a variety of complex mental functions, though a complete explanation of consciousness is still elusive. The alternative, that there is some sort of “soul” that explains mental functioning, has generated few empirically-testable hypotheses, those that have been tested have failed the test, and the hypothesis itself borders on the incoherent. No one has ever suggested a remotely plausible answer to the question of how a non-physical substance can causally interact with a physical substance.

Confidence in materialism (or physicalism) is not based on faith but on evidence. It is a plain fact that mental states are exactly correlated with a range of specific brain events. Although a correlation between mind and body does not guarantee a causal relationship, if physicalism were false, this correlation would be an utter mystery. Furthermore, the causal relationship has been established with regard to a variety of mental functions.

Give it up already.

Philosophers are feeling the heat in France these days: The French finance minister Christine Lagarde (the Sarkozy administration) suggests the French should think less and work harder! This according to The New York Times:

In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.” “France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”

One might assume her point to be that excessive speculation may lead to a kind of action-paralysis (which may be true), but her comment seems to stem from a perception that if you work hard, you can accumulate wealth, but if you think hard, you can’t work hard. Ergo, if you think, you’ll stay poor, and wealth is good, so thinking must be bad. Huh? For one thing, I would suggest that it is probably a matter of priorities rather than an inherent flaw in the thinking process that most of us who think hard aren’t particularly wealthy. For another, thinking is hard work: the French philosopher and writer Alain Finkielkraut responds in the article that thinking is, in effect, a 24 hour job that you keep on doing even in your sleep. But Finkielkraut takes it one step further, which “sillifies” the entire debate: Not only does he find it offensive that the Sarkozy administration is anti-intellectual; the really offensive thing about President Sarkozy (whom he otherwise supports) is apparently that he is a jogger. Horror of horrors! Finkielkraut points out that all the great philosophers have been walkers, not joggers—a jogging French president is way too American! I hope this whole thing is tongue-in-cheek; otherwise I’d say that’s an excellent example of too much thinking right there…

            Getting back to Lagarde: What’s really amusing about her deliberate deselection of the philosophical tradition is that her appeal to being practical rather than theoretical in order to effectuate change is not new at all; who was it who implied that philosophers had done enough thinking, and the time had come to roll up one’s sleeves and take action? None other than Karl Marx himself: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”…But I’m sure this interesting similarity is unintentional; I doubt that a right-leaning administration such as Sarkozy’s would want to align themselves with Marxism…

I suspect that many philosophy professors, when asked what cognitive benefit students acquire in a philosophy class, would respond that students should begin to acquire a world view.

What is a “world view” and why is it good to have one?

“World view” seems to refer to an understanding of how everything in our experience fits together conceptually. (Assuming it does fit together conceptually, which is not obvious.) And I suppose that the great thinkers in history–Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, etc.–have attempted some sort of comprehensive, synoptic understanding. But this is a devilishly difficult intellectual task and they all seem to have gotten it wrong, since we are still preoccupied with figuring out exactly what they were trying to say and posing an endless stream of objections to their respective world views.

But if these accomplished and devoted thinkers got it wrong, how can we expect our students to get it right? Yes, I know there is value in understanding how the great thinkers of the past got it wrong, but that understanding is not sufficient for constructing a comprehensive alternative view that gets it right. So it is likely that whatever our students come away with will be wrong in some significant respect.

What is the value of a world view that is likely to be false? I suppose the maxim “any port in a storm” applies here but, in a real storm, imaginary ports are dangerous. Isn’t this true of imaginary ideas as well?

Physicist Michael J. Disney thinks modern cosmology is in trouble. Essentially his argument is that, in a maturing science, the number of purely theoretical constructions invented to explain observed phenomena should be less than the number of independent observations that confirm the theory.

Apparently, given the proliferation of theoretical constructions such as dark matter, dark energy, etc. and the paucity of independent observatations confirming them, cosmology doesn’t qualify as a maturing science.

Is this a good standard for evaluating a science? We humanistically-trained scholars would like to know.