Madness! from noiset.com

OK, so this isn’t the easiest thing to read (after seeing numerous Žižek videos, it looks to me that he writes like he talks like he thinks, which is pretty fluid, making connections between things and not necessarily driving through focused theses…) but a little time spent on it yields some interesting points.  For some context, Katie noted in the episode that Discipline & Punish was one of a series of works by Foucault examining Power that included Madness and Civilization and The History of Sexuality. We only talked about Discipline and Punish, but you can take the general theme on Power found in it and imagine how Foucault uses it in the other two works even if you haven’t read them.

Žižek summarizes Foucault’s characterization (in Madness and Civilization) of the status of madness from the Renaissance to the Classical Age of Reason thusly:

In the Renaissance (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Erasmus, etc.), madness was a specific phenomenon of human spirit which belonged to the series of prophets, possessed visionaries, those obsessed by demons, saints, comediants, etc. It was a meaningful phenomenon with a truth of its own. Even if madmen were vilified, they were treated with awe, like messengers of sacred horror. – With Descartes, however, madness is excluded: madness, in all its varieties, comes to occupy a position that was the former location of leprosy.

As has been a theme in both the podcast on Foucault and the discussions of him here and on our FB page, I’ll put aside a judgment about the historical accuracy of Foucault’s claim.  What I’d like to do is unpack Žižek’s reading of Foucault’s reading of Descartes.

Žižek notes that Foucault addresses the Cogito in Madness and Civilization.  We are all familiar with the idea that Descartes founds the certainty of the Cogito by hypothesis that everything we perceive is illusion.  Madness, insofar as it creates false perceptions or illusions, is treated by Descartes in the same way as dreams or waking sense delusions – I can doubt that I am perceiving correctly (I am being deceived) but I can’t doubt that I think.  The Cogito is gotten to via reason and not perception – it rejects perception and by extension, madness.  So on Žižek’s reading:

Foucault’s reproach is that Descartes does not really confront madness, but avoids to think it. He EXCLUDES madness from the domain of reason: “Dreams or illusions are surmounted within the structure of truth; but madness is inadmissible for the doubting subject” In the Classical Age, Reason is thus based on the exclusion of madness: the very existence of the category ‘madness’ is historically determined, along with its opposite ‘reason’; that is, it is determined, through power relations.

This is intended to illuminate the previous comment about the exclusion of madness.  Madness, instead of being constitutive of (a certain type) of self is excluded from self altogether when Descartes positions the rationally founded I think against the content of perception.  Žižek highlights Foucault’s criticism of Descartes:

When I suffer sensory illusions of perception or when I dream, I still REMAIN NORMAL AND RATIONAL, I only deceive myself with regard to what I see. In madness, on the contrary, I myself am no longer normal, I lose my reason. So madness has to be excluded if I am to be a rational subject.

So the thesis here is that the Cartesian rational subject requires the rejection of madness.  This is problematic in that people who experience madness (we could probably more charitably refer to this as ‘psychologically irrational states’ but that’s too long) are either not subjects or somehow lose their subjectivity.  Given that the rational subject is intended to be the basis for an account of the human Self and Knowledge, it can’t apply partially or be something people can drop into and out of arbitrarily. Foucault’s criticism is then that by excluding the non-rational, Descartes marginalizes it and as Cartesian subjectivity takes hold in theory, thought and social structures the non-rational becomes something antithetical to the Self and must be treated with (at first) hostility and then clinically.

Žižek in the essay wants to contrast how Foucault, Derrida and Lacan treat Madness if you want to explore it further.  Somehow he manages to name drop, in addition to Descartes, Adorno, Kant, Rousseau, Daniel Dennett, Hegel, Schelling, Pippin, Chesterton, Nietzsche, Husserl, Brecht, Freud, David Lynch, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Malebranche, the Wachowski brothers and Berkeley.  I’m not kidding.  Bringing thinkers into conversation indeed…

–seth

But if our brain’s chemistry does affect our moral behavior, the question of whether that balance is set in a natural way or by medical intervention will make no difference in how freely we act. If there are already biochemical differences between us that can be used to predict how ethically we will act, then either such differences are compatible with free will, or they are evidence that at least as far as some of our ethical actions are concerned, none of us have ever had free will anyway. In any case, whether or not we have free will, we may soon face new choices about the ways in which we are willing to influence behavior for the better.

So, part of what we face here is that the variety in our behaviors and dispositions has some significant portion that is like the variation in our heights or the amount of our body hair. Such variations are just part of the myriad of distinctions between one human and another. Put that way, we’re faced with the question of what culpability for our actions really means—we certainly don’t expect to hold people guilty for their extreme height or their hair loss (though, pertinently, both have social effects).

I’m inclined to put a slightly different spin on it, however. Our chemistry, like the rest of our bodies, mark limitations, but generally a range rather than a determined value or relation—a boundary that constrains without determination. Sometimes, that boundary is very tight. For instance, as a group we humans can tolerate fairly little variation in the amount of potassium in our blood without dying. In other cases the boundary is pretty loose. We flourish is nearly all the climates on the earth. The question we have socially is how much variation in behavior do we tolerate (even encourage) and what do we do about it before generating technological solutions to the failures of our physiology. (Shelter and clothing anyone?)  Faced with the possibility of modifying even more behaviors through advancing knowledge of how chemistry affects moral behavior, we must confront the need to make explicit judgements about letting unapproved, even bad things, happen, just as much as we concern ourselves with encouraging good things to happen and hamper bad ones.

-Dylan

To that end, I point you to a very new blog written by a dear friend of mine called The Food of My People. By study and training he is a specialist in metaphysics (with much work on Thomas Aquinas). He’s a master teacher of language (particularly Greek and Latin, though I would happily sit in his French class) and a wonderful conversationalist. His blog captures some of my fondest memories of our friendship — sitting in his kitchen with a well-chosen glass of Italian wine while he cooked dinner and talked about the food, the preparation, and his life growing up in Brooklyn (and learning to cook). I’ve been privileged to  have him teach me how to make frittata and Sunday Gravy. I point all of you cooks to a good read that will keep philosophy on your mind while directing you straight to the kitchen. Consider one small excerpt:

Salt is all important.  In the old Catholic rite of baptism, it signified wisdom.  Don’t be a fool and skimp on salt.  The thing you need not only to understand but also to believe, if you are ever to be a good cook, is that salt has the wondrous power of making things more themselves.  Other spices add flavor; salt brings it out.  The self-same salt, used in due measure, makes broccoli taste more like broccoli, and steak like steak, and potatoes like potatoes.  Salt is ready to do self-effacing service to one and all – its very humility merits its exaltation.  Its hidden action is not so much causal as causative, i.e., it does not do something, but causes something else to do something, namely, to taste delicious.  If something tastes salty, it means you have added too much salt (unless you meant it to, as with nuts and pretzels), but if something does not taste like itself, it likely needs the eductive agency of salt.

Shame on Plato for letting you think that cooking is mere cookery.

-Dylan

Rick Roderick from larshjo.tihlde.org

Long time listeners and readers know that I’m a fan of Rick Roderick.  For those who don’t know, he was from Texas, got his degree in philosophy from UT and taught at various places including Duke.  He was a down home type who became famous to philosophiles through a couple of lecture series he published through The Teaching Company.  (Home also to Mark’s crush Robert Solomon)  They were filmed in the 90s and have subsequently been re-posted to various places on the web including youtube.  He died way too young and had a checkered academic career (you can read more about that along with testimonials here) but as evidenced by his videos, was a great communicator and passionate about philosophy in society.

Roderick did a lecture series in 1993 called “The Self Under Siege:  Philosophy in the 20th Century” covering Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse and Ricoeur.  Roderick sets the question as follows:

1. Current professional philosophy is “deflationary” in that it gives no answers to our larger questions, in particular our questions concerning our selves, our projects, our place in society and in the world.
2. We have lost a vast resource of cultural meaning upon which we could draw to construct meaning for our lives. Meaning, in this large sense, can no longer be drawn unproblematic from religion. We have information, but not knowledge.
3. We all strive to have a “theory” or narrative about our selves., we want to have a meaningful story about our lives that affirms our humanity. In short, we want them to mean something.
4. The complex systems under which we live (economic, technological, global) have put the self”under siege”, overloaded with information and images that offer no meaning for us. We have difficulty making any sense out of our lives.

The Foucault text Roderick chose to focus on was Discipline & Punish. Situating Foucault via this text in a dialogue with these other thinkers is some kind of validation of the broad reach of the text and its importance in the stream of 20th century thought.  All 5 parts of the Foucault lecture along with a transcript can be found here and I have embedded the first video below.  A page on the whole series is here.  I recommend you check out the whole series and his other recorded lectures as well.

–seth

–seth

So the modern prison system is not the same as the ancient prison/dungeon, it is more like other institutions of discipline such as educational institutions and the military.  In turn, the expansion of the application of discipline gives rise to the development of further techniques that spread to other areas of society like factories.  In each case, the system of discipline gives rise to a field of knowledge specific to the subject to affected:  the student, the soldier, the criminal, the worker.

[Note: The poster disabled embed, so this will take you to youtube]

Lest you despair, Foucault in the second part of the recording notes that structure of disciplinary systems is “rational”, not “totalitarian”.  This was Katie’s point in the podcast that Foucault doesn’t see Power as bad in itself, but simply as a way in which society is ordered to influence people.  Awareness of this ordering and influence is necessary to question and potential change or resist it.

–seth

The secular philosopher-sociologist Steven Fuller performs here the role of philosophical midwife to what I believe is arguably the next major conceptual revolution in modern intellectual culture: liberal humanists, who use neo-Darwinian theory in their fights with religion, having to abandon the massive, underlying contradiction between neo-Darwinian theory and the secularized theology or metaphysics of their belief in humanism. The Western metaphysics of liberal humanism — belief that the human intellect is special — has been taken on loan from theology for roughly 400 years. But now the contemporary debate between neo-Darwinism and Intelligent Design theory is critically uncovering the reasons why the time seems to be nearing for liberal humanists to stop living in denial of this loan and their debt.

Like a family intervention taken to stop an addict’s spiral into oblivion, Fuller articulates the sobering confrontation: either you can believe neo-Darwinian theory, or you can believe that the human intellect has the intrinsic motivation and capability to solve any problem humanity faces through reason and science, but you cannot rationally or coherently believe both of these propositions.

Tom McDonald

Over the past few years, other EEG studies have supported the idea that anesthesia doesn’t simply shut the brain down but, rather, interferes with its internal communication. Mashour’s research, for instance, has shown that feedback between the front and back of the brain is interrupted during general anesthesia, leading to a disconnect between different brain networks. That feedback is thought to be important for consciousness.
…

“What we find is that the anesthetized brain is still very reactive to stimuli,” he says; both EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), an indirect method of measuring brain activity, show response to light and sounds. But somehow that sensory information is never processed and integrated into the type of activity necessary for conscious awareness.

– Wes

At least three hosts at a time trying to interpret, in their own natural and thus imprecise language, a philosophical text itself composed in its own natural and thus imprecise language, opens up infinite opportunity for purely semantic argument. The show’s discussions, as with so many philosophical discussions in life, sometimes careen inexorably toward thickets of seemingly endless loops circling around what the words being used could or should mean…

Don’t feel too bad if you lose the thread — especially if you listen, as I do, while performing entirely non-philosophical database work. But you’ll find fascination and even intellectual beauty in hearing human minds collectively grapple with concepts even as the concepts crumble under scrutiny.

Marshall is a podcaster too, with a very NPRish demeanor: The Marketplace of Ideas podcast. Listen to him interview Sarah Bakewell about Montaigne. (After, of course, listening to our Montaigne episode; plus, here’s a past post on Bakewell).

-Mark Linsenmayer

The Best of OpenCulture, 2011.

Heaps of online lectures, video, and other stuff, with the occasional post from me if I actually make time to submit one. (Neil Gaiman apparently retweeted the post I wrote on him.)

-Mark Linsenmayer

-Mark Linsenmayer

I just checked out his one titled “Phenomenology of the Senses”: (video quality is a bit choppy)

Watch on YouTube.

It’s a short but interesting meditation on the way the individual senses give us information – in combination and separately.  Anton chooses to focus on the spatio-temporal characteristics of different sense.  At about 1:30 he says something I found particularly odd:  touch has no possibilities.  It is a sense of pure actuality.  He claims that any notion of possibility in the sense of touch comes from our sense of sight – we see what we might touch, but touch itself is ‘blind’ to these possibilities.  Touch requires presence.

This is a fascinating idea which I’m sure one of our readers will point out has been explored elsewhere (/bait).  If Merleau-Ponty correctly supplemented Heidegger’s Analytic of Dasein by bringing to it a notion of ‘embodiment’, then there is a sense in which phenomenology, as a methodology, should prioritize the sense of touch.  We are much more intimately involved with our own bodies through our sense of touch than we are through sight, sound, taste or smell.  Less intimate are taste and smell, followed by sight and sound.

If being is being embodied, embodiment prioritizes the sense of touch and touch is a sense of presence, then there is a neat connection between being and presence as articulated through the body.  This might be sounding a bit ‘continental’ (to refer to another recent post) but think about it:  our sense of touch – not just interacting with external objects, but how we physically “feel” – is so fundamental to our existence that it is practically forgotten.  Until, that is, something doesn’t feel right.  If you are lactose intolerant but can’t resist the cheesecake at that fancy restaurant, you know what I mean.

Pushing this a bit further, it makes the body sound like Heidegger’s das Zeug:  something that has a being in-order-to.  You notice when you don’t feel well or you break a bone, but when things are working, food is digesting, breathing is clear, no worries, right?  Well, yes but that’s not all.  Your sense of your body can be ecstatic, exhilarating, electric.  Think about stretching, a belly laugh, a clean shave (face or legs), blushing at an admirers glance.

So the body doesn’t seem to be only a being in-order-to like some instrument or tool.  We notice it not just when it’s sub-par, but when it’s super-par.  The body, embodiment, is our primary way of being-in-the-world.  Touch is the first sensation we have coming into life and likely the last.  And yet we don’t acknowledge its importance.  Philosophy has, historically, prioritized sight over touch.  The primary metaphor of knowledge is ‘seeing’: illuminate the difference, shine some light on the subject, can’t you see what I mean?

And it’s not just Philosophy – I remember hearing/reading somewhere that once humans started to walk upright, the sense of sight developed more fully and became more important than smell and hearing.  Certainly for interacting with the world external to the body, sight is more important for humans that touch.  Think about how much technology and care goes into televisions vs. couches. And how much more importance and money we place on the former.

So Husserl and Sartre were still stuck on the metaphor of sight/knowledge and Heidegger couldn’t even find the words (or rather found a bunch of them but they didn’t stick).  Maybe Merleau-Ponty was on to something fundamental, even if he didn’t cash it out this way.  Touch and presence.  There’s a nice connection to the some of the Eastern thought we’ve seen and will be looking at this coming year as well.

–seth

A really good interview with Nietzsche scholar and opinionator Brian Leiter appears in 3:AM Magazine, where he drops pithy quotes on Obama, Nietzsche, Marx, and Foucault.

But he also appears to have a new argument to sell. Leiter advocates a new way to divide the philosophical canon, not into “contintentals” or “analytics,” but rather into “naturalists” and “anti-naturalists”. You can also listen to Leiter’s argument on the latest Philosophy Bites episode, where Nigel Warburton thankfully pushed back a bit.

It seems to me that Leiter focuses too much on outlier examples to deny the boundaries of the “continental” and “analytic” camps. Sure, perhaps Marx wouldn’t have thought much of Derrida (though who can say, and what kind of an argument is that, really?). But that doesn’t mean they weren’t both united as students of Hegel, and therefore assignable to a certain intellectual camp. I mean, Heidegger didn’t think much of Sartre, either, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t more similar than different when compared to Frege and Russell. Not all Republicans agree on all points with their fellow Republicans, but they can still sense when a Democrat has entered the room; there’s a reason these camps evolved in the first place.

And perhaps the discourse of analytic philosophers can also be criticized as impenetrable, just as so-called “continental” philosophers are accused of using obscurantist language. But that’s not the same phenomenon at work. As Warburton pointed out, logical language and technical jargon is often required to maintain an argument within the analytic tradition. And such language is certainly clear within that group, in the same way that mathematicians converse in a clear and readily understandable language amongst themselves. Anyway, Leiter’s description of the language of analytic philosophy is only apt when describing analytic philosophy journals, where these professionals are only talking to each other, and not to the public at large. So of course professional jargon would predominate; a lay audience reading a medical journal would also become overwhelmed by the medical jargon. But that doesn’t prove that the language of analytical philosophers isn’t more rigorous than, say, Lacan or Deleuze.

I agree with Leiter that these kinds of Venn diagrams have limited utility. But for Leiter to suggest that the traditional distinctions have naught but “sociological value”, whereas only his championed categories have genuine explanatory value, strikes me as unpersuasive. I’m sure Leiter’s naturalist/anti-naturalist categories have explanatory value, yes, but only in that they organize these thinkers according to criteria which Leiter himself deems important. If you look at any set of cars in a parking lot, you can organize them by color, engine size, chassis, country of manufacture, etc. Any particular categorization might be useful, depending upon what you were trying to accomplish with your grouping. His proposed criteria may catch on, or they may not, but that he must take the time to even argue for them bodes ill for their future adoption, and indeed their utility. I think the real “sociological” insight of these categories is not why people go with “continental/analytic” for their distinctions, but why any such divisions, including Leiter’s, are made at all. The history seems clear that the “analytic/continental” divide was first created (if not explicitly named) by the post-Russell logical positivists, who wanted to separate those they would take seriously from those they wouldn’t. In that sense, it served, and to a similar degree still serves, a useful function.

Finally, adopting new philosophical definitions using the word root “natural-” seems to me unhelpful, as earlier definitions already appear to have been claimed for terms like “naturalism” or “naturalists,” even as alternatives to “analytic”/”continental”. Exercising “eminent domain” over the existing nomenclature will lead to more confusion, not less.

Unlearned and unearned quibbles aside, Leiter’s forceful approach makes him a great interview, so check it out:

There are real dividing lines in the history of philosophy, but the one between the “analytic” and the “Continental” isn’t one of them, though it’s interesting today from a sociological point of view, since it allows graduate programs in philosophy to define spheres of permissible ignorance for their students. A real dividing line, by contrast, one that matters for substantive philosophical questions, is between “naturalists” and “anti-naturalists.” The naturalists, very roughly, are those who think human beings are just certain kinds of animals, that one understands these animals through the same empirical methods one uses to understand other animals, and that philosophy has no proprietary methods for figuring out what there is, what we know, and, in particular, what humans are like. The anti-naturalists, by contrast, are (again, roughly) those who think human beings are different not just in degree but in kind from the other animals, and that this difference demands certain proprietary philosophical methods – perhaps a priori knowledge or philosophical ways of exploring the distinctively “normative” realm in which humans live.

So on the naturalist side you get, more or less, David Hume, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Ludwig Büchner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Carnap, W.V.O. Quine, Jerry Fodor, Stephen Stich, and Alex Rosenberg and on the anti-naturalist side you get, more or less, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Gottlob Frege, Jean-Paul Sartre, G.E.M. Anscombe, Wilfrid Sellars (at least for part of his career), the older Hilary Putnam, Alvin Plantinga, and John McDowell, among many others. This disagreement – a disagreement, very roughly, about the relationship of philosophy to the sciences – isn’t one that tracks the alleged analytic/Continental distinction. Indeed, the founders of the 20th-century traditions of “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy (Frege and Husserl, respectively) are both on the anti-naturalist side, and both are reacting against hardcore naturalist positions in philosophy that had become dominant on the European Continent in the late 19th-century. And the first explosion of what anti-naturalists would derisively call “scientism” came in Germany in the 1840s and 1850s, as a reaction to Hegel’s obscurantist idealism. Naturalism and anti-naturalism mark a profound dividing line in modern philosophy, but it has nothing to do with “analytic” vs. “Continental’ philosophy….

-Daniel Horne

I found this to be an interesting video which relates to both the Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty episodes. In the video, Hubert Dreyfus discusses Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and the philosophical implications for artificial intelligence. Dreyfus has long been a critic of AI and has often cited Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as offering important phenomenological insights into AI’s philosophical underpinnings.

Dreyfus discusses how human expertise depends primarily on practical coping skills and a basic engagement with the world, not on some internalization of rules. I think he’s spot on. Practical knowledge, as more fundamental than that of the theoretical, need not even rise to the level of consciousness.

Merleau-Ponty is mentioned as being significant for calling out that the body plays an essential role for our being-in-the-world. Whereas the philosophical tradition has always taken the body to be something which gets in the way of reason and the intellect, Merleau-Ponty takes it to be crucial. Dreyfus goes on to talk about his book, the internet, and how the past failures of AI were based on mistaken philosophical presuppositions.  [The video is in two parts, if you don't get a youtube link at the end to part II, you can find it here.]

-Brad Younger

Watch on YouTube.

Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday after a punishing bout with cancer, and I’d like to take the liberty of inserting a brief memoriam. I do this in a philosophy blog partially because PEL recently discussed one of his books. But mostly I do it because I would hate to think anyone remembers Hitchens as nothing more than a “New Atheist” icon.

I first stumbled across Hitchens’ work in law school, after picking up discarded issues of The Nation left lying around student offices and library carrels. I soon came to seek out ever more trashed copies of an otherwise predictable opinion paper, simply for the chance to cheer on or get pissed off by his unpredictable stances. A reliable aspect of Mr. Hitchens’ writing over the years has been his willingness to pugnaciously defend unpopular views, whether on political figures,religious figures,or, more recently, unpopular wars.
To get a sense of the younger but no less feisty “Hitch”, check out the clip above. He punches in fine form around the 6:45 mark.

Perhaps like Montaigne, Hitchens was not a philosopher, but rather a polymath essayist of rare skill, whose gifts you’ll find on display in anyoneof several collections.I also can’t help but be impressed that, like Wittgenstein (also struck down by cancer at age 62), Hitchens maintained until the very end a voluminous (the word “disciplined” seems inapt) writing pace.

In his last article for Vanity Fair, you’ll find him ruminating on Nietzsche’s aphorism, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger,”a tenuous connection to philosophy I will exploit in the service of broadcasting his style to anyone not yet familiar:

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound. It is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker. In German it reads and sounds more like poetry, which is why it seems probable to me that Nietzsche borrowed it from Goethe, who was writing a century earlier. But does the rhyme suggest a reason? Perhaps it does, or can, in matters of the emotions. I can remember thinking, of testing moments involving love and hate, that I had, so to speak, come out of them ahead, with some strength accrued from the experience that I couldn’t have acquired any other way. And then once or twice, walking away from a car wreck or a close encounter with mayhem while doing foreign reporting, I experienced a rather fatuous feeling of having been toughened by the encounter. But really, that’s to say no more than “There but for the grace of god go I,” which in turn is to say no more than “The grace of god has happily embraced me and skipped that unfortunate other man.”

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker. Nietzsche was destined to find this out in the hardest possible way, which makes it additionally perplexing that he chose to include the maxim in his 1889 anthology Twilight of the Idols. (In German this is rendered as Götzen-Dämmerung, which contains a clear echo of Wagner’s epic. Possibly his great quarrel with the composer, in which he recoiled with horror from Wagner’s repudiation of the classics in favor of German blood myths and legends, was one of the things that did lend Nietzsche moral strength and fortitude. Certainly the book’s subtitle—“How to Philosophize with a Hammer”—has plenty of bravado.)

In the remainder of his life, however, Nietzsche seems to have caught an early dose of syphilis, very probably during his first-ever sexual encounter, which gave him crushing migraine headaches and attacks of blindness and metastasized into dementia and paralysis. This, while it did not kill him right away, certainly contributed to his death and cannot possibly, in the meanwhile, be said to have made him stronger. In the course of his mental decline, he became convinced that the most important possible cultural feat would be to prove that the plays of Shakespeare had been written by Bacon. This is an unfailing sign of advanced intellectual and mental prostration.

(I take a slight interest in this, because not long ago I was invited onto a Christian radio station in deepest Dixie to debate religion. My interviewer maintained a careful southern courtesy throughout, always allowing me enough time to make my points, and then surprised me by inquiring if I regarded myself as in any sense a Nietzschean. I replied in the negative, saying that I had agreed with some arguments put forward by the great man but didn’t owe any large insight to him and found his contempt for democracy to be somewhat off-putting. H. L. Mencken and others, I tried to add, had also used him to argue some crude social-Darwinist points about the pointlessness of aiding the “unfit.” And his frightful sister, Elisabeth, had exploited his decline to misuse his work as if it had been written in support of the German anti-Semitic nationalist movement. This had perhaps given Nietzsche an undeserved posthumous reputation as a fanatic. The questioner pressed on, asking if I knew that much of Nietzsche’s work had been produced while he was decaying from terminal syphilis. I again responded that I had heard this and knew of no reason to doubt it, though knew of no confirmation either. Just as it became too late, and I heard the strains of music and the words that this would be all we would have time for, my host stole a march and said he wondered how much of my own writing on god had perhaps been influenced by a similar malady! I should have seen this “gotcha” coming, but was left wordless.)

-Daniel Horne

Saturday’s episode of the Wisconsin-based radio show “To the Best of Our Knowledge” concerned the literature of memory and has a particularly interesting interview with Julian Barnes, author of The Sense of Ending,about memory and how it factors into the constitution of one’s identity. Barnes discusses how earlier in his life he thought of memory as being fundamentally distinct from imagination, particularly in having something like truth content. He’s come closer to thinking that they’re much less distinct, in large part because of how we essentially have memories of our own imaginings. (He mentions discussions with his brother Jonathan Barnes who was a professor of ancient philosophy at Oxford and Geneva in this context — that he’s come much closer to what his brother has thought for a long time.) The other interviews in the episode are also well worth listening to about memory — preserving it, writing about it, and trying to find truth in it.

Another piece of this ego/memory/identity puzzle lies is how our thoughts, ideas, and expectations are held in our bodies. This is something of concern for Sartre and even moreso for Merleau-Ponty. In this past week’s New Yorker magazine, Michael Specter gets at it through an article about a new institute created at Harvard University to study the placebo effect called the Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter. A big chunk of the article is getting to know Ted Kaptchuk, the director of this new institute. For me Kaptchuk shows us how data-driven questioning (i.e., science) helps clarify deeply multifaceted mind-body issues without simplistically turning the human being into a clockwork. Additionally, for a philosopher, the placebo effect is a ripe example of the contingency of our thoughts on our bodies and our bodies on our thoughts.

-Dylan Casey

Since I wrote the post, I got to talk up our episode as well. As I point out there, we’ve had quite a surge in downloads of late, as we’ve been featured on the front podcast page of iTunes: nearly 9500 downloads yesterday alone (our one-day record prior to being featured last week was around 3000).

So welcome, new readers! I invite you to flip back through some of the recent posts here and do some searches in our archives to see what we’ve posted on your favorite philosophers.

-Mark Linsenmayer

One of his central philosophical concerns was Sartre’s view of freedom and responsibility, and his take on existentialism always seemed to climax at that point. Here he is introducing the major themes of existentialism.

Watch on YouTube.

In this audio clip, he lays out themes in Being and Nothingness and explains why the book is such a convoluted read: Sartre read Heidegger but wants to put Heidegger’s insights within the French tradition of focusing on consciousness going back to Descartes.

Listen on YouTube.

So, yes, I stole my analogy of consciousness as a flashlight without the beam from this clip. It comes from Solomon’s series of audio lectures, “No Excuses.”

To experience a guided introduction to Being and Nothingness, please purchase my Close Reading audio on its first pages.

-Mark Linsenmayer

With a little research I found this podcast/lecture on Bergson by Daniel Coffeen, focusing on Bergson’s book Matter and Memory.

The topic sneaks in on you, with 17 minutes discussing cliché in movies and music (“Cliché is the production of death!” he exclaims) eventually getting to the text. He starts off discussing appearance vs. reality: these are not one, but they co-mingle; they’re not in ontologically different categories. Correspondingly, Bergson recommends making consciousness and the brain into the same ontological category. (How? By fiat, apparently. Simply make it your starting point, presumably for phenomenological reasons.) “Everything is an image,” and “this conception of matter is just common sense.” He explains this as a view common to the post-Heidegger phenomenologists. There’s also some more detail on what I claimed to be Sartre’s ascription of affect/emotion onto the contents of experience itself (as opposed to on ourselves as the subjects having this experience), and some on interpersonal communication and its relation to action, and more. The final 15 minutes or so involve discussion of some specific artworks (which loses something in a purely audio format, as you might expect; I wasn’t able to sit through it). This seems a common move for this type of view: Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in explicating their epistemology both turn readily to the experience of art: perceptions designed to make us think about perception itself.

I gather that this lecture was given at UC Berkeley, but it’s not overly formal/academic (i.e. there’s swearing). He’s a bit fast and loose, and definitely into post-modernism (here he is on Deleuze on the Diet Soap podcast), but his illustrations are generally clear, so I’ve found this useful in getting myself attuned to that kind of terminology/outlook. His PhD is in rhetoric, and his recent podcast episodes are all presentations of his current rhetoric course.

This link will call up both the episode and the subsequent lecture, also on Bergson.

-Mark Linsenmayer

As Dylan noted in PEL Episode 40 on Plato’s Republic, Socrates’ criticism of democracy is often emphasized in classrooms for its ability to give us critical perspective on the democratic values we normally do not question. Thus Peter Lawler turns to Plato’s dialog for its analysis of how the political regime, democracy in particular, shapes the soul and its attitude (perhaps the soul just is an attitude) toward life, aging, and death.

Lawler is a scholar of government who writes a blog over at the Big Think blog forum. His blog is sort of an odd-man-out in that he writes from an intellectually conservative and “realist” point of view, while the rest of the Big Think blogs are generally expressive of the techno-libertarian and techno-utopian thinking characteristic of Silicon Valley and TED talks. Lawler looks here at our problem with old people through the lens of Socrates in The Republic:

The ranking part of the soul Socrates calls spiritedness [or pride] … which [the soul in a democratic regime] calls repression. [Democratic levelers] liberate desire from spiritedness [from ranking in terms of value] and so they, according to Socrates, become deeply pro-choice when it comes to everything people think and do. [...] Democrats claim to be free to do whatever they want whenever they want. They understand their lives as a series of hobbies. For Socrates … we should be worried that our way of life become too democratic, meaning too comprehensively pro-choice or too promiscuously libertarian.

[For Socrates] the cure to what ails democracy is usually less democracy. That means the cure is more oligarchy (or disciplined concern for the production of wealth), more timocracy (or high-minded concern for honor or nobility), and more aristocracy (or more concern for merit, excellence, or the rule of wisdom). Every real democratic country counts on being mixed with these undemocratic “regimes” for its security and moral goodness.

The same freedom of the democratic way of life Socrates describes Marx describes as communism in The German Ideology. The difference between Socrates and Marx is that the latter took his description seriously as perfectly desirable and as our more or less inevitable future — a world in which religion, the state, the family, and so forth [everything which puts external obligation upon one] would have withered away.

The ugliness of democracy is its unrealistic denial of the inevitability and even the goodness of personal death and personal authority. The easiest and maybe the truest criticism of Marxism is about its idea that capitalism — or liberated techno-productivity — could ever overcome natural scarcity. The scarcity that always remains is scarcity of time. Under communism, people will remain self-conscious and mortal.

That means they will remain to some extent obsessive and repressed, and they’ll be stuck with ranking their activities or choices with the scarcity of time (if nothing else) in mind.

So in a democracy, young people are particularly repulsed by old people. They remind them of death, the death that comes to us all. As Socrates explains and we observe, in a democracy the old do everything they can to look young and imitate the ways of the young. They do everything they can not to be disagreeable or unpleasant. That’s why, in our time, they nip, tuck, botox, and so forth.

And they don’t get any respect. Nobody believes, in a democracy, that wisdom comes with age, and, in any case, nobody respects wisdom or even the “truth.”

Read Lawler’s full blog post

- Tom McDonald

I recently came across the following article by Hannah Arendt, written late in her life during the 1960s. I felt that she gives here a good expression of the issue. It would not be mere political correctness to say of Hannah Arendt that she is a philosopher of the first rank, and a better critic of the modern age, our science and politics, than Heidegger was. She recognized the import of Heidegger’s diagnosis of the ills of modern existence (as one of his students) while not falling prey to the naive neglect of politics in his philosophy and the terrible choices wound up making in that arena.

Her general view is shaped by the premise that, essentially, all modern philosophy and thought shows evidence of being crippled by an underlying mistake made during the development of British and European Enlightenment thinking in the 17th century. The mistake was the demotion of the classical political sense of reason and rationality, as expressed in Aristotle, for an ideal of universal rationality modeled on modern physical science, the tradition begun by Descartes.

Modeling itself on the physical scientist, modern thought tries to replace everywhere in the problems of the human condition the classical goal of philosophical and political wisdom with the goal of ‘scientific’ techniques, perfectly repeatable methods, and a generally utilitarian, technological attitude. Making matters even worse, the latter goal gets confused with ‘reaching reality’.

In brief: modern, scientistic philosophies (Descartes, Kant, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Dennett) think that people begin alien to reality so therefore need method, procedure, and technique for reaching reality, while post-modern, anti-scientisitc philosophies (Hegel, Heidegger, Arendt, the later Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty) reject that notion as the fatal, false premise of modern thought generally, destining us for skepticism, and instead conceive of methods, techniques, and procedures as ways people change and reorganize their thinking about a reality that thought never was or is essentially apart from. Therefore the modern feels bound to the limitless problem of representation where the post-modern feels free to conceive philosophies as normative expressions of how one should think. (Recent British and American analytical philosophy remains Cartesian and Kantian in this sense, and its repeated failures to establish logically fixed epistemic foundations through a scientific method is a symptom of the disease).

On PEL, Mark is tuned in to this pivotal axis whenever he pauses to check if we are ‘getting it right’ or ‘messing up’ within a particular philosophy. Mark’s phrasing here shows the normative nature of the methods held within a philosophy.

The modern switch of rank in the sense of rationality, demoting the political and promoting the technical-methodical, Arendt recognizes as the disfiguring root of most problems and failures in modern thought and many of the resulting dissatisfactions we feel in everyday modern life.

The question raised is addressed to the layman, not the scientist, and it is inspired by the humanist’s concern with man, as distinguished from the physicist’s concern with the reality of the physical world. To understand physical reality seems to demand not only the renunciation of an anthropocentric or geocentric world view, but also a radical elimination of all anthropomorphic elements and principles, as they arise either from the world given to the five human senses or from the categories inherent in the human mind.

[The scientist] has also been forced to renounce normal language, which even in its most sophisticated conceptual refinements remains inextricably bound to the world of the senses and to our common sense. For the scientist, man is no more than an observer of the universe in its manifold manifestations. The progress of modern science has demonstrated very forcefully to what an extent this observed universe, the infinitely small no less than the infinitely large, escapes not only the coarseness of human sense perception but even the enormously ingenious instruments that have been built for its refinement. The data with which modern physical research is concerned [...] are not phenomena, appearances, strictly speaking, for we meet them nowhere, neither in our everyday world nor in the laboratory; we know of their presence only because they affect our measuring instruments in certain ways. And this effect, in the telling image of Eddington, may “have as much resemblance” to what they are “as a telephone number has to a subscriber.”

Read the article.

-Tom McDonald

In his post on Intelligent Design theory, he gives a brief defense of “transcendental reason,” which he defines as “deciphering the ultimate purpose behind the patterns of things we observe.” In Aristotle’s terminology, this means looking for final causes. Using a slightly different but I think equally secular tack as Thomas Nagel (as discussed at the outset of our quantum physics epsiode), Tom suggests that since naturalism is ultimately unsatisfying–incomplete (Nagel’s rationale for this is clearer in light of his take on philosophy of mind), there’s a future for this transcendental conception of reason. I quote:

But natural science does not give us and cannot give us an empirical explanation of itself, of its own character as a rational social institution, appearing over time, historically. It cannot explain its own rationality as a result of natural mechanisms.

I grant that the transcendental conception of reason with which the cruder proponents of Intelligent Design theory operate may be more flawed and less plausible today than naturalistic instrumentalism at explaining human life, but neither is the instrumental sense of reason adequate to this task. Naturalistic thinkers would be foolish to assume that Intelligent Design theory is simply Biblical Creationism in disguise, denying the possibility that it could draw wider public support among intelligent persons. It can do this by appealing to many such persons across the political spectrum who are frustrated with the dominance of instrumental reason in science, business, and technology, with its reductive understanding of culture, humanistic knowledge, and public institutions.

Read Tom’s post at owlofminerva.org.

-Mark Linsenmayer

In describing Leibniz’s view (which agrees with Plato’s), Malik makes the same jump from the metaphysical to the epistemological that Matt criticized me for in our discussion (the bolding is mine):

Or, as Leibniz asked at the beginning of the 18th century, if it is the case that whatever God thinks, wants or does is good by definition, then “what cause could one have to praise him for what he does if in doing something quite different he would have done equally well?” If, on the other hand, God recognises what is good and promotes it because of its inherent goodness, then goodness must exist independently of God. But God is no longer the source of that goodness, nor do we need to look to God to discover that which is good.

Now, that point didn’t slow down our discussion much, even though Matt pointed out that you could conceive a coherent view by which “the good” is metaphysically distinct from God yet God is the only one who knows it adequately, so we still have to look to scripture or whatnot to get it. I don’t know that such a view would be very attractive to any party. Certainly if you see God’s creation as part of his revelation to us (general revelation as opposed to the special revelation of scripture), then at least the gist of such an important topic for us to know about should be discernible from nature itself: we’re given such gifts as pain and pleasure and moral sentiments and all that. This is why, for Adam Smith, analysis of the human condition leads us to figure out what God commanded, even if mentioning God, for Smith, might turn out on closer examination to be an afterthought to patch up his sketchily conceived metaphysics of morals and to cover himself politically. The important point for him is the epistemological, and I don’t see much evidence that he cares about the metaphysics.

As someone sympathetic to phenomenology, I generally share Smith’s indifference: what’s important for action is how we can know moral truths, and in this way I can compare Plato’s method (self-questioning, trying to tear oneself away from the concrete to come up with coherent underlying principles) to the moral sense theorists’ (also self-questioning, taking ones moral sentiments as the raw data but reflecting on them to come up with a coherent underpinning that will resolve, for example, apparent differences in the sentiments of those in different cultures) and see quite a bit of similarity despite their differences on the metaphysical matters. I was inspired by Matt, though, to better consider the metaphysical question, and I don’t buy Malik’s formulation that accepting Plato’s argument that God’s preferences are non-arbitrary means that there’s a metaphysical divide between God on the one hand a preexistent-to-God “good” on the other hand. That kind of metaphysics to me involves positing two different, near-equally bewildering entities: it seems much worse to me than Plato’s actual metaphysics of the form of the good being supreme and then there being some divine beings who are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and certainly less easy to grasp than the Catholic conception of God I’ve attributed to Swinburne.

So what’s the alternative? If, like Swinburne (and Leibniz), you accept Plato’s argument, then your metaphysics becomes fuzzy: God is in some way responsible for morality, and the laws of logic for that matter, because God is the ultimate ground of everything, but yet we can make a conceptual distinction between the actions/attitudes of God as a personal will on the one hand and His nature as the ultimate ground of everything on the other. If you want to say God has attitudes at all (which is inherent in having a personal conception of God and not Spinoza’s), then you have to say that his attitudes (part of God) are caused by his nature (another part of God), which means that, contra Swinburne, God is not simple after all, but has parts causing other parts. This seems like it’s skirting the edge of to some form of polytheism, but Catholics like Swinburne are certainly no stranger to having to explain away things like that, what with the trinity and all.

I’ve certainly not read enough Swinburne to know how he handles this exactly, but I can imaginatively construct one: Drop the talk of God’s nature providing the grounding of morality (and logic), but insist that nothing else provides this grounding either. Unlike a contingent being of the properties of a contingent being (such as the scientific laws that capture in general how contingent beings behave), a necessary law doesn’t require any grounding. For example, that there is necessary being itself (God) doesn’t need any further explanation, and the laws of logic and basic facts about morality are just necessary in that way.

All of this strikes me as bizarre and unsatisfying, but I’m going to steel myself in 2012 for following Matt’s example and taking these metaphysical issues seriously insofar as doing so is necessary to understand that strain in the history of philosophy.

-Mark Linsenmayer

-Mark Linsenmayer

So, yes, other blogs that take the time to talk about us coherently will probably get a link-back, if you’ve not noticed that before. You may have to send the link directly to me, though, as my narcissistic Googling of our own podcast name has become much less constant of late. Come on, religion bloggers! Give us your take on the dilemma!

-Mark Linsenmayer

Free will is a hot topic in neuroscience these days, especially with experiments leveraging new fMRI imaging techniques in which we can “watch” the brain do its thing. One of those the neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga, interviewed briefly in Scientific American to “explain the new science behind an ancient philosophical question.” Though he wants to claim “the demise of free-will,” he does seem less carelessly strident than some, characterizing the study of free-will as the study of “the nature of action.”

Philosophers, of course, continue to be in on this conversation. Recently in NYTimes’ The Stone, Eddy Nahmias asks, “Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?” The article does a nice job of pointing out common oversimplifications of the problem of free-will, particularly as a dichotomy with determinism.

Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them.

Not too surprisingly, the way out of this all-or-nothing style free-will/determinism discussion relies on being in the messy middle where we have constraints that don’t determine. (Emergence anyone?)

-Dylan

Reality is like a thief in the night (from Owl of Minerva.org)

The analytic philosophy of logical positivism or logical empiricism, which dominated 20th-century Anglo-American scientific thinking, leaves philosophy with a complex and problematic legacy that must be addressed and overcome if we are to have any hope of a renewed, meaningful, philosophically rational realism.

On the one hand, the positivist view of philosophy is deflationary, diminishing and even de-legitimizing the very notion of philosophy.  The idea that philosophy was to become ‘underlaborer to science’, following Lockean empiricism, proved quite popular with scientists and science enthusiasts, and to this day informs the common belief that philosophy can be wholly displaced by empirical investigation on pretty much any question. On the other hand, following the linguistic turn and Thomas Kuhn’s historicist account of science, many disillusioned analytical philosophers have become convinced that their discipline cannot really provide any affirmative, unchanging, principal foundations to scientific thinking. For example, the principles of method and observational verification sounded great until one realized that the principles themselves couldn’t be reached by method nor verified by an empirical observation.

The problem we’re given here is that despite the serious challenges to Whiggish science triumphalism recognized by Kuhnian history of science, the latter has produced only criticisms but no affirmative solutions, and the philosophical tenets of logical positivism continue in fact to provide the ideological and normative principals which inform much thinking about science in the public sphere. So philosophy is still widely granted some limited importance as a form of critical defense by non-positivistic and humanistic areas of thought, but the influence of logical positivism remains strong.  It is evident everywhere someone asserts in the public sphere that empirical investigation functions (in fact or potentially) wholly independently of philosophical considerations.

For example, we often see the positivistic attitude in the ‘God debates’ by enthusiasts of the New Atheism. Sam Harris has said that ‘what we now know in neuroscience shows that there is no free will’. In such statements we can detect the thrill Harris must get from making a big, threatening, macho statement presumably resounding from the bowels of deep science out towards the unscientific public with their silly myths and folk beliefs. This is the sort of attitude the legacy of positivism continues to leave us with. It is clear here that Harris is either philosophically ignorant or uninterested in questioning his own concept of free will, where it derives from, or the question of how it is possible in the first place that a conflict between concept and reality could arise at all. Positivism prevents intelligence from recognizing itself. It is an incredible irony and a mark of philosophical shallowness that Harris and his followers claim the banner of ‘reason’ when their positivism operates with a diminished, instrumental, utilitarian sense of ‘reason’ that is in conflict with their claim to realism.

Check out this site to see the influential metaphysical picture of reality that is the legacy of logical positivism.

Tom McDonald

I can’t resist throwing up a link to this article by Kelly Oliver: “Pet Lovers, Pathologized,” as it hooks into both our moral sense and feminism episodes.

Our inconsistent treatment of animals is one of the key signs that something is wrong with our cultural values. I’ve got a new puppy in the house now, and like any responsible pet owner, I acknowledge a real moral responsibility toward her. It’s very much like having a toddler in the house, and if I really just considered her property or a toy or something, I wouldn’t put up with any of it. But the issue is not just our hypocritical “I love my pets, but they have no moral standing” stance. As Ms. Oliver points out:

The animal rights and animal welfare debates continue to be dominated by discussions of whether and how animals have minds or intentions like we do. This discourse continues to measure animals against human standards in order to judge whether or not they deserve legal rights.

We were pretty dismissive of Peter Singer in our utilitarianism episode because thinking about moral respect for animals in terms of animal rights breaks down: so each animal counts as morally equivalent to a human, including mosquitos? As long as we see morality as a calculation (like the utilitarian), it’s hard to see where animals could fit in (though they’re much better about including them than Kantians: Read about the issue at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Moral sense theory, being not about abstract rules (Churchland was pretty clear on this), better accommodates our reactions towards animals, and provides a good test case for discussing the progressive, transcendent character of a moral sense theory like Smith’s. If our moral sense theory is too literal, i.e. we’re just taking a poll of what people think about animal issues, than we might well have a lot of animal-insensitive people reinforcing the attitudes that Oliver is complaining about in the article. It’s only through an ongoing dialogue that we negotiate toward a social view that a pet lover’s respect for animals is nothing to be ashamed of, and needs to be accommodated in a rational moral framework. This is a case where, invoking Mill’s notion of competent judges, I can confidently say that the pet lover simply has a greater insight than his insensitive opponent. How to best update ethics to give animals their due is complicated, and I’m not confident about the details, but I can say that a human-rights-based approach a la Kant is fundamentally flawed. The point for the moment is that that this kind of deliberation can fit within the moral sense theorist’s project: though ethics is based on an appraisal of our current moral reactions (and our judgments in hindsight about those reactions), the notion of the ideal observer allows us to make use of the ideas of competent judges and social progress.

A bit of background: Kelly taught at U. of Texas when we were there, leading us (Wes and I) through a punishing intro to continental course required for all philosophy grad students, and Seth knew her better than we did. She’s a big-time feminist philosopher (Kristeva and the like), and though I will admit that I did not enjoy her writing or her teaching at the time and was not particularly polite about expressing that, I’ll also happily admit that I was an immature, egostistical boor. Progress is possible!

Prominent in the Wiki article is one of the lesser known among the new atheists, Victor Stenger. The video below shows him talking about this issue. The fine-tuning discussion starts runs from around minutes 16-38. Before getting into the technical details of what fine-tuning amounts to, he first makes the point that if the universe was designed for life, we should expect to see a lot more life in it (less lifeless space and time without intelligent life). We’d also expect more accessible planets to be conducive to life than just Earth (the point being that most of them sure aren’t, and even if there are any, we couldn’t get to them in a lifetime of travel). Neal Degreasse Tyson makes the same point more energetically here.

Watch on YouTube.

The values that allegedly, if different, would prevent life include the speed of light, Planck’s constant, the ratio of electrons to protons, ratio of electromagnetic force to gravity, expansion rate of the universe, mass density of the universe, and the cosmological constant). I’ll let you watch the video for the details of Stenger’s response, but the upshot is that the most important of these constants are self-regulating, meaning they’d approach that rate regardless of where they started. According to Stenger, everything looks exactly as it would if the universe came from nothing.

Personally, I don’t feel comfortable enough with the physics either before or after this lecture either to actually see that there’s a problem and to see that Stenger has solved this for us. I don’t have a sense of the scientific consensus, and Stenger says that some of what he’s saying is still a matter of debate among physicists. In conclusion, I sympathize with Dawkins’s seeming inability to thoroughly describe this problem or what’s wrong with it.

-Mark Linsenmayer

One of his comments was that we didn’t seem to find an argument in Harris to critique. Here’s the argument as I remember it that we were focusing on:

If you suspend your critical faculties and “have faith,” then you open yourself up to believing all sorts of horrific stuff, such as, most importantly to the rest of society, commands to violence.

The general response is, yes, if faith is actually a matter of “I can’t think for myself! Think for me!” then this is a legitimate concern, and no doubt that is exactly the experience of faith in some people. However:

1. Per Kant and William James, faith about matters over which no experiential deconfirmation is even theoretically possible isn’t irrational in this way. Granted, most actual religions are not Kant-friendly in this way (so it’s kind of goofy that we spent so much time on this when that’s not the new atheists’ target for the most part).

2. As a practical matter, people just don’t get brainwashed to the point of violence. Other forces in human motivation tend to step in to curtail violence, and when violence does occur, you generally find that the perpetrator had more things wrong with him than just the religious motivation. Religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for violence… which is not to say that they’re unconnected in all circumstances or that more critical thinking wouldn’t be very helpful in preventing the spread of violence. To the extent that religion is against critical thinking, it’s a detriment to any society.

I think we all (on the podcast) agree that a lot of religion is superstitious nonsense: dubious historical claims, ad hoc explanations for natural phenomena, and in some cases commands that wrongfully override the moral sense of any decent person. Even the most religious person believes that lots of the claims of other religions fall into these categories. Using this case as an example, I think that religion can have a deleterious effect on the critical faculties of even someone smart, conscientious, and striving to be impartial in an investigation.

I think we (meaning Wes vs. me and Dylan at least) have some disagreement among us re. this whole “science itself is a form of faith” response. I don’t buy it at all; particular scientific claims just don’t resist contrary evidence in the way that religious dogmatics do. There is an interesting discussion to be had about Kantian “regulatory principles,” e.g. the principle of causality itself is not one that an experiment proves, but rather is presupposed by all experiments. However, as in the case of quantum mechanics, even this fundamental principle can be questioned as a result of experimentation. None of the new atheists seem inclined to grapple with this issue.

Many arguments about religion have the problem of being intolerably vague: if you argue “all religion is subject to” [some fatal flaw], then I can likely show you a variety of religion that doesn’t have this flaw. I prefer more specific debates: I don’t buy Kierkegaard’s defense of the morality (or rather the moral immunity) of Abraham’s actions (not to mention God’s) in the matter of the near-sacrifice of Issac in “Fear and Trembling.” I don’t buy creationism or the historical accuracy of many Bible stories or spiritual uncleanliness or the power of prayer to affect events in the world or any number of other specific things that this or that religious person may believe. Those specific arguments, though, are more contextualized than many other philosophical debates: you’re arguing against specific people, trying to convince them, or work your way out of some beliefs that have been binding you. Monologues aimed either at straw men or at people not open to rational discourse are not the paradigm of generally engaging philosophy.

Harris’s strategy is not to politically argue against the bad outcomes of some religion (i.e. violence) or the faulty beliefs engendered by gullibility encouraged by religion (e.g. creationism), but to go at faith itself, which he considers the root of the problem. This is politically problematic, as I think we pointed out repeatedly on the episode: it’s not going to convince those who have faith, because you’re essentially calling them stupid, which will close their ears to you.

Instead, we already have routes to political action designed to achieve the same effect available to us: First, act against actual violence and stupid policy (by voting, etc.). Second, enforce separation of church and state; we all admit we’re going to have different opinions about things like abortion, and we really need policies determined based on foundations that more or less all of us can agree on, which are going to be secular ones. Third, try in general (as we do through this podcast) to promote critical thinking, which will not eradicate faith but will help people to be circumspect about their faith, which can lessen the number of unfounded policies that might flow from it. As Dylan repeatedly said on the episode, the goal in a liberal democracy is to figure out how to get people to coexist peacefully with others regardless of their beliefs, not to regulate what people are allowed to think. (Incidentally, I think Dennett presents a better model than Harris in trying to diagnose and bring to light virulent strains in religion and saying something about how religious beliefs form in comparison to other sorts of cultural accretions.)

-Mark Linsenmayer