Last time, I alluded, in a footnote, to an “elsewhere” wherein William Blake clarifies his mind/body dualism position. I have since been cadged by the masses into both clarifying myself and citing my sources. This quote comes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate IV (which I linked to in my previous post, before getting into the guts of the interpretation):
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
You can find the full text of the work here. I think Blake’s position here augments my previous discussion without much need for further explanation and analysis
Alright, perhaps it is not yet an official holiday (is it?), but November 28th is in fact the anniversary of the death of this remarkable British poet-artist. It has been far too long since I added a meaningful post here; I have been working on a number of new things which have simply not allowed me to get back to my examination of Rorty’s large, but so far quite readable, work.
a scene from Blake's series on Dante's Divine Comedy
In the meantime, I have not been dormant. I have taken on a bit of work researching Emmanuel Lévinas. This work has thus far largely been one of data-mining, if you will; little actual reading and interpretation has yet been done, but I have learned or reacquainted myself with the task of journal-finding and sorting. My skills had perhaps become somewhat rusty over the past year, but I also suspect that I had come to expect that my web-searching techniques would work just as well for sorting through piles of academic works. Soon enough, I hope to actually be reading some of these journal articles and books, a task which is understandably more exciting than merely fishing for sources. Since my first experience with Lévinas, I have found some of his ideas to have profoundly altered my perspective, others to seem prima facie contrary to reason, and a number more to simply baffle me. I hope to find more clarity and insight, more explanation for the ostensibly nonsensical, and of course a little footing for the confusing material; of course, I suspect I will just find more material that fits into all three categories.
A number of issues probably made my earlier attempts at following Lévinas’ thought quite difficult, and I suspect that the most salient of these obstacles was my total inexperience with Husserl and Heidegger. I have, since the time of my last writing (over a month ago, it seems) had my first tiny morsels of both of these philosopher’s works. No doubt these little bits are markedly inadequate representations of these two philosophers’ complex perspectives, but I suspect that having a start will help me re-read Lévinas.
In the meantime since my last post, I have also experienced a few more tiny nuggets from philosophers like Michel Foucault, Slavoj Zizek, Roland Barthes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Benedetto Croce, Daniel C. Dennett, Francis Bacon, and perhaps a few others whom I cannot now recall. I suspect, though, that the thinker with the most substantial influence on my thought patterns over the past month has been none other than William Blake. Therefore, I mean to take a moment to relax here at home, treating my Black Friday outside as if it were the terror its name implies, while I discuss a bit of the influence of Blake’s ideas.
My standard disclaimer applies; I am interpreting, but as an interested party with limited experience, rather than as an authoritative scholar. I know little about Blake’s life, and have scanned only a few small works of his, so forgive (and correct, point out, or argue against!) my errors and missteps.
I first became interested in William Blake when studying art history. I was struck instantly by Blake’s unusual forms, style, and color in Elohim Creating Adam. This, as so many of his creations, depicted deeply religious images with aesthetic beauty and a seemingly converse, irrepressibly sheol-ic gloom. I saw in Blake’s approach a sort of algedonic theology, maybe even an aesthetic retort to theodicy. The creation of mankind, as an example, is an admixture of good and evil–at least from the standpoint of mankind today. The work is a manner of showing mankind’s ability to get beyond good and evil (see also), without resorting the irreverent self-righteousness of proverbial Tower of Babel architects.
Elohim Creating Adam by William Blake
Recently I rediscovered William Blake, this time in the genre of poetry. I am not much of a poetry critic, and quite honestly I have not experienced the same degree of aesthetic ekstasis from his writing as from his art. My approach and my interest is in philosophical ideas, a category of thoughts which exist aplenty in these poems.
One thing that struck me immediately when reading Blake was his similarity to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both poets have an ostensibly devout affiliation with some form of Christianity, yet each has a fascination with other world religions. Both adopt a pretty revolutionary form of universalism for their time. Blake’s All Religions are One poem/print/argument indicates his position in the least-obscured manner:
The Argument As the true method of knowledge is experiment
the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences.
This faculty I treat of.
PRINCIPLE 1st That the Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that
the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius.
Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius.
which by the Ancients was call'd an Angel & Spirit & Demon.
PRINCIPLE 2d As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with
the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius
PRINCIPLE 3d No man can think write or speak from his heart, but
he must intend truth. Thus all sects of Philosophy are from the Poetic
Genius adapted to the weaknesses of every individual
PRINCIPLE 4. As none by traveling over known lands can find out
the unknown. So from already acquired knowledge Man could not ac-
quire more. therefore an universal Poetic Genius exists
PRINCIPLE. 5. The Religions of all Nations are derived from each
Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where
call'd the Spirit of Prophecy.
PRINCIPLE 6 The Jewish & Christian Testaments are An original
derivation from the Poetic Genius. this is necessary from the
confined nature of bodily sensation
PRINCIPLE 7th As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various) So
all Religions & as all similars have one source
The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius
(Be sure to see some original prints of this here.)
It looks like we get to do a little metaphysics before we get the theory of religious/spiritual universalism! Blake is pretty clearly setting up a definition of the self/mind, but it is not clear at first whether this coincides with Cartesian mind/body dualism or not. Most readers would agree that, at the very least, Blake’s “poetic genius” plays a similar role to that of the mind in traditional Cartesian dualist models, because it is both the source of basic inner consciousness and the originator of thoughts. I think that the work also implies that the “poetic genius” is also the recipient of experience (or at the very least, revelation); this “poetic genius” can also be said to be a consciousness of as opposed to simple consciousness, and perhaps a force of reasoning, memory, and other trope mental functions.
Blake's Behemoth and Leviathan
However, I think that it is quite unfair say that Blake’s “poetic genius” is simply synonymous with the Cartesian mind; a few important considerations illustrate that this would be an oversimplification. First, even if it is only a matter of emphasis, Blake uses the term “poetic genius” place weight on the role of creativity being at the heart of the human being, rather than our gamut of cognitive functions and perceptions. Blake’s education would have ensured that he knew of the term poet in its original Greek sense; the poet (???????) is not simply “creative” (a term by which we typically indicate “original” thought) but an actual force of creating, a maker. Likewise, the term genius, which to us now implies only high-level cognition, would have been known to Blake also with its Latin connotations; in this case, not simply excellent mental performance, but a sort of spiritual auspice for the individual. Thus the poetic genius is not just a source of unique thought, but an active participating spirit in the world A second consideration to note is the mind/body interaction model supplied by Blake. While it is unclear in this work1 whether the “poetic genius” and our physical bodies are made up of the same metaphysical stuff, Blake is unequivocal in declaring that the outward body is derived from the core, the poetic genius. By then associating the poetic genius with that which “by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon”, Blake could be saying that the poetic genius is the incorporeal “mental” “spirit”, but he could also just mean that people formerly described features of the poetic genius in erroneous ways. The middle-way interpretation which I think yields the most interesting results is that Blake is attempting to get beyond the corporeal/incorporeal distinction at this point. By providing a metaphysical structure which allows not only simple mind/body-like interaction but also posits the excressence of the traditionally material from the stereotypically nonmaterial, Blake critiques this metaphysical distinction.
It is important to observe, though, that Blake still appeals to a metaphysical ideal–that the poetic genius is the “true” man; additionally, he offers another grand metaphysical ideal in the form of the universal poetic genius, which of course has implications for a possible hierarchy of metaphysical relationships between the self-ideal of the poetic genius and inter-poetic genius relationships. Unfortunately, I never managed to get beyond the metaphysics to my main point about correlations between Emerson and Blake on topics like universalism, human creativity, and freedom (and, on reflection I think there’s an interesting correlation to flesh out between Blake and symbolists like Stéphane Mallarmé). Perhaps the point is already becoming clear, but if I get the chance I might make another quick post about this topic. I’ll make no promises this time, though, as that seems a sure-fire way to keep me from completing any post.
By the way, in the last month I have also had the unfortunate experience of rediscovering Librarything.com, a place for bibliophiles such as myself to waste their time online. If you are likewise afflicted, I invite you to look me up there by my username “jxn”.
Blake makes a pretty clear, distinct argument for metaphysical monism elsewhere, but curiously continues to use dualist body/spirit imagery in many other works, perhaps just to confuse folk like myself ↩
When I first read the opening from Hobbes’ Leviathan as an undergraduate, I laughed. I laughed heartily. There was something clearly, and quaintly, absurd about his simple (though perhaps vaguely Rube-Goldberg-esque) chain of mechanistic causal events which for him became the workings of the universe. From Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 1: Of Sense:
The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which
presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediatly,
as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing,
and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other
strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain,
and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure,
or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour
because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this Seeming,
or Fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye,
in a Light, or Colour Figured; To the Eare, in a Sound; To the Nostrill,
in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest
of the body, in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities,
as we discern by Feeling. All which qualities called Sensible,
are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions
of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly. Neither in
us that are pressed, are they anything els, but divers motions;
(for motion, produceth nothing but motion.) But their apparence to
us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming. And as pressing, rubbing,
or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare,
produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce
the same by their strong, though unobserved action
The absurdity, to me, was not merely that Hobbes thought that he had figured out the mechanisms that ruled over our senses and feelings simply by expanding simple principles of interaction of bodies. Rather, I laughed because I thought it was preposterous that Hobbes thought to account for non-physical things, like emotions and mental activity, by means of materialist mumbo-jumbo.
Leviathan, cover from wikimedia.org
Curiously, I was simultaneously quite sincerely open to, if not entirely credulous of, the findings of modern psychological studies which played the exact same role–namely, making the naturalist presumption that those things which seem incorporeal (like thoughts, sensory data, and emotions) could be studied as causes of simple physical interactions observable, for instance, by means tools like nMRI. Modern naturalist science (I’m convinced that naturalism is not in any way definitional of science, but rather a mere ubiquitous presumption of modern scientists and the in-vogue scientific paradigms) simply has a more complex version of Hobbes’ materialism. Rather than simply positing that something “preseth on the eye”, biologists a conception of our senses as the products of a complex of chemical and physical interactions which can all be reduced, theoretically, to a naturalistic incarnation of particle physics.
Each of these two perspectives–Hobbesian materialism and modern naturalist science–has issues with the classical Cartesian mind/body dualism. What I considered incredible in the Hobbesian perspective, I should recall, is not the given dualism ” between two sorts of ‘stuff’, material and immaterial” (as Rorty calls it), but was once an idea marked more by its novelty than its broad acceptance. With what reasons did dualism replace materialism as the dominant metaphysical structural assumption? Certainly a number of enticing dualist metaphysical systems exist, and we might have good reason/s–logical or practical–to accept any of these. I am not convinced that this dualism is essentially reasonable (or for that matter, if it is, that it is reasonable that we should assume that the non-material side of this dualism should have laws similar to our empirically-derived laws for the natural world); I am likewise not convinced that the material dualism has any cogent appeal over metaphysical tri-ism, quad-ism, or infinit-isms (do metaphysicians have terms for these?), other than theoretical parsimony.
Rorty speaketh
Richard Rorty opens Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Chapter 1 with this to say about dualism:
Discussions in the philosophy of mind usually start off by assuming that everybody has always known how to divide the world into the mental and the physical–that this distinction is common-sensical and intuitive, even if that between two sorts of “stuff”, material and immaterial, is philosophical and baffling”
While I don’t think that this position is completely fair or accurate, Rorty’s point is well-made. If we need a dozen or more metaphysical systems for bridging that “between” in the mind/body dualism–epiphenominalism, parallelism, occasionalism, and their ilk–and the whole dualist project is so difficult for us to fine-tune, what makes this dualism seem so obvious? I suspect Rorty is not just being eristic when he implies that its our dogmatic entrenchment which makes this dualism seem natural, not some objectively-apparent metaphysical substructure. This dogmatic entrenchment, I think, is what made Hobbes’ materialist metaphysics seem so quaint and rediculous; meanwhile, my dogmatic entrenchment in the authority of modern scientific findings allowed me to provisionally accept a sort of materialist perspective. Perhaps it is unfair of me to so readily accept one while simultaneously poo-poo-ing the other.
I enjoy Rorty’s criticism of this dualism, but I think my position is still largely gauche to his. We should not ignore the predominant metaphysical assumption of dualism–nor, conversely, the metaphysical (or physical) presumption of monism/materialism (or other metaphysical -isms). We simply ought to be aware of, but not necessarily strictly opposed to, our dogmatic assumptions. Likewise, we should take note when our various presumptions do not jibe well. Do we assume dualism, yet affirm the findings of research that presumes or requires monism? If so, is it merely the result of the brute cultural force of one over the other, or are there good reasons for believing both? Certainly we might simply mean “monism” and “dualism” in different ways. Dualisms, of course, may be distinctions between “subtances”, “properties”, or “predicates”, among other things; or perhaps it is fair of us to utilize dualist assumptions in a monist reality or monist assumptions in a dualist reality, if they get us the practical results we desire in some parsimonious way in some areas. In the same way that we still utilize Newton’s laws for some gravity calculations, despite the existence of more precise post-Einstein calculations, it may simply be the best to use one or the other as a tool. By this point you surely have figured out that this is my pragmatic proposition for an approach to metaphysics; It is my belief that a “dualism assumption awareness” campaign is much more likely to give us the results we desire than a “dualist-smashing” campaign which it seems to me Rorty is using to get us to agree to presume materialism for pragmatic purposes (corrections/comments greatly appreciated!).
Having now crossed the introductory threshold into Rorty’s work, a few general notions have struck me. The first is that it seems to me that Rorty, despite having a varied set of philosophical positions as a youth (assuming his autobiography is correct) and during his early philosophical career, held a remarkably stable philosophical position from the writing of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature through the end of his life. Waggish thinks that you can sort Rorty’s positions into three categories: analytic, decontsructionist, and liberal populist (see Richard Rorty, 1931-2007). So far, I disagree. Yes, there are thematic differences in Rorty’s works. It may also be true that pre-Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature-Rorty is a code-cracking (as Rorty calls himself) analytic philosopher with little to foreshadow his later anti-foundationalism aside from a caustic devil-may-care style of criticism.
However, Rorty’s topical differences, which even Waggish says exist simultaneously, hardly come off as differences in philosophical perspective. If Rorty, who at this point in the work is wearing his goals and influences on his sleeve, is being honest about where this book is going and how it is getting there, the only foreseeable potential for change from 1979 to 2000 would be mere nuance. Of course, this conclusion is both tentative and flippant, based on a few pages from a handful of varied books written decades apart.
Summary
To return to the content of the introduction itself, Rorty begins with a small gift–a brickbat for modern philosophy. Philosophers since Kant, he claims, like to think of themselves as having access to the timeless problems and the timeless answers (or search for answers) that serve as the basis for all other human knowledge (and, I suspect he would be willing to agree, founds not only metaphysics/epistemology, but also ethics and now “meaning” as well). We owe this foundationalism/arrogance, he states matter-of-factly, to John Locke’s ” ‘theory of knowledge’ based on an understanding of ‘mental processes’ ” as well as to Descartes’ conception of “the mind” as a distinct, process-like intangible. From that point, the role of philosophy was developed into a “tribunal of pure reason, upholding or denying the claims of the rust of culture” with the assumption that philosophers had access to foundational mind/process upon which all of the rest of human knowledge is contingent. Most of the grunt work here was done by Kant, but the job was not finished until neo-Kantians so embedded this foundationalism that ” ‘philosophy’ became, for the intellectuals, a substitute for religion.”
Many philosophers undermined this position. Many, like William James and Nietzsche, were simply ignored or marginalized. Eventually, though, criticisms became too great, and the works of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey, for instance, have helped erode the authority and faith in philosophical foundationalism. While many–notably Husserl and Russell–have attempted to re-foundationalize philosophy, Rorty seems to think that philosophy is ineluctably bound to be demoted from its position as high-meta-priest of knowledge and culture, certainly with his help.
Rorty promises to try to convince his readers not to think of philosophy as a means of obtaining objective truth (a mirror of nature); we ought to ditch our Greek/Cartesian dualisms, embrace a mildly Kuhnian historicism and a Deweyian conception of truth, and move on.
Discussion
So, are Rorty’s charges of philosophical foundational arrogance fair? Anecdotally, I have found many of the philosophers whom I have met to be among the most humble, despite being among the most intelligent, of people with whom I have associated in general. As a student of philosophy, I suspect that I’m prone to awarding philosophy that arrogant prize that Rorty wants to take away–the claim to holding, if not the answers that provide universal foundational knowledge, the meaningful questions that humans desire, or should desire, to ask.
If this is all that Rorty is getting at, his assessment seems somewhat fair. I would add, however, that in modernity philosophy is not the only field which makes claims of this sort. Religion, and theological studies, often make claims or seek objective meaning, objective ends, foundational understanding of truth, a method of prioritizing which places religion or religious belief or religious ethics or religious questions at the foundation of human existence. Psychology, likewise, has claims to begin at the foundation of knowledge, the human mind itself. Do not biology and biochemistry seek the same foundational understanding? Don’t astronomers look for clues which they hope would give us foundational understanding of life and meaning? Would not particle physicists claim that all these other pursuits are dependent upon their foundational knowledge? Even in the humanities and social sciences–sociology, rhetoric, anthropology, history–it seems to me that some incarnation of claims to foundational access to knowledge, meaning, or importance are made. Perhaps few or none of these claims have the same sort of epistemic or metaphysical bent to them, but I reckon that each is guilty of its claims to arrogance in its own way–perhaps moreso the product of the values of those entering these fields than by virtue of the unified claims of the field in general.
However, if perhaps only for historical and cultural reasons, the field of philosophy may be just a bit more chauvinistic than other areas of study. Certainly after having been the apex of renaissance humanism’s educational hierarchy, after having been Boethius’s consolation, and having been the salient intellectual perspective enduring since the supposed Greco-Roman founding of Western Civilization, Philosophy may yet have a little humility due it. Rorty thinks philosophers might need to quit calling their questions and answers eternal; we should recognize that philosophy as time and culture bound as the hard sciences. Yale’s Anthony T. Kronman argues, in Education’s End ([amazonify]0300143141::text::::sold here[/amazonify]), that philosophy and the rest of the so-called humanities are simply the last fields of study to be brought under the research ideal; perhaps an eventual full incorporation into this ideal (which neither I nor Kronman support) would give philosophy that historicist humility which has so far escaped so many philosophers still seeking to write that “last book”.
The “Cash Value” of my reading
I certainly think that Rorty’s criticisms are worth bearing in mind. Perhaps I am guilty of being too-far embedded in the goals, practice, and culture of philosophy, but I think it is better that we meet Rorty only half way. His historicist and antifoundationalist positions ought to be recognized and ought to strongly discourage us from believing in the permanence of any philosophical questions and/or answers. However, I do not think that this means we should not still attempt or cannot ever achieve the kind of permanence or foundationalism that Rorty rails against. While philosophy may seem old, I argue that is quite young. Even if you claim that what we today call philosophy is the same animal that arose in Ancient Greece; or perhaps when Gilgamesh first contemplates his mortality; or perhaps the first time the first person “desired to know”, humans are a young species on a young planet with heck of a lot of learning yet to do. Writing off foundationalism at this youthful stage of our development is, if nothing else, closing a giant door to inquiry. Yes, Rorty, philosophers do not seem anywhere close to coming up with foundational answers, but leave us, please, our foundational questions and let us cavil a bit about them just in case.
image courtesy of princeton press; apparently only aesthetic philosophers get pretty covers
In my attempt to learn a bit more from some “post”-analyitic philosophers, I’ve decided to begin by revisiting Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature ([amazonify]0691020167::text::::sold here[/amazonify]). I rather regret going back to this text before having had direct experience with the work of Heidegger in particular, but I am also displeased that I have yet to read any substantial works from Wilfrid Sellars, David Donaldson, Rudolph Carnap and W.V.O. Quine. However, I suspect that I will be aided by the fact that I have ventured at least gotten my feet wet in exploring John Dewey, Hans Gadamer, Richard J. Bernstein, Quine, and Wittgenstein since i first rushed through parts of Rorty’s work two years ago.
I have chosen to start with Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature for a number of reasons. First, it seems to me something of a seminal work–for Rorty, for philosophy internally, and about philosophy from an external perspective. Rorty’s criticisms are, if I remember well and if my sources are accurate, poignant, reflective, but not pleasing to the ears of most philosophers. As such, he cannot be ignored. Either Rorty’s harsh words are valid and philosophy must reform itself in some dramatic ways or philosophers must make a cogent rejoinder. Since the writing of Rorty’s book, I suspect both have been done with countless subtle incarnations of each, and perhaps some not so subtle.
I have also selected this work for pragmatic reasons, because I think it represents a noteworthy pastiche of early Neopragmatist/postanalytic philosophers’ works (namely Quine, Sellars, and Davidson), as well as those of some of their influences (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and to some extent Dewey). Furthermore, there is a marked lack of analytic tradition philosopherss in my formal education in philosophy–a deficiency which I hope to allay at least to some degree by reading this work. Finally, I have selected Rorty’s text over those of his peers because the philosophical exploration that I have just begun was encouraged by epistemological criticisms of Rorty’s later work–work which is foreshadowed very strongly in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
(If you came from facebook, click on the “view original post” link to see animations and formatting, the article’s much prettier that way. If you were invited, it’s because I thought you might enjoy a little joyful reminder of the pragmatism you once studied. peace.)
No doubt that one of the most salient sources of the flak that philosophers receive from others is that they are willing to engage in serious discussion about otherwise seemingly worthless minutiae–apparently that includes pragmatists, too. However, when I happened again upon this piece by William James, I simply could not keep myself from asking a few hair-splitting questions.
From William James What Pragmatism Means: Lecture II [1909]
Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel – a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Every one had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: “Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other.”
While I appreciate James’ attempt to illustrate pragmatism by example in this case, I think this is a great opportunity to nitpick a bit, hopefully to better elucidate the meaning and uses of pragmatism.
I have a few outstanding criticisms of James’ use of this story above. First, I am not confident that when James says “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel” [emphasis mine], that the word practically brings any additional meaning its sentence, given the assumption that the rest of James’ paragraph is the explanation of what might be meant practically. In other words, James might just as well have said that it “depends on what you mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel”, because there is no difference in meaning between the two sentences. When William James goes on to describe the two potential definitions for “going round”, he supplies definitions which do not really touch on the pragmatic nature of the situation. Each definition is, it seems to me*, metaphysical–as is the question of going round the squirrel (*for the sake of simplicity, I’m proposing a metaphysical v. pragmatic dichotomy here, let’s not bring language/psychology/etc. into the equation).
This is not to say, however, that a pragmatic distinction cannot be made for this metaphysical squirrel question. Indeed, it seems to me that a clarification drawn between what our squirrel-watching friends “mean” and what they “practically mean” might help us get a better grasp on pragmatism, if we can simply get away from the positions James offers us.
I will begin by examining James’ two potential definitions for “going round” the squirrel.
“Going Round”
First, James says one approach is to claim that going round said squirrel means “being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again”. My complaint with this description is that it does not satisfy what we expect when we say “going round”; to illustrate this, I’ve composed a little animation (go easy on me, it’s my first attempt ever) which shows a man–William James himself, actually– “going round a squirrel” by this definition:
apposite version of James going round a squirrel
I suspect most people will agree that this does not really illustrate what we mean when we say “going round”; therefore, James’ apposite approach to defining the motion is unsuccessful. I should say that there are other options for satisfying the conditions of this apposite definition, but they are more difficult to animate.
Now on to the directional approach to defining “going round”. I have made another animation in a like manner to illustrate a scenario that falls within the bounds of James description “passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again”:
directional version of James going round a squirrel
Again, I think most of us will agree that this is not what is meant by going round, and, again, this is only one animation of a number of possible configurations.
So…what’s the point?
My intent, here, was not merely to disapprove of William James’ options for defining a man going round a squirrel. Rather, it is to question whether merely defining things in simple relations to each other–and abstracted from the reality of motives and consequences–presents us with metaphysical answers, not pragmatic answers (pragmatic in both the sense of philosophy and of practical use).
My alternative approach, and one which seems to me more indicative of the goals of pragmatism (please correct me if I am wrong), is that the definition of “going round” can be precise, but it must be fluid depending on our ends, our experiences and knowledge, and the prospective consequences of the ends and knowledge which we bring to the table. I’ll attempt to make this clearer with a quick and dirty example.
A truly pragmatic distinction in meaning requires application. In this sense, we might need not only to “go round the squirrel”, but to “go round the squirrel for [some reason] “. For example, if I ask you to go round the squirrel to get a full-view 3D picture for mapping into a computer, and you keep chasing the squirrel around with the camera, but can only ever get the little beast to show its belly to you, then you might rightly tell me “I simply could not get round the squirrel to get those pictures”. Yet if your task was merely to go round the squirrel to set up pylon cameras to get those same images, you might rightly explain to me that you were able to go round the squirrel in order to complete this task, though in this case you never beheld the rodent’s dorsal side. In these cases, the definition is formed through the situation and its consequences; there appears to be a real cash value (on the converse, what does James’ situational and definitional distinction get for us? Perhaps we receive nothing, if we have no interest vested in either consequence).
Perhaps, then, the difference between what we mean and practically mean might not be a difference in denotation. What I mean by going round the squirrel might be confined to a simple definition, but what I practically mean in the given example is that the act of “going round the squirrel” is an act the whose completion belongs to the category of things required in order for me to accomplish my end goal, one of the things which would get me closer to obtaining the cash-value of the 3D computer image of said squirrel.
So much for getting back into the habit of “blogging”. So much, also, for the promises of new reviews, thoughts, comments, and readings. I have not, of late, had quite the slew of time for which I had hoped, and that which I have been afforded was spent in ways previously unanticipated. What I have accomplished thought, is some work on a new piece of “software”–a little mysql/php-based teaching application, inspired by the illustrious pauker, and based loosely on the same Leitner cardfile method, but more adapted to my needs as a student more readily prone to a Deweyian process of education than the tedium of memorization.
In other news, I have actually begun my reviews of the Dead Science album and Appiah’s book, but both are incomplete. My venture into Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding has also begun, but I may set it aside now that I have acquired a few new postanalytical philosophy works. Critchley was not uninformative. Though the first 20 pages or so of his work it seemed to me held nothing particularly cogent except that which was a mere reformulation of Levinas, it seemed to simply be an attempt to come to terms in order to make a clearer point later in the work, and I will be eager to later resume my reading of Infinitely Demanding. However, I have an alluring idea for a sustained study of postanalytic philosophy. If this study bears any fruit, I will describe it later.
I’ve decided that a couple of things that I’ve recently read and heard deserve a good review. I eventually hope to put up somewhat in-depth reviews of Anthony T. Kronman’s book Education’s End, an actual review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics, and The Dead Science’s latest album Villainaire. If I get enough time (not likely) I’d like to eventually compose some reviews for a few other records and readings that I completed this summer, particularly the readings on Eastern religions, terrorism, a few things from Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. If, for some strange, new, and unforseen reason, I am allowed any time aside from my studies, I would also be eager to put up a few mentions that I have on some recently discovered films and albums, of which Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and recordings from The Azusa Plane and Randy Grief come immediately to mind.
While I am at it, I might start posting a few random things on the progression of my thoughts and ideas in general, as that was one of the original bases for my posting here.
I am going to attempt to read from a little collection of Quine papers, and I shall hopefully soon make some headway in the Simon Critchley book, Infinitely Demanding, on which I just got my hands.
I’ve finished preparing my “summary” of Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s [amazonify]0674026098::text::::Experiments in Ethics[/amazonify]. I ended up deviating a bit too much to call my work a real summary, but I think many of the points will make for useful discussion. A lot of material has been intentionally left out, particularly after the situational examples illustrated, because I would like to see how the existing points play out in discussion. My article can be found here, and there is room for discussion of the article or topic in general here, if you feel so inclined.
I’ve begun constructing a brief summary of Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s [amazonify]0674026098::text::::Experiments in Ethics[/amazonify] for next week’s philosophy club meeting. I intend to focus on three main concepts, beginning with the assumption of virtue ethics, moving through the challenges of situationist ethics, and ultimately applying a hybrid of those two concerns to the situations provided by the book. I intend to include a bit of my own interpretations and examples. It is clear that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics have a great relevance here, but I am looking for a bit more information on the psychological side of things, perhaps I’ll see if William James had something to contribute here.
