On Perspectivism, Science, and the Affects in Nietzsche

In this essay I am going to critically discuss Nietzsche’s account of perspectivism, defending Brian Leiter’s rejection of what has come to be known as the received view. With his interpretation in view I aim to unearth an example of perspectival interpretation embedded in the last part of the Genealogy of Morals (henceforth ‘GM’). To this end I hope to go some way towards answering the question of what Nietzsche means when he speaks of perspectives and consequently how he understands interpretation.

The place which we find Nietzsche’s most explicit account of perspectivism is found in the GM section 12. In it he denounces the idea of a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless, knowing subject” insisting that it is in fact unintelligible to imagine a knowing being having a nature of that kind. For Nietzsche, the separation of the will and the intellect amounts to the latter’s castration. At the section’s close he asserts the priority of knowing grounded in an active interpretive engagement with the world organised from within a perspective and insists that such perspectival knowing is the only kind of knowing.

Nietzsche’s comments are, unfortunately, very brief and so a plentiful horizon of interpretive possibilities has been opened up trying to get clear on what Nietzsche means when he talks of perspectives and interpretation. The “received view” has it that perspectivism amounts to the following claims: the world has no determinate nature, our models of the world are necessarily in error (no interpretation has a definite state of affairs to correspond to), and as a result no ‘mere’ interpretation is any better than another.[1] The evidence for this interpretation is found throughout Nietzsche’s work, in his denial of an absolutely knowable reality,[2] his challenging of the value of truth,[3] and his insistence that all understanding is interpretation.[4]

Treating all of these issues would take us beyond the remit of the current paper, however presenting some interpretive evidence against the received view (henceforth ‘RV’) will be necessary in support of the present claim. The aspect of Leiter’s interpretation which is significant in the context of the present essay is his emphasis on passages where Nietzsche can be seen speaking of a certain privileged mode of access to reality. The idea is that if Nietzsche’s mature philosophy does contain a notion of epistemic privilege then the RV (which asserts priority over no view) will simply be at odds with Nietzsche’s other mature views, rendering the interpretation inconsistent.[5]

Throughout his later work we often see Nietzsche rejecting ‘spiritual’ or metaphysical interpretations of matters in favour of naturalistic or physiological accounts. At the end of GM I he in fact offers a sort of challenge to academia, to involve physiologists and physicians in developing the history of moral concepts. He writes that “all ‘Thou shalts’ […] require physiological investigation and interpretation prior to psychological examination".[6] Elsewhere, Nietzsche describes the possible physiological grounds of ressentiment as “excessive secretion from the gall-bladder”, “deficiency of sulphuric or phosphoric potash in the blood”, and “poor circulation in the lower body”, among others.[7] Yet more revealingly he even says that “if one cannot deal with ‘spiritual suffering’ […] this is not the fault of his ‘spirit’; but more probably that of his stomach” and “if he cannot ‘deal’ with an experience, then this kind of indigestion is as much a matter of physiology as the other kind".[8]

Similarly, in Twilight of the Idols (henceforth ‘TI’) Nietzsche describes a fundamental error of morality and religion in their conflation of cause and effect.[9] Morality and religion err by prescribing a way to live and insisting that following it will grant happiness. Nietzsche instead holds that “one can experience hope because the physiological basic feeling is once more strong and ample".[10] This reversal means that the state of the body provides the condition of possibility for feeling ill or well, but Nietzsche’s whole claim is even stronger than this. He seems to want to tell us that a good constitution necessarily causes someone to perform certain acts (they must, he writes) and refrain from others, contra the religious/moral view that happiness actually results from such acts of faith, charity, and hope themselves.[11] Nietzsche here explicitly denounces moral and religious interpretations as translation into a "false dialect".[12]

The difficulty the RV faces is translating Nietzsche’s talk of falsehoods, errors, and the priority of physiological interpretation into the sorts of radically sceptical terms it must couch him in. If one interpretation cannot be better than another, why does Nietzsche quite obviously prefer to emphasise physiological phenomena in his discussions of morality? Leiter offers two ways a proponent of the RV might respond to this challenge, the most promising of which is denying that Nietzsche grants epistemic privilege to naturalistic and physiological interpretations. On this view Nietzsche favours an interpretation on the basis of its pragmatic value where endorsement emerges not of a relationship to truth but out of its contribution to living well. Certainly in his notebooks he describes every interpretation as “a symptom of growth or decline"[13] which would seem to suggest a mode of evaluation apart from epistemic concerns.

The problem is that if the world has no determinate structure then how could it be that moral and religious interpretations translate somatic phenomena into a false dialect? In order for something to be falsified there must be a discrepancy between the way in which it is and the way in which it has been presented. This simply doesn’t make any sense under the RV which has it that, owing to its lack of a determinate structure, any interpretation of the world is as good as another. Further supporting passages are provided by Leiter, indicating where Nietzsche denounces morality and religion for their lack of contact with reality[14] and where he stresses that the phenomenal world is the only demonstrable world.[15][16] The consequence of this view is that it devalues transcendental interpretations such as religion, morality, and metaphysics. Furthermore, as Nietzsche is here explicitly praising a mode of access to reality it seems the most obvious way of understanding his rejection is epistemic and not pragmatic.

Leiter makes use of the following analogy provided by Frithjof Bergmann to make this interpretation of Nietzsche clear.[17] On any given map there is represented a series of data representing a landscape of some sort. Depending on the concernful perspective which gives the map its meaning (is it for navigation? for finding treasure? is it a map of geological phenomena?) certain elements of the world become salient and are represented on the map. If you want to get from Leeds to London the same map a geologist might use to predict the whereabouts of a given mineral won’t be of use. You need a map with roads on it, not geological formations. The roads and geological formations are both there in the world, though not always represented on the same map, maps being as they are informed by a set of active concerns (what the map is for).

So it is with interpretation, certain aspects of the world become salient relative to one’s concernful perspective. There are infinitely various elements we can include on a map, though only a few of those are relevant to our concerns. The possibility remains that some maps are false in that they do not describe the landscape at all. Critically, as Christopher Janaway points out, the idea of an “absolute” map which excluded nothing is absurd, yet, contra the RV, it doesn’t follow that the maps we do have don’t describe the world in any way.[18]

Now, it would be hasty to call this matter settled though we have at least now provided sufficient textual evidence to demonstrate the plausibility of Leiter’s claim against the RV. It seems like Nietzsche does value certain interpretations over others, and that he does so on epistemic grounds. But in order to get clearer on what Nietzsche actually means by “interpretation” and how he imagines a perspective we will look at the example of science to which he devotes a considerable amount of time to in the GM. We’ll see what he has to say about the perspective from which science emerges and then trace the type of interpretation such a perspective gives rise to.

Nietzsche claims that there is no such thing as a science without presuppositions[19] and controversially accuses science of being supported by a mode of the ascetic denial of sensuality.[20] He holds that scientists are moved by a will to conceal their suffering which emerges “from a lack of any great love”. He describes them as “insensate men who fear one thing only: being brought to consciousnes..."[21] This ascetic basis results in the scientific emphasis on disinterested contemplation, something which Nietzsche himself rejects.[22] There are obvious affinities here between the suffering of the scientist from a lack of ideals and the suffering of the poorly-constituted, treated in GM II, both of whom, for Nietzsche, seek refuge in the denial of sensuality[23] and the denial of their perspectival characters.[24]

Now, Leiter quotes Nietzsche as saying that the physicist’s interpretation of the world is a “perversion of meaning” and a “bad mode of interpretation".[25] In GM I Nietzsche presents his initial comments on the character of the scientist. The “English Psychologists” mentioned here seek the driving force of human life “in the very place the intellectual pride of man would least wish to find it” – in a “blind arbitrariness of a mechanistic chain of ideas” or “in something purely passive, automatic, reflex-like, molecular, and fundamentally stupid".[26] In a late notebook entry Nietzsche openly challenges the mechanistic notion that calculability grants comprehension, and taking the example of a piece of music he asks how much has been understood when its calculable aspects are translated into the formalism of mathematics.[27]

Nietzsche’s dim view of scientific reductionism is obvious, but crucially (and in line with Leiter’s interpretation) he does not insist that the interpretation offered by scientists is untrue. In fact, Nietzsche asserts that there remain a lot of useful things for science to pursue, and even remarks that the work of scientists brings him pleasure.[28] His repeated emphasis on physiology too reveals his support of science, however ambivalent that support may be - so why it that the physicist’s mechanistic view is a bad mode of interpretation?

Nietzsche’s selection of a piece of music to demonstrate the wrongs of reductionism is incredibly astute. Quite clearly, when one reduces a piece of music down to its calculable formal aspects much of the piece is stripped away. Merely considering a list of calculable facts is an entirely different manner of approach to listening to the music and being moved by it. What is reduced in a mechanistic interpretation is the character of a thing as it is when it’s experienced. What makes his example so clever is that music has an essentially affective import so that science’s “cooling of the feelings"[29] is made particularly obvious when given in contrast to it.

It might be true that a piece of music has this or that calculable structure[30] but it is simply erroneous to imagine this disinterested perspective as the only or most fundamental way of understanding the music. One way of discovering things about the piece is to listen to it and be involved with it first-hand, it is quite another to reduce it to its formal calculable elements for the sake of study. We’re already familiar with Nietzsche’s strong emphasis on first-hand phenomenal experience. However, what might seem a strange is that he seems to be referring to something other than science when he gives deference to phenomenal experience. In fact he even goes so far as to say that science concerns itself with a world other than the phenomenal world.[31] Indeed the object of physics is no longer even the object of experience considered in its primary qualities but the ideal formalism of mathematics.[32]

What the foregoing demonstrates is how a perspective, a will, effects an interpretation of the world. If Nietzsche’s analysis of the character of the scientist is correct, science’s inclination towards discovering facts of a certain formal, ideal character by means of disinterested contemplation emerges from a denial of sensuality. What thus becomes salient in this interpretation of the world are precisely those sorts of facts, and affectivity, sensuality, and so on are demoted to a lower rank ontologically.

- Jordan Adshead (February 2012)

Bibliography

Heidegger, M. (2009). The Question Concerning Technology. In M. Heidegger, Basic Writings (pp. 307-343). Routledge.

Janaway, C. (2007). Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy. Oxford University Press.

Leiter, B. (1994). Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. In R. Schacht, Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (pp. 334-357). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will To Power. Vintage Books.

Nietzsche, F. (2003). Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Penguin Books.

Nietzsche, F. (2008). On The Genealogy of Morals. Oxford University Press.

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[1] Leiter (1994), p. 334

[2] GM III, 12

[3] GM III, 24

[4] WP 481

[5] Leiter (1994), pp. 336-338

[6] GM I, 17

[7] GM III, 15

[8] GM III, 16

[9] TI VI, 1

[10] TI VI, 6 (emphasis added)

[11] TI VI, 2

[12] TI VI, 6

[13] WP 600

[14] The Anti-Christ (‘A’), 15

[15] TI III, 6

[16] TI IV

[17] Leiter (1994), p. 356

[18] Janaway (2007), p. 204

[19] GM III, 24

[20] Ibid.

[21] GM III, 23

[22] GM III, 12

[23] GM III, 25

[24] GM III, 24

[25] Beyond Good and Evil (‘BGE’), 22

[26] GM I, 1

[27] WP 624

[28] GM III, 23

[29] GM III, 25

[30] In Bergmann’s terms, it is an aspect owning the possibility of being represented on a ‘map’, but it is not an absolutely complete map in itself.

[31] GM III, 24

[32] Heidegger (2009), pp. 326-328

Existence & Computational Creativity

In this paper we are going to be looking at computational models of creativity. Computational models are generally applied in two different projects, in understanding human creativity and in producing machine creativity.[1] The idea that computational models can take us some way towards explaining human artistic creativity is not uncontroversial. In this paper I will be looking at reasons to think that computational models are inadequate to map what is essential to artistic creativity but that they have important explanatory value nonetheless.

Before we can begin a definition of creativity will be necessary. There is broad consensus in the field on two necessary conditions of creativity which is thus defined as a faculty for producing (1) original and (2) valuable things.[2] So with a rough idea of the minimal basis for creativity we can better see what forms creativity can take. Margaret Boden identifies three such modes; combinational, exploratory, and transformational.[3] Combinational creativity involves making original and valuable connections between things which haven’t been made before, as with metaphor or analogy. The exploratory and transformational forms require more elaboration.

In order to understand what exploratory and transformational creativity are we have to first know what a conceptual space is. Boden characterises a conceptual space as a “structured style of thought” which does not originate in the individual’s mind but is rather picked up from their cultural or extra-cultural environment.[4] To take a modern example, dubstep music focuses on syncopated rhythm structures, sub-bass frequencies, minimalism, little or no vocals, and largely minor key melodies. These sensibilities constitute the “conceptual space” within which the music is created. The creation of a dubstep track constitutes exploratory creativity, i.e. the creation of new things from within the conceptual space which exhibit its general sensibilities.

However, this conceptual space wasn’t simply “given” - it had to have come from somewhere. Around the late 90’s the then popular 2-step garage began to transform into “dark garage” and then into what became known as dubstep. The syncopated rhythm structures of 2-step were assumed and coupled with elements from dub music, resulting in a focus on sub-bass, lack of vocals, and minimalism (hence the name “dubstep”). This constitutes transformational creativity as the conceptual space itself is transformed opening up the possibility of creating music within a new space under new sensibilities, music which could not have been created before the transformation.

Boden’s claim that exploratory-transformational creativity (henceforth “ET-creativity”) is measured according to a conceptual space gives us a great way of evaluating a given non-combinational creative act. The above example shows that her model of ET-creativity can successfully be applied to at least some real world cases, and we can easily imagine others to which it would fit. Furthermore, combination and the exploration/transformation of conceptual spaces can be mapped by computational models, a fact which gives Boden reason to think that such models are able to help us explain creativity. Many attempts have been made to create computer programs which help us understand creativity and a few are even able to demonstrate some form of transformational creativity.[5]

In the following I will present reasons to think that computational models may not be able to help us adequately understand creativity and certainly not to emulate it, but I do not mean to claim that computer programs can’t model any aspect of creativity at all. Insofar as certain parts of the creative process involve deduction, the use of heuristics, and other computable operations it would be a mistake to insist that computer models can’t map these aspects of creativity. The claim is simply that what is essential to artistic creativity may not exhibit a formal computational structure.

Now, an additional condition of creativity offered by Berys Gaut is that a creative act must demonstrate understanding. The intuition is that if an act did not emerge from deliberate intentionality then that act cannot be called creative. Gaut’s example is of tectonic forces creating diamonds, a case which clearly satisfies the originality and value clauses but which we’re reluctant to call a creative act.[6] We hesitate to call this creative because it doesn’t involve agency, but as Gaut points out not just any old type of agency will do. If we were to spill paints on a canvas accidentally and it resulted in a nice looking piece we still wouldn’t think of it as a creative act as it did not involve the deliberate application of skill.[7] If it turns out that computer programs cannot understand the ends to which they are set, on Gaut’s definition they cannot be said to be creative. But this only suggests that computer programs can’t truly emulate artistic creativity - the question remains as to whether they can at least help us explain creativity in some way.

An account of human intelligence offered by Hubert Dreyfus claims that our ability to understand things depends upon our concernful, active way of existing.[8] Dreyfus became infamous in 1964 for predicting that computer programs attempting to create machine intelligence would run into trouble when they tried to represent more intuitive forms of understanding.[9] Around the mid 1970’s difficulties encountered by information processing computer models led AI researchers to believe that our cognitive information processing capacities in fact operate upon such an intuitive background understanding, a predicament which became known as the “common sense knowledge problem".[10]

The goal, then, was to represent this common sense understanding in a computer model. When the task of representing the whole of common sense knowledge began to look overbearing, AI researchers created something called a “micro-world” to make the task more manageable.[11] A micro-world is an isolated aspect of human discourse, like being able to understand a story, follow instructions for moving blocks, or indeed be creative. The assumption behind micro-worlds is that fewer common sense primitives will be required in order to generate results, given that we’re only emulating one aspect of human discourse at a time. Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert consider the common sense primitives a computational model would need to understand a simple natural language statement offering a trade. The list includes temporal categories (to grasp that you have an item presently and in future may have another in exchange for it), values (to grasp that the item you have may be better, worse, or equal in value to the item exchanged), and so on.[12]

The idea of a micro-world proceeds from a controversial philosophical assumption – that you can create human intelligence by working on each human capacity separately and that in doing so you will eventually converge on a set of computable primitives which account for all aspects of common sense.[13] Furthermore, the claim that humans represent common sense understanding by means of cognition is also a controversial assumption and stands in need of justification.

Boden’s insistence upon exploring or transforming a conceptual space reveals her emphasis on our “higher” cognitive capacities, but in order to behold a concept one must first have initially grasped something as what it is. Martin Heidegger, the source of much of Dreyfus’ claim, argued that lived experience must necessarily precede the having of knowledge.[14] What this implies is that having concepts must first be preceded by a concernful engagement with the world in order that a given phenomenon can be understood as something and thus rendered as a concept a posteriori. Once a mountain is grasped as a mountain and gold grasped as gold we can imagine Hume’s golden mountain. So how do we understand our sense impressions and secure our perception of a thing as a thing?

One of Kant’s lasting contributions to philosophy was in raising the issue that direct intelligibility of the sensory manifold is problematic and that we stand in need of an explanation as to how sense impressions are intelligible to us at all. Kant himself sourced intelligibility in his categories of the understanding, thereby subjectivising the source of intelligibility and emphasising the role of separate individuals in its accomplishment. When this problem landed on Heidegger’s desk he sourced intelligibility in what he called “the world”. The world in Heideggerian terminology denotes a publically shared nexus of concernful activity signifying equipment, people, the natural world, etc. which hangs together through the pursuit of possibilities.[15]

Only within “the world” can something demonstrate itself as what it is. To make this clear consider again the notion of trade then imagine two instances of a person handing something to someone. As far as raw sense impressions are concerned the situations could be identical, but imagine that in one a debt is being repaid and in another an item is being given to someone as a gift. The situations mean different things with respect to the purposive involvements of each person and are in fact only discriminable through common sense familiarity with such customs (the sense impressions themselves can’t get us this far as both situations look the same). Heidegger would insist that we can only understand the difference between the two cases by being a purposive being oneself and thereby being able to understand the different ends involved.[16] Both are possible ends human beings can pursue and so bringing a pre-conceptual grasp of such ends to bear on our sense experience actually renders it intelligible.

If the foregoing is correct, our everyday common sense understanding of the world must precede cognition. If there wasn’t this original phenomenological encounter, along with the way of being which renders things initially intelligible, our conceptual information processing capacities would have nothing on which to operate. Our problem is that a human being has to program computational models[17] with a conceptual representation of this kind of background understanding in order to get them to perform in creative micro-worlds. If Dreyfus is right, human beings do not have to be programmed in this way but rather already have such common sense understanding as the simple result of our being what we are.

Computer programs model our capacities separately when what seems to be most interesting about them is their fundamental inseparability. Dreyfus’ point is that a given feature of human existence like creativity can’t be considered in isolation from the rest of our concernful activity, customs, and practices. Our capacities do not stand as a composite of isolated skills but are rather related to one another as aspects of the same holistic phenomenon rendered possible by the active, engaged kind of being[18] as which human beings exist. Computational creativity therefore suffers from the common sense knowledge problem as much as any micro-world.

To make this explicit consider Picasso’s Guernica, a painting about the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. In order to create such a work in a deliberate, intentional manner Picasso must first have been able to grasp the significance of such an historic event. One would have to have this kind of common sense understanding for war to demonstrate its character as horrifying or lamentable or even triumphal, as the case may be. Similarly to grasp Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain one needs to be familiar with the customs and practices of the art world to appreciate how it stands out as a curiosity (again, raw sense impressions cannot convey this – it looks like any other urinal).

Boden actually anticipates that creativity is in part a socially integrated affair but nevertheless insists that computer models can tell us about how creativity emerges in individuals.[19] However, it is the initial having of a conceptual space which is the real mystery of creativity and not the calculative procedures which one may follow whilst already in such a space. The “magic” of creativity is still being performed by human beings with computational models simply able to follow out any residual deductive or heuristic procedures. Even the impressive transformational models Boden mentions, such as EURISKO and AM, presuppose a large degree of human involvement. Douglas Lenat himself admits that concepts given in the LISP programming language and even human guidance in problem solving are partly responsible for their success.[20] So long as computational models of creativity have their common sense background represented ‘conceptually’ in isolated micro-worlds they cannot get us to the heart of what is most curious about artistic creativity - that it emerges from an inseparable connection with the wider phenomenon of human existence.

Boden has said that the aim of computational models is to help us understand creativity, even if that means by falsification.[22] To this extent the successes and failures of computational models do in fact help us to explain creativity. Even if they cannot at present represent what is most significant about artistic creation these models nevertheless allow us to see whether or not creativity is computational in part or as a whole and so in this respect they have significant explanatory value.

- Jordan Adshead (January 2012)

Bibliography

Boden, M. A. (1999). Computer Models of Creativity. In R. J. Sternberg, Handbook of Creativity (pp. 351-372). Cambridge University Press.

Boden, M. A. (2004). The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (Second Edition). Routledge.

Dreyfus, H. (1992). What Computers Still Can't Do. The MIT Press.

Dreyfus, H., & Dreyfus, S. (1987). Mind Over Machine. The Free Press.

Gaut, B. (2010). The Philosophy of Creativity. Philosophy Compass, 5, (12), 1034-1046.

Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and Time. SUNY.

Lenat, D., & Brown, J. S. (1983). Why AM and EURISKO Appear to Work. Proceedings of AAAI, (pp. 236-240).

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[1] Boden (2004), p. 1

[2] Gaut (2010), p. 1040

[3] Boden (2004), p. 3

[4] Ibid. p. 4

[5] Boden (1999), pp. 365-368

[6] Gaut (2010), p. 1040

[7] Ibid, p. 1040

[8] Dreyfus (1992), pp. 285-305

[9] Dreyfus & Dreyfus (1988), p. 7

[10] Ibid, p. 68

[11] Ibid, p. 72

[12] Ibid, p. 74

[13] Ibid, p. 74

[14] Heidegger (2010), pp. 59-62

[15] It’s important to make explicit that Heidegger doesn’t imagine the world as an exhaustive list of all objectively present beings as one might ordinarily imagine, but rather imagines activities, moods, capacities, and so on as a part of the world too, things which cannot be understood with regard to objective presence.

[16] Ibid, pp. 81-87

[17] Boden (1999), p. 353

[18] Being in the active sense, i.e. be-ing, like mov-ing, or walk-ing. Not to be confused with being in the sense of a being.

[19] Ibid, p. 352

[20] Lenat & Brown (1983), pp. 236-240

[21] Boden (1999), p. 353

Why Philosophy is Still Vital

As a student of philosophy I'm definitely no stranger to the sentiment that philosophy is useless. Even some philosophers themselves take it as a sort of publically accessible in-joke. Like so many things in common parlance you think it must have some credibility, but again you know that general views so often turn out to be wrong, sometimes with unpleasant consequences. Is philosophy sold short by this idea?

A lot of the time philosophy is seen as a commendable, interesting, but ultimately futile endeavour. Callicles, an interlocutor in Plato's Gorgias, asserts that philosophy is for young men and that it ought to be put aside as maturity beckons one become adept in the political skills required in adulthood. In more modern times, as Stephen Hawking sees it, philosophy has been replaced by the natural sciences. Man has come out of the age of superstitions and philosophy, now we can intervene in the world and see how it is for ourselves... directly.

The classic image is the philosopher in their armchair, coming out with archaic sounding nonesense and getting most of it wrong. And the worst bit is, even if one of them got it right, how would they know? Where's their proof? They tried to use their logic as an absolute standard and look what happened there. Presumably this is the reason why, suffering from government cuts, some UK universities have begun to threaten their philosophy departments, some of them even being disbanded entirely. Things just don't look good for we humble philosophers.

So why do we bother? Arguably some of the most intelligent people who have ever lived persist with philosophy even in a post-scientific age. Immanuel Kant, who once said that Copernicus' astronomical findings made him redundant, still didn't put all his books in a box and go back to selling marijuana. But don't forget philosophy also boasts the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, etc. - what would keep genius of this calibre involved in all of this fluffy BS? I'm quite sure I'll be accused of begging the question here. "It is precisely because of their active involvement in and approval of all this "fluffy BS" that they were not geniuses but imbeciles, charlatans, or con-men!"

I quite like philosophy, incase you couldn't tell from some of the stuff I posted on here, and so I was going to tell you why it is that I persist with it, having got to the crossroads at the end of oblivion and asked myself why it is I bother at all. So why do I? Firstly because I realise the critical importance of asking philosophical questions. More importantly, I also realise how little attention anyone pays to philosophy these days, which means there is a growing need for people to get involved with it so that they can keep it moving forward and ensure it doesn't eventually disappear....

But what would be wrong if philosophy did vanish? And what even makes philosophical questions important? In a sense this is two ways of asking the same question, and so I will only provide one answer. My answer is that boasting of direct access to the phenomena, or speaking of "mind over matter", or of responsibility, or a self, as a part of any practice without at least having some idea of whether these are actually contentious philosophical claims is as ignorant as neglecting to consider General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics in matters of physics. Such philosophical assumptions are made by a huge (perhaps total) number of social institutions, including law, education, and of course the sciences themselves - but this is not to say that they have partook in the business of philosophy.

In my view, any practioner whether scientific, educational, or legal should seek to understand not only how to to carry out their practice but should also critically engage with things about their practice, questions about scientific, legal, or educational institutions and their foundations. It's important to pay attention to what is happening across the boundaries of the various disciplines, and the sciences are no less obliged to pay attention to philosophy as philosophers are to pay attention to science. Thinking of the foundation of a practice reveals it as a part of the whole phenomenon of human existence, the place where it makes sense (is grounded) in terms of some human concern.* Understanding existence, of course, is precisely the place where philosophical thinking emerges.**

Antonio Damasio writes in the postscript to "Descartes' Error" of the Cartesian assumptions built into Western medicine. The conceptual separation of mind and body, redundant in philosophy for a long time, permeates their treatment of the body alone without proper consideration of the "mind" as an important operation of that body. He sees the effect of such conceptual misdemeanor manifest in the relative ignorance of physiological consequences of psychological difficulties, and of psychological consequences of physiological diseases.

The fact that our language reflects this dualism makes it seem the obvious ontological picture, even to the point where other ontological pictures might seem unthinkable. That we speak of something's being psychological or something's being physiological certainly seems to at least suggest the existence of two different domains, as Descartes imagined, a mind substance and a matter substance. However, as John Searle helpfully suggests, these refer to nothing but perspectives on the same single phenomenon. "Physiological" refers to what is revealed when considered from a third-person perspective (by observing it), and "psychological" refers to what is revealed when it's apprehended in a first-person perspective (by living it).

We needn't get too embroiled in a discussion of Cartesian dualism (they're numerous, and in my view, more or less decisively weighted against dualism) because our purpose here is to demonstrate why philosophy is still vital. The point I wanted to bring to your attention is that an issue which has been strongly contested in philosophy and even in the other sciences still prevails in some places as obviously true, without any suggestion that its ontological basis may be unsound, indeed often without any idea that there is even a problem. And the prevalence of faith in the Cartesian view is still huge outside of philosophy. But whether or not Cartesianism is the correct way of looking at things does not matter, for the sake of my point here, what matters is that the ontological assumptions behind medicine are not settled yet nevertheless affect how the science goes about its practice. And how could a science go about its practice without an ontological view of what it's investigating and how what it's doing makes sense?

Another time where a scientific project spent a lot of money not realising it rested on a philosophically unsound ontology was the Artificial Intelligence project in the late 1960's-1970's. Researchers around this era failed to take Hubert Dreyfus' critique of its computational understanding (again sourced in Plato, Descartes, Leibniz) seriously, a critique which was inspired by the anti-Cartesian works of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (his predicted failure of information processing models was in the end vindicated following dual snags the "frame problem" and the "commonsense knowledge problem"). However, as they say in science, a falsified experiment is still valuable to furthering scientific knowledge. "Good old fashioned AI" helped us learn a lot about how human beings understand things, and arguably for the first time put philosophical ideas into an empirical scientific setting where both endeavours worked alongside one another profitably. In the end, of course, Dreyfus and others began influencing the scientific research itself with the creation of so-called "Heideggerian AI" and embodiment research inspired by Merleau-Ponty. And the research itself still returns with the potential of sharpening, validating, or falsifying philosophical ideas upon which it rests.

Wouldn't it be worthwhile if we did those sorts of projects more?
__________________

* I shouldn't need to mention, of course, that the notion of worldhood I operate in freely here is my debt to Martin Heidegger, who pointed the way.

** I of course can't defend all of philosophy. Some of it seems a bit daft if we're honest. Sorites Paradox? Can't say I dwell on that one too much when I'm trying to find my keys.

Living & Survival

On more than one occasion I have witnessed, espoused, or considered the notion that brute survival is the ultimate foundation of all actions, the ultimate good, that for the sake of which all else is ultimately done. We’ll call this the “survival view”. With the expression of this thought I wish to critically appraise the survival view, but it might seem hopeless of me to bring this issue to bear. What could be more self-evident than man’s will to live? Certainly, and I don’t wish to deny anything in expression of this thought but merely to challenge our understanding of what it means for a being which exists as we do to have a will to live. I don’t intend to make any proper conclusions here, for the issue (and the interpretive potential of the survival view) is complex. I am simply offering food for thought. However, first I must elucidate the survival view so we know what we’re looking for.

Consider that you have agreed to help a friend or family member move some boxes. The survival view would have it that your doing so ultimately relies upon your not wanting to lose the approval of the group, and that not wanting to lose the approval of the group is rooted in survival fears. As the Hobbesian account of the origins of civilisation would predict, losing the favour of the group means you forego the benefits of civilisation and are left to your own mortality. It is well known that banishment was (and still is when you consider imprisonment a form of banishment) a type of sanction wielded against those who fly in the face of the agreement.

Sexuality is of course frequently couched in terms of an orientation towards preserving survival, either that of the individual or the family (or indeed the species). Sexual attraction has even been interpreted as the recognition of personal features rendered salient by such a will to survive (wide hips in a woman, wide shoulders in a man, etc.). As an extension of sorts, one’s concerns about their family are also interpreted under the survival view. The sorts of anguish and anxiety concerned parents are put through by advertisements playing on their concern for their children are again seen as rooted in the drive for survival. But what is this “survival” which serves as the meaning-giving horizon for all of these various phenomena?

In order to get to the heart of this matter we will need to consider the two words under which I have brought this thought: “living” and “survival”. When one imagines the term “survival” we imagine a mode of existence in which everything inessential to the most rudimentary and basic impulse of life is discarded. Asking a friend with financial difficulties how they are getting by, they might reply “I’m surviving”. This sort of passive, only doing/having what is necessary is all that one requires to survive in the sense of getting from one day to the next. But what of living?

When we think of living we imagine the rich tapestry of activities we are involved in, or can become involved in. We think of lovers, friends, music, work, we think of books, films, walking, climbing, travelling, creating things, destroying things, dancing, fixing things, improving things, acquiring things… the list is, I expect, inexhaustible. To cite another common phrase, upon having a kind of breakthrough, perhaps a new job has afforded you an opportunity you did not have previously, or a certain experience has helped you overcome a limitation which you might have had, you could say “now I am really living”.

Clearly these two words, “living” and “surviving” are formally identical. When you strip them back to their logical structure both denote successfully getting from here to there in time (without dying!) However, their characters, considered in themselves, are actually opposed in a certain sense in that “survival” emphasises the passive “just getting by” of life, whereas "living" gives us a much more dynamic and colourful picture of what transpires in the business of life.

It’s certainly no secret that Western thinking tends to prioritise the cognitive-theoretical over other faculties of thought expressed in the life of man.[1] What results from this is an emphasis on the disinterested apprehension of the observer as opposed to the affective, involved apprehension of the participant. Our best descriptions of what life is like, this general view has it, originate in ways of looking at things which are not “coloured by subjectivity”, where phenomena encountered subjectively are demoted to the level of an unwanted cognitive interference (like noise on a phone line). The intuitions which bolster this view are numerous, involving various instances where affectivity genuinely does mess things up and where the detached apprehension of an observer is required.

Causal explanations of the sort yielded by science are one such arena where disinterested observation is essential.[2] Not only does the reduction of elements to their formal structure sharpen the focus of a scientific investigation (by delimiting the phenomena it focuses on to formalisable elements of natural or mechanical systems) but it also goes some way towards preventing bias. If it is the case that there is a threat to the future of our planet our feelings about it shouldn’t influence the results of our investigation as we’re trying to figure out what is genuinely going to happen and not what we would like to happen. However, the consequence of stressing this view as primary is that we end up thinking that the world in which we find such feelings is a false picture of what the world is “really” like…

When we consider our affairs it should come as no surprise that we interpret all of our dealings as resulting from a will to survive. We are, each and every one of us, involved in the business of life, expressing it in our various ways (even those who wish to die are responding to life and are involved in a particular mode of living). But we should not see our “living” as “survival”! It is not any mere “hunting” for necessity which drives man. Man does not simply wish to live but to live well.[3]

Man is concerned about existence. Man wants to live, and all of the things man does involve this "being towards life", but what the survival view misses is that it's not sufficient for man to merely be alive. Certainly everything we do concerns the future, our future, the future of the species - but we do a lot more whilst we're here than merely passing on our genes. We pass on a culture, a way of living and a body of knowledge (both practical and theoretical). The arts, sciences, and technology do a lot more for us over and above transmitting how to preserve our survival.

The extent of the violence which the survival view does to our pre-conceptual understanding is evidenced in its treatment of sexuality wherein the present life of the individuals in love are no longer in focus. The survival view of sexuality discards the affective and ultimately existential motives for seeking a partner and replaces them with a blind and impersonal impulse towards propagating the species. The invention of contraception (and let’s not forget the phenomenon of masturbation) are places in which we find sexuality expressed in realms extraneous to that of mere survival.

It may be objected that such phenomena are merely the “sublimation” of the will to propagate the species. However, I feel there are too many possible motivations for seeking and pursuing partners. For instance, the continuation of affection between lovers even after reproductive capabilities are severed (either by nature of by their own intervention) certainly suggests that something more than merely furthering one’s genetic agenda is at play. More casual pursuits also inhibit the reproductive initiative. Reasons for involving oneself in a relationship of this particular sort might be related to self-esteem, boredom[4], or the suppression of a feeling of loneliness opened up by the prior loss of a more significant relationship.

It can be nice sometimes to reflect with a friend or a lover on the memories you’ve shared, the places you’ve been, or to have a smoke or a drink and share some laughs together. The survival view sees these acts not as having value in their own sake, but in their contribution towards securing survival. Seeking lovers without the intention of having children would no doubt be interpreted as feeding back into the “survival loop” in some way, perhaps in its alleviation of anxiety, a condition inimical to survival. But what makes this view implausible (I do not think it is grounds for calling it explicitly false at present) is that people, in their gut, would often rather die than be forced to live life in a certain way. The fact that the survival instinct has to be maintained in situations where living well has been critically compromised at least suggests the priority of living well over merely living in the life of man.

The survival view, as I see it, is based upon a category mistake in that it confuses a third-person detached explanation with an involved, first-person description. It assumes the formal, detached account of the actions of human beings is primary and subsequently attempts to reduce all of the phenomena encountered by an involved participant in its own terms. When we come to appraise our lives and the value of the efforts we make we are left with the formal account which offers simple survival as our fundamental reason for living when in reality our motivations for living far surpass merely surviving. It is the quality of our life which moves us, not simply securing the mere fact of our being[5] but ensuring that we live triumphantly. In short, it is not the simple fact that we wish to survive which is false. It is rather the way of stopping short at formalisable facts which falsifies our understanding of what it is that we preserve in continuing to live, something which can only be made manifest by living it (or expressed linguistically by describing what is thus made manifest).

- Jordan Adshead (January 2012)

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[1] For a more explicit and in depth critique of this cultural idiosyncrasy see Gilbert Ryle’s “The Concept of Mind”, Hubert Dreyfus’ “Mind over Machine”, essay three of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals”, and Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time” which, for my money, offers the most expanded and in-depth critique of this phenomenon.

[2] Note that here I mean only scientific questions work best without affective involvement. Any questions about science, however, validly concern the appraisal of the feelings.

[3] This is the view shared by José Ortega Y Gasset.

[4] I expect boredom has a large role to play in understanding the life of human beings.

[5] Consider your own understanding of the term "being" as it is presented here. When you read "our being" did you imagine an objectively present thing? Or did you imagine being in the sense of activity: be-ing, like mov-ing, or walk-ing - being as a thing we do?

Happy New Year

Over the holidays it really strikes me how cheerful and light everybody becomes, and how bitterness and spite are seldom seen. In 2012 I hope we continue to recover our humanity and move closer to solving our problems.

Happy New Year, to you and anyone who's reading.

On Heidegger's "Being and Time": Being-in-the-World I (Study Notes #2)

Continuing my attempt at providing study notes to sections of and notions in Being and Time. As already mentioned in the previous post these are my study notes and I present them in the hope that they are of some use to people approaching the text and trying to make sense of it (producing notes like this is also a great exercise in understanding the text yourself). As I stated in the last entry, given that these are my study notes familiarity with terms is presupposed and little or no critique is offered.

The notion of Being-in-the-World is fundamental to Heidegger's phenomenological investigation into the being of Dasein given that Dasein simply is the way of being-in-the-world. What Heidegger is getting at by this compound expression is detailed across three large chapters. Critically, he stresses the equiprimordiality of its "structural moments" - for Heidegger it is crucial not to crudely analyse being-in-the-world in the sense of breaking it down into parts and trying to find some homogenous ground through which it all makes sense. Being-in-the-world is the ground and it is a whole phenomenon.

Now, he does not deny that its structural moments can be appreciated by themselves (the world, being-in, and the "who" of being-in-the-world) otherwise his analysis could not get off the ground. He simply insists that phenomenologically, i.e. in reality, the phenomenon does not present itself as a sum of isolated parts. This holistic character is reflected in the analysis itself which cannot be strictly organised into chapters dealing exclusively with one of the three structural moments. The chapter dealing with world, for example, must also consider being-in, if only briefly, in order to make sense.

So what does Heidegger mean by being-in-the-world? We'll begin as Heidegger does by offering "knowing" as a founded mode of being-in. Knowing is a form which our intentionality can take in its being directed towards the world in some way. Being-in-the-world in a knowing manner simply entails having knowledge about something in the world. The typical view which Heidegger is seeking to overthrow here is that knowledge necessarily precedes all modes of being-in. He wants us to see that there are more original ways of being-in - one can love something, or use something, or produce something, be frightened by something. Heidegger's analysis will show us that knowing depends upon these more original modes of being-in. What is known is always something which is encountered in pre-cognitive activity. That you love Earl Grey, or that your friend studies philosophy - in order to be able to know these things as propositions there must first be a thing which is known, an original encounter. How we understand things, as we'll see, is through concernful lived activity. If Heidegger is right then it simply makes no sense to put knowing before living.

The world, then, is that towards which modes of being-in are directed. The being [sein] of beings [seindes] within the world includes Dasein, the ready-to-hand, and the present-at-hand. Our understanding of these three enables those beings to demonstrate themselves, to be intelligible. Understanding the being of the ready-to-hand, for instance, involves always already grasping how something can be for something, as the keyboard is for typing or the mug is for drinking from. However, the keyboard and mug considered from a disinterested perspective are merely objectively present things occuring at a place in space at a given time, divorced from the practical context in which they make sense (have meaning) as what they are. This disinterested perspective reveals things as they are under the aspect of the present-at-hand.

But what Heidegger wants to show us is that things are never initially encountered as present-at-hand, i.e. as meaningless objects simply "there" at a point in space and time which then have value-predicates foisted on them by a subject (see previous for a more in-depth set of notes on Heidegger's reinterpretation of the present-at-hand with regard to its grounding in the engaged/lived/pratical context). Things are initially encountered by us in some sort of meaningful practical context. As we said above, they must be able to touch us in some way, to be significant in order to be understood at all. How, then, does this understanding come to pass?

In order to appreciate this more fully consider the following example: walking through a busy Christmas market you see a child aimlessly striding towards you with some candy floss. Without thought you immediately perceive the child as threatening the sugarless and unsticky status of your clothes and step aside to avoid getting the candy floss on you. How is it that the candy floss was understood with respect to its being sticky? A typical account might insist that at some point we identified the fact that candy floss is sticky. Inferring from the stickiness of candy floss and the desire not to be sticky we arrive at the resolution to step aside. Sounds plausible, but what this account misses is the original phenomenon in which the candy floss was first of all able to demonstrate itself - the phenomenon of being-in-the-world.

How does the candy floss come to be understood as "sticky"? It is not that stickiness is directly intelligible by any means! In fact, taken outside of this lived context the candy floss is merely an object with no other meaning (even its being identified as an object depends upon this meaningful context in which it is initially encountered). How, then, does it demonstrate its nature? Our concernful engagement allowed the stickiness of the candy floss to come forward and reveal itself as a threat to our otherwise clean and dry clothes. Through its being relevant to our concern it is able to demonstrate its significance - that it is sticky.

That we were averse to getting candy floss on ourselves results from, as mentioned, being concerned about our clothes. In wanting our clothes to stay clean and dry various things which would make our clothes dirty show up for us in their relevance to this particular concern. Being concerned in this manner signifies various courses of action (avoidance, for example). We already had to know that candy floss was sticky, but how we came to know this originally was still in concerned engagement with it - not disinterested knowing. If we were not at all concerned about things "getting sticky" the stickiness of candy floss would never have become salient and we could never have known about it.

Within this context of involvement the things of the world are able to be understood as what they are - as heavy, or difficult, or indeed "sticky". Knowledge itself is organised with respect to a concernful perspective. "Pure" knowledge is a non-concept. How could we call the performance "delightful" if we are not captured by it? Or "boring" if it fails to affect us? How could we call a shattered mug "broken" if it isn't already understood as for drinking from? Being "broken" implies being in a state such that it can no longer do what it is supposed to. This "supposed to" derives its sense from the phenomenon of world as an in-order-to. An in-order-to (e.g. in-order-to drink tea) denotes a with-which (the mug) and a towards-which (drinking tea). Practical involvements reveal the nature of the things engaged with. The world, in Heidegger's sense, just is this interrelated nexus of people, things, and purposes. It is what Heidegger calls a "clearing", an open space in which things can be understood as what they are. Being-in-the-world is the practical/engaged/lived activity in which Dasein secures its understanding of the things in the world (not just propositional knowing-that but engaged knowing-how).

With this cursory overview we can more easily appreciate "being-in" and "the world" as equiprimordial structural moments of being-in-the-world. Without things and such in the world for Dasein to make use of or be threatened or seduced by Dasein can't make use of or be threatened or seduced by anything! But similarly, without Dasein these things could never enter into a lived context and demonstrate what they are by virtue of their relevance to our concerns. Beings press in upon us as we press in upon them.