The Philosopher’s Attic

While I was talking to the phone to a very dear friend I hadn’t talked with for quite a while now, she said something simple, but interesting to me: you don’t need to have all the answers. (I’m leaving out the almost-yelling bit and the mild swearing that accompanied the rant for obvious reasons )

It sound like an easy thing to say and understand, some might consider it trivial even. As a ‘philosopher’ however we are trained to work everything out. It’s what we do, it’s our job, our work, our ultimate goal and our method to cope with the world.

As long as a problem can be well formulated, analyzed, dissected, taken apart and put back together again, we’re happy. Once we’re done dissecting a problem, an obstacle, a tricky situation or a spat, we think that the better part of a problem is already solved. That the rest is only cosmetics. Finding solutions is what we do and it does play tricks on us. It leads us to believe that naming a problem is part of the solution. That we virtually have all the answers.

The trouble here is not hubris, because a philosophical person would claim to have all the answers to all the questions. But, they would probably say that once you’ve named the problem, you’ve done the greatest step to solving it.
That’s all very good when dealing with theories about matter and intellect or formal logic, but when it comes to life, human beings tend to not be that rational at all.
It’s the well known discrepancy (hey, another big word to be added to the list…) between knowing that smoking is bad, but not stopping anyway. It’s the same discrepancy that leads to utter craziness in economical decision and game theory btw.
The fact that we can analyze why we’re feeling the way we do or why X annoys the hell out of us, does not necessarily mean that we can keep it from annoying us.
That’s probably the answer why so many academics have undiagnosed psychological disorders or problems: they think they can figure it all out by themselves. They think that knowing why they feel the way they do, solves their problem.

Accepting that we don’t need to have all the answers or solutions, that’s probably the real solution.

Some things do not warrant a discursive answer where we should weigh all the points according to their validity. Sometimes there is no place for argument and earnest dialogue. This is especially true for things and “free opinions”⁽¹⁾ that have only one true goal: insult and belittlement.

Sometimes the only way to reason with malevolent content leads to satire. And satire is what they shall get:

Copyright Notice: I made this picture to show a point. If you want to use it in order to make your own statement, you are free to do so as long as a link points back to this original post. The original picture retains my copyright however and the picture may not be altered otherwise. Thank you.

1. How free is our speech really? Or would anyone have dared to put the ‘Explicit content’ sticker on the Q’ran? [back]

Page statistics have a terrible way of satisfying our voyeuristic needs. But most of the time they also serve a purpose. For instance it has become clear in the last few weeks that most of the new visitors to my site came here while searching for Herbert Grönemeyer. Unfortunately this is not some random music blog and I suppose that there really is no way of tying these readers to my blog in any permanent manner.
And then there was this one Google searcher - let’s call him Lexicographer - that came several times to my blog while looking for “big words that start with s” or “big words that start with c” etc. Unfortunately he didn’t find what he came for, only a post with the title Big words from the wise.
But I wouldn’t be me, if that didn’t give me a brilliant new idea for which I owe my thanks to Lexicographer.

So here starts a new series of random Big Words from philosophy, history, culture and whatnot. (NB: If you have any suggestions or would like to have particular word appear here and be explained, don’t hesitate to drop me a line in the comments or just contact me over Skype.)

Big words that start with… A

Analogy

If you’re trying to say something without saying it directly, but using an example, chances are that a) you’re trying to be polite and b) you’re using an analogy.
Ever heard something like “You talk like an electrical sewing machine…” or “Listening to you is like sticking my head into a microwave oven. It makes me dizzy…” ? Lucky you. It’s the philosopher’s way of insulting anybody that does not share his sense for pertinence.
A basic element of analogies is that they are rarely understood the way they were meant. This is particularly true for such weird ideas like The analogy of being where several philosophers and theologians have asked themselves whether we can say from God or the Angels that they ‘are’ the same way we do it from plants or humans. People that do deal with these questions can be encountered in the wild, but they do fear light and company, so please don’t scare them off.

Absolutes

Someone wise once said: “Only Sith deal in absolutes.” and guess what… he was making an analogy. What he actually meant to say was: “Only Republicans deal in absolutes…”, but that’s another matter.
Absolutes - just like the famous “Never say never…” line - have the bad habit of coming back to bite you somewhere sensible (i.e. where it hurts). And even if black and white are your favourite colours, they’re still absolutes. Try to avoid them. Grey is such a nice colour too.
Right.

Anachronism

Using words like tabernae potoriae minister for Barkeeper or iuvenis voluptarius for Playboy, really are anachronisms in our times. Just as the fact that the Vatican is actually publishing such pieces of anachronisms on their holy page…

Analysis (asked by Juliana)

The basic principle of taking things (hair-dryers, personal computers, texts, poems, arguments, meanings…) apart, giving you the possibility to examine the parts that make up the thing you are willing to take apart. As with all things this procedure requires adequate tools and methods: there are only so many things a drill can do for you and finding logical fallacies for instance is not one of them. So, when analysing anything written or said, apply the folowing basic rules: 1) don’t ask of the text what it is not able to give (Spiderman will not explain the Communist manifest to you. Ever.) 2) Be suspicious of everything. Everybody lies. Everybody. 3) Watch the Code. Not everything that is said is meant and not everything that is meant is spelled out on the page. 4) Do not get intimidated and use a dictionary. Texts are like playground bullies: big words and mostly no muscles, only pure force.
Happy analysing!

Analytical

In 20th and 21st century Philosophy often used as an insult or a nobility claim respectively, depending on where it is uttered (on the continent it’s an insult, in the US of A it’s a noble title). It’s a movement that started out by analysing texts and phrases that are used to describe the world. This analysis was in fact supposed to help get rid of 99% of the problems we have with the world. Unfortunately - like it can happen with any analysis - some of the leaders were sidetracked from the righteous path and somehow fell into Narcissus’ well. This in turn led to Analytical philosophers boldly claiming the supremacy of the argument over the commentary. Thus was born the infamous quarrel between continental and analytical philosophy. You have studied continental Philosophers? Sorry, then all you ever did was produce was commentary. Only analytical philosophers can argue and offer arguments, since explaining Aristotle’s Ethics does not need any argument, only a Cambridge Companion. There you have it.

Anathema (asked by Juliana)

Ever been excluded? Ever been banished from an Internet forum? Then an anathema has been called upon you. Historically speaking the anathema was first neutral or positive even: everything that was set apart and thus special, sacred. It came to a much harsher meaning during Church History and especially Catholic Church History where it names the most extreme act of casting somebody out. Beyond. any. redemption.
But not to worry, anathemata (aha, yes, this is a greek plural) have become quite unpopular and anachronistic. See there.

Arduous

If you feel overworked, overwhelmed or simply overrun by life itself, then arduous is the right adjective to describe whatever you’re battling with. How pale does “It’s hard…” or “It’s heavy work…” sound, compared to “This task is arduous work…”?
Even if you’re dragged down by everything that doesn’t necessarily mean that you cannot have at least a literate description for it, does it?

UPDATE

Aberration (asked by Arsedendi)

According to Murphy’s Law everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. While aberration in general signifies an unintended change of course or a deviation from a generally established plan, the word has also taken a literary - metaphorical - meaning of something being astray, wrong or perverted (in it’s original meaning). A closer look seems to impose itself here: let’s say we have an occurrence of some sort, say the lunar eclipse. We know it’s course, the exact timing when it will start, at which angle the earth will pass between the moon and the sun etc. An aberration would be for instance that instead of taking a regular vector passage, the shadow cast on the moon would all of a sudden stand still, or pass in a line or simply would not happen: a deviation from a normal, calculated way. To go back to Murphy’s Laws, whoever it was that first formulated this law simply elevated the aberration to a general, again foreseeable, course that things take. A contradiction in terms, no? Either we can calculate how things will go when they go right, or we can calculate how they will go when they go wrong, but since things do need to go one way or the other, not both calculations or plans can be right. A brilliant reality paradox, isn’t it? And to complicate things even further, there is a theory called occasionalism which states that every occurrence in the world (physical or metaphysical) is the work of God. I want to raise my arm? Then according to occasionalism, my will is just a mere occasion for God to act and actually make me lift my arm. The theory itself is again based on the principle that in fact God sustains this world, it’s physical laws and all that happens in it at any given moment. God himself created all the laws and he is the one sustaining them, so if he decides in one moment to overthrow the laws of nature, he can. (This principle was thought up to counter the critics of a omnipotent God that could somehow not break his own laws without ending the world in a major contradiction of powers…)
But since all things that can go wrong, will eventually go wrong, who knows if genetic aberrations (mutations) are simply due to God having a small hiccup… now that’s something for the new militant atheist movement to be afraid about, isn’t it?

…To be continued…

When is egoism permitted and when is it not? What is egoism in a relationship? And do we need to save ourselves before we can save someone else?

I am somehow not quite happy with Carry Tennis’ advice to Negotiating (a woman married to an alcoholic who has not accepted his problem as of yet) on Salon.com.

The major question is whether Negotiating should just leave or give her husband an ultimatum to get sober. Her problem is that she doesn’t know whether she can stay with him even if he gets sober:

Somehow, announcing that I am leaving unless he gets sober, then leaving even if he does, seems wrong. However, if I just announce that I am leaving because of his drinking, I don’t think he’ll have any motivation to quit. He is still the father of my children and still someone I care about even if I am having serious doubts about the marriage at this point.

Tennis advises:

The effect of your escape on this man is not something we can predict in advance. So do not premise your escape on any agreements with this man or any expectations about his future. He is not a person you can make agreements with. He is not a person whose future is predictable. He is, for the moment, a hopeless alcoholic. All you can do is save yourself.

It is a general rule that we cannot help anyone as long as they do not accept our help. In the case of addicts (psychos etc.) this means that, if the person in question has not accepted their problem and actually wants to change something, there is simply no way for external help to have any effect. In most cases it can be counter-productive even.

But isn’t it normal for a responsible person to reflect their own decisions and deliberate on the effects their actions might have on the people around them: their family, their friends? For all we know the fact of Negotiating leaving her husband and taking the kids with her, might be another notch in her husbands addiction. This does not imply any responsibility on her part. But its a fact that social isolation makes addiction even more hard to beat.
It’s normal for her not to know how she will feel about her marriage once he would be sober. How could she? If there are other doubts about the marriage and anger involved, they are clouded over by the most important problem: the addiction.
Why do people expect themselves to have it all figured out all the time? Leaving to reconsider and then after reconsidering would be a perfectly possible solution for Negotiating. But Tennis simply tells her to leave, be egoistic and save herself. This advice is perfectly fine for the acute problem. But is it the best way from a moral point of view?

I very much doubt that. To shed people because of their problems, their weaknesses or their ‘incompatibility’ is the easy way out. It is much harder to stick with them, love them anyway, fight with them and for them.

Analysing one’s actions and their impact on others is not simply a way to avoid a decision, it is also a way to appreciate the people around us. But everybody has their own free will to decide what to do or not to do. So even if I am concerned by somebody else’s decision, I can decide to have it affect me or not. And if my decision could affect someone else negatively, it does not imply any responsibility per se. Of course this is only valuable in ‘normal’ cases of decisions or actions, meaning: cases where the basic principle of benevolence for another person are satisfied. If I want to hurt someone, the hurtful act is surely my responsibility.
But we choose by what we are affected.It can be painful or rewarding. Being reflective about it doesn’t make us egoists, but concerned individuals.

While checking my log and referral files it has become obvious that some of you are still entering my page being automatically referred by my old address at http://yseult.blog-city.com

The automatic referral is due to some code I had in my header when I changed my blog. My Blog-City blog has been deleted since (no worries, all my entries have been migrated here) and I have no idea why the redirect is still working.

However, I would prefer if you could update your bookmarks to the actual address http://yseult.mediaevaliter.com since I have no idea if Blog-City will delete the page completely sometime in the future, which will leave you without a bookmark to me.

Thank you very much and a great day to you all!

Apparently I am not the only one having problems with Mr. Pinker. In Science and Spirit, Susan Greenfield⁽¹⁾ says this in her interview with the editor Chris Floyd (unfortunately there is no date provided with the article):

And there is another, perhaps more serious problem with attempts by Dennett and others to explain consciousness by purely mechanical processes, she says. “The problem is that he tends to conflate mind with consciousness. I think you can talk about mind being something enduring, something that involves the configuration of your brain cell circuitry. But we know that this personalization of the brain can be divorced from consciousness, because you can lose your mind and still be conscious, you can blow your mind and still be conscious. You can also go to sleep and become unconscious, but you haven’t necessarily lost your mind. So I think the two are separate. But as far as I know, Dennett has not really been fierce about those distinctions.”

No, Dennett certainly has not been as fierce as Pinker is now. But this quote shows two interesting things: a) the connection between personal identity, consciousness and the mind and that b) scientists are sometimes so much more philosophical than philosophers themselves…

1. Neuroscientist from the University of Oxford: her profile at wikipedia. [back]

Part three of my critical analysis of Steven Pinker’s latest highly acclaimed article in TIME.

I left off in my last post with the following question regarding Steven Pinker’s style in his latest article: Why? Where lies the reason for the continuous omissions of critical questioning of modern neuro-research findings? I will add another one here: What is he trying to accomplish?

The double-minded agenda - Steven Pinker is pursuing a hidden agenda of his own with the Time.com article. One that I hope will not just disappoint me - as someone who had always appreciated his efforts - but also every philosopher that identifies him-/herself enough with their work in philosophy to follow a certain code of honour in their work and their publications. So far I have not come across any reaction to Pinker’s article from professional philosophers, let alone critiques. All I have encountered is baffled awe by lay people at the so-called results Pinker depicts.
My critique of a double-minded agenda behind “The Mystery of Consciousness” is based on the following:

Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many non-scientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices–not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. (…)
My own view is that this is backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul.⁽¹⁾

First, let me point out the obvious: when stating “few scientists doubt…” it is clearly suggested that there are scientists that would contest this. Who are they? Again, there is a total absence of reference to follow up on.

Second: since when has physical reductionism been accepted? Or let me rephrase: the biological side of consciousness is just the physical side of the phenomenon. This is exactly when John R. Searle states that even tough conscious states and beliefs can be traced to certain brain patterns, it is not automatically clear that they can be reduced exclusively to this biological phenomenon. Science simply does not permit this. While biologists will simply talk about the biological aspect of consciousness, the philosophers throughout history have been talking about the soul. Does it mean that they have been talking about two different things? No. It simply means that they addressed an issue from several, different and distinct sides. Reducing one aspect to another will certainly not be the way to a better understanding of consciousness in particular or the human mind in general.

Third: Based on the second point, how did the undying soul come into the equation all of a sudden? (This is where I start to get a philosophical hiccup that will very well turn in to nausea in a moment.) When Arabic interpretations of Aristotle’s work arrived in Europe, they sparked a huge commentary tradition - largely due to the unclear passages of Aristotle’s texts themselves, but also because namely Averroes and Avicenna had adopted Aristotle’s ideas about epistemology (De anima) in a way that would do exactly what Steven Pinker hopes for neurophysiology: they endangered the idea of an undying human soul. And without an undying soul, there is no afterlife. Based on Aristotle’s description of the soul as eternal, undivided and immaterial, Averroes concluded that the intellect could not be located in the human being himself (since it is material), but rather that the human being - while having an act of intellection - would be linked to the only eternal, immaterial thing in the universe: God. This of course would annihilate any idea of a personal, human intellect and thus was a hard nut to crack for the Christian world view.

While in the 12th century the human soul and thus immortality was endangered by making intellection purely godly, now again it is tried to be annihilated, but by making it purely physical. For a specialist in the theories of intellection, this borders the comic relief. As to the question how Pinker can be completely unaware of the parallels in history, well, maybe it’s the idea that a colleague calls the good trait of amnesia of the history of philosophy in analytical philosophy. (How he manages to stay earnest and actually mean it, is beyond me…)

Not enough that Pinker actively ignorant of any critical points of views on his project of reducing consciousness to mere brain function, not enough that he doesn’t feel ridiculed by ignoring over 800 years of philosophical discourse, he manages to top it all off with a nice punch against religion:

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.

And now, I guess we all get the greater picture at last. This is not an article to show us the latest research in neurophysiology or the sciences. This is not a philosophical pleading for reductionism, against the pseudo-problems of metaphysics or even different ideas about consciousness. This is simply a personal vendetta against the idea of an undying soul, an afterlife and religion, motivated by a political agenda that in my view has no place in philosophy of mind.

All that remains for me to say is this: Steven Pinker is another 9/11 casualty. A walking wounded of a conflict that he doesn’t have the means to address (nor does he seem to have any will to address it in it’s proper terms), a philosopher lacking the basic decency of respect for anybody else’s beliefs, a professional engaging in simple partisanship.

We see it happening every day. Seeing it here - where a brilliant philosopher is concerned - is a tragedy.

1. Steven Pinker, “The Mystery of Consciousness”, Time.com; Jan. 19, 2007; p. 6. [back]