A note on the failure and success of actions

Sometimes an action leads to a dead end.

Being able to act is one of the foundations of human life. I think that it’s even more basic than being able to think. That’s why in one of my blogs I replaced Descartes’s famous “I think, therefore I am” by “I act, therefore I am” (see my blog dated 3 March 2008: http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-act-therefore-i-am.html).

Although acting is fundamental to man, this doesn’t mean that the performance of an action always goes smoothly. Some actions are better to be described as attempts that can fail or succeed. Nevertheless, it belongs to the essence of actions that most of them succeed. Therefore, it is not normal to see each action as an attempt, before it happens. We just do, and when a normal action fails, afterwards we may say that we attempted to perform it but failed, but this doesn’t mean that it is right to say that the action concerned was an attempt. We just say something like “Something went wrong”.

An action can fail in two ways. Either it is so that the action hasn’t been finished, or the action didn’t bring the result we expected or hoped for. In the latter case, the action hasn’t failed in the sense that it hasn’t been accomplished, for the action as such is there. The runner has finished the race, but didn’t break the record. The long-jumper had a personal record but didn’t qualify for the championship, which was her aim. In such cases the finished action failed in view of its outcome. The jump is good but it doesn’t have the aimed result, even though it was her personal best. Or, another example, she opened the window and fresh air streamed into the room, but the room didn’t cool down, which was just why she opened the window: The effect was absent even though the action – in the sense of an intentional piece of behaviour – had been performed as planned.

What we see here is that the success of an action is not the reverse of its failure. For what should “the reverse” mean in this case? If an action failed, because the intended aim hasn’t been achieved, there are at least two things that might have happened, as we have seen: The agent has not performed the action to its end or the agent fully performed the action without achieving the aimed result. If we should call the latter the reverse of a successful action, there would be no room for unfinished actions, even though they happen often in life. But if we should call an unfinished action the reverse of a successful action, there would be no room for a nice try.

Is failing in acting bad? In a certain sense it is but not if we keep in mind that acting is basic for existing as a human being and that also a failed action is an action. Failures belong to acting. Nobody is perfect and when failing has become inherently impossible, we cannot act any longer. Then life has ended.

The layers of Pagliacci

The cast of Pagliacci receiving the applaus in The National Opera in Amsterdam

In Leoncavallo’s opera “Pagliacci” the actors Canio and Nedda act in a stage play in which Pagliaccio (played by Canio) is deceived by his wife Colombina (Nedda) and kills her. What the public in this play doesn’t know is that in “real life” Canio is deceived by his wife Nedda, and that the murder in this drama is not acted (as it should be) but that it is a real murder: While playing Pagliaccio, Canio becomes so angry that he forgets that he is acting and during the play Pagliaccio becomes Canio who has been deceived by the real Nedda. The border between fiction and fact fades away.

In the opera we see a double-layered story: The first layer is the play with Pagliaccio and Colombina and the second layer is the “real life” of the actors Canio and Nedda, who act their lives in this opera. It’s not without reason that I write real life between quotation marks, for in this case also the “real life” is a play. Actually, it’s not difficult to add more layers. For instance what if the tenor Brandon Jovanovich, who sang the part of Canio, would have been the husband of the soprano Aylin Pérez (Nedda) and would have murdered her on the stage when I was watching the opera, because she had deceived him? Then fiction would really have become fact. But even without this layer that springs from my imagination there are at least two other layers, namely the spectators in the opera hall (I and my wife and the others present in the hall), for during the time of the opera they had stepped out of “real life” so to speak, and played the part of real spectators (to be distinguished from the actors in the opera who play the parts of the spectators in the play). And then, of course, there is also the real world outside the opera building. So we can distinguish at least four layers, each with their own realities and each with their own fictions and facts, their own actions and events.

The idea of layers is also thematized in philosophy. Maybe the first philosopher who did was Plato with his Allegory of the Cave: A group of people is imprisoned in a cave already since childhood. Behind their backs a fire is burning and between the fire and the prisoners people are continuously passing by. The prisoners cannot see what occurs behind them. They see only the shadows of the passers-by on a wall in front of them. Therefore the prisoners know only how these people look like and what they do in an indirect way. For the prisoners the projections on the wall constitute the real world, since they don’t know the world in another way. Here, we see two layers: (1) the world of the shadows on the wall and their spectators (which is the real world for these spectators), and (2) the world behind the backs of these spectators. However, as the Dutch philosopher Nicole des Bouvrie remarks, when commenting on this allegory: How does Plato know that there is not yet another layer, another reality? And indeed, there is at least one other layer, like in Leoncavallo’s opera. Just like the spectators of the opera in the hall in the same way the readers of Plato’s allegory constitute a layer as well.

An opera wouldn’t be an opera and an allegory wouldn’t be an allegory if they wouldn’t stand for something in reality. And isn’t it so that we all play our parts and that we all have our realities that we try to keep apart and that often interlock like layers? A job is often merely a way to get the money to live, as it is for the actors (as actors) in the opera. Our “real life” – for us – may be at home with our family, or in our club, or elsewhere. And this “real life” is enclosed by a world outside, like the life of the town where we live, our country and the wide world, which have a big influence on us and on what we can do. Real life consists of layers of fiction and fact. For aren’t we often playing a role in our job, for instance, when we hide what we actually think in order to avoid a conflict with our boss? Don’t we often screen off a part of us, so that it becomes a separate layer? (Who of the other students in my class at school knew that already then I loved classical music and opera and not, say, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones)?

Layering is a fact of life. Often it has a protective function, and it simplifies our view on reality. It makes our life structured and surveyable and helps us act in the right way. This is exemplified by Leoncavallo’s opera in a negative way: Negative in the sense that we see there what can happen if the border between two layers fades away and the fiction of a lower layer becomes the fact of a higher layer. Then we can get a problem. Examples are relatives or friends who have to do with each other in different roles. A teacher with her daughter in her class. A mayor who gives a building order to a friend. A husband who deceives his wife with her best friend / A woman who deceives her best friend with her husband. Suddenly the situation explodes. We have a scandal. The business deal becomes public. The marriage ends in a divorce. In the worst case there is a murder. If this happens the last words of “Pagliacci” apply: The comedy is finished. La commedia è finita.

Reference: Bouvrie, Nicole des, Diagnose van de moderne filosoof. Waarom filosofen gek zijn. Eindhoven: Damon, 2018

The solar cell paradox

The solar panels on the roof of my house

I think that every reasonable person will agree that we live in an age of global warming and that the main cause of this global warming is the behaviour of man. We simply use too much energy and moreover we use energy of the wrong kind: fossil energy. In fact, fossil energy is solar energy long ago laid up in the soil by natural processes. Probably all this energy would still have been there, if not once, also long ago, man was added to the big number of creatures that lived already on earth. As all creatures, also man needed energy to live, but as long as man led a simple life, s/he lived more or less in balance with what the earth produced. Now you may think that I’ll add: And everybody was happy. Not true. For many people thought that life could be better, but for this they needed more energy, not only for cooking and for heating themselves during cold nights, but for a lot more, like better shelters, making better tools, producing more food, waging war, etc. In the end man needed so much energy that the immediate environment couldn’t produce enough any longer. Happily man discovered that there was a lot of energy stored in the soil: peat, coal and oil. That was nice, of course, but there was a problem – a problem that was ignored by man at first, for the simple reason that s/he didn’t realize that it was a problem: Peat, coal and oil are stored kinds of energy but at the moment you are going to use it, it is added to the energy that is already freely present on earth. Before man used this stored energy, the amount of freely present energy was more or less in balance, and if it wasn’t it wasn’t man’s mistake. But man begun to use more and more stored energy and more and more stored energy became freely present. And so it happened that the balance of freely present energy was upset: The earth became warmer. First the global warming went very slowly and nobody noticed it. However, it went faster and faster and finally it went that fast that it became impossible to deny that global warming had become a problem. It became also impossible to deny that there was one main cause of the problem: Man, or rather man’s energy consumption. (As it happens, there are always people who deny that there is a problem or who deny that they themselves are the problem. Also in this case there are such men, but I’ll ignore them.)

But where there are problems there are solutions, and so also in this case. Actually the solution was quite simple: If the global warming is caused by using stored energy, don’t use it any longer but use only yet freely present energy. So man started to develop machines and apparatuses that caught freely present energy everywhere on earth, and so they made things like windmills, water turbines and solar cells. But since windmills and turbines are very big and since hardly anybody can or wants to have them in the backyard, the state propagated and stimulated the use of solar cells for the common man. Moreover it was made – at least in my country – that you could automatically sell the solar cell energy to your energy provider if you produced more than you needed yourself. Therefore it became very profitable to have panels with solar cells on the roof of your house, for you saved on your energy costs and you could sell your overproduction. And so, when you walk through my little town and look at the roofs, everywhere you see solar panels and you can see them also on my house. Moreover, everybody with solar panels is happy, for it gives not only a clear conscience because you improve the environment but you get also a big bank account, for having solar cells on your roof is big money, so to speak.

When you have money you want to spend it, or so it is for many people. Therefore, as soon the solar panel buyers had got well filled bank accounts they asked themselves what to do with their money. Some bought new fridges, others bought new furniture, again others booked trips to countries far away, again others took new cars. Thus it happened that many of those people with solar panels on their roofs increased their consumption and bought new consumer goods. But alas, we are still in the age that most consumption goods, also when using self-produced energy, are made with the help of fossil energy. Moreover, many of such products still use fossil energy as well, like the aircraft you use for your travel. To cut a long story short: When people take panels with solar cells, soon they are going to use more energy than before, which still is mainly fossil energy. That’s what we see nowadays. And that’s the solar cell paradox.

Source for the case: Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things. London: Penguin Books, 2016

Subjective and objective methods

Monument for the Battle of Heiligerlee, at Heiligerlee, Netherlands

History is man-made and so it must be studied by methods that reflect that history is man-made. This means that there is no place for the objective methods of the exact sciences in the study of history and in the other humanities as well. Instead we must use methods that reflect the modifications of the human mind. This is the view that Giambattista Vico advocates as we have seen in my blog last week. We can say it also this way: In the natural sciences we look for general laws and for causes, in the humanities we look for individual reasons, intentions and purposes. I basically agree with this view, but as such it is too simple, I think. I want to make this clear with the help of an example taken from Dutch history.

The 16th century was an age full of developments that would transform the social structure of the world, to start with the structure of Europe. Two developments stand out: The rise of protestantism and the end of the medieval class society. These developments went together with a new economic order, and new ideas on freedom and justice. In some parts of Europe the developments went quickly, elsewhere in Europe it was a matter of centuries. A country that was in the vanguard of progress was the Netherlands. In the middle of the 16th century this country was ruled by the King of Spain, but the Dutch found his regime so oppressive that they revolted. The result was a protestant republic governed by civilians.

Traditionally this Revolt – also called the Eighty Years War – is supposed to start with the Battle of Heiligerlee in the north of the Netherlands, on 23 May 1568. Then a little Dutch army led by Louis of Nassau (brother of Prince William of Orange Nassau, also called “William the Silent”) defeated a little Spanish army. Now it is so that Louis of Nassau may have had several reasons for attacking the Spanish. Besides that he had an unique opportunity to ambush the Spanish, he had also political reasons to do so. Maybe Louis saw his attack as an opportunity to advance the cause of freedom, to advance the protestant religion, or he wanted to support the idea to create a new Dutch state, led by the Dutch nobility, as it had been suggested by his brother Prince William. So we can understand Louis’s attack in terms of his reasons and purposes taken from his personal situation and his ambitions. What we cannot do, however, is saying that Louis of Nassau saw his action – at the moment that he performed it, so not interpreted afterwards by him – as an event in the transition period from a medieval class society to modern age that contributed to this transition. Nor can Louis have seen his attack as a step in the Revolt that advanced the rising capitalism. For him the ambush near Heiligerlee was a lucky chance to advance the interests of the Netherlands or something like that.

Anyway, whatever Louis’s thoughts may have been when attacking the Spanish army – and we don’t know the details – we should analyze them in terms of his reasons, intentions and aims, so Vico proposes, if I interpret him well; so in my example we should analyze them in terms of a contribution to the Dutch cause, against and oppressive regime and for religious and political freedom. And if we want to complete our analysis of the battle we should also analyze the motives of the other participants in the battle like Louis’s brother Adolf, who fell in the battle, and the other soldiers, but also those of their Spanish enemies. By doing so we would get a description of a man-made historic event that reflects the modifications of the minds of the participants.

Nevertheless, my example, which describes the “view from within”, shows that there is also a “view from the outside”; a “view from a distance”, so to speak, that sees the battle as an event within certain social developments. In the latter view there is no room for the motives of the participants of the event. As the Dutch historian Romein says it, in this view there is no space for the idea of freedom as felt by the Dutch in the middle of the 16th century. In this sense this approach is “objective”, and according to Vico, there is no room for it in history.

At first sight, the two approaches just sketched seem basically incompatible. A view from the inside is simply different from a view from the outside. Nonetheless both approaches have the same object, for both try to analyze the Battle of Heiligerlee, although they do it in a different way. One approach sees the battle as an interaction of individuals with their reasons, intentions and purposes, while the other approach sees it as an event in the stream of history of political conflicts and social changes that has led to a new order. However, both approaches have a common element and that is the Battle of Heiligerlee. So we can say that this battle binds the two approaches together. The “subjective” approach that analyzes the battle as man-made and the “objective” approach that gives the battle its place in the stream of history simply analyze other aspects of the fight. Such a double approach exists for any historic – and social ! – event, I think. Therefore although at first sight the two approaches seemed incompatible, on closer inspection they just appear to supplement each other as well. That’s why I think that there is room both for subjective and for objective methods in the sciences of man, or – named differently – the humanities.

Source: Henk bij de Weg, De betekenis van zin voor het begrijpen van handelingen. Kampen: Kok Agora, 1996.

The New Science of Giambattista Vico

Scene from Pergolesi’s opera Il Ciarlatano by Die Neue Hofkapelle Graz at the Festival

 for Early Music (Festival voor Oude Muziek). 24 August 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands

When I would ask you to mention a famous inhabitant of Naples from the first part of the 18th century, I think that most of you wouldn’t know whom to name. Or maybe you would mention the composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, known for his Stabat Mater but who also wrote operas. Or you might mention one of the other composers from Naples of that time. But Vico? I guess that most of you have never heard of him. Nevertheless, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) has been an influential thinker, who was read by and had an influence on many other thinkers after him, and they are not the least ones. They range from Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche till recent or current philosophers like Gadamer, Apel, Habermas and MacIntyre. Who was this man, who has been so forgotten and still is remembered?

In fact it was not by chance that Vico became a scholar, for he was a son of a bookseller, and already as a child he had a deep interest in books, which was stimulated by his father. Nevertheless, his development was seriously retarded when he fell from a staircase in his father’s bookshop and hurt his head. It took him three years to recover. Although Vico visited several schools, he considered himself an autodidact. 18 years old he accepted a job as a tutor in Vatolla, 100 km south of Naples. He felt himself isolated there, although he kept in touch with Naples. After nine years he returned to his native city. There he got a chair in rhetoric at the university. Later he was also appointed Royal Historiographer by the viceroy. He published several books and orations. His most influential work is his Principles of New Science, which is still reprinted.

Vico’s influence has been and actually still is great, as said, and his views are still interesting. In view of what I usually write about here in my blogs, I want to discuss three themes from his work.

– Vico was clearly anti-Cartesian in his views. Descartes had developed important and useful ideas, so Vico, but his method and “criteria of clear and distinct ideas could not profitably be applied outside the field of mathematics and natural science.” (Berlin, p. 9). For the science * of history and for ethics we need other methods based on understanding how things come about, such as imagination.

– This anti-Cartesian view is based on what is Vico’s most known statement: “Verum factum est”, which means “Truth is made”. This implies that what we consider true is not an objective representation of what there is in the world that we capture in the mind, but what we consider true is a construction of the mind. This made Vico a forerunner of what nowadays is called “epistemological constructivism”.

– Although he doesn’t use the term, Vico is seen as the founder of the philosophy of history, so the philosophical study of the sciences of history and historiography. One of his most fundamental principles of history is that the history of man has been made by man him and herself. Or to quote Vico: “[T]he world of civil society has ... been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our human mind. [paragraph 331] ... [H]istory cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them.” [349] In other words, history is not a natural science but it is man-made and therefore it must not be studied with means of “objective” methods but by methods that reflect that history is man-made. And it’s also the other way round: Not only must history be studied by its own man-made methods, but also, as Apel puts it, just because man has made history, it is possible to understand it (p. 20), unlike nature, which we can only explain, but which we don’t understand, since nature just happens. This principle developed by Vico is not without consequences, for both at the end of the 19th century and again in the second half of the 20th century just the question whether the historical and social sciences have their own methods that are different from the methods of the exact sciences would lead to serious discussions if not conflicts in the philosophy of science and history.

I want to end this blog with a quotation form MacIntyre’s After Virtue: “[I]t was Vico who first stressed the importance of the undeniable fact ... that the subject matters of moral philosophy at least ... are nowhere to be found except as embodied in the historical lives of particular social groups and so possessing the distinctive characteristics of historical existence ...” (p. 265) Man-made history is the foundation of the moral and social practices, so Vico. One wonders how a philosopher who had such a big influence could have been forgotten, or almost.

* Note: “Science” in the sense of “wetenschap” (Dutch) or “Wissenschaft” (German), so including both the natural sciences and the humanities.

 ***

Sources

Apel, Karl-Otto, Die Erklären:Verstehen-Kontroverse in transzendentalpragmatischer Sicht, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979.

Bergin, Thomas Goddard; Max Harold Fisch (eds.), The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Abridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1970.

Berlin, Isaiah, Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London: The Hogarth Press, 1976.

Blaisse, Mark, Het orakel van Napels. De alternatieve waarheid van Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2018.

MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue. London: Duckworth, 1985.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Giambattista Vico, on https://www.iep.utm.edu/vico/#SH3b