Montaigne on Christmas

Montaigne's chapel in his castle

 I know that Wittgenstein used to celebrate Christmas with his family (see my Christmas blog last year), but how did Montaigne? I have no idea. In his Essays he shares many personal experiences with us, but although Montaigne was a religious person – he had even a chapel for personal use in his castle and he came there often – he doesn’t tell us about his Christmas celebrations. Maybe he had a mass celebrated for himself and his family in his chapel or maybe he went to the church across the gate of his castle. I don’t know, but the former seems most likely to me. And how did Montaigne spend Christmas Day, when he was at home? With his wife and children? No idea.

Only once Montaigne tells what he did that day, but it was not in his Essays but in his travel journal. During his travel through France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, Montaigne spent the whole winter of 1580-1581 in Rome. On Christmas Day he went to the papal mass, as he let his secretary write down in his diary, and he gave a short description of what happened. Actually, it was nothing special, with the exception that it was new to Montaigne that the pope, the cardinals and other prelates sat down most of the time with their heads covered, while chatting with each other. The lustre seemed to be more important than the devotion, so Montaigne.

And did he watch the woman, too, during the mass, as young people still do today during a religious service? Anyway, in the next indentation the secretary tells us that Montaigne wasn’t impressed by the beauty of the women and that it didn’t correspond to the reputation Rome has. Was this a general observation or one he had made during the mass?

In his Essays Montaigne mentions Christmas only twice and even then it’s only for referring to the winter season and not to the religious feast. The first time is in his essay “Of presumption” (II, 17): “An understanding person of our times says: That whoever would, in contradiction to our almanacs, write cold where they say hot, and wet where they say dry, and always put the contrary to what they foretell; if he were to lay a wager, he would not care which side he took, excepting where no uncertainty could fall out, as to promise excessive heats at Christmas, or extremity of cold at Midsummer.” The second time that Montaigne mentions Christmas is in the essay “Of physiognomy” (III, 12): “What good will this curiosity do us, to anticipate all the inconveniences of human nature, and to prepare ourselves with so much trouble against things which, peradventure, will never befall us? [Like] ... to put on your furred gown at Midsummer, because you will stand in need of it at Christmas!”

So, in fact Montaigne ignored Christmas in his writings, although it must have been important for him, since for him religion was more than just a custom in an age in which everyone was religious. But maybe this explains why Montaigne didn’t mention Christmas in his essays. Sometimes we don’t talk about what is important to us, simply because it is so obvious that it is. Not celebrating Christmas in some way was unthinkable in Montaigne’s age. We tend to ignore what we think that everybody knows, even if it isn’t so.

Conceptual analysis in a social world

Individuals or group?

Take this statement by Kit Fine: “Philosophy is the strangest of subjects: ... it attempts to deal with the most profound questions and yet constantly finds itself preoccupied with the trivialities of language ...” (source: see below). This is especially so in the analytical philosophy. As the name indicates already, its method comprises conceptual analysis, hoping that by doing so we can say something about reality. Analytical philosophy in its several forms is one of the main streams of Western philosophy so one must not underestimate its influence on thinking about important questions.

I am a big fan of this approach. Since I am a sociologist by education, it might be expected that I prefer to answer questions about society by going to the field with a questionnaire and ask people what they think. Or that I should observe how they behave. Then I should try to find out from the data I collected what is common in what people do. For instance, a question that intrigues me at the moment is: How do groups behave? Well, collect data about all kinds of groups and draw your conclusions. However, what I actually do is sitting behind my laptop and analyzing the concept of group.

I am certainly not alone in studying social groups this way. Outstanding analytical philosophers who do so are for instance Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela and Margaret Gilbert. Take for instance the latter. Gilbert argues that when we want to explain group activity, we can look at a simple model of a two-person group for seeing what is going on; for example the case of two people walking together. She says: “[G]oing for a walk with another person involves participating in an activity of a special kind, one whose goal is the goal of a plural subject, as opposed to the shared personal goal of the participants. [It] involves an ‘our goal’ as opposed to two or more ‘my goals’.” (1996, p. 187) Walking together is more than just walking next to each other in the same direction, even when both are talking with each other, for maybe at the next corner each will go his or her own way. “[I]n order to go for a walk together”, so Gilbert, “each of the parties must express willingness to constitute with the other a plural subject of the goal that they walk along in one another’s company” (id., p. 184; italics MG). The individual wills must be put together to “a pool of wills that is dedicated, as one, to that goal. ... The individual wills are bound simultaneously and interdependently” (id., p. 185; italics MG). It is not only that each individual promises to follow the group goal, but there is a mutual, or as Gilbert says it, joint commitment that I follow the group goal if you do: “[E]ach person expresses a special form of conditional commitment such that (as is understood) only when everyone has done similarly anyone is committed.” (ibid.; italics MG) Only if the others agree one is released of the obligation. So, according to Gilbert, a group is founded on some appointment between its members, and the two-person walking group is a model that basically applies to all kinds of groups. From this we can conclude that in the end all groups are based on a kind of explicit agreement between its members.

Is Gilberts right? At first sight it sounds plausible. Nevertheless I think that we come here at the limits of the analytical approach. For when I look around what is happening in the world, the practice is often different. Groups as described by Gilbert do exist, indeed. If people go for a walk together, usually they do this by agreement. But is it a model case of all kinds of groups? I have my doubts. How often doesn’t it happen that I belong to a group that I don’t have constituted with the other members, but that I simply joined and that I adapt myself to, because I have no choice and because the positive aspects of joining exceed the negative aspects. People join sports clubs but often they have no say in its rules. “The club” determines in which team you play and changes also the club rules now and then, and it often happens that you have no say in it. You are in an army unit because military service is compulsory in your country, but if possible you would quit. Or you work in a team of a department of your company, for you need the money, but if you had the choice, you would work elsewhere. However, the unemployment is high so you can’t. And your boss can dismiss you, if he doesn’t need you any longer, even if you don’t agree. Most people have so little influence on the groups they belong to, that it’s difficult to say that these groups are based on a joint commitment. Indeed, the members have committed themselves to do what the purpose of the group requires, and once having joined they must follow orders and adapt without having much say in what the group does. As said, I am a big fan of the analytical approach, but I find it also important to look at the facts. Philosophy, even analytical philosophy, and sociology need to go together and they go well together, when they talk about society.

Sources: Margaret Gilbert, Living Together. Lanham, etc: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996. Mahrad Almotahari, “The identity of a material thing and its matter”, in: The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 64, No. 256 (July 2014), pp. 387-406 (p. 387 for the quotation of Fine).

Après nous le déluge

The future of the Netherlands?

“Après nous le déluge” (After us the deluge) is a saying that has become proverbial in many languages. It is ascribed to Madam de Pompadour, mistress of the French King Louis XV. She should have said it, when France was in troublesome circumstances. It means something like: As long as we aren’t hurt ourselves in person, we don’t need to care; when the consequences will be felt, we will be gone or we will be dead. Such an attitude has everything to do with responsibility or rather with irresponsibility. It’s an attitude that says: I care only about what touches me and I am not interested in the consequences of my behaviour for other people, as long as I stay beyond their reach. It’s an attitude you find, for example, among politicians who think that they don’t need to account for their deeds, like dictators and leaders in authoritarian states. For who would call them to account, is what they seem to think. Happily practice is sometimes different, but often irresponsible politicians escape and don’t need to give account, for instance because they die.

Although, as far as I know, responsibility as such is not a theme Montaigne explicitly wrote about, the idea comes back in one form or another in many of his essays, for instance in the essay “That the intention is judge of our actions” (Essays, Book I-VII). Here Montaigne first discusses the question whether we can try to escape responsibility and account by postponing the effects of one’s actions till after one’s death. For isn’t it so that death discharges us of all our obligations? Montaigne’s examples are always a bit antique from our point of view – but also always to the point – but he mentions the case of Henri VII, King of England, who had promised to save the life of a certain duke but in his testament he ordered his son to kill the man as soon as possible when he had died. As if his death would discharge Henri VII from his obligations to save the duke’s life! Or, just the other way round, when the counts of Horn and Egmont were about to be decapitated on the 4th of June 1568 in Brussels by order of the Duke of Alva, Egmont asked to be the first to die. For wasn’t he responsible for the death of Horn by having asked him to come to Brussels, promising that nothing would happen? But Egmont had said this in good faith and it was Alva who had tricked both counts. Basing himself on these two cases, Montaigne’s conclusion is: “We cannot be bound beyond what we are able to perform, by reason that effect and performance are not at all in our power, and that, indeed, we are masters of nothing but the will, in which, by necessity, all the rules and whole duty of mankind are founded and established.” Or, as the title of the essay says: “That the intention is judge of our actions”. So, Egmont was to be excused, whether he would die first or second, but Henri VII was responsible for the death of the duke, even if it took place after his death, for he gave the order to kill the man.

Another instance of the idea that death discharges us of our obligations is that people try to correct their mistakes in their testaments, although they could have done so already in life time. This is not right, so Montaigne, for not only need mistakes be corrected as soon as possible, but also “penitency requires penalty”.

What Montaigne makes clear in this essay is that responsibility doesn’t end with death, even if the perpetrator can no longer give account of his deeds and doesn’t feel the consequences in person. I know that there are too many people who think “What happens after my death is no concern of mine”. Politicians – and not only politicians! – should think of these words of Montaigne, but who does? Some don’t even care about their reputation.

Now the Climate Change Conference in Paris has reached an agreement. That’s a first step. Is it a good step? Is it enough? Anyway, the next step must be that the responsible politicians carry out the agreement and that they’ll not think “Après nous le déluge”, for then I fear that we’ll have to take this saying literally.

On the Climate Change Conference

Just one question: How many participants of the Climate Change Conference in Paris have arrived by bike?

When I publish this blog, the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris will go on yet for a few days. Some 40.000 people (not only politicians) have come together for discussing one of the most important political and social problems of the future: Global warming and its consequences. And, let it to be hoped – but I am very sceptical about it – that they’ll take relevant and effective decisions in order to tackle the problem. As everybody knows, all this is very important. That’s why the participants of the conference should set an example to the world population. Or better, each participant should be an example and be the necessary change she or he wants to see. How different reality is. The conference hasn’t yet finished and the actual decisions are always taken on the last day, but already now I know how the result has to be summarized, in view of what resulted from such conferences in the past. In good French “Après nous le déluge” (After us the deluge), as Madame de Pompadour said, when France was in troublesome circumstances. As long as we aren’t hurt ourselves in person, we don’t need to care, is often the implicit attitude on such conferences. Need to change the climate change? Get on your bike.

At the right time at the right place

Last week I talked about the phenomenon that what people do is influenced by the situation they are in in the sense that the situation determines what they do and that it is not their values and attitudes that make them act in a certain way. The latter is what we should expect and it is also what many people consider desirable. This view that actions are situation-dependent is called situationism.

I have talked about situationism in my blogs before, although I didn’t call it that way. For instance, maybe some long-time followers of these blogs remember that people with a warm cup of coffee in their hands are more positive towards strangers than people holding a cold pad. In several other blogs I discussed the view of the psychologist Phillip Zimbardo who developed the theory (based on his research) that it is the situation that makes you a devil or a hero. Not psychological dispositions make people behave in an evil way but the situation brings people that far, so Zimbardo. Actually it is also what Hannah Arendt defends in her book on the Eichmann trial, just as Stanley Milgram does in his famous study Obedience to Authority.

If situationism were true in its strict sense, the question presents itself whether people can still be considered responsible for their behaviour. For isn’t it so that they can say then “I can’t help that I acted that way; the situation made me do so and I couldn’t resist”? And indeed, that is in fact what people do when they appeal to an order given to them by someone above them. In the end strict situationism means that we cannot be held responsible for what we do and also the idea that we have a free will is at stake.

Although I don’t want to deny that a situation can have a large influence on our behaviour and that it is often difficult to resist the “pressure of the situation”, I think that there is much to say against the idea of strict situationism. (In what follows for a part I follow the argumentation by Pauline Kleingeld in her article referred to below). For isn’t it so that we can often chose the situation that fits us best? To give a banal example: Don’t be surprised that we’ll play football if we have joined a football club, for if we had preferred to skate, we would have joined a skating club. And so it often goes. Another approach is trying to manipulate a situation. Again a simple example: If you don’t want to be asked for a task but you know that you’ll not refuse, hide yourself behind the backs of the others present; if you just want to be asked, seat yourself in the first row. A third way to confront conceivable situations is to train for it. That’s what soldiers do, when they train for war, so that they don’t run away when the shootings start. All these possibilities – and there are certainly more - are forms of situation management: conscious ways to make yourself prepared to what can happen or to influence what will happen.

But if we can make the situation so that it makes us do what we do want to do – and often it is possible – we can no longer hold the view that we are not the responsible agents that we denied we are. Although situations often happen to us, we are free to prepare ourselves for the possibility that they will happen and that we will be “pressed” to take a stand we actually do not want to take. “Why do I do now what I do?” is a question we have to learn to ask as much as possible. By preparing ourselves “[our] behavior is no longer just due to ‘the power of the situation’ and ‘without intentional direction’ ”, as Kleingeld says it (p. 357; italics K.). This doesn’t mean that we can always follow our preferences, but it makes us conscious of what we do by our own volitions and what we do “because we can’t help” and what is beyond our control. By doing so, we make ourselves the responsible persons we are, but we are also ready to take the responsibility that others ascribe to us (and with right). Then we don’t need to refer to the situation as an unjustifiable excuse. If you want to be free, prepare yourself.

Reference: Pauline Kleingeld, “Consistent Egoists and Situation Managers”, in: Philosophical Explorations, 18/3, pp. 344-361.

At the wrong time at the wrong place

A few days ago I read an article about moral luck (see the reference below). The authors distinguished several kinds of moral luck, but in this blog I must ignore that because of lack of space. In order to make clear what the concept involves I’ll use an example from the article.

An effect corroborated in many studies is the so-called bystander effect. Suppose you are walking in the street and you see someone getting a heart-attack. What will you do? If you are the only person there, you’ll probably help, but the more people are around there, the smaller the chance is that you’ll come to the person’s aid: “the likelihood of intervention in emergency situations inversely correlates with the number of people present in that situation”, as the authors formulate it (p. 367). It depends on what is happening and how serious the accident is – or whatever it is –, but if you are the only bystander, the chance that you’ll help is, say, more than 80%; if there are more people present the chance that you’ll help may be as low as 10% or less. The bystander effect applies apart from your personal attitude towards helping in emergency situations in the abstract (so what you would say you would do when you are not there). In other words, even if you are morally and maybe also legally required to render assistance to a person and even if you think you should help, how you really will act generally depends on the accidental number of people present. So whether you’ll do your moral duty is dependent on whether you are in luck or whether it is just your luck, so to speak, whether or not many people are around there on the place of emergency. That’s why philosophers talk here about “moral luck”. Whether you’ll act in a moral way as you should do or whether you’ll dodge is determined by the situation you are in, at least for a big part. Does this mean that we are actually not responsible for our actions because “the situation made us do what we do”? Maybe, but I think that in the end a person is responsible for his or her own actions and that s/he is always accountable for what s/he does, certainly if there is freedom to act, as in my examples. But that’s a subject for debate for another blog.

Actually all this has nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday the 13th of November,  but when I read this article a few days later, automatically I linked up a connection between what happened to the victims and the idea of moral luck. For isn’t moral luck a bit like being somewhere at some time by chance? I mean, someone gets an accident and you happen to see it: two unrelated events that coincidentally go together. And by chance nobody else is there, or just a few other people are there, or maybe a lot. These phenomena unrelated to your walking there happen to go together and together they make what you’ll do. But one of the factors might be different and you would behave in a different way: Things happen to you and often you cannot help. It’s a bit like when we say: he was there at the right time at the right place (so he could and did help) or just at the wrong time and at the wrong place.

So it was in Paris in the evening of Friday the 13th November 2015 as well: Many people who were where the terrorist attacks took place simply happened to be there but they could have been elsewhere as well. Coming one minute later; leaving one minute later; just a banal thing as having gone to the toilet (and whether or not it was in use); that the terrorist would have come a few minutes or even seconds later, because a car happened to cross their way; such banal things in life often make whether you are a victim or a survivor. Being at the wrong time at the wrong place can kill a life; or many. From the point of view of the victims, of course; for the perpetrators there is no excuse. What happens in your life can be a matter of good luck and back luck. Often life is on your side, but not always.

Reference: Marcela Herdova and Stephen Kearns, “Get lucky: situationism and circumstancial moral luck”, in: Philosophical Explorations, 18/3, pp. 363-377.

Are individual actions possible?

Sometimes we do things alone, sometimes we do things together with other people, tuned to what our companions do – together with us. We could call the former kind of doings individual actions and the latter one coordinated actions, or maybe joint, shared or collective actions – the term is not important. Are individual actions possible?

Let’s say that I want to take the train to Utrecht in order to go to a concert there. So I take my coat, walk to the railway station, buy a ticket and get in the train, after it has arrived. In Utrecht I get off the train, leave the railway station and walk to the concert hall. This complicated action of going to a concert can be divided in a series of subactions with their own separate intentions that can also be considered on their own. I’ll consider the subaction “taking the train to Utrecht”.

When I want to spade my garden, I walk to the shed behind my house, take a scoop, go to my garden and start to turn the soil over. There is no other person involved than myself. How different it is when I take a train. Taking a train is not possible without the presence of a whole man-made and man-maintained infrastructure. In order to be able to take the train (in a legal way), first I must buy a ticket, for instance from a ticket machine. Even this simple action supposes many intentions and actions of other persons in order to make it possible! Someone (or several people) must have thought out this system, some must have constructed the machine, some must have put the ticket machine on the platform, must maintain the ticket machine and take care that there is enough paper and ink for tickets to be printed, etc. In selling railway tickets a whole structure of intentions and actions is involved and without such a structure buying a ticket is simply impossible. No one could print his own train ticket, or it would be seen as forgery.

It is the same for getting in the train and going by it to your destination. This is only possible if there is an infrastructure intentionally built up by many people who cooperated together in making it, with their own individual reasons and intentions for doing their tasks and, last but not least, the personnel (engine driver, guard) on the train and others that make that the train can safely ride on the railways.

So what looks like an individual action with an individual intention at first sight, turns out to be possible only if there are other people – most of them unseen by you – who each for their own reasons help you perform your action in some way. The individual action of taking the train to Utrecht can be performed only within the presence of an intentionally built up structure intentionally run by cooperating people. And so it is for performing many other individual actions as well, if not for most of them: they are based on a structure of individual intentions and actions geared to one another in order to make their realization possible. We need coordinated intentions and actions in order to make the structure run. In the case of my example, we could call it “railway system” or “maintaining a railway system”. Moreover, it works in two directions: No train, no customs, but also no customs no train. One implies the other and every participant needs to endorse the coordinated intentions and actions in some way. Every participant makes his or her own contribution realizing his or her own individual intentions.

The upshot is that most individual actions are difficult to distinguish from what I called coordinated actions. The difference is rather gradual than absolute. Most actions that are individual on the face of it can only be realized by cooperating with others in some way, as it is the other way round.

And how about spading your garden? Is it really an individual action, as I supposed? Who made your scoop? What made it that you are allowed to spade that piece of land? Why did you want to dig your garden? (maybe for selling the vegetables you grow there or preparing the soil, because you want to compete in a flower show next year?) It is to be wondered whether really pure individual actions are possible, or you must be a Robinson on a deserted isle before you met your Friday.

Philosophical paradoxes

Paradoxes are a type of puzzle cases not mentioned on the website on action puzzles in my last blog. Nevertheless, they can be useful in clarifying concepts in the philosophy of action. I suppose that every reader of this blog will know the most famous of all paradoxes, the Liar Paradox: Epimenides said: Every man from Crete is a liar. The paradox becomes clear, if we know that Epimenides himself is a man from Crete.

I have discussed already extensively a well-known paradox in my blogs above, namely the Ship of Theseus, which is also known as Theseus’ paradox. Also one of the leading ideas in the philosophy of action actually is nothing but a kind of paradox, namely the idea that what we do – our actions – is dependent on the way we describe it. This idea has been introduced by Elizabeth Anscombe. Here I’ll use the version of E.J. Lowe: “A man is described as poisoning the inhabitants of a house by pumping contaminated water in its supply from a well, which the inhabitants drink with fatal consequences. There are various ways of describing what this man is doing: ... moving his arm, ... depressing the handle of the pump, ... pumping water from the well, contaminating the water-supply ..., ... poisoning the inhabitants of the house, ... killing the inhabitants ... [A]re these six different things he is doing, or just six different ways of describing one and the same thing?” (p. 240) In the former case, we would call him a juggler, so Lowe, but also the latter case – the one accepted in the philosophy of action – is problematical. Moving his arm is considered then to have different descriptions, but suppose that we want to know when and where the man is killing the inhabitants of the house. Depending on the way we describe what the man is doing, he kills them at different places and at different times, for the arm-moving takes place outside the house and the killing (which take place later) occurs within the house. (pp. 240-241) “So, it seems, we have to say that the man kills the inhabitants outside the house and quite some time before they die. But that is surely absurd”, so Lowe (p. 241). Lowe presents an alternative approach to resolve the paradox, but I refer those interested in it to Lowe, for here I want to talk about paradoxes.

I end this series of blogs on puzzle cases with a paradox that can be used to cast light on the idea of intention. The question is: Can we intend what we surely will not do? Generally philosophers of action support the view that intending to do a supposes minimally the absence of the belief that one will not a. However, take this paradox, which is known as the toxin paradox and which has been developed by G. Kavka (here quoted from an article by Stephanie Rennick): “You are offered a million dollars to form the intention of drinking a vile potion which, though not lethal, will make you unpleasantly ill. Once you have formed the intention the money is handed over, and you are free to change your mind. The trouble is that you know this, and it will prevent you from forming the intention, since you cannot intend to do what you know you will not do”.

This brings me back to the question whether I can try to do what I cannot do, discussed in my blog last week. Suppose now that I know that I cannot break the world record 5.000 m running, if my personal record is still three minutes slower than the world record after many years of hard training. Can I say then that nevertheless I can try to break the world record? Just as we cannot intend to do what we know we’ll not do, we cannot try to do what we know for sure we cannot do. Nevertheless I think there is much truth in the conventional wisdom saying “who doesn’t try doesn’t win”, even if you know that you have no chance.

Sources: - E.J. Lowe, An introduction to the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mH12kYm1RKAC&lpg=PA242&dq=%22individuation+of+actions%22+lowe&pg=PA240&hl=nl#v=onepage&q&f=false).

- Stephanie Rennick, “Things mere mortals can do, but philosophers can’t”, http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/content/75/1/22.full.

On trying

In the philosophy of action puzzle cases can be used for several reasons. An already old website (I suppose it has been made by Joshua Knobe, who is now especially known for his contributions to experimental philosophy) mentions three such reasons:

– Exploring the causality of the relation between intention and action. Davidson’s case of the mountain climber in my blog last week falls under this category.

– Exploring the question whether acting intentionally implies acting with the intention to do what one intentionally does. For example, Harman discusses this case (quoted from the website): “In firing his gun, [a] sniper knowingly alerts the enemy to his presence. He does this intentionally, thinking that the gain is worth the possible cost. But he certainly does not intend to alert the enemy to his presence.”

– Exploring the relation between intending and succeeding to do what one intends to do. (see http://actiontheory.free.fr/Actionpuzzles.htm)

In this blog I want to discuss a question that belongs to the last category and that I find intriguing since already a long time: Can one try to do what one cannot do? For instance, can I try to break a world record, if I am by far not good enough to break it?

According to Stuart Hampshire trying implies that “there is some difficulty and a possibility of failure”. If so, we speak of trying “whenever difficulty or the chance of failure is stressed” and the trying agent knows what to do and has decided to perform the trying action: The agent “should have some idea of how the required result might be achieved and that he should make up his mind now” (Hampshire 1959:107).

Suppose that I am a long distance runner. The world record on 5,000 metres track (5K) is 12'.37,35", run in 2004 by Kenenisa Bekele in Hengelo in the Netherlands. It is my big wish to break this record. However, my personal record (pr) is exactly three minutes slower: 15'.37,35". I ran it after many years of hard training. Therefore everybody body will say that it will be impossible for me to break the world record. Nevertheless, I don’t give up and I train and train and train ... and then I choose a race for the big try. As expected by the experts, I fail and because I have started by far too fast in the race I even fail to break my own pr.

According to Hampshire’s definition of trying, we can say that I tried to break the 5K world record but that I failed. Is it really so? It’s clear that I failed, but can we say that I tried? I think that we cannot, for it was 99.99999... % certain that I would fail, and I think that in order to speak reasonably of a try there must be a minimal chance of success and the chance of success was absent from any reasonable point of view. Therefore I want to add this “minimal chance of success” as a condition when we want to speak of a try. However, what is a minimal chance? Is it when my pr would have been 14'.37,35"? Or 13'.37,35"? Or 13'.07,35"? Or 12'.52,35"? Or ...? The problem is what tells a try from a not-try. A man cannot try to give birth to a baby, but a long distance runner with a pr of 12'.38,35" on the 5K track can reasonably try to break the world record on the distance, and there is a lot in between from the perspective of what we can possibly try and what we cannot. But where is the line that separates them? Often there is one, but as my case of the 5K runner shows, also often there isn’t one. In practice we know what trying is but in theory we cannot define it. The upshot is that we can’t even try to define “try” for there is no chance of success but only failure.

Hampshire, Stuart, Thought and action. London: Chatto and Windus, 1959.

Philosophical puzzles

Philosophical puzzles, like the “Ship of Theseus” (see last blog), are much used in analytical philosophy and especially in the philosophy of action. Then I don’t mean logical puzzles or puzzles merely done for fun or for training your brain and, but puzzles with an ethical or practical aspect, so like Theseus’ Ship, which plays an important part in discussions on identity, or the trolley problem, which I used in my blog dated Feb. 18, 2013. They are good instruments for thinking through complicated issues. However, the reasonings involved rely on philosophical intuitions, and is it really true that such intuitions are the same for everybody, even if philosophically schooled? It’s doubtful. Therefore a new branch of philosophy has come into being, experimental philosophy, which investigates philosophical problems by presenting them to different groups of laymen, while using an experimental format (for instance using test groups with different cultural backgrounds).

Since my specialty is the philosophy of action, I am especially interested in puzzle cases in that field. Some are about what an action is, what intentionality is, and the like. Other ones try to distinguish actions “as such” and its side effects. Again other puzzle cases focus on the relation between action and causality. And maybe there are other categories as well. Donald Davidson, who left his mark on the development of modern action theory, uses several puzzle cases for examining the question if and under which conditions there is a causal relation between an agent’s beliefs and the result of an action by him or her. Such cases are of the type that someone wants to perform an action with an important consequence and the idea of doing so makes the agent so nervous that he loses the control of his body and just this makes that he does what he intended to do but not in the way or at the moment he wanted to do it. Here is an example by Davidson: “A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his hold, and yet it might be the case that he never chose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally.” (Davidson, 1980: 79). According to Davidson we can say only that the climber caused the fall of the co-climber if what the climber believed and wanted to do on the one hand and the fall of the co-climber on the other hand were causally related “in the right way”, and that is apparently not the case in this instance. Is he right? For one can also say that one needs to keep his nerves under control in such a situation, anyhow, since being unnerved can make that a climber loses control of what he does and he has to know that, and wrong beliefs can make a climber nervous. Maybe one must say that just because the climber’s belief and want were related in the wrong way to the fall of the co-climber they caused it. Isn’t it so that we are often held responsible for what we do, not as side effects but just as the thing we do, because what we intended to do is related in the wrong way to the consequences? Just this “being related in the wrong way” makes that we are often held responsible for what we didn’t believe and wanted to do and nevertheless actually did (in causing a traffic accident, for example).

These are only a few initial remarks about Davidson’s puzzle case. Much more space is necessary to flesh it out, and maybe finally I would draw another conclusion, if I did. But what all this shows is that a good puzzle case doesn’t only make you think (using your brain) but also gives you a lot to think about.

Reference: Donald Davidson¸ Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

Truth and the Ship of Theseus

Last week I mentioned the famous puzzle case of the Ship of Theseus. It was first put forward by the Ancient Greeks. Nowadays it is especially used in the debate on personal identity in the analytical philosophy. And indeed, the problem I discussed in my last blog has much to do with the question of group identity; in this case the identity of a group over time. But if a group like a sports team has a continuity over time despite changes in membership, just as the Ship of Theseus remains to exist when its planks are replaced one by one, does this mean that a group exists independent of the members who make up the group? The more I think about the case of the Ship of Theseus, the more intriguing questions come to my mind. It casts even doubt on one of the basic assumptions of classical logic, namely the law of excluded middle and double negation. The first part of this law says that for any proposition either it is true or its negation is true. The second part says that a statement cannot be true and not true at the same time.

To repeat, the case of the Ship of Theseus involves that the vessel is repaired by gradually taking out the old planks one by one and putting in new. Do we then still have the same ship at the end? Of course, Theseus, the owner of the ship who has commissioned the repair, will say “yes, we have”, and we’ll certainly agree if the old planks are destroyed. But suppose that someone has stolen the planks before they could be destroyed, builds a new ship with these planks (and only with these planks) and paints the name “Ship of Theseus” on it, just as on the original ship and on the one repaired by order of Theseus. Which ship is then the real Ship of Theseus? Say that just after the reparation has been finished, a fire completely destroys the ship with the new planks. Then the plank-hoarder appears and says: No problem, I have saved the ship for I have reconstructed the Ship of Theseus with the old planks. I think that it would be absurd to deny the truth of this claim. For if the Ship of Theseus would have been taken apart by taking away the planks one by one, storing the planks for a year, and then rebuilding the ship with the old planks, we would say the same. However, if we had replaced all old planks by new planks and would have destroyed the old planks, we would say that the ship with the new planks was the real Ship of Theseus. So whether the ship made of the old planks is the Ship of Theseus or whether the new ship is depends on the history of the building of the Ship of Theseus and on what has happened with the planks.

Suppose now that the repaired ship hasn’t caught fire and that the old planks haven’t been destroyed but used by an antique dealer to rebuild the Ship of Theseus. Theseus would say then, with right, that the old planks have been stolen and that the repaired ships is the real Ship of Theseus. But the antique dealer maintains that he wanted to save the original Ship of Theseus. Then he can also say with right that his ship is the real Ship of Theseus. As Noonan says about this case: “The identity statement in question is at worst indeterminate in truth-value” (p. 132). The problem can be solved by letting the truth of a proposition depend on who utters it (either Theseus or the antique dealer in my case), but classical logic does not allow this possibility: Either Theseus’ ship or the antique dealer’s ship is the real Ship of Theseus.

But suppose now that Theseus didn’t know that the old planks have not been destroyed and that they were used for rebuilding his original ship. Theseus puts out to sea with his repaired ship and he runs across the antique dealer with his ship. Theseus falls into a rage, when he sees another ship with the name “Ship of Theseus”, and he attacks it with his boat. We get a sea battle and one ship is destroyed and sinks. Then there are good reasons to call the winning ship the real Ship of Theseus, at least from then on. So the result of the battle determines which ship is the real Ship of Theseus. In other words, the truth of the proposition “The Ship of Theseus is identical with the ship constructed of the new planks” depends on the result of the battle. If Theseus wins it is true. However, this doesn’t involve that if the antique dealer wins this proposition is false. Moreover we have then the intriguing question, whether Theseus changes his opinion, in case he loses the battle. Maybe he considers from then on the ship rebuilt with the old planks again the real Ship of Theseus.

Source: Harold W. Noonan, Personal Identity. Second Edition. London: Routledge, 2003

A philosophical enigma

If we want to explain group behaviour, we are faced with the question: “What is a group?” Many answers have been given in philosophy, sociology and other disciplines. I’ll not try to evaluate them here. I want to consider a question that is relevant when we explain group actions from the perspective of analytical philosophy. Some examples of groups I am thinking of are people painting a house together, going for a walk together, a sports team, a task group, or a small company.

Although a group doesn’t have a shared intention, as we have seen in my last blog, usually it has a goal, which can be seen as the reason that brings the group members together, although it doesn’t need to be the intention that makes the group members act. It can make that people join the group.

Groups can be organised for only one task and once it has been executed, that’s it. Usually such groups are stable. Membership doesn’t change during the activity and once the task has been finished the group is dissolved. However, many groups have a longer duration: Its activity is permanent or at least it lasts quite a long time. Instances of such more or less permanent groups are sport teams and business companies. Then it often happens that members of the group have to be replaced now and then, temporarily or once and for all. Someone can become ill. Another member decides not to go on with the group. A member is replaced by someone who is more competent. And so on.

Let me take the case of the first team of a football club that wins the national cup. I call this team First Team (FT for short). Sometimes a team keeps the same core of players for years, but there are always changes from match to match and from year to year. Suppose that after fifteen years all players that once won the cup have left the team. Nevertheless it is normal to say “Finally, after fifteen years, the First Team has won the cup again”. One can say, of course, that in fact another team has won the cup and that it is not right to say that after fifteen years it was the First Team that has won the cup again, but then we have the problem to decide when the old guard (FTold) is no longer the new guard (FTnew) that wins the cup fifteen years later. Let’s say for simplicity that every year a player of FTold leaves the team and is replaced. So after eleven years FTold has become the FTnew that wins the cup again at last (I ignore the substitutes from match to match or even during a match). Then two views are possible. One is that FTnew is the same team as FTold, because it belongs to the same club, has a continuity in time with FTold, etc. The alternative view is that FTold and FTnew are different teams. But, as supposed, the change from FTold to FTnew is gradual, so when do we no longer have FTold and can we say that we have got FTnew instead? If one of the players of FTold leaves the team and is replaced, do we have then still the same team? If we say no, we have a problem, for everybody treats FTold still as the same First Team of our club. Moreover, say that the leaving player is injured and comes back after a few months, but after again a few months he leaves the team once and for all. Is it so then that we have two different teams during this period? Or is there a difference when a player leaves a team temporarily because of an injury and when he leaves it definitively? However, if we say that FTold remains the same after only one player has been replaced, then we can ask the same question, when a second player is replaced. If we say “yes” again, etc., then we have eleven new players that wins the cup after fifteen years and still we have the same team, although our view was that FTold and FTnew were different. Or must we say that we have a new team if at least half of the FTold players has been substituted? And why then just when six players have been substituted and not five or seven?

I can go on discussing this case and I can consider all kinds of variations. However, I think that the problem whether FTnew is or isn’t the same team as FTold has no solution. It is the same so for any other group in case members are replaced. I think that from one respect we can say that it’s still the same group and from another respect that a group with subsitutes is a new group, but the problem cannot be solved in a satisfactory way.

My case looks like the famous case of the Ship of Theseus – already discussed by the Ancient Greeks – which is repaired continuously by taking out old planks and putting in new. Do we still have at the end the same ship or do we have a new one? This problem of gradual substitution is one of the great enigmas of philosophy that until now nobody could solve and that maybe never will be solved. A group changes and nevertheless stays the same during the years. That’s all we can say about it.

The strings that bind people together

Many years ago I have written my PhD thesis about the question how to explain human actions. At the end of my thesis I thought: this is all about individuals but how about groups? Can we explain what groups do from a kind of group intentions just as we can understand individual actions with the help of the agent’s individual intentions (plus his or her beliefs)? In my thesis I wanted to dedicate a chapter to the problem but I dropped it. Nevertheless it stayed in my mind. Actually, I was not the only philosopher who found the issue intriguing. Twenty years ago the theme was rather new, but since then more and more philosophers in the field of analytical philosophy have got their teeth into it, like Raimo Tuomela, Margaret Gilbert, Michael E. Bratman, John R. Searle and Seumas Miller, to mention a few names. One of the most important contributors to this subject is Bratman.

According to Bratman, just as an individual agent has intentions that guides his or her actions, also group behaviour is led by a kind of common intentionality – at least if we talk about small groups. He calls this common intentionality “shared intention”. Say, so Bratman, you and I are painting a house together. It’s not just that each of us is painting on his own, but we coordinate our painting in some way. You scrape the old paint and I paint what you have scraped. You buy the brushes and I buy the paint. We check what the other has promised to do; etc. If this is the case, we have a shared intention, namely in the sense that each of us has the appropriate attitude and that these attitudes and the way they are put into practice are interrelated. We can compare this with the way an individual coordinates what she does over time, for instance when she would paint her house alone: “Thus does our shared intention help to organize and to unify our intentional agency in ways to some extent analogous to the ways in which the intentions of an individual organize and unify her individual agency over time.” (Bratman, 1999: 110-111; quotation on p. 111). Elsewhere Bratman says it this way: “... shared intention ... involves intentions of the individuals whose contents appeal to the group activity” (2014, p. 12). We can compare this sharing an intention with the case that my neighbour and I are painting our houses – we have two semi-detached houses –, but we haven’t consulted on the matter. Then, in my words, my neighbour and I have the same intention but we do not have a shared intention.

However, do we really need a shared intention in order to explain what two people do that are painting a house together in the way described by Bratman? The problem is that Bratman doesn’t say who you and I in his sample are, which suggests that his analysis applies to every two (or maybe three or four) people who form a painting group or another task group doing a job together.

So, let’s say that I want to paint my house, but it is too much work for me. Therefore I hire a hand in order to help me. Together we paint the house, exactly in the way described by Bratman. Then we have a painting group in the sense of Bratman, but does this group and do the people making up the group have a shared intention? On the face of it the shared intention is “painting the house”, and indeed, what I do can be understood in this way:

(1) I have the intention to paint the house.

(2) I think that I can paint the house only, if I hire a hand to help me.

(3) Therefore I hire a hand who helps me painting the house.

(4) Together we paint the house.

Does the hand share my intention to paint the house? I think that what he does can be better understood in this way:

(1) The hand has the intention to earn money [since to hire himself out as a hand is his work].

(2) The hand thinks that he can earn money by helping me painting the house.

(3) Therefore the hand hires himself out to me for this reason.

(4) Together we paint the house.

What this example shows is that for me – the owner of the house – the supposed shared intention is what I want to bring about but for the hand it is a means for another intention, namely earning money. In a certain sense we can call a means also an intention (at least often we can), and then we could say that hiring himself out contains the intention to paint the house, but even if we accept this, we must admit that for the hand this intention is on another explanatory level than it is for me. Therefore I think that my counter-example contains the case of a group of two people who cooperate and act together but who don’t share an intention in the way conceived by Bratman. The upshot is that it is not a shared intention that explains what a group does. The problem here is not finding a common goal that binds the members of a group together but to unravel why these members let themselves bind.

References: Bratman, Michael E., “Shared Intention”, in Faces of Intention. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 109-129; Bratman, Michael E., Shared Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

On refugees (2)

“... and suddenly I discovered Descartes among a group of refugees and quickly I took a snap shot ....”

I finished my last blog remarking that there might be a Descartes among the refugees who look for a better life in Europe. I didn’t mention the name of Descartes without reason, for 22 years old Descartes left his native country France, afraid that he could be arrested because of his ideas. He went to the Netherlands, where he stayed twenty years, till he left for Sweden, where he died.

It’s not exceptional that philosophers and others have to leave the places where they live because of their ideas. Also in the Netherlands in the days of Descartes it could be dangerous to have unusual ideas, although the country had the reputation to be tolerant. Especially it could be dangerous to have ideas that conflicted with the reigning religion. Spinoza, excluded because of his atheistic views by the Jewish community of his home town Amsterdam, first felt forced to leave for the nearby Ouderkerk. Although he returned to Amsterdam after some time, soon he preferred to leave the town permanently and finally he established himself in The Hague.

I’ll walk with seven-league strides through history till I arrive in the twentieth century. So, for instance, I’ll not talk about Rousseau, who fled France in 1762 persecuted because of his ideas, or about Voltaire who had taken up his residence in Switzerland just a few years before Rousseau went to live there, also for avoiding arrest by the French authorities.

In the twentieth century it was especially for political reasons that philosophers had to flee. They were victims of the reigning ideology, be it communism or nazism. In the latter case philosophers (and many others) didn’t only have to flee because of their ideas, but also if they belonged to the “wrong race”: They were Jews or of Jewish descent. Most members of the Vienna Circle – a kind of philosophical debating club – fled from the Nazis to the USA (like Carnap, Feigl and Gödel), or sometimes to Britain (Neurath) or New Zealand (Popper). Wittgenstein, who was already in England, did not return to Austria. The members of the Frankfurt School – a sociological current centred around the Institute for Sociology in Frankfurt, Germany – fled via Geneva and Paris also to the USA, although most of them returned to Europe after the fall of Nazism. This was, for instance what the philosophers-sociologists Adorno and Horkheimer did. Their colleague Walter Benjamin found himself forced to commit suicide during his flight (in 1940 from France, occupied by the Nazis). An outstanding philosopher who fled communism was Kolakowski from Poland. Kolakowski had developed a kind of revisionist Marxism, which was rejected by the communist leaders, who deprived him of his academic functions. In the end Kolakowski went to the West.

Most philosophers mentioned here were welcomed in their new fatherlands, or at least they were treated in a decent way. That needed not always be so. Montaigne was not a political refugee, but once he had to leave his castle because the plague reigned in the region where he lived. Travelling around with his family (and some servants, I suppose) he could not find a refuge, although he was already a well-known man. In his Essays (Book III-12) Montaigne tells us that

“I myself, who am so hospitable, was in very great distress for a retreat for my family; a distracted family, frightful both to its friends and itself, and filling every place with horror where it attempted to settle, having to shift its abode so soon as any one's finger began but to ache; all diseases are then concluded to be the plague, and people do not stay to examine whether they are so or no.”

In need and no longer being the lord of his castle when he was on the run, Montaigne was considered as vermin and bringer of the plague, and not as a man respected by his environment. His social network collapsed as soon as he had to flee and no longer counted who he was, despite his past.

Actually this is the situation many refugees are in. Most are not welcomed but feared because they might bring misery, even if a few weeks ago they lived yet in their own country as well respected citizens. In this case the misery is not a contagious disease but the fear of social unrest and instability and the fear that the refugees “pick our houses and jobs”. So you don’t handover to them the food parcels they need – containing only bread and water –, but you throw them in the mob, as I have recently seen on TV in a report about a reception camp for refugees in Hungary (as if they are animals in a zoo).

This is how Montaigne continued his story:

“And the mischief on’t is that, according to the rules of art, in every danger that a man comes near, he must undergo a quarantine in fear of the evil, your imagination all the while tormenting you at pleasure, and turning even your health itself into a fever.”

A parallel with a refugee camp is easily drawn. The Latin proverb “Homo homine lupus est” (Man is a wolf to another man) has got man interpretations, but there seems to be a kernel of truth in all of them.

On refugees

Refugees

Now streams of refugees from the Middle East are arriving in Europe – and many migrants from Africa as well, but in this blog I’ll ignore this, although the question is the same in many respects –. The first problem is, of course, how to receive them and how to take care of them. This logistic problem is immense and must not be underrated, also because some countries in Eastern Europe would like to get rid of the refugees rather yesterday than tomorrow. Have they forgotten that before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 many people from there has fled to the West and that they were always most welcome? They should remember the words of Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America: “The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.”

Once the refugees have arrived in their country of destination and have become settled a bit, another problem arises: integration. This seems to be the more difficult since many of the newly arrived have a different religion and social and cultural background than most of the inhabitants of their new fatherlands. On purpose I speak of “new fatherlands”, for in view of the present situation in the Middle East it is not likely that the refugees can soon go back home again; at least not in the years to come.

Integration is often difficult to realize, especially if it doesn’t regard just a few individuals or families but such quantities of people that come to Europe today, moreover almost within a short period. Integration is not an automatic process. One has to work on it. Many people think that it cannot and will not be successful. Is it true? It’s a never ending discussion, also in Germany, a country with many refugees and migrants, which was recently yet in the news because of protests against the arrival of new refugees. Happily, many Germans think differently about it and recently refugees from Syria and other countries in the Middle East were welcomed with applause and presents in Munich when they left the train. Will they succeed to integrate? As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas underlined in an article a few years ago, problems of integration must not be denied but generally integration is successful. The problem is not so much the integration as such but those who  are afraid that traditional values will be undermined by the arrival of newcomers (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/opinion/29Habermas.html?pagewanted=3&_r=2 for the article). I don’t want to play down the problem of integrating people from other cultural backgrounds (and that’s much more than only different religious backgrounds). However, I just finished reading a book about the “fin de siècle” – the period around the year 1900 – in the Netherlands. In those days the towns had been overflowed with migrants from the countryside, like all countries in Europe then. Many people saw their traditional ideas undermined because of that. Also the introduction of many technological innovations at that time had this effect. People were on the move; ideas and values were changing. Later, during the famous 1960s we see a movement towards democratization and against the authoritarian structure of society. Many new ideas developed then are still practiced and honoured today. In the 1960s they were seen as an attack on everything “we” stood for. Now, fifty years later we live through new social changes caused by the introduction of the computer, the Internet, the smart phone, and so on, as a consequence of the digitalization of society. The way we get along with each other has changed, too, and also, for instance, the concept of friendship must be given an new interpretation (for many people today a “friend” has become someone who is on your friendship list on Facebook, even if it is no more than that and even if you never talk with him or her). Be it as it may, the best solution of the present problem of refugees would be, of course, an end to the wars in Syria and the Middle East. But how to do that?

What most people do not realize is that many states have been built on migration. Go back into history and see how people always have been looking for new places to live. Also during the past hundred years many people in Europe have moved and migrated and they settled elsewhere as a consequence of two world wars or simply looking for work.

I want to finish by quoting a few words by Max Frisch and then change them. Somewhere he said: “We asked for workers. We got people instead.” I want to make it this way: “We expected refugees. We got people instead”. Fugitives are seen as people in miserable circumstances that need help, but they bring also a lot with them. There are also philosophers among them; maybe a Descartes.

Can we measure the value of life?

Two years ago I have read The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer and I have written a few blogs about it, too. Then I put the book in my bookcase and I never read it again, for actually it is not my type of philosophy. Therefore, what I remember from this book is not much and it can actually be summed up in a few words: To live is to suffer. This seems to be Schopenhauer’s idea of life. Leafing through the book today, I saw a passage that I had underlined and that expresses this idea, too: “... so the view forces itself on us that life is a business and that the gains of this business are by far not enough to cover its costs”: In other words, life is an unhappy affair, if we could make a cost-benefit analysis. But would this really be possible? For how should we calculate the value of happy and unhappy episodes in life? How much happiness balances how much suffering? I suspect that it is an impossible task.

I think that there is at least one philosopher who would disagree with Schopenhauer, if he could – if he could: for he lived before Schopenhauer – : Michel de Montaigne. Despite his own sufferings – he lost his best friend Étienne de La Boétie, which determined the course of the rest of his life; he had kidney stones for many years and he died of it – Montaigne had a positive outlook on life. He knew how to live. And although he knew that a life could be happy or unhappy in its totality, he didn’t want to pass a judgement before it had ended.

In his essay “That men are not to judge of our happiness till after death” (Essays, Book I, Ch. XVIII) Montaigne defends the thesis that an event at the end of someone’s life can push the final verdict in the opposite direction. Someone’s life looked happy, but he has been murdered in a cruel way. Therefore, we must judge his life as a whole as unhappy, Montaigne seems to defend in this essay. Or, to take an example by him, “I have seen many by their death give a good or an ill repute to their whole life. Scipio, the father-in-law of Pompey, in dying, well removed the ill opinion that till then every one had conceived of him.” Montaigne says in this essay that the last act a person does in his life, especially if he died during this act, can shape a reputation of this person that comprises his whole life and give it a positive or negative turn: “Wherefore, at this last, all the other actions of our life ought to be tried and sifted: ‘tis the master-day, ‘tis the day that is judge of all the rest, " ‘tis the day," says one of the ancients,—[Seneca ...]— "that must be judge of all my foregoing years." ”

Well, I have my doubts. It’s not that I think that someone’s last act cannot influence the judgment on this person’s life, or that it cannot have even a strong influence, but a life lasts many years. Some people are criminals during their younger years and become saints during their last years. Do then only the last years count? I think that it would be better to say that we have here, for instance, the case of a person who has seen the light, or, if a life develops in the opposite direction, the case of a person who got into low water. Summarizing a life in this way gives a better look on the phases a person lived through than just saying that someone’s life was good or bad as a whole – or happy or unhappy. But what remains is: How to measure happiness or goodness? Or how to balance one phase of life against another phase, like a happy event at the end of your life against a very unhappy youth fifty years ago (or the other way round)? Actually it implies the question what the influence of the time perspective must be on your judgment and also the question whether one can compare time as a moment (the final act of your life) against time as a process (the flow of actions that made up your life). I think that seen this way we compare incomparable variables, if we ignore the ups and downs and want to press a whole life in one word.

Wittgenstein and the First World War

View on the Italian Front, where Wittgenstein has fought during the First World War

Once I wrote in a blog (dated March 10, 2014) that I was surprised that Wittgenstein said nothing about his war experiences in his Notebooks 1914-1916, although he wrote them during his service as a soldier in the First World War. It was not true: he did write about it. As so many soldiers Wittgenstein kept a diary, which is now known as the Secret Notebooks. What is strange, however, is that in volume one of the collected works of Wittgenstein published by Suhrkamp Verlag in Germany, so in the volume that contains the Notebooks 1914-1916, there is not any mention at all of the existence of these Secret Notebooks. This is also strange since these personal notes have been written in the same notebooks that Wittgenstein used for his philosophical notes, namely on the pages opposite to these philosophical notes. Moreover, the personal notes clearly help understanding the development and explanation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Therefore it is a “must-read” not only for those interested in Wittgenstein’s war experiences but also for those interested in his Tractatus.

I “discovered” these secret notebooks on a website with new publications in philosophy. They have been published (in German) by Wilhelm Baum in a book on Wittgenstein in the First World War (see the reference at the end of this blog). Baum presents there not only the Secret Notebooks but he gives also much information about the history of the notebooks, about Wittgenstein’s participation in World War One, his relations with other people in this period of his life, the philosophical meaning of the notebooks, and so on. It’s a pity that Baum could publish only a part of Wittgenstein’s notes, for most of them have been lost.

For an interpretation of the Secret Notebooks I refer to the work by Baum. I want to make only two comments. The first is that religion and a religious view on the world were for Wittgenstein more important than many people know. Wittgenstein was a religious person, as it turns out. My second comment is that this allows a religious interpretation of a famous statement by Wittgenstein: “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions have been answered, our problems of life have still not been touched at all.” (Tractatus 6.52). This is especially so, if one relates this statement to a remark by Wittgenstein in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker: “The meaning of this book [the Tractatus] is an ethical one. ... [It] exists of two parts: the one that you see here and everything that I haven’t written. And just this second part is the most important part. For the ethical is so to speak bounded from the inner side by the book...” (Baum, 120). It is possible to give this passage a religious interpretation, as Baum does, in the sense that in fact most important in the world are not the facts but our view on the facts, and for Wittgenstein this view was religious. This reading by Baum is possible and at first sight his argumentation is convincing, but a more general ethical interpretation of this passage remains possible.

Since I am very interested in the First World War I was curious to know Wittgenstein’s war experiences. As for that the value of the notebooks is limited. They tell us a bit about what Wittgenstein did during the war, his relations to other soldiers, how much he worked on the Tractatus, when he was under fire, and so on, but the notes are short – often too short– and it is difficult to relive Wittgenstein’s war on the basis of these notes. Many other war diaries and novels written by soldiers give so much more insight in the personal experiences and feelings of the authors (cf. the diaries by Maurice Genevoix and Charles Delvert, to mention only two of them). The notebooks have hardly any value for military history, but the more important they are for understanding Wittgenstein as a person and for understanding the Tractatus. Therefore I wonder why it took so long before they have been published and why they haven’t been published in Wittgenstein’s Collected Works. They are essential for understanding a great work in philosophy and a great philosopher.

I want to end with a quotation from the Secret Notebooks:

“When one feels that one gets bogged down in a problem, one must not think about it any longer, for otherwise one stays stuck to it” (November 26, 1914). It’s a lesson a lot of us should take to heart.

Reference: Wilhelm Baum, Wittgenstein im Ersten Weltkrieg. Die „Geheimen Tagebücher“ und die Erfahrungen an der Front 1914-1918), Klagenfurt-Wien: Kitab Verlag 2014.