Producing and practising

I shall not give an answer to the question of my blog last week. I simply haven’t one. At least not now; maybe later. However, when I had finished the blog, I had to think of a distinction by Aristotle that may be relevant for the answer on the question whether we die a bit when my action has finished and the result of it no longer exists.
In the blog I mentioned several examples of actions: writing a book, making a garden, shopping, making a bike ride, chasing away a burglar, visiting a friend. Let us look at two of them: writing a book and making a bike ride. Writing a book is a long and complicated action. It can last many years, but in the end there is a result: a book, which you can buy in a shop, for instance. If you find writing a book a too complex example of an action, let’s say that I write a letter to a friend. It takes me half an hour to write it and then it is ready for posting. An action like making a bike ride does not have such a material result. I love cycling and several times a week I make a ride just for pleasure. However, when I am home again, I cannot say: Look, here is my bike ride. I have just finished it. Do you want to have it? Nobody would understand it, for making a bike ride does not lead to a result that you have at the end of it as a ready-made product independent of the action itself. No, the aim of making a bike ride is just the doing itself. Such an action was called “praxis” by Aristotle (from prattein, to act, to practise) and he distinguished it from actions like writing a book or a letter, which he called “poiesis” (from poiein, to make).
In view of the distinction between praxis and poiesis, maybe it is possible to say that one dies a bit when the result of a case of poiesis is destroyed, while praxis is an instance of living. Although this may be a starting point for answering my question, I think that it is not as simple as that. In the first place, we produce many things during the years. Letters, memorandums as an office worker, objects as a production worker or in spare time, meals in the kitchen, and so on. Can we say that I die a bit each time such a result of our productive actions is destroyed? I think that not everything we produce is so important that we can go that far. But secondly, not all actions can be clearly classified as a case of poiesis or praxis. Take making a garden. I have changed the wilderness behind my house into a garden. Must I say now that I have produced a garden? But at which moment was my garden finished? When I have put the last plant in it? And how about garden maintenance? A garden is not something stable but must be kept. Moreover, making a garden as such, the action of gardening, is for many people also a case of praxis. These are only a few of the points that need to be cleared, when one wants to distinguish poiesis and praxis. Nevertheless, I think that the distinction is useful and that it may help a bit to understand better what fundamentally belongs to us.

The destruction of actions

Let us suppose that I like gardening. I have a large piece of land behind my house and when I bought the house and moved there this piece of land was a wilderness. It was full of weeds. Birds and insects loved to live there and rabbits loved it, too. In short, it was a beautiful piece of nature. However, since I like gardening, I was not satisfied with it. I wanted to cultivate and to civilize it. And so I did. I invested time and money in it, made a garden plan, bought plants, bought seeds, grew plants, planted them out. I did everything a gardener does with such piece of land and after many years I had a beautiful garden. I opened it on Open Garden Days for everybody and my garden attracted always many people. It became famous and it was considered a piece of art. Then, after again many years, I moved. Nobody in the family that bought the house liked gardening, the garden went in decay and in the end it was again a beautiful piece of nature and the birds, the insects and rabbits loved it again and so did the frogs that lived in what remained of the pond. And after some time everybody had forgotten that once there had been a beautiful garden there.

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Let us suppose that I like writing. I always wrote little stories for myself, wrote articles for the school paper. When I went to the university and studied philosophy, I loved writing term papers and then my dissertation. However, as a philosopher it is difficult to get a job and I did something else but in my spare time I managed to write a couple of philosophical books that became rather popular, although it was not enough to live on it. Actually they gave me not more than a bit of pocket money. But I loved it and I had put my heart and soul in these few books, which were actually an extension of my mind. But fashions change. My books were less and less bought and in the end nobody wanted to buy or read them any longer. They were considered boring and outdated, secondhand bookshops did not want to sell them anymore and what remained was snipped. Maybe you still find here and there a copy in an odd corner, and of course, in my bookcase, but I will be sure that after 100 years no copy will be left any longer.

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I ended my last blog with: “When we destroy a book, we destroy not only a bunch of paper, but we destroy a part of a human mind, a part of what we as humans are.” Burning books like the Nazis did is considered uncivilized and a criminal act. It destroys our culture. It destroys what we are. If we see books as an extension, if not a part, of the mind, we can say that I die a bit when my books are destroyed. Many people agree with this idea. Books are holy in a certain sense. But what about when my garden is destroyed? Didn’t I have put my mind in it? Okay, gardens are considered to be a piece of culture by many people. But what about my other actions? I do a lot in my life. Some actions have a material expression, like my books. Other actions do not have such an expression. They fade away at the moment that I have done them and that is it. My shopping, my making a bike ride, my chasing away a burglar in my house, my visiting a friend: What is the difference between all such actions, including writing a book and gardening, and is there a difference? Do I die a bit when my bike ride has ended or when I leave the shop?

Tagging my mind

Several times I wrote here about or I suggested that our mind is not only in our head. This may sound stupid for isn’t it so that our all our thinking takes place within our brain and that our brain is situated in our head? How can it be then that at least a part of our mind is not in our head but somewhere in the world around us?
A few days ago I met a simple example that clearly illustrates what I mean, which I’ll quote extensively:

Consider the following scenario: You have to remember to buy a case of beer for a party. To jog your memory, you place an empty beer can on your front doormat. When next you leave the house, you trip over the can and recall your mission. You have thus used … a … trick … exploiting some aspect of the real world as a particular substitute for on-board memory. (Andy Clark, Being there, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. etc, 1997; p. 75)

This beer can example is a simple version of something that everybody does: making a note on a piece of paper in order not to forget something we have to do: A shopping list, a note in a diary for an appointment, a list of tasks we have to do. In its simplicity the beer can example shows the essence of what it means that a part of our mind is outside our head. If our mind would be only inside our head, we should have to mark somewhere in our memory that we have to buy beer. But then we have the risk to forget it. Therefore we need something that triggers this marking. If we would make a marking-2 in our memory, again we should have the risk that we forget it. Therefore, we do something else: we make marking-2 outside our head and we make a tag within our head that gets activated as soon as it meets the marking outside our head that belongs to it: the beer can on the mat in our case. We move marking-2 to the outside world, put it on a striking place and replace it in our head by a tag. And so a part of our mind has found its place in the world around us now.
However, this tagging and marking-2 has a significance that is wider than simply being a memory aid. Once we understand it, it makes clear, for instance, why books are such valuable objects: When we destroy a book, we destroy not only a bunch of paper, but we destroy a part of a human mind, a part of what we as humans are.

The smile on my face

One of the current themes in the analytical philosophy is the relation between body and emotions. On the one hand we have the view, like Antonio Damasio’s, that says that emotions are a kind of knowledge and that they are very important in the process of taking decisions. On the other hand we have the view that emotions are thoughtless bodily reflexes that have no relation to our higher cognitive processes (for example Joseph LeDoux; see the recent article by Rick Anthony Furtak, “Emotion, the Bodily, and the Cognitive” in Philosophical Explorations, 2010/1: 51-64). I tend to support the first view, although Furtak shows in his article that the differences between both views are smaller than one might think.
However this may be, that emotions have a somatic feedback is clear in many ways. Emotions can make us drop tears, can make us laugh, both by changing the expression of our face and by making certain sounds, we can turn pale with fear, or we can blush with shame. But does it work also the other way around? Can we cause emotions within us by moving our muscles in the right way? Experiments have shown that we certainly can. When we make a smile on our face we tend to feel as if we are smiling and it is more likely that we feel amused by a joke or a cartoon. When we make a sad facial expression we tend to feel sad. When we straighten our back we tend to feel pride and when we look to the ground we tend to feel humble. And so on. How this mechanism works is not yet clear. It might be so that a physical expression really causes an emotional expression in a direct way. It is also possible, however, that the physical expression is associated with the emotional expression: We tend to feel cheerful when we make a smile on our face, because we often make a smile on our face when we feel cheerful. Just like that a piece of music may make us think of the first time that we heard it.
Trainers in interpersonal communication and other trainers make use of this relation. They advice to adapt your bodily expression to the right situation. Then you do not only make a better impression on the other people present, you feel yourself also better adapted to the situation and you feel like you are supposed to behave. One can call this manipulation but since I discovered this relation I make use of it to manipulate myself, too, so not in the relation to other people but really towards myself. I simply try to deceive myself by way of speaking. So when I am at the end of a long bike ride with still too many kilometres to go because I feel tired, I simply straighten my back, lift my head, look around and make a smile. It gives me again the right attitude and feeling to go on with a decent speed. I do not want to say that I am less tired then, but at least it feels so.

Body and soul in the garden

Philosophizing is like travelling in your mind. It is often full of unexpected experiences and often you do not know where it will bring you. And travelling can be a bit like philosophizing and bring you new experiences that make you think. Anyway, so it was for me last week. When my wife and I left for the Pyrenees, we did not expect that our actual roundtrip would end near the border with Belgium in the little town of Béthune near Lille. But so it happened. We had just arrived in the mountains in Southern France or the weather became so bad that we decided to turn back and to go where it was better and at least where it was dry. Thus we arrived in Central France, in the Loire region with its famous castles. After having visited Blois we went to the nearby Château de Chaumont. We had been there already a few years ago, but every year it organizes a garden festival with a new theme on its domain. This year’s theme was quite philosophical, body and soul, and I was curious how garden designers would interpret it. It is true, the distinction body-soul is not exactly the same as the distinction body-mind, one of my favourite fields of interest, but isn’t it so that already in the old days of Plato and Aristotle these concepts were seen as more or less the same?
The gardens were beautiful and interesting and what was striking for me was that the interpretation of the theme was very different from how a philosopher with an interest in analytical philosophy like me would have done it. This doesn’t mean, of course, that they were unphilosophical or nonphilosophical. They simply gave a different view. So no Cartesian gardens that tried to stress that body and soul are separate entities, or, criticizing Descartes, that they are just one, however such ideas might be expressed in a garden. What I saw were mainly gardens that stressed how gardens make you relax, how they influence your feelings and so your body. What was also striking was that most designers interpreted the body-soul relation this way, while there are lots of other ways for seeing the theme, of course, without thinking of a Cartesian or anti-Cartesian interpretation: a theological one, for example, where the soul is a divine essence seated in an earthly frame. To difficult to express in a garden design? Would I be able to that? And so I had a lot to think on my way to Chartres and then to Béthune, my last stop before going home.

The anti-scepticism of Wittgenstein

Sentences like the one I commented in my last blog might give the impression that Wittgenstein is a sceptic. The quotation from On Certainty there seems to imply that we can doubt everything: each statement that might be true still has some aspects that might make it possible to doubt it. One might think that this is supported by one of the first aphorisms in this book, which I quote now from an edition that I have found on line: “From its seeming to me - or to everyone - to be so, it doesn't follow that it is so.” (aphorism 2; see http://budni.by.ru/oncertainty.html, also for the next quotations) It implies the idea that everything that we might hold true might be different, not only in the sense that it has implications that may make it false (for instance that our statement about an object is only true as long as we look at it; see my last blog). It may also be possible that our statement is false if we look at it from another viewpoint, for instance from the viewpoint of another person. Everything might be different, so it seems, and this is basically the position of a sceptic.
This is not the position of Wittgenstein. It is true, much can be doubted, but already in the second sentence of aphorism 2, right after the quotation just given, Wittgenstein gives a hint that he doubts this endless doubt: “What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it”. As Wittgenstein shows later in his On Certainty, in order to doubt we always need a frame of reference from which it is possible to doubt: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty” (115). And here we get to Wittgenstein’s famous language games in the sense of regions of our language with their own rules and grammar, which make talking and discussion possible, anyhow. Even then one can ask: What justifies these languages games? However, there is no endless regress and in the end we simply have to act in order to survive (see my blog of March 3, 2008). And so Wittgenstein’s develops his anti-scepticism.
Basically, I agree with Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, if we look at the present research by Metzinger and Murphy and Brown, a certain degree of scepticism cannot be avoided. For is it not so that they have shown that the truths we hold are actually only representations in our head, which makes them individual truths in the end? The only way to try to avoid such a relativism with sceptical consequences is, I think, to look for as much agreement between as many people as possible about the truth of these individual truths, by a free, unlimited and unrestricted discussion as proposed by Habermas. What we arrive at then is not TRUTH but at least a maximum possible intersubjective consensus.
But however this may be, one thing is without doubt: My next blog will be published a bit later than usual.

The fluency of reality

Wittgenstein’s books consist of long series of aphorisms and when I took his Über Gewißheit (On Certainty) from my bookcase last Monday, my eye fell immediately on aphorism 215, which I had underlined: “Here we see that the idea of ‘correspondence to reality’ has no clear application” (my translation). It followed an aphorism in which Wittgenstein had said: “What will prevent me to suppose that this table, when nobody looks at it, either disappears or changes its colour or shape and that it turns back to its old state, now when somebody watches it again? …” (214; my translation)
For many readers of this blog these sentences may be obscure. For me they aren’t. Immediately they made me think of a reaction to my blog “The bucket of our mind” (April 5, 2010) and of the so-called correspondence theory of truth. There are several theories in philosophy that formulate what “truth” is and this theory is the one accepted by most philosophers. However, I do not.
This theory looks so simple. On a winter day I sit in my study and I am thinking about snow. “Snow is white”, I think. I look out of my window into the garden and see that the snow there is white, indeed. So, it seems that my little theory about the colour of snow has been confirmed, for there is a correspondence between what I thought and what I see in the garden: That snow is white. However, already as a student I wasn’t convinced, and from my blogs it must be clear that I am still not convinced. I explained here, for instance, that you can compare my eyes and brain with a photo camera and that it depends on the properties of the camera and everything that belongs to it what we see: the lens, the film, the way the film is developed, or today the software in your camera, and so on. In other words: what we see is not a reality as such but an interpretation of reality by the properties of the camera in our head. There is no one-to-one relation between what we think to see in our brain and what there is over there in the world around us. For the colour of snow in our garden this may be difficult to grasp, but when we try to classify a bird in our garden it can be quite difficult to know what we see: is it a marsh tit or a willow tit? Until not so long ago even ornithologists thought that it was one species. If we talk about things still to be discovered as in science, there simply can be no correspondence between what we think to see and what there is in the world: what we see in the world is partially dependent on how we have classified it or how we will classify it with our scientific theory that is still in development (compare the discussion whether Pluto is a planet or a dwarf planet). In short: there are no facts, there are only interpretations. For me, what exists is only the way I “see” it in my head.

And now, when I read these sentences by Wittgenstein, even this may not be true. For what Wittgenstein says is simply this: What guarantees me that what I “see” in my head still exists the way I thought to see it at the moment that I do not look at it? Everything might be fluent and even that might not be so.

P.S. The pictures show a marsh tit (to the left) and a willow tit. Note that the difference in colour between the birds right and left are an artefact of the light circumstances and what the cameras made of it, which just substantiates my thesis. In my garden, I cannot see a difference. (Photos from Wikipedia)

Grasping concepts

Once some scientists thought that the language we speak determines in a certain degree the way we think and see the world around us. However, this view could not be substantiated by research. Nevertheless I think that our language has some influence on the way we think and observe: Our language is a guide for us, for the way we look at the world and make classifications. It gives us the first categories of what we perceive. But as it is with any guide: we can improve it or we can take a better one. We can use another language with other categories and we can invent new categories. In that sense anything goes.
In science and philosophy we need a language, anyhow, for expressing our thoughts and the results of our investigations. I don’t use the word “express” by chance, for language can be very expressive in its metaphorical way of describing what we think or see and catching the right meaning in a concept. Just the word “concept” is such a beautiful expression that exactly says what it is. “Concept” comes from the past participle of the Latin concipere, which means grasp (capere) together (con-). And if we have brough the parts of our object of thought or research together and caught them in a concept, we have a grip on it and we understand or grasp it. We find this idea of a metaphorical relation between mentally grasping and physically grasping of what we understand also in other languages like German (begreifen=understand; lit. more or less “grasp”), Dutch (begrijpen, as in German) or French (comprendre, which is a literal translation of concipere). It is as if we hold what we understand in a mental embrace or we keep it maybe like something that we carefully enclose in our hand so that it cannot escape. But after some time we usually forget the literal meaning of words. How plastic language can be and how pity it is that it happens so often that the expressive meaning of a word fades into the background and that we do not realize it any longer. And then a concept is no longer something we have grasped but it has become an abstract word drawn away (Latin: abs=away; trahere=draw) from its original meaning.

Hallucinating reality

As we have seen in my last two blogs, in our brain we have no direct picture of the world around us. Our image of the world is no copy of the world but it is a constructed image that represents mainly what is relevant for us. Rays of light touch our eye. Already in the eye certain types of light are selected. We see no infrared or ultraviolet, while bees do, for example. Then the light impressions are transported to our brain, not as rays but as chemical and electrical signals. There the final image is constructed by a complex mechanism in our head. Information can be lost in this way but can be added, too. I think that many people know the idea of Gestalt. Three separate points arranged in the shape of a triangle are seen as a triangle, although there may be no objective reason for it. We just think that the three points form a triangle. Therefore, we can also say that we simulate a triangle. In this way, what we see is actually a simulation in our head. This simulation needs not to be a real image of the world, but it is one we think that it might be so: It represents a possible world.
The simulations of the world around us, of the “real world”, are not the only possible worlds we have in our heads. We have dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, inner monologues, plans for the future, images of ideal worlds, and so on. All these simulations represent a world as it might be, a possible world constructed by the brain on the basis of information stored there but maybe also based on (or partially based on) false information, or even caused by disturbances of the brain. The only difference between a simulation of the real world and the other simulations is, as Thomas Metzinger says it, that the first one “simulates … a ‘Now’ ” (Metzinger, Being no one, p. 50).
Metzinger points to the fact that idealistic philosophers have seen this clearly. And if representations of the real world are not fundamentally different from the other kinds of simulations and if all simulations are produced by the brain, it is only one step further to see all simulations, including the simulations of the real world, as kinds of hallucinations. However, there is an important difference between the other hallucinations and the hallucination of the world around us: A simulation of the real world is continuously checked and updated with new information, while the other hallucinations are not or only now and then. As Metzinger formulates it (p. 51), our images of the world around us are online hallucinations, while the other kinds of simulations are hallucinations offline.

The bucket of our mind

Some time ago I met a girl on the Internet who wanted to learn 60 languages. I told her that I wondered whether that is possible, for there are only a few geniuses in this world who are talented enough to learn 20 languages and who do not need much time to keep them up without much practice. Not to speak of learning even 60 languages. She wasn’t convinced.
Then she asked me for advice how “to gather as much knowledge of the world as possible”. Again, I was perplexed by her naivety. It looked as if she thought that there is a fixed quantity of knowledge and that the main barrier to know all there is are the limitations of our brain. It made me think of what Karl R. Popper calls in his Objective Knowledge the “commonsense theory of knowledge” or with a beautiful expression “the bucket theory of mind”. It is true, Popper’s theory is about how to get new knowledge of the world, things that we do not know yet, while the girl thought of things already known, but here the difference is not important.
The bucket theory of mind, as naively believed by many people, supposes, according to Popper, that “our mind is a bucket which is originally empty, or more or less so, and into this bucket material enters through our senses … and accumulates and becomes digested” (p. 61). And a few lines later Popper continues: “The important thesis of the bucket theory is that we learn most, if not all, of what we do learn through the entry of experience into our sense openings; so that all knowledge consists of information received through our senses; that is, by experience (ibid.; italics Popper).
There are many reasons why this theory is not correct, but what is important here is that it supposes that “knowledge is conceived as consisting of things, or thing-like entities in our bucket” (p. 62), and in the case of the girl in the buckets of other people. Knowledge is something that there is in this view. If we want to know, we simply have to collect what there is. However, using the photographic analogy again, light that passes the lens of a camera and touches the film or sensor, does not simply makes an image of the world as it is. How the picture looks like depends on the type of lens, the quality of the lens, the type of film or sensor, whether there is a filter on the lens, how the film is processed or how the settings of our photo program are, and so on. So it is also with our senses and brain. What we see does not only depend on the information that reaches our senses but also on what we want to see, hear or feel and on our selection mechanisms. We often do not hear background noise, for instance, or, when we are concentrating on a point in our field of vision, we do not see a lot of other things there. Moreover, we often interpret what we think to see in the wrong way, we ignore things because they are not relevant for us, we fit new knowledge in what we already know, and when it does not fit, we often change the new knowledge or the old one. In short, knowledge is not something that exists as such but something that is made with the help of the information that reaches our senses and brain. We can even guide this process by asking questions and by systematically looking for answers in the world around us. That’s what a researcher does, for instance. Knowledge is not something that simply fills the bucket of our mind. It is quite the reverse: knowledge does not exist as such, once discovered, but it is constructed and continuously adapted and reconstructed by the processes in our senses and brains.

“Only those who can see can also dream”

Many people think that dreaming has not much to do with reality. Sometimes people are classified as dreamers or as realists, implying that the former do not have an eye for reality, while the later have their feet firmly on the ground. Maybe there is some truth in it and I do not want to say that all dreamers are actually realists in disguise, but when I think of Martin Luther King Jr. (“I have a dream”) or Bertha von Suttner, the peace activist who dreamt of an International Court of Justice, I guess that dreamers are often as realistic as so-called realists are. For isn’t Barrack Obama in a certain sense the fulfillment of King’s dream and don’t we have several international courts of justice today? Sometimes I think that dreamers have a better eye for reality than realists have.
This idea was sustained when I started to read Thomas Metzinger’s Being no one. The self-model theory of subjectivity. It is a thick work about self and the first person view, about personal experience and consciousness. I still have a long way to go in it, but somewhere in the beginning Metzinger describes how we see the world, namely how we make a representation of what is around us. I know that the analogy is not completely correct, but let me explain it in my own words in photographic terms. If we want to make a photo, we can choose a black-and-white film or a colour film, for instance. We can also use filters on our lens in order to accentuate certain aspects in our picture or to bring about a certain effect and make the picture more dramatic, or softer, or just what we like. Usually we call only the plain colour picture real. This does not mean that we can call the colour picture “better”. For instance, a photo in black-and-white can show drama that a photo in colour cannot do and in this way it can impress us more than the same picture in colour. But we can value the worth of the black-and-white photos or the effect of a filter only if we know how the representation “really” is and then we take the colour picture as a measurement.
Continuing my photographic analogy of Metzinger, so it is also with our dreams and our view of reality. Our camera makes a picture of the world. The standard picture of this is the one in colour. Its function for us “consists in depicting the state of affairs in the real world with a sufficient degree of … precision” (p. 53; italics Metzinger). Only if we have such a basic idea of how the world looks like in our mind (the colour picture), we can accentuate its dramatic aspects (making the colour photo black-and-white), making it romantic (using a soft focus filter) or even change the photo with Photoshop in order to show how to situation on the photo actually should be (replacing houses by trees in a landscape, for instance, when we want to have more nature there). That is, we can express our dreams by changing the plain picture in one how we would like to have it. However, we can do that only if we do have a plain picture, namely the idea of how reality is like. Or, in Metzinger's wording, “Only those who can see can also dream” (p. 54). If we take it this way, I wonder whether dreamers do not have a better view on reality than so-called realists. For while realists take the reality as it is and simply try to live with it, those who have dreams do not only know reality is but they know also some of its weak points. And just that’s what they want to have changed in their dreams.

Running as an art and as a way of life

In the waiting room of my dentist last Monday, I didn’t read one of the usual magazines on the reading table. I had taken my own book with me, Why we run by Bernd Heinrich. I opened it where I had stopped reading the day before and my eye was caught by a statement of Steve Prefontaine, the late middle and long-distance runner and one of the persons who has made running popular: “A race is like a work of art that people can look at and be affected by in as many ways as they’re capable of understanding”. Being a runner myself, I thought this statement is as true as a statement can be. At least when one interprets it as a sentence about running, although, I suppose, every sport is an art in its own way. I had to think of the joy of seeing a race on a track, in the field or on the road. I had to think of all those graceful African long distance runners. Just seeing them running makes it already worth watching, independently of how the race develops. And I had to think of the wonderful John Ngugi in the first place, who won so many races and who was the best cross country runner in the world for many years.
However, at second glance, I think that this quotation describes only one side of the expressive side of running. Although I do not deny that a runner (and, generally, a sportsman) is an artist, what this statement does is showing how the sport is from the outside, from the third person perspective in philosophical terms. It shows how we see the sport, how we as spectators experience the performance of what is for us, the spectators, actually a kind of show that can move us in many ways, like a piece of art.
From the perspective of the runner, the first person perspective, it is different, I think. Unlike an artist, a runner – or another a sportsman – does not try to make something beautiful, a work of art. If that is what s/he does, it is only a side effect. A runner wants to perform as well as s/he can. S/he wants to win. Or running is done for pleasure, for the joy of doing it, for losing weight, for feeling well, or for another reason. However, one cannot do that only by simply doing it in some way. One has to live for it. Of course, one can go and run just as one goes shopping, takes the train or reads a newspaper. But for many people it is more. It is a part of what they are, maybe a little part, maybe a big part, but it is not something that is done casually. It has become a part of their personality, their personal identity. Without it they would be different persons in a certain sense. Then, from the first person perspective running or sport has become a part of the way of living if not, for some, the way of living itself.

Gardening in my mind

Once I wrote a blog about the relation between gardening and philosophizing. Philosophizing can be seen, I said there, like weeding the thoughts that I have developed until I have an ordered whole. Every single thought that does not fit in the whole I have thought out is removed or put in the compost bin of my mind where it will decay so that it can be used as fertilizer for better thoughts still to be developed. But the relation between gardening and doing philosophy is not only one of analogy. For when I walk through my garden, look at what has to be done and start to work, it always happens that my thoughts drift off to spheres that are no longer related to the grubbing of my hands in the soil, to the weeding and to the putting of plants on their proper places. I simply cannot help but it always happens. After a few moments my thoughts are far away in other worlds, although I still know what my hands are doing. Then it looks a bit as if I am two different persons. I have begun philosophizing.

It is not always so that my mind drifts to deep reflections that lead to the foundations of philosophy. Far from that. Often my thoughts are quite superficial. They can centre on what I have done today, remember a letter that I have written yesterday, go to what I have planned to do tomorrow. But frequently it happens that they are deeper and that my mind starts to work out thoughts for an article. Or an idea for a blog develops. Or my thoughts simply evaluate a book that I have read recently. Actually it is nothing special, but what is special about it is that I can never stop it. I cannot say: let me concentrate today on the garden and on nothing else. In this way it is very different from other practical activities I do. When I make a bike ride, for instance, or a run in the wood behind my house, it happens often that thoughts are restless moving through my head, but soon they gradually fade away and I am fully concentrated on this activity, the cycling the running, and on nothing else. My mind becomes empty of everything else. Sports is distracting like gardening but in a very different way. For when I am in my garden it happens just the other way around. I begin with gardening but then my gardening gradually moves to the background and I cannot stop beginning to philosophize a bit, sometimes superficially, sometimes deeper, but it always happens. And seen in this way, gardening in my garden is gardening in my mind.

The value of thought experiments

Doing thought experiments is one of the methods used in philosophy. Philosophers discuss often problems that need experimentation. However, in many cases this is no practical option. Many philosophical issues are related to man and society, and, for instance, one cannot force people to undergo brain surgery for the sake of answering philosophical questions. What remains then are analytical methods. Doing thought experiments is one of them.
Man’s imagination is boundless. Man can think almost everything. This applies also to thought experiments. However, does every experiment that we can think lead to valid results? In fact it is so that a though experiment, like every experiment, can produce such results only if its premises are true. This logical fact is largely ignored when discussing the results of thought experiments. For instance, in action theory there is a thought experiment in which a surgeon puts something in a brain which make it possible to manipulate the agent’s movements. But what value do conclusions based on this thought experiment have if we do not know whether such an operation is basically possible? Even more, the argumentations about personal identity in the analytical philosophy are founded mainly on thought experiments of dubious value. Brains are switched between persons. Brains are split and the parts are placed in the heads of different persons. People are scanned and teletransported to other planets. On the basis of such thought experiments philosophers come to far-reaching conclusions about our personal identity. However, what is never done in the discussions about personal identity is questioning whether brain switches and teletransport are fundamentally possible at all. I think that in the light of the present research and literature on the relation between the brain and the rest of the body and between mind and body these thought experiments are not possible, for the working of the brain is based on the working of the body, at least for a part. Moreover, a part of what we essentially are is just in our body. If we suppose then in a thought experiment that our brain and body are separated, the conclusion that the brain – and the mind, which is supposed to have its residence in the brain – carries our personality and that the essence of what we are is our psychology is actually a repetition of the main premise of our thought experiment. We suppose that we can separate brain and body, so we can come to no other conclusion then that we fundamentally are our brain (or mind). In other words, it is begging the question.
Thought experiments can lead to valid conclusions only if we can make true that their premises are realistic. As long as we do not try to substantiate that a certain thought experiment represents a fundamentally possible event, it is a doubtful instrument. However, this is often disregarded by philosophers who study personal identity.

The contextual embeddedness of the free will

The question whether man has a free will is one of the main themes in analytical philosophy. The will is seen here as something within man that steers his or her actions and makes that he or she does the action chosen. The view that the will takes its decision independently and that the will is “free” is called indeterminism. The opposite view that the decisions of the will are caused by other factors is called determinism. However, whether the will is determined or free, it can happen that someone wills an action and is about to do the action but does not do it without having a reason for not doing it. Then one speaks of akrasia. Whether man has a free will or not and whether man can really act in an akratic way are important in the light of the question whether man is responsible for what s/he does.
I think that one of the problems in both views of the will in analytic philosophy is that they are based on the Cartesian distinction between mind and body. Actually it sees man as having a little mental man, a homunculus, inside that steers the body. However, who steers then the homunculus? Another problem is that this approach has no eye for the contextual embeddedness of man: the fact that man is a being with an environment that has as much influence on how s/he acts as man’s inner reasons, believes and intentions.
A good illustration of the contextual embeddedness of the will is a sports drama that I saw during the just finished Olympic Winter Games. It happened during the 10,000 m race in speed skating. Let me first explain a bit for the readers of my blog who do not know much about speed skating races. During a competition, the skaters compete in pairs on a 400 m rink and the one with the best time after all pairs have competed wins. For a 10,000 m race they have to skate 25 laps. The rink is divided in two tracks: an inner track and an outer track. On the side of the rink opposite of the finish line, the skater that comes from the inner track goes to the outer track and the skater that comes from the outer track goes to the inner track. If the skater fails to do that s/he is disqualified. During his race, the last one of the eight races for the Olympic 10,000 m competition, the Dutch skater Sven Kramer was clearly about to win the gold medal. After, if I remember well, 15 laps, Kramer was in the inner track and on the changeover point he skated unmistakingly in the direction of the outer track. However, a few moments before he was there his coach made a fatal mistake and shouted: “go to the inner track”. So did Kramer, and he lost his second gold medal of these Games, because he was disqualified.
What can we say about this case from the perspective of the problem of the free will? His behaviour when he left the inner track (what he said afterwards) made it clear that Kramer had the will to go from the inner track to the outer track. I think that it is also clear that the fact that he decided otherwise at the last moment was not a case of akrasia. Hadn’t Kramer’s coach shouted to him, he wouldn’t have changed his mind and from the context and from his explanations later it is clear that Kramer did not change his mind because of an inner stimulus or inexplicable change of mind. It was his coach that made him do it. However, the time left to Kramer to decide whether he had to follow his own original intention (going to the outer track) or had to do what his coach said (going to the inner track) was so short that he followed his intuition (or must we say his automatism?) that the coach is right and he made a quick jump to the inner track, with the fatal consequence.
Must we say now that Kramer did not follow his will when he chose to go to the inner track? But Kramer was not forced to go to the inner track. In a certain sense it was his own choice to follow the advice of his coach. Therefore I think that this case is an illustration that our will is not simply something that is only within us but that it is also contextually embedded in what is around us.

“In view of my present knowledge …”

Recently an official committee established by the Dutch government criticized the political and military support by the then Dutch government to the American-British attack on Iraq in 2001. One of the main conclusions of the committee was that the military attack on Iraq had not been authorized in a proper way by resolutions of the United Nations Security Council according to international law. Mr. Jan Peter Balkenende, then and now Dutch Prime Minister (albeit then of another government coalition) reacted: “In view of my present knowledge, I should have decided differently”. Since then, “everybody” uses the expression “in view of my present knowledge” here.
Are the words by Mr. Balkenende a right reaction? I think they are not. Of course, it is true, when we look back on what we did in the past, we often think that we did wrong. We have new knowledge that puts our past motives and reasons in another light; our opinions may have changed; we see the consequences of our action; we see how other people have reacted on what we did; and so on. In short, we have become older and wiser. The problem is, however, that at the moment we have to take a decision, often we cannot postpone it until we have better information. And, of course, we can know its consequences and how other people will react only for a part. We simply have to decide now and we have to do it on the basis of what we know now. Later, we may have excuses that we took the wrong decision, and these excuses may be good excuses. This is not only true for the man in the street but also for politicians. However, politicians are supposed to take the right decisions at the moment that they have to be taken. In case they do not have enough knowledge for a well-considered decision, they are supposed to collect more information. If they have to act in a hurry, they have to be able to explain why they decided the way they did in the light of the information then available to them. It is no excuse to say later “If I had known then what I know now, I would have acted otherwise”. That is avoiding responsibility, for a politician is supposed to take the best decision right at the moment, not later, and he or she is responsible for that decision in that situation. If we would accept an excuse like “If I had known then, what I know now”, it is like: “ ‘In view of my present knowledge, I wouldn’t have been in jail now’, said the prisoner, and he was released”. It does not work that way, neither for a prisoner nor for a prime minister.

note. Since I finished this blog and before its publication, the Balkenende government has tendered its resignation. In view of my present knowledge of it, I wouldn’t have written this blog.

Paradise lost?

In Slavoj Žižek’s Violence, I met a passage in which he describes that today’s world of the Internet has no longer “Master-Signifiers”: world leaders like Churchill who simply take decisions and steer the world on the basis of the complexity of information brought to them by specialists-advisers. “A basic feature of our postmodern world is”, says Žižek, “that it tries to dispense with this agency of the ordering Master-Signifier” (p. 30). Typical for the present world is a “World Web Surfer ... sitting alone in front of a PC screen [who is] increasingly a monad with no direct windows onto reality, encountering only virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever in a global communication network” (p. 29; italics mine). Here, I do not want to discuss whether the Master-Signifier is a vanishing type. I wouldn’t be surprised if it will come out sooner or later that the events in the world are more manipulated than ever before. However, even if we suppose that the World Web Surfer is not only a World Web Surfer but has direct personal relations as before like family, friends and colleagues, the quotation evokes a picture of modern man becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world and increasingly losing his or her grip on it. But is it a correct picture?
It is true, many of our relations are nowadays no longer from face to face but from screen to screen. No longer from voice to voice and from look to look, but intermediated by apparatuses and bits. But does this make the relations less personal? When we look around and see what most of our direct relations involve, we realize that, outside the little circle of family, friends and colleagues, although being “personal”, our relations are only superficial in most cases. My washing machine has broken down and I buy a new one. I have lost my job and I apply for an unemployment benefit. My car has been stolen and I go to the police. All these contacts are made in person, indeed, but we do not meet persons here as Mr. or Mrs. Johnson, Mary or Pete, but we meet them as functionaries, usually playing their parts in larger bureaucracies; bureaucracies that one can penetrate, if at all, only with much patience, time and energy. The reality one encounters here is often no less virtual than the one encountered in the Internet. As soon as one thinks about making the functional relation really personal, one is usually stopped by one’s own reserve and a lot of institutional rules and practices.
Against this, I want to state that the window onto reality offered by the screen and keyboard of a PC is often by far more direct. On the Internet one has many opportunities to come in a direct contact with persons one has never met before and could hardly meet in another way. The Internet gives the opportunity to get round blockades that exist in the “real” world. Authors can publish in bits what nobody wanted to publish in paper for often vague reasons. There are social relations websites like Facebook, elderly people can escape isolation brought by their age, to mention a few things. I do not need to list the advantages of the Internet as a means for communication and making relations for the readers of this blog. They are already caught in the Web and they know what I mean. However, I do not want to glorify the Internet and the computer era. My problem with quotations like the one above is that they always seem to suggest that we have lost a paradise of personal relations and communication that never will come back. Yes, we got global communication back for it, it is said, but it is virtual, not real (forgetting that this virtuality is also a part of reality). I want to state, however, that if we have lost a paradise, we have got back another one. It is different, indeed. Maybe it is not better but it is also not worse. We have lost the old Garden of Eden, but we have got a new one in return.

Am I different persons? Personal identity (23)

To the right and to the left still the same person?

One of the problems discussed in the philosophy of personal identity is that body cells or body parts are artificially replaced by new cells or parts. For example it is Parfit’s case in which I am (or rather my brain and body is) teletransported to another planet with the help of a machine. Then, according to Tye in Consciousness and Persons, “I no longer exist” (p. 148). But he continues: “[W]hat happens to me, if 10 percent is replaced, or 35 percent, or 70 percent? Is there a fact of the matter about which partial teletransportation destroys me?” After some discussion Tye concludes that such a fact of the matter does not exist but “Once enough of the original neurons are replaced (and the originals simultaneously destroyed) a new brain is created and the resulting person is not me”. I’ll pass over here that Tye talked earlier about teletransporting brain and body and now suddenly only about the brain. Readers of my blogs will know that I see the identity of a person in the body as a whole (including the brain) and not only in the brain. But is it really so that we can say that if enough of my brain or body (including my brain) has been replaced, I no longer exist in the sense that the original person that I was has been destroyed?
What philosophers who discuss this theme always forget is that the replacement of cells and body parts is not only a philosophical thought experiment, but that it happens also in nature. For isn’t it so that damaged parts of the body can heal by replacing the damaged tissue by new tissue? Even more, isn’t it so that during my whole life my body cells are gradually and continuously replaced by new ones, while the old body cells are destroyed? But in the case of the natural replacement of my body cells nobody says that my personal identity is destroyed and that I have become another person with another identity after some time. If we would accept that, it cannot be without consequences. For instance, fingerprints do not change through the years, but after, say, ten years they would be the fingerprints of another person! Or take this: the mainstream of personal identity philosophers, who defend the so-called “psychological view”, state that a person’s personal identity remains the same as long as a person can still remember past facts of his or her life or as long as a person has remained unchanged in other psychological respects between some point of time in the past and the present. If a person has changed enough in psychological respect he or she is no longer the same, they say. However, if we accept that the replacement of my body cells makes me another person after some time, then it can happen that physically I am another person but psychologically I am still the same as before this replacement. And that sounds rather weird.
If we cannot accept that the gradual natural replacement of my body cells and body parts makes me another person, what is then the fundamental difference between this natural replacement of my body cells and parts and its artificial replacement by means of teletransportation, transplantation or which other artificial replacement we might invent in real or in our thoughts? For the latter replaces me by another person in the view of Tye and others, while the former does not in case there is a fundamental difference between both. But if there is no fundamental difference, either a big part of the discussion about personal identity must be done anew or it must be accepted that I am physically different persons during my life, even if my life is a psychological unity.

On philosophical puzzles

One of the attractive things of philosophy is that it racks your brains. This sounds weird, but actually it is this what philosophers do: racking their brains. I do not know how it is for other philosophers, but I become restless and get an unsatisfied feeling, when I haven’t thought about difficult problems or when I haven’t read a difficult philosophical book for some time. Happily, I have my blogs that I have to write each week. And in those days that I did not yet write blogs, I wrote articles or my dissertation. Actually, philosophizing is torture that causes happiness, at least for some, for it seems that there are people for whom it is real torture, by way of speaking.
That voluntary torture causes happiness or a kind of happy feeling, whatever this may involve, is probably an instance of a general human phenomenon. Masochism is one of its extreme cases. I guess such strivings are a special expression of the general human characteristic that man is not a passive being waiting till something happens that makes action necessary. No, man is fundamentally always looking for activity, trying to be ahead of the problems that may arise and setting goals. When there are no possible problems of life that need to be coped with, man makes problems for himself. We have a special name for such problems. We call them puzzles.
In a certain sense we can see philosophy as a puzzle on its own: Why philosophy? But also within philosophy we find puzzles. We can call them second-order puzzles. Being formulated this way, philosophical puzzles seem masochistic ways to chase away boredom. Maybe, for some philosophers they are, but most philosophical puzzles have serious foundations that relate them to questions of daily live. Take for example this puzzle from the philosophy of action, which I found in one of the essays of Donald Davidson: A man may try to kill someone by shooting at him. Suppose the killer misses his victim by a mile, but the shot stampedes a herd of wild pigs that trampled the intended victim to death. (originally it comes from Daniel Bennett) Or take this one by Chisholm: Carl wants to kill his rich uncle because he wants to inherit his fortune. He believes that his uncle is home and drives towards his house. His desire to kill his uncle agitates him and he drives recklessly. On the way he hits and kills a pedestrian, who happens to be his uncle. The question in these cases is: Did the shooter and Carl perform intentional actions by killing: did the killings happen to them or were they performed on purpose or maybe they are a mixture of both? In other words, were they guilty, responsible or liable for the killings and in what degree? It is true, one can discuss such cases as mere puzzles, and although they are for some nothing else, for others like judges they are puzzles with far-reaching consequences. Seen from that perspective, masochistically torturing your brain can even be useful and contribute to the happiness or unhappiness of other people.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

Often I receive useful and interesting reactions to my blogs and I am my readers grateful for them. One such a reaction was by a reader of my blog last week, who added the comment “post hoc ergo propter hoc!”, to which I reacted “Exactly!”, for that is what my argument is (see note). I concluded seemingly that the recent cold waves in Europe and elsewhere in the world had been caused by the Climate Conference in Copenhagen. In fact, my blog was a cynical critique of the Climate Conference, of course, and I suppose that the readers of my blog have understood this.
Usually post hoc ergo propter hoc arguments and related reasonings like cum hoc ergo propter hoc (see note) are not as innocent as in my blog last week. We hear them everywhere around us and we see everywhere that people behave as if such arguments are valid, with the most serious consequences. For instance, the increase of crime is often ascribed to the rising numbers of foreigners in a community without any clear evidence. But maybe the truth is that the crime rate has risen because the foreigners are assaulted by the autochthonous people. Or another one, the economy is going down and the unemployment increases. What one often hears then is: “Those foreigners did it; they have taken our jobs”. The fact is, however, in many cases, that “those foreigners” have jobs that most local people do not want to do and the economy would even be more in trouble if there were no foreign labourers to do that work. And what to think of the holocaust? Jews were murdered because they were used as scapegoats for who knows what. The murder of Tutsi by Hutu in Rwanda is another case in point. Often we see here also the false argument that facts are ascribed to individuals because they belong to a group. Suppose that 60% of the Bytheway family are criminals. Then it is quite possible that I, the writer of this blog, am not a criminal and that I am the most honest person in the world.
What makes all these arguments so treacherous is that they might be true in the sense that it is quite well possible that what follows is caused by what precedes it or that there is another relation between things happening together. A cause precedes always its effect, for instance. And it is true, an individual might have the average characteristics of the members of the group he or she belongs to. But it is a matter of fact that such kinds of arguments are so often wrong that it is better to consider them as fallacies.

note: “Post hoc ergo propter hoc” means literally “after this, therefore because of (on account of) this”. For instance, the rooster crows, and therefore the sun rises. “Cum hoc ergo propter hoc” is the false argument saying that if two facts or events happen to take place together, one is the cause of the other. For example, in the countryside there are both more storks and the birth rate is higher there than in towns, so the higher birth rate in the countryside must have been caused by the higher number of storks. Nobody will accept such arguments in simple cases, but in more complicated cases people often do.
More on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation.

The effectiveness of “Copenhagen 2009”

I have never seen never seen an international conference that has been as effective as the Climate Conference in Copenhagen one month ago. People have criticized this conference and called it a failure because no substantial decisions have been taken there. However, hardly had the conference ended or Europe and other parts of the world have been hit by a cold wave.

Dutch passion

When it is winter and the temperature falls below the freezing point, the Dutch become restless: will it be possible or will it not? And yes, this year we can do it again, and I could do it again, too: skating. Of course, we can skate a big part of the year round on rinks with artificial ice, but skating on natural ice is something different. Skating on natural ice means skating on little or large lakes, on ponds, ditches and canals. Marvellous and extended spaces open for you once you can move on the ice. Places where you never come when the water is not frozen, even not by boat. Nature reserves normally closed to the public are now areas where it is free to skate. No one can stop a Dutch skater, certainly not the owner of a nature reserve, so the only solution then is to open these areas to the public.
In the past, when cars and trains still had to be invented, skating was not only a joy to do, as can be seen on the paintings by old Dutch masters. It was also practical. Normally, the only way to go somewhere was by foot, by horse or by coach or cart. And because many people did not have much money, most went by foot. But when there was ice, people could travel long distances within a short time. Some people skated even up to 200 km on one day. It was a good occasion to visit relatives that did not live in your town or village. But today skating has become a pure pleasure and a sport or both at the same time.

Last Monday, when I made my first gliding strides of this winter on a mere not far from my home (yes, it is a nature reserve, normally closed to the public), I was thinking about my blog. For hadn’t I been there on the ice, I should have sat behind my laptop writing down my next thoughts for the world. What should I write about? That Descartes saw the body as a machine, but that, after a year without skating, it is quite difficult to control this human machine on the ice and making the perfect strides? Or should I write something about “mens sana in corpore sano”, a healthy mind in a healthy body, and how in my life both come together, I hope? Or relate my activity to the meaning of sport for philosophers like Socrates and Plato? However, if I would do that, in a certain sense it would not be true. I mean, of course, it would be true, but in fact it would have nothing to do with my skating and in general with the skating of the Dutch. For even although it would be an interesting and useful explanation or framing of it, it would have nothing to do with what this skating really stands for, for skating is simply a Dutch passion.

The sensationlessness of nonviolence

In an article titled “Protest mobilization, protest repression, and their interaction” Clark McPhail and John D. McCarthy briefly describe and analyse one of the largest British riots in the last quarter of the 20th century, the 1991 Poll Tax Riot in and around Trafalgar Square in London. Despite the violence reported by police and media, scientific analysis of the case must lead to the conclusion, according to the authors, that “[it] is no exaggeration to assert that in this riot ... violence by civilians or by police officers is the exception rather than the rule. This is not ... the impression left by the print and electronic media, who consistently report violence against person and property, if and when it occurs, to the exclusion of the more frequent, prosaic, and nonviolent actions by the majority of the actors in the riot area” (in: Christian Davenport et.al. (eds.), Repression and Mobilization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005; pp. 17-18).
I think that generally this is true, not only for the case described: Media are more interested in reporting the violence in actions than the nonviolent behaviour of the participants. Even more, peaceful actions and demonstrations are often ignored just because there is no violence. Simply the fact that there is an action going on is often apparently not enough, even if this action is reasonable and justified. I do not want to say that peaceful actions are always ignored but generally the selection made in the media which actions to report is that way that one gets the impression that public actions and violence are linked in some way. However, during the years I have taken part in many demonstrations and other actions. Only one of them ended in disorder (although I do not have seen violence then; it was an anti-Vietnam demonstration about 40 years ago with some 50.000 participants). All other public actions I participated in had always a pleasant and relaxed atmosphere. What I know from this experience, but also from reports that I received in other ways (mainly not from the big public media) is that a nonviolent course of public actions is the normal way. Even more, I dare to say that more than 99% of all public actions go off in a peaceful and pleasant way. But who is interested in talking about what is normal even when it may be more interesting? Aren’t we all sensation mongers and muckrakers in our heart who secretly enjoy the bad news and do not want to value the good news?

The contextuality of personal identity

In my blogs and elsewhere in an article (see http://home.kpn.nl/wegweeda/PersonalIdentity.htm ) I argued that the main stream of the identity theoreticians is wrong in claiming that the identity of a person is merely psychological, and I have defended that idea that it has both psychological and physical aspects. In my blog two weeks ago I argued that in addition our personal identity includes the ways relevant other people look at us. This implies that our identity has not only internal aspects but that it has external aspects as well. Although this is a step further away from the mainstream of the personal identity theory, in essence it is still Cartesian, like the mainstream theory is. I mean this: the hidden idea behind both the mainstream theory and my theory is that there is a kind of homunculus, a little man, in you, or a kind of processor, or how you want to define it, that says: “That’s me”.
Now, take this. I find somewhere in a drawer a Giro cheque, which has been there for years, and I want to pay with it, not knowing that it is not valid any longer and that such cheques have been replaced by bank cards already long ago. In the shop I am treated as a stupid man; maybe even as a deceiver. A few years ago, however, I would have been treated as a decent customer. So, what am I? A stupid man or a deceiver or alternatively a decent custom? It depends not on me but on how other people see me and on the rules and regulations of society.
Second. In some countries, like the Netherlands (at least in practice), it is allowed to have little quantities of drugs for personal use. In other countries, however, it is a criminal act that will be heavily punished. So, in some countries I am a person who obeys the law, in other countries I am a criminal.
Third. Hundred years ago, when the movement of conscientious objection of military service arose in the Netherlands, conscientious objectors were looked down on and often despised. It was difficult for them to find a job, some jobs were legally forbidden for them, and they were often seen as traitors of the state. However, after, say, the 1970s, conscientious objectors were seen as respected young men who followed their principles. Being a conscientious objector was often an asset when looking for a job. In Germany now one of the problems of doing away with conscription is that there will be no conscientious objectors any longer, who are highly esteemed and do useful jobs.
The upshot is that my personal identity, what I am, is not only embodied, or actually embodied and “embrained”, but that it is also embedded in the world around us. Personal identity cannot simply be the (maybe hidden) Cartesian idea in us but it depends, at least for a part, on the context in which we live. What we are, good or bad, a philosopher, a man, an inhabitant of the Netherlands, is determined and defined in the world around us. If this context becomes different our identity changes with it as well.

Big Brother and Bentham’s Panopticon

One might think that Big Brother is a recent invention and that it is related to electronic cameras and TV screens. It is true, the expression “Big Brother” is only 60 years old and has been thought up by George Orwell, and the modern way of observing people is not possible without cameras and screens. Nonetheless, the idea as such is much older. I do not know how old it is, but at the end of the 18th century Jeremy Bentham designed what he called a panopticon. Forty years ago the panopticon has been discussed by Michel Foucault in his Discipline and punish. However, for a description I want to quote Elisheva Sadan’s Empowerment and Community Planning (e-book version, 2004, on www.mpow.org/elisheva_sadan_empowerment_intro.pdf , p. 62): “The Panopticon is an eight-sided building surrounded by a wall, with a tower at the center. The … occupants of the structure sit in cells located on floors around the wall. The cells have two apertures – one for light, facing outwards through the wall, and one facing the inner courtyard and the tower. The cells are completely separated from one another by means of walls. … Overseers sit in the tower and observe what happens in every cell. The [occupants] are isolated from one another, and exposed to constant observation. Since they cannot know when they are being observed, they supervise their behavior themselves.” As Foucault (1979, p. 200) explains, the structure can be used “to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy”, or, I want to add, any other person that you want to observe in this way. It is based on the idea of secret observation and secretly controlling what people do. Seen in this way, the panopticon is nothing else than Big Brother before the expression existed.
A panopticon and surveillance cameras are ways of exercising power over people. As such this needs not to be bad. Prisoners are in prison with reason, because of what they have done in the past. Surveillance cameras are often used in order to prevent crime. There are enough people who will misuse the situation if a crime can be done unpunished. But these kinds of power are not personal, as I explained in my last blog. They are embedded in a bureaucratic situation with all the risks of a bureaucratic situation: nobody feels oneself responsible in person for what happens and what the whole organisation does. It is as Sadan says (p.63): “The most diabolical aspect of power is that it is not entrusted in the hands of someone so that he may exercise it upon others absolutely. It entraps everyone who comes close to it: those who exercise power as well as those who are subject to it. The jailers, like the prisoners, are in certain senses also entrapped in the prison.”

Personal identity and Big Brother who is watching you

In my last blog I concluded, succinctly formulated, that the eye that is watching you is also within you. People behave differently when they know that they are being watched and when this being watched lasts long it becomes a part of their ways of life. In short, it becomes part of their identities. People living in dictatorships tend to behave differently from the way people in free countries do. The idea that everything you say, at least what you say it in public, can be used against you, makes you cautious if not wary and tends to suppress spontaneous actions and reactions. This way of acting becomes what Bourdieu has called a habitus, and persons used to habitual manners do not suddenly change when the circumstances that made to develop them change, for instance when the dictatorship falls.
This is why surveillance cameras and other measures from the arsenal of Big Brother are so dangerous. Maybe they prevent or suppress some forms of crime but they function like people who are watching you. But there is an important difference: if a person is watching you, for instance a policeman or a bystander, and you are wondering why, you can ask him or her for the reason and you can explain what you are doing if you are doing something weird or something that might be interpreted as a suspicious action. But to whom do you have to go in case of a camera? A camera does not talk back and does not have a microphone where you can complain and explain. Usually you do not know who is behind the camera and where you can find the guard or authority responsible for the camera. And if you know, it takes so much effort and time, that probably you’ll resign to the fact that the camera is there, and you’ll adapt your way of acting. If this happens once, it might not be such a problem, but if it happens often and regularly, it is likely that it becomes a part of your personal habitus in the end. There is a good chance that your spontaneity diminishes. You adapt to the situation and the people around you and you avoid attracting attention. Positively but also negatively, for you never know how what you do is interpreted and you cannot explain what you are doing. Maybe you tend also to avoid certain places. In other words your personal identity has changed. And if it has come so far, Big Brother does no longer need to watch you, for Big Brother is now within you.

P.S. Yes I know that Big Brother reads my blogs, too.

Personal identity and those who are watching you

People have given many definitions of man. Famous is Plato’s definition: Man is a biped without feathers. So Diogenes took a picked chicken and said: Look, Plato’s man! Aristotle defined man as a “zoon politikon”, a political being. Based on what I wrote in my last blog, we can say that man is a being that acts. Or maybe I can better say, man is a being that is able to act, for not acting does not disqualify a being as man, but it is the possibility to act that is essential, and the rest is up to him or her.
But what does it mean that man is able to act as distinct from doing something else? Much has been said elsewhere, also in my blogs, about the difference between behaviour and action, acting with an intention and the like, and I want to refer to that discussion for indicating what acting is. Now I want to discuss another question: Is it really so that it is up to man as man to fill in his or her action capacities? For this suggests that man is free to act within his or her physical limits. However, in a blog of mine some time ago we have seen that the temperature of the cup of coffee in my hands influences my decisions. This is in agreement with other studies. For example, Steven Tipper and Patric Bach have shown that students rated other people as more academic and less sporty when the research situation had been arranged that way that they could give a quick answer than when it had been arranged so that it took more time to answer. The authors concluded that the way we characterize other people depends on the fluency of our response. For Tipper and Bach this says something about social perception, the way we perceive others. For me, these and other studies say as much about how man is constituted. They suggest that man is not simply a bundle of capacities that has to be filled in. Man consists in an interaction between the mental and the physical, something that scientists have discovered already long ago but that many philosophers still seem to deny, if we think of the discussion about personal identity. Unlike what the mainstream of the philosophers who discuss this theme tends to think, our identity is not merely psychological but it is made up of the mixture of our psychological and our physical characteristics and their interactions.
So it seems that we have an identity made up of our psychological and physical aspects, allowing that we develop in time. However, if our judgments of how other people are depend on the fluency of our responses and maybe also on the temperature of the cup of coffee in our hands, then the same must be true for other people who judge us. If this is so, another factor comes into play. In what we do, we often react to how other people react to us, including their judgments of us and their behaviour based on these judgments. On the one hand, this is an aspect that attributes to the development of our identity. But on the other hand, this makes that our identity exists not only of our psychological and physical characteristics and the way they have developed in time, but our identity is also made up of what we are in the eyes of others, at least in the eyes of those others who are significant for us. And we can say, as many eyes there are that see us, as many identities we have in a certain sense. Moreover, these identities are not stable but at least for a part they depend on the temperatures of the cups of coffee in the hands of the onlookers, the fluency of their responses when they judge us and what more there is, which are factors that naturally change continuously.
The upshot of all this is that our personal identity exists not only of our psychological and physical characteristics and our past experiences as identity theorists often think. It is also made up by what is outside us and around us, which involves also that it is not stable. The eyes of our significant onlookers are a relevant factor among those that influence our identity. So, personal identity theorists have to allow for it but until now they haven’t.

The inspiration of Wittgenstein

When I set myself to write my next blog and I do not know what to write about, the Essays of Michel de Montaigne are always a good source for inspiration. However, there is another source that is actually as good as Montaigne’s book. This is the Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In fact, I had read Wittgenstein already long before I had ever heard of Montaigne and, unlike Montaigne, Wittgenstein has had a direct and an indirect influence on my philosophical thinking and work. I can best formulate the difference between Montaigne and Wittgenstein for me in this way: I read Montaigne’s Essays like a novel, but I read Wittgenstein’s work like a scientific treatise.
Wittgenstein’s contribution to philosophy cannot be summarized in a few statements. But what has always interested me is the importance he has given to the place of language in science and life. For Wittgenstein, language was not simply an instrument for expressing our thoughts, but language has an important influence on the way we think. This made him one of the ancestors of the so-called linguistic turn, the idea that language constitutes our reality and that it is actually the foundation of all our knowledge. This relieves the older idea, which goes back to Immanuel Kant, that the foundation of our knowledge is to be found in consciousness. It is also contrary to the idea, defended by Karl Popper and especially by his follower Hans Albert in discussion with Karl-Otto Apel in Germany, that there is no foundation of knowledge at all but that scientific method is characterized by a continuous criticism. Formulated in contradictory terms: criticism is the foundation of science.
Despite that language was fundamental for Wittgenstein’s thinking and analyzing, in the end he did not found our thinking on language. We can try to give any explanation we like by going to their linguistic sources, be it of scientific facts, be it of facts of life, but such an explanation means nothing to us, when we do not know how to use the explanation, namely how to act on it. In this way, Wittgenstein formulated a fundamental insight, for isn’t it so that there is no longer life where there is no action? Isn’t it so that, if we want to give a foundation to man in all her or his aspects (physical, mental, historical, and who knows what more) it must be action? And then I do not mean only action in the sense of moving arms and legs and other body parts, but I think of action in its widest sense. Also our speaking is an acting, as has been shown in such a powerful way by J.L. Austin, as well as our thinking is.
How inspiring can Wittgenstein be, considering that this was only a comment on the first of the 693 philosophical investigations in the first part of his book.

The banality of banality

A few days ago I talked with a friend of mine, a photographer, about taking pictures of banal things. My friend is good in it but most photographers, professionals as well as amateurs, take photos of things that are striking in some way and that are therefore not banal by definition. What is beautiful; a place where something is happening, like an accident or a birthday party, a political fact; a place where we have been because we want to keep a memory of it. These are usual themes for photos. But most photographers do not make pictures of what they consider banal. An odd corner between houses with rubbish. A cable lying on the ground. Laundry on a line. Most photographers do not feel it worth to make a photo of it, unless it has a striking aspect, like a coloured detail which makes it artistically interesting, or when the photographer comes from a country where things are different.
It is the same for philosophy and sociology. Scholars in these fields tend to study what is conspicuous or important for some reason. Violence, the mind, power, and so on; themes that are very important, indeed, and that have a great influence on our life. But isn’t that true, isn’t that even more true for the banal?
Once I published here a blog about waiting. It was because of a few photos that I had taken of this theme. Some time later, I have googled the word. And what did I find? Nothing. Oh no, that is not true. I found my own blog (Google is an excellent searching machine), I found a website where my blog had been bookmarked, and in addition two or three other relevant websites. That was all. But despite the little attention given to waiting, it is an important aspect of our daily life and we spend a lot of time on it! For a substantial part, living is waiting.I’ll not try to give here a list of banal themes that would earn more attention in the sciences and philosophy of man, in my opinion. But is the banal really as banal as many people think? If we say no, it sounds like a contradiction, for we just take no notice of it because it is not worth to give it attention, and that is what makes the banal banal. This seems to be true unless we realize that the banal is often not as innocent as we think. We simply have to think of Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is a book on the banality of evil as the subtitle stresses, for realizing that banality can be dangerous. And isn’t it so that the idea of “bread and circuses” shows that it is good for a dictator to promote the interest in the banal in order to stay in power?

Montaigne and the stupidity of man

Readers of my blogs have probably noticed that Michel de Montaigne is one of my favourite philosophers. Even more, I started this series of blogs with a comment on a quotation from Montaigne’s Essays. Actually this is a bit strange, for the ideas of Montaigne have no direct relation with my main field of philosophical interest, which is the philosophy of mind and action. However, Montaigne is one of the few philosophers that I read and reread, since I came into touch with him. No wonder, for Montaigne was ahead of his time, and much of what he wrote more than 400 years ago is still modern. Moreover he has a good style of writing. Montaigne is also one of the few philosophers about whom I have read a lot of books, and the more I know about him and his ideas, the more I want to go into the man and his ideas. Montaigne is stimulating and thought provoking when you read him. He is more stimulating and more thought provoking the more you know about him and his time.
At the moment I am rereading Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond”. It is his longest essay and actually it is a book of its own. Montaigne translated the Theologia Naturalis by Raymond of Sabunde, a Catalan philosopher (< 1400-1436), on request of his father and later this work stimulated him to write down his ideas on science, knowledge and theology. I will not write here a summary or appraisal of the work, but it is full of ideas and it shows Montaigne as a precursor of Descartes. Almost any sentence there is worth a comment.
Take for instance this: “Who intelligently collected and compiled the pieces of asinine behaviour of human wisdom, would be able to tell us odd things”. Montaigne wrote this sentence after having listed a series of stupidities of the human mind through the ages. And has there been any change in human behaviour since then? Moreover, we do not need to limit us to “scientific” facts like those cited by Montaigne, for example about the places where people have placed the spirit in the body through the ages (everywhere between head and feet). In politics we find many stupidities of the kind discussed by Montaigne, through the ages before and after him. Take, for instance, the Berlin Wall, which has fallen 20 years ago. How stupid the idea that one can close a country with a wall. What would happen could have been predicted: either it would be a failure in the end, or it would lead to a world war. Happily the first thing occurred. But what was the reaction of Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minster of the UK, one day after the fall? She called Michael Gorbachev and asked him to stop the reunification of Germany. “Let they [the East Germans] just stay behind their Wall”, she said to Gorbachev. How stupid. Or take the reaction of François Mitterand, then president of France, who feared the resurrection of a mighty Germany.
In the light of what has happened since then one can nothing but laugh about such stupidities, but in those days it was a serious affaire, like many stupidities of the mind, and giving in would have made a different world. And who would ever have thought in the days of the First and Second World Wars that France and Germany would together commemorate these wars and that these countries would be united in a common union with a common presidency 55 years after the end of the second one of these calamities? It is true, as Montaigne says, the human mind has produced many stupid things through the ages. How unfortunate that we see that often only afterwards and not at the moment that we produce these thoughts.

Outdoor cafes

Streets, and roads (“streets” for short) are places of public life everywhere. Streets have many functions. The main function is connecting places. That’s way they are there. Streets connect places that are important for people for one reason or another, because they live there or work there, because these places have special functions (theatres, shops, railway stations), and so on. In order to go from one such a place to another one you follow the streets that connect them, walking, by bike, by car or how you like. However, streets have many other functions as well. Some people work there like policemen or street sweepers. Other people practice sports along the roads, like running or cycling. Some people use streets for meeting other people, for example by making an appointment at a crossing or on a square with another person or by parading along the streets. Sometimes people use streets for making their opinion public, like in demonstrations. People can use streets also as an extension of private life. On warm summer evenings it can happen in the Netherlands for instance that people put their chairs outdoors on the street sides, for talking with their neighbours, for reading the newspaper, and the like, or for just sitting there. In other countries with a warmer climate a big part of private life takes place in the streets. Streets have other functions as well.
What we often find along streets are outdoor cafes. In most cases, they are (semi-)public extensions of the semi-public life that takes place in the cafes and restaurants along the streets, mainly in the centres of towns and villages, but not only there. I think that outdoor cafes are a very interesting aspect of public and semi-public life along the streets. In a certain sense they reflect local society, since they are often reflections of the life that takes place around the sites where they are. The furnishings are often adapted to the environment or purpose. An outdoor cafe of a highway restaurant is different from an outdoor cafe in a town centre. In some outdoor cafes you find mainly local people, looking for contact with other locals. In other ones you find tourists, stopping for a short rest, a drink and maybe a simple meal. Other ones are for casual passers-by or shopping people looking for a short break. Because they are often so characteristic, I find it interesting to make photos of them (see www.flickr.com/photos/photographybytheway).
One typical photo of such an outdoor cafe is the one here in my blog. It shows an outdoor café on an unpaved surface. Parked cars on the other side of the road. People with race bikes and with a racing outfit standing by or sitting down. In the left upper corner you can just see that it is a place high in the mountains. All this limits the place where the picture can have been taken. It could be in Switzerland, Austria, or Spain, if it is in Europe, or, where it actually has been taken, in France. It is on the Col du Tourmalet, a mountain pass in the French Pyrenees. This col is one of the most famous cols of the Tour de France cycle race, and that’s why it attracts many bike tourists.

Truth (2)

When we admit, like I did in my blog last week, that we can never know that a statement is true, and that things expressed in it can always be different from what we originally thought that they are, truth can no longer be something absolute. However, it can serve as a guideline. For when I argue that there are only subjective viewpoints and interpretations of the world around us, I do not want to say that any viewpoint and any interpretation will do. It is a bit like what George Orwell said in his Animal Farm: All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. In the same way we can say: All statements are true (namely from a subjective point of view) but some statements are truer (namely what they say is nearer to reality) than other statements. And because we prefer statements that are truer above statements that are less true, truth can serve as a guideline. This is basic knowledge in science and it is what science is about: to produce truer statements. However, that truth is a guideline needs not to be limited to science but it applies to social life as well: What we think that is true in social life from our point of view may appear to be fundamentally different from another viewpoint. But many people think that their own truths are the only truths and some may even be prepared to die for them and to make other people die for them instead of talking about their truths. Actually matters are more complicated, for truth in science is not exactly the same as truth in social life. But just this brings the idea that one has to talk and not to fight about fundamental differences even nearer to the truth.