How we think: The time perspective

The future: The way ahead of us or the way up?

Language affects (but does not determine) the way we think about the world around us. We have seen this in my last blog, where I introduced an example from the interesting studies by Lera Boroditsky in this field. Other studies corroborate this view. However, the influence is not universal. So, it seems that the language we speak has no effect on the way we see colours. Does it also affect the way we see time? An investigation by Boroditsky makes clear that it is likely the case. At least, that is the result of a study with English and Mandarin speaking test persons. English has other spatial terms for referring to past and future than Mandarin Chinese. English uses horizontal terms like ahead and behind while Mandarin uses vertical terms like up and down. According to this study by Boroditsky (and now I quote from her summary) “Mandarin speakers tended to think about time vertically even when they were thinking for English (Mandarin speakers were faster to confirm that March comes earlier than April if they had just seen a vertical array of objects than if they had just seen a horizontal array, and the reverse was true for English speakers).” However, the effect of language on thought is not determinate and can alter under the influence of external factors like having learned another language. So it is no surprise that another investigation by Boroditsky showed “that the extent to which Mandarin–English bilinguals think about time vertically is related to how old they were when they first began to learn English.” The effect works also in the other direction, for “[i]n another experiment”, so Boroditsky, “native English speakers were taught to talk about time using vertical spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin. On a subsequent test, this group of English speakers showed the same bias to think about time vertically as was observed with Mandarin speakers.”

But why then the difference between the case of time and the case of colour, since for colours language does not affect the way we see them? Boroditsky suggests  – and I think it’s plausible, although much research has yet to be done in this field – that the difference between time and colour is that colour experiences happen already before a newborn has learned a language while abstract concepts like “time” develop only after the language acquisition. All this brings her to the idea that once there “one’s native language plays an important role in shaping habitual thought (e.g., how one tends to think about time)”. Which should explain that colour perception is more or less universal while abstract ideas like time are is more or less language-bound, at least initially.

So far, so good, and, as said, all this is very plausible in my opinion, and it agrees with my view. But it made me think a bit about the idea of time. I should have consulted Henri Bergson and other philosophers (and psychologists) for saying something reasonable about this (and in order to avoid telling something as if it were new, while others may have said it many times before). However, we can see time quite momentaneous, as is actually done by Boroditsky in her studies: we stand here now on the road from the past to the future (or maybe a Mandarin speaker would say on the mountain between the valley and the top) with much time behind us (down to us) and much time ahead of us (up). And so life goes in a certain and significant sense, at least for an individual. But in another sense time is recurrent. The seasons and how we live through them are a case in point (and now the question occurs to me what the difference is between my experiencing the seasons, living in Northwestern Europe in a region with a clear seasonal cycle, and the experiencing by a person living in a region of the world like the tropics where this cycle is very different). Another instance of the recurrence of time is the way we produce our society and so our history as conceived by the sociologist Anthony Giddens: By what we do, so by our actions, we produce our social systems and social structure, which we later encounter as the conditions that make new actions possible and that give them an embedment. These visions of time make that it is much wider than merely a linguistic phenomenon (and I think that no one interested in the language-thought relation will deny this). But besides that, this recurrent cycle, or rather spiral, is also the way a language is produced and reproduced. Does this mean that the influence of time on the way a language produces its time categories is at least as big as the influence of language on our view of time? In general: does this mean that the influence of thinking on language may be at least as big as the influence of language on thinking?

Source: Lera Boroditsky, “Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English

Speakers’ Conceptions of Time”, on http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/mandarin.pdf

How we think, at least initially

Meuse Bridge at Harreville Les Chanteurs, France: Sturdy or elegant?

Many languages classify nouns in categories called “genders”. Spanish nouns are classified as either masculine or feminine, for example. To take a few instances, masculine in Spanish are the nouns for man (hombre), bridge (puente) and courage (coraje), while feminine are those for woman (mujer), tower (torre) and happiness (felicidad). German has three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral. Some masculine German nouns are man (Mann), road (Weg) and courage (Mut), feminine are woman (Frau), bridge (Brücke) and happiness (Glück); neutral nouns are house (Haus), girl (Mädchen) and trust (Vertrauen). Don’t say that it’s obvious that “man” is masculine and “woman” is feminine for in Russian the word for man (muzhchina) has a feminine gender. And we have just seen that the German noun for girl is neutral. Some languages, like English, have only one gender (or no gender, if you like); some Australian aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders.

Although there is no necessary relation between the gender of a noun and its meaning, it’s an intriguing question whether its gender influences the way we think about a noun. For as my examples show, the same words can have different genders in different languages: puente (bridge in Spanish) is masculine, while its German equivalent Brücke is feminine. Lera Boroditsky accepted the challenge to find an answer to this question. She took a group of Spanish speakers and a group of German speakers and asked them to describe words with opposite gender assignments in their respective languages. The tests were done in English, which has only one gender, so that the language used for the test didn’t influence the findings on this point. For instance, when asked to describe “bridge”, the Spanish speakers said “big”, “dangerous”, “long”, “strong”, “sturdy” and “towering”, so Boroditsky, while the German speakers said “beautiful”, “elegant”, “fragile”, “peaceful”, “pretty” and “slender”. Other tests gave equal findings. As Boroditsky concludes: “Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world.”

On April 19, 2010, I wrote in a blog: “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, by 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.” Then I hadn’t heard yet of Boroditsky and her research. For some years I had been occupied with the question whether language determines our thoughts (the so-called Sapir-Whorf thesis), but I came to the conclusion that research had refuted the thesis. Nevertheless the feeling remained that this conclusion was false. I mean, it was correct that languages do not have a determinate influence on how people think, but I thought that there had to be some influence, namely that the language you speak serves as a first guide for the way you think about the world around you. That’s what I expressed in the quote from my blog. However, I hadn’t the means to research it. Now we see that Boroditsky comes to the same conclusion. Although the example of her research presented here may give the impression that language determines the way you think (“German speakers gives bridges female qualities, Spanish speakers give bridges male qualities”), other research by Boroditsky and her team shows that such world views can change. Speakers of a certain language can change their views when they learn about other views. Actually, the world view in your native language is the view from which you start, but which you can alter later. That’s why I wrote then that “We can use another language with other categories and we can invent new categories. In that sense anything goes.”

I do not write this because I want to be right, but Boroditsky’s findings show how important it is to consider the way we speak (what feminists always have said). They show for instance (and here I refer to and quote from Prinz, 2013, pp. 189-190) that “we must be cautious when using gender-specific language”, and, as I want to add, “language in general”. It influences the way we see and categorize, anyway initially. “It’s a mistake”, so Prinz (and I fully agree), “that we cannot think without language”. However, “if you look at a scene, you immediately and automatically label the salient objects.” And although cultural and other influences and facts affect the way you see and classify as well, “linguistic variation is not superficial. It is a powerful example of how something we learn through experience can shape our understanding of the world.” Or in Boroditsky’s words: “Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.” In short: Languages help us shape and discriminate, positively and negatively.

Sources: Lera Boroditsky, “How does our language shape the way we think?” on http://edge.org/conversation/how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think ; Jesse J. Prinz, Beyond human nature, Penguin Books, London etc., 2013.

Whether one must always directly confront an enemy

View of the battlefield of Lake Trasimene from
the place where consul Flaminius was killed

When travelling usually I follow not so much this or that travel guide, but I follow my mind and sometimes my photo camera, which is actually the same. So when I was in Tuscany in Italy a few weeks ago, I found it more interesting to be led by the Montaigne’s footsteps and to walk on the battle field of Lake Trasimene where Hannibal ambushed a Roman army than to see the great objects of art admired by many, although one can doubt whether most of them really admire them or that they admire them “because they have to” (as a pen friend remarked to me). But it is not up to me to judge the truth of the admiration of others. That would be quite arrogant and these “others” could probably say the same about me, and with right. Anyway, I remember that when I was in Florence a few years ago I walked into a church and my eye was caught by a statue on the wall and, although not being an art connoisseur, I immediately saw how excellent it was and when I looked up in my travel guide who had made it, I saw that it was by Donatello. Since Donatello is recognized as a famous and very good sculptor, I concluded that there must be something objective in what is good art and what is bad art and that even a layman can see that and can sincerely enjoy it. Nevertheless, my feeling tells me that my mind must lead me to other places when I am on a travel. Or most of the time.

Anyway, walking on the battle field of Lake Trasimene I wondered why Montaigne hadn’t been here, since he needed to make only a brief detour in order to go there. Montaigne writes several times about Hannibal in his essays, although not over consul Flaminius who was commanding the Roman army there, if I am right. I think that a walk, or rather a horse ride a Montaigne’s case, would have given him new insights and would have stimulated him to new themes, if he had looked at the details of the battle and had compared the reports of Livy and other authors with what he had seen in person on the terrain. And certainly he would have got inspiration if he would have studied what had happened after the battle, if he didn’t know it already. For after the Romans had heard about what was a calamity for them (15.000 soldiers had been killed, 6.000 had been taken captive and only 4.000 soldiers escaped), they were seized by panic and, as they had done so often in such situations in the past, they appointed a dictator who was charged to solve the situation and, of course, to beat Hannibal. However, Quintus Fabius Maximus, the new man on the top of the Roman Republic, chose the strategy of avoiding a direct confrontation with Hannibal. Instead he used a tactics of law-level harassment in order to exhaust his opponent and to give Rome time to rebuild its military strength. By doing so Fabius got the nickname Cunctator or “Delayer”. But the Romans were not very charmed by this approach. They dismissed Fabius and elected two consuls instead, who gave battle to Hannibal in the Battle of Cannae, which was even a worse defeat for the Romans than the Battle of Lake Trasimene. Apparently, Fabius’s strategy of avoiding and exhausting was not so bad. Even more, the same method was used by the Russian generals Barclay de Tolly and Kutuzov in 1812 when Napoleon invaded Russia and occupied Moscow. In this case the strategy was a big success and Napoleon was forced to leave Russia, which actually meant the end of his reign. Of course, Montaigne couldn’t have known about Napoleon, but without a doubt a few other such instances would have come to his mind. If he would have written about them, I think he would have given his essay the title “Whether one must always directly confront an enemy” and the upshot would have been that procrastination is not always as bad as it looks on the face of it.

In Montaigne’s footsteps

The house where Montaigne stayed in Bagni di Lucca

When I was in Tuscany some years ago, I suddenly realized that Montaigne had been there, too, on his trip to Germany and from there to Italy. But where exactly had he been? I seemed to remember only vaguely that he must have stayed some time in Bagni di Lucca, but I wasn’t sure of it. I had a book on Montaigne with me, but it didn’t talk about Montaigne’s tour. It was purely philosophical. I had no Internet connection at my disposal (smartphones did not yet exist, for instance), so how to find out where Montaigne had been in Tuscany? In the end, I skipped the idea to visit the places where he had stayed, although I was a bit disappointed, also because I was so stupid not to think of it, when I prepared my trip.

But now, I had a second chance. My wife and I had planned to visit the region again and this time I was well prepared. I had reread the relevant passages of Montaigne’s travel journal and I had previewed the places where he stayed on the Internet.

Our hotel was just north of Lucca and after our arrival our first trip was to Bagni di Lucca. We followed the same road Montaigne had taken in 1581 on the right bank of the River Serchio, stream up. The typical high bridge just north of Borgo a Mozzano described by Montaigne was still there. Today only pedestrians are allowed to use it. Had it really been possible to ride over the bridge with a cart 400 years ago? For the bridge was very steep and rather narrow. But Montaigne and his company had only horses with them.

We crossed the Serchio via a modern bridge and soon we were in Bagni. First we walked a bit through the little town. Then we went to the tourist office. They had a book with names of all famous and less famous people who had stayed in Bagni. Montaigne was certainly not the only person who had got the idea to cure there, in his case because he suffered from kidney stones. The healing power of the springs was already known in Roman times and Montaigne tells us that many people from the surrounding area used to spend the summer there. Especially in the 19th century it was a popular health resort, but today the bloom days of the spa seem to have gone.

Montaigne had rented rooms in a house in La Villa, a residential quarter a bit separate from the actual town, mainly existing of mansions and villas. The road leading to it is rather steep but from here you have a view on the roofs of the houses of Bagni. Where the road enters La Villa, there is a little square. To the left I see the stately mansion where Montaigne had passed many weeks in the late spring and early summer of 1581 and then again in August and September. The house is not open to the public but a plaquette tells us that Montaigne has stayed here 74 days all together. In front of the building, where once coaches were parked, now modern cars take their places. The mansion has been built against a slope. A staircase on the right side brings us to a garden on the level of the top floor of the house. Actually it’s not more than a lawn. A mountain wall closes the garden on the backside. A basin with a tap has been built in it. Was it already there in the days of Montaigne and has he used the tap then? As such it’s a bit a strange idea for me to imagine that the man must have gone there where I am now stepping in his footprints so to speak.

We walked a bit around the house and I absorbed the scene as well as I could. Then we went down again to the centre of Bagni. Later on our trip we met Montaigne yet a few times more. In Siena, for instance. According to Montaigne, its square is the most beautiful to be found anywhere. The square is beautiful, indeed, but it is clear that Montaigne hasn’t been in Brussels (or was the “Grand Place” not so beautiful in his days, as it is today? Anyway, Montaigne hasn’t been there). In the spa of Bagno Vignoni we saw the large basin with hot water, which has also been described by Montaigne. What surprises me is that he hasn’t visited the battle field near Lake Trasimene, where Hannibal defeated the Roman army in one of the most famous ambushes in military history. Montaigne needed only to make a little detour in order to go there. It’s true; there are no medicinal springs nearby. But isn’t it so that his interest was usually much wider than that, also when travelling? We can learn a lot of his openness for new experiences and his receptivity to new customs and habits, also on his travels abroad.

Friendship between books

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog on choosing books in an eclectic way or rather on “reading broadly”, as I called my blog. I argued that reading broadly lays a better foundation for understanding the specific and maybe narrow topics you are interested in. I had to think of it, when I happened to read a novel by the German author Walter Flex on his friendship with Ernst Wuche during the First World War. I see you thinking already: This is again a case of eclectic reading, for what has a novel on the First World War to do with the themes discussed in these blogs? “Maybe nothing and yet maybe a lot”, is my reply. However, here I don’t want to talk about the direct relevance of these novels for “my” philosophy and philosophy in general but about eclecticism.

Flex’s novel is on friendship and especially on his relation with Ernest Wuche. In a certain sense the book can be compared with Montaigne’s essay “On friendship” dedicated to his friend Étienne de La Boétie, who had died a few years before Montaigne wrote it. Also Flex wrote his novel after his friend’s death. Flex meets Wuche for the first time when they received officer training somewhere in Germany. They clicked immediately with each other, just like Montaigne and La Boétie. And also the friendship between Flex and Wuche was short lasting but intensive. A difference is that Flex wasn’t there when Wuche died, although he was present at his burial. Also Flex, like Montaigne, couldn’t forget his friend and thinking of him made him depressive. This made Montaigne write his Essays and Flex write his novel Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten (The Wanderer between Two Worlds).

On the train to the Eastern Front, Flex and Wuche got into conversation. They talked about books. Wuche is an avid reader, and also in the trenches and behind the frontline he read a lot (as many other soldiers did, on both sides of the front). Flex tells how Wuche gets a few books from his knapsack: An anthology of Goethe, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the New Testament in a special edition for soldiers. “Is this compatible with each other?”, Flex asked. Wuche smiled and said: “In the trenches all sorts of people who do not know each other are forced to comradeship. It’s the same with books as it is with people. They may be very different – they need to be only strong and honest and be able to hold out, this gives the best comradeship.”

Must I add anything to it? Good books do not need to fit objectively, as long as they fit in the mind of the reader.

The power of words (2)

In my blog last week I wrote about Simone Weil’s analysis of the use of empty words in politics. Later this phenomenon has been exposed so well by George Orwell. The slogan “War is Peace” from his novel 1984 is a good example of how meaningless words can be used for manipulation. Weil gives also a few instances of vague words with a baleful influence on the practice of politics, just because of this vagueness: nation, security, democracy … Still today these words are often used for justifying political measures and even war. The problem is not that these words have to be skipped from our vocabulary (I certainly do not want to deny that the idea of democracy is important!). The problem is that, so Weil, “each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean … anything whatsoever” (242). Nevertheless, “we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related to one or another or to any concrete facts.” (243) Many fights are fought only in the name of abstract words that haven’t been translated into concrete aims. With right Weil speaks here of “lethal absurdity” (243).

“The prime specimen [of this lethal absurdity] is the antagonism between nations”, Weil continues. Nothing could be more true, if one realizes that the nations that a few years after she had written these words begun to fight against each other in one of the most lethal wars in history, six years after the end of this war concluded a treaty of cooperation transferring powers of these same nations to a supranational organ: The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), one of the foundations of the present European Community. The ECSC exemplifies what Weil writes just after the quotation: that national rivalries are meaningless in the light of many international networks that exist at the same time, and that, for instance, “the German steel industry may be regarded with hostility by producers of steel goods in France; but it makes little difference to the mining companies whether the iron of Lorraine [in France] is worked in France or Germany…” (243). How absurd would the establishment of an organisation like the ECSC would have sounded when Weil wrote this at the end of the 1930s!

In view of the many actual relations in the world between individuals, groups, companies and peoples, the relations between national states is only one way of how we go along with each other globally. The importance of it is simply overstressed. However, the interest of the nation cannot be in the relations with people outside the nation; it would mean that the nation would disaffirm itself. According to Weil, a study of history has shown that its interest is in its capacity to make war. Weil doesn’t say it, but I think that this can be reduced to the sociological phenomenon of ingroup-outgroup, which explains much of the social behaviour of man. Here, I cannot take notice of this complex problem, but in the end it makes that man is prepared to use violence in order to defend its own group, the ingroup, against the outgroup. “Right or wrong my country”, as the British say (and not only they do!). As soon as we see this, much of what happens internationally becomes comprehensible: “What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict. Thus when war is waged it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one’s capacity to make war.” (244) However, as the singer Country Joe McDonald song in his famous chorus of the “Fish" Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag”: “What are we fighting for?”. What are the real interests of a nation? Again Weil puts the finger on the problem: “If the countries were divided by a real opposition of interests, it would be possible to arrive at satisfactory compromises. But when economic and political interests have no meaning apart from war, how can they peacefully be reconciled? It is the very concept of the nation that needs to be suppressed – or rather, the manner in which the word is used”. (245) That’s what’s done today by the European Union, for instance. The EU has been successful insofar since its foundation no war has been fought anymore between its member countries, although before the history of the relations between these countries has been a history of war (so the Netherlands, “my” country, fought at least four wars against Britain; an eighty years lasting war against Spain; several wars against France; one against Belgium; one against Germany and others against its founding states; etc.). How sad then that the EU meets with so much nationalistic opposition now. “For the word national and the expressions of which it forms part are empty of all meaning; their only content is millions of corpses, and orphans, and disabled men, and tears and despair.” (245)

The quotations are from “The power of words" in Simone Weil, An Anthology, London: Penguin Books, 2005. Here you can listen to the I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Soy3PHV3RiM

The power of words

Actually I didn’t need to write a blog, this week. Instead I could past Simone Weil’s essay “The power of words” here and then I would have a clear political comment on the world events of today. For Weil’s criticism of what was happening in the world around here is eternal. Or must I say, following Nietzsche, that history repeats itself? For, when writing this essay, Weil was not practising futurology but she was disclosing the hidden reality of contemporary political conflicts.

What Simone Weil (1909-1943) saw in many conflicts of her time (she wrote the essay on the eve of World War II) was that they were empty in purpose or rather that they didn’t have a clear purpose at all: “… they are conflicts with no definable objective” (p. 240). But just this kind of conflicts, are the most dangerous, Weil goes on: “The whole of history bears witness that it is precisely such conflicts that are the most bitter”. (ibid.) In a conflict where the stakes are well-defined, each combatant can judge whether the efforts and pains are worth the possible gains, Weil explains. “But when there is no objective there is no longer any common measure or proportion; no balance or comparison of alternatives is possible, and compromise is inconceivable” (241). Then only the past costs, especially the number of victims, count and just this is often a reason to continue. What we see then is that each combatant picks an object from its gamut of possible purposes and writes it with capital letters. Then the combatant says: THIS is our purpose. But often this purpose is empty. It’s just a word. “But when empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruins in their name, without effectively grasping anything to which they refer, since what they refer to can never have any reality, for the simple reason that they mean nothing.” (241). Then, the only measure of success is that you are able to bash the brains of your “enemy” in.

The part of the essay I just summarized contains only one aspect of Weil’s comments, but only this analysis is enough to make it a “brilliant essay”, as Siân Miles, who wrote an introduction to it, calls it. Referring to Homer’s Iliad and Early Rome, she wrote an attack on French foreign policy of her time, and without a doubt she was also thinking of the ideological conflicts of her days between nazism, communism and western capitalism c.q. democracy. And she thought of the First World War, of course, which was still fresh in the minds of many Europeans and which might have finished earlier, if the politicians hadn’t been so stubborn. However, it is not difficult to apply Weil’s words to the political events after the Second World War as well. Although the Cold War remained cold between the countries immediately concerned (the western countries versus Russia and Eastern Europe), because of the emptiness of the conflict and its aimlessness it lasted more than forty years. The consequences of this conflict about words, or ideological struggle as it is usually called, were bigger in the regions where the ideological differences led to hot war. Then one has to think of the Vietnam War in the first place, where what was initially a war for independence dragged along so long, because it was reinterpreted in ideological terms.

Weil’s analysis can also easily be applied today when we think of what Samuel Huntington called a clash of civilizations and what can also be seen as a clash of religions. For what is actually the “definable objective” of the attack on the Twin Towers in the sense that if this or that has been reached war is over? It’s also a war that is drags along since then because of the vagueness of the aims of the terrorist attacks. And, by the way, here, too, we see that history repeats itself, as becomes clear when we read Albert Camus’s analysis of anarchistic terrorism around 1900 in his L’homme revolté (translated into English as The Rebel). For although the justifications for terrorism may have changed, its form and dynamics have remained almost exactly the same more than hundred years later. But back to Weil, her analysis is brilliant because she disclosed a phenomenon and laid her finger on a problem that were not only important in her time but that apparently are eternal. “That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

The quotations from “The power of words" have been taken from Simone Weil, An Anthology, London: Penguin Books, 2005.

Reading broadly

Eclectic selection

Once someone told me that my choice of books is quite eclectic. As soon as I had finished Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, I started to read an anthology of Simone Weil, which I happened to find in a book shop when I was on holiday in Estonia this summer. I must admit that Schopenhauer and Weil are very different kinds of philosophers, but does this mean that my choice is really so eclectic? For what kinds of books I read, already since many years the philosophy of mind and action is at the centre of my field of interest; and also a theme that I am concerned with already much longer: non-violence. As I see it now, this will still remain so for the time to come, although you never know what will happen. Alternatively, however, one can say that at the forefront of my philosophical thinking are the questions I have chosen as the subtitle of my most recent book: Who am I? What do I do? (which is expressed also in my blogs here). Seen in that light, books like Schopenhauer’s or Weil’s are not more than side-roads for me.

Be it as it is, I think that actually it would be better if many philosophers would have a wider choice of reading than they have. How often doesn’t it happen that I read a philosophical article or book and I think: What is asserted here is absolutely not according to the facts. This author trusts too much his intuition and if he had read a bit about the theme, he would have known that it is simply not right, what is said here, or at least it is doubtful and needs more discussion or it needs some evidential support instead of relying only on intuition. Often this happens when the philosopher concerned supposes something intuitively about how the mind works or about social behaviour. So many new discoveries have been done in brain research and so much has been discovered about how the minds works in recent years, that the days are gone, I think, that one can philosophize only or mainly on the base of intuition about such themes. And also society is often more complicated than an intuitive feeling can bring to the light. It would be good for philosophy, if it would be more eclectic in a certain sense. How the world is shaped cannot be thought out intuitively, to formulate it succinctly.

Coming back to Simone Weil, hadn’t I seen that anthology of her work in an Estonian book shop, maybe I would never have read a word of her writings, which has yet been so influential, although Weil was philosophically a bit of a loner. Her philosophy touches central themes of life and Weil herself participated in the main events of her time (the labour movement; the resistance against the Nazi occupation of her country France). While reading her work, again and again I discovered insights that I discussed here in my blogs from the viewpoints of other philosophers or researchers. Take for example this. In her “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” Weil writes: “… the conquering soldier is like a scourge of nature. Possessed by war, he … becomes a thing, though his manner of doing is so different – over him, too, words are as powerful as over matter itself. And both, at the touch of force, experience its inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb.” And a few sentences further, she goes on: “It is not the planning man, the man of strategy, the man acting on the resolution taken, who wins or loses a battle; battles are fought and decided by men deprived of these faculties, men who have undergone a transformation, who have dropped either to the level of inert nature, which is pure passivity, or to the level of blind force, which is pure momentum. Herein lies the last secret of war …”. And I wanted to add: and of much of what we else do in life.

But isn’t this what Hannah Arendt has written down later when she discussed the banality of evil and in fact holds the thesis that what we do is determined to a large extent by the situation we are in? That we are carried away by the dynamics of the situation we are in, which tends to push away our individuality and our faculty of independent thought? Isn’t it the same as what Philip Zimbardo experimentally demonstrated in the famous “Stanford Prison Experiment”? That the situation often makes us do things we would never have done if we would (and could) have taken time for reflection? Reading “broadly” helps you see connections that you otherwise wouldn’t have seen. It helps you also to come into touch with authors who are interesting as such, irrespective of their wider meanings, like Simone Weil.

Note: The quotations are from Simone Weil. An anthology, Penguin Books, London, 2005; pp. 204-5.  What I wrote in my blogs about Arendt and Zimbardo can be found back by using the searching machine on this website.

On rumination

Ruminants

When I stand on the shoulders of other people (see last week) and I am the one at the top, how do I come higher? Once being there I have the risk that I ruminate what those others below me have thought out before and that I see it as something new. If that happens, my thinking has become an obstacle for my thinking. Then, it’s time to spring down and to do something. Act! Gather new experiences! But isn’t this what most of us fear?

Actually, my physical constitution says already so, for why else should I have not only such a big brain (the thinking system in my head) but also such refined hands (typically made for doing)?  Isn’t it so that they represent the two sides of what I am? They express the two aspects of my existence. These aspects are dependent on each other and cannot do without each other. As such they exclude each other but nevertheless they supplement each other, too, and seen that way they are complementary, in the way the German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel has described so well in a different context. Thereby they make up human life, which is made for thinking and acting, anyhow.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201108/metathinking

More on Apel in my PhD thesis (see left) and in older blogs.

Meta-thinking

Actually what I write down here are mainly thoughts about thoughts, or meta-thoughts. Some time ago, in a blog called “What thinking can” (Jan. 14, 2013), I wrote also about meta-thinking but from another perspective. There I discussed the question whether meta-thinking (and thinking as such) influences our behaviour. I think it does. Even more, it’s an important means for stimulating our basic thinking and that’s what I want to talk about here.

My written work has always been full of quotations. Not only my blogs are but I begun extensively quoting already long ago when I wrote papers as a student. I used citations  as a kind of evidence for my thoughts, but when looking for them and when reading the articles or books where I found them, they stimulated my thoughts as well and they led to new ideas in me. The thoughts of other writers made me think and brought me to new meta-thoughts. Therefore, I do not understand why some authors commit plagiarism. I am happy that I can stand on the shoulders of other people and that I can go to the top by doing so. And also that I can give the opportunity to others to stand on my shoulders. By committing plagiarism you run away for yourself – apart from what is further wrong with it–, for have you ever seen a person who shaped his own world without any help? Once I said to a photographer: “When I make photos, actually I copy what others have already done”. When I photograph a shop-window, for instance, I simply copy the work of the window-dresser. “No”, he said, “you give your own view of it and you put it into your perspective, and just that makes your contribution special”. It’s true, I think. To take another example, there is much misery in the world, but by making pictures of it, the cameraman doesn’t make an objective report but makes other people taking action. So, for philosophy we can say that meta-thinking helps take the best in a person out, and I think the more so if you consciously admit what you are doing.

One of the thinkers who most of all used this method was – my dear readers will have guessed already his name – Montaigne. His works is full of quotations from and references to the works of other authors, especially classical authors. Montaigne did not hesitate to mention those who influenced his thoughts and brought him to the ideas that still make him famous today. There are even some essays in which he mentions this approach explicitly in the title. One is his “Of a saying of Caesar”. Referring to a quotation from Lucretius Montaigne says there: “Whatever it is that falls into our knowledge and possession, we find that it satisfies not, and we still pant after things to come and unknown, inasmuch as those present do not suffice for us; not that, in my judgment, they have not in them wherewith to do it, but because we seize them with an unruly and immoderate haste”. I do not know whether Schopenhauer was aware of this passage, but in his The World as Will and Representation we find it as the idea that man quickly becomes bored and again and again looks for new activities. For Schopenhauer it is an argument that to live is to suffer since man is continuously desiring, without ever being satisfied. For Montaigne this restless searching means, following Epicurus, that we don’t know how to enjoy in the right way. And since we think that it is our own fault, we look for support elsewhere and outside us and give it honour and respect. Or as Caesar formulated it according to Montaigne: “ ‘Tis the common vice of nature, that we at once repose most confidence, and receive the greatest apprehensions, from things unseen, concealed, and unknown.”

Trust yourself and do not only stand on the shoulders of others, but find out also whose shoulders they are. 

Deceiving oneself

In this room, where he used to work in winter, Montaigne wrote on the wall (in Latin):
“In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.”

Wittgenstein says somewhere that nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself. Maybe I walked into this trap, when I wrote at the end of my last blog that “although my body may fail the mind still is as fresh as since I was a child” (but then Schopenhauer walked into the same trap as well). It’s true that I added to this statement “or so I think”. Moreover, since I was talking about a feeling, I couldn’t be wrong. For although a feeling may not be the right one at a certain place or in certain circumstances, it cannot be false. One has a feeling, whether one wants to have it or whether one doesn’t want to have it. In the latter case one can be ashamed about it.

Nevertheless, maybe Montaigne was more to the point when he wrote in the essay “Of age” that the mind does deteriorate, whether one thinks so or whether one doesn’t think so. And he adds “by how much the more it is a disease of no great pain to the sufferer, and of obscure symptoms, so much greater is the danger”. In other words, often you don’t notice it, and then it’s a dangerous phenomenon, like a hidden disease. When one becomes older “[v]ivacity, promptitude, steadiness, and other pieces of us … languish and decay”, so Montaigne. “Anyhow”, I would say. “Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind”, Montaigne rightly states, and in the end it is this process that will make that one doesn’t feel young in the mind anymore and that the mental feelings adapt to the condition of the body.

Until fifty or forty years ago or so most sportsmen stopped being active when they were about thirty years old. The idea was not only that above this age the body was not fit enough for top sport any longer, but also that sport was something for the young and that after this age it was time to build up a career. Sport and career couldn’t go together and sport at a later age was “not done” in a certain sense. In case one did continue doing sport (and in fact, there were still a lot of people who did, although not as many as today), doing sport was something that you had to take not too serious or not serious at all.

How much has changed since then. Sport has not only become an important part of the lives of older people, sport at a later age is also stimulated, and no longer it is seen as an activity that is actually not to be taken seriously and that doesn’t fit with a career. Not only has it become clear that sport at a top level can be done past the age of thirty as well, but also how fanatic older sportsmen can be! As if they were twenty years old. And is there something wrong with it? Is there something wrong with feeling younger than you are? Sometimes and maybe often it is. But as often it isn’t. And then, although the body languishes and decays, there is nothing against doing as if the mind doesn’t, even if you are deceiving yourself (or so I think).

Feeling onself

"... although my body may fail the mind still is as fresh as since I was a child (or so I think)."

The idea that to life is to suffer has a subjective and a objective aspect. Whether my life is miserable or happy depends to a large extent also on the way I, the person who lives the life, see it. Some people are happy and optimistic by nature. Other people have a depressive and pessimistic character. Something can be done about this but not everything. On the other hand, according to Montaigne, whether a life was happy as a whole can be judged only once it has come to an end, for the final part of the drama of life can give yet a turn to the way we judge the life of the person concerned as a whole. The end of a life puts a life into perspective, as we can say. There is some truth in Montaigne’s view and maybe there is much truth in it, but is it the whole truth? I think it is the truth of history but it needs not to be the truth of the carrier of the life. To put it differently, we must make a distinction between the third person’s perspective or objective perspective of man and the first person’s perspective or subjective perspective. Despite what others say about me, during my life or after it, finally it is only the subjective perspective that counts for me. When I feel unhappy it is no help for me that other persons say that I am happy, how much truth there may be in it. And although other people may say that my life is happy as a whole, I (and any person whoever) live from moment to moment. I live in the now. With this I do not mean that I ramble from one subject to another and that I do not make any planning of my activities at all, like that I think only about getting food at the moment that I become hungry, so that I have no food at home just when I need it. But the way I feel, is always in the now. I can try to suppress my “true” feelings; I can try to cheer myself up, if necessary; good memories can make me happy and the future can make me worry; but all this takes always place in the now and is from the perspective of the now.

I wonder what these remarks have all to do with it, but I got these thoughts, when I read an observation by Schopenhauer, which says something that I had noticed already long ago: “… however old we become, we yet feel within that we are entirely the same as we were when we were young, nay, when we were still children”. This is typically a judgment from the first person’s perspective. For whatever other people say of me, and how much younger people (and older people, too) see me as “that old man” with his old-fashioned or weird ideas and habits, for me the present feeling of myself is and has already been during my whole life that I am the same person as I always was, at least mentally, for although my body may fail the mind still is as fresh as since I was a child (or so I think).

Our experiences are rarely pure

When I commented on Schopenhauer’s statement that to life is to suffer, my point was that it is oversimplified. Suffering is not the background noise of everything we do, not to speak of the thread through life. Rather I think that suffering and happiness are personal experiences brought about by the personal and individual happenings of life. In fact, everything is possible and what will be the case depends on where you live and in what circumstances, on your personality type and character, and on much more. There are moments and periods that we are happy and moments and periods that we are unhappy and that we are suffering. For some or maybe many or even most the latter may prevail, for others perhaps the former. This doesn’t imply that happiness or suffering is inherent in life, although one might tend to think that the latter is, if one realizes what is happening in many places in the world. Maybe life was so different in Schopenhauer’s days that for him it was the natural way to think so and maybe it still is in many parts of the present world.

Nevertheless, Montaigne, who lived a few centuries before Schopenhauer, had a more balanced view on life, I think. Montaigne didn’t ask whether the foundation of life is suffering or happiness, or whatever, but he wrote a lot about experiences and facts of life and what they mean for us. While Schopenhauer stressed that actually life is suffering, according to Montaigne pure experiences do not exist, as we can see in his essay “That we taste nothing pure” (Book 2, XX). Both our joys and our sorrows, both our positive experiences and our negative experiences are mixed and contain at least a bit of the opposite. “Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience”, as he says there,  which he illustrates with a quotation from Lucretius: “From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is bitter, which even in flowers destroys”. “Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it…”, so Montaigne.

On the other hand, Montaigne refers to Metrodorus, who remarked “that in sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure”. Although Montaigne seems not to be completely sure what Metrodorus meant by it, he adds that it can be seen that way, for instance, that “there is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy.” The “confusion” between joy and sadness can be seen well, when painters hold, so Montaigne, “that the same motions and grimaces of the face that serve for weeping; serve for laughter too”. This is actually an exemplification of the fact that both pure delight and pure sorrow do not exist. And I think that for most people it’s the same for suffering and happiness. Schopenhauer interpreted the world that way that everything we do has at least a shade of suffering if it is not suffering in disguise or suffering right away. But wouldn’t a more optimistic mind have said that the reverse is the case and have called happiness the essence of life? But in view of what Montaigne says we can ask whether any pure principle of life exists at all.

Can one desire without suffering?

Despite the remark by Schopenhauer quoted in my last blog and my comment on it, the main function of books remains that they are there for being read. So, I didn’t stop reading Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation after the preface. But when to read such a thick book of nearly thousand pages if one has no special reason for doing it besides simply wanting to take note of its contents? I always read a lot when I am on holiday, so I put it in my luggage for my summer travel and I begun reading it from the first day on. But even then I haven’t finished it yet, also because I have read two other books at the same time (and because I am not on holiday for reading, of course, but for getting new impressions). I still have about half of the book to go. Nevertheless I can give some first thoughts.

What I found most striking in the book till now is what I see as its central theme, namely: Das Leben ist ein Leiden, or, in English: To live is to suffer. For Schopenhauer suffering is part of the human condition. It is the consequence of the fact that we always are busy striving for things. People never do nothing or they become bored. We always have desires, so Schopenhauer, and we want to fulfil them. These desires can be small things or they can be big things, such as wanting to read a book (like the one by Schopenhauer); making a travel; having a special job; and so on (the examples are mine). As long as the desired goals haven’t been attained we are more or less unhappy and we keep looking for ways to achieve them. However, once a wish has been fulfilled, we are happy for only a short moment. In another blog of mine you can read that such “moments of happiness” last three months at most according to present insights in psychology. Then we become bored. We begin looking for other desires and the process starts again, so Schopenhauer. That’s why he says that desiring, and human life in general, is suffering: Life is the striving to fulfil unfulfilled wishes. It is mainly a matter of being dissatisfied with what one has and so of wanting to have it better, but this is basically impossible.

Is it true? When one looks at the portrait of Schopenhauer on the cover of his book, I see a happy man and not someone who is suffering. But maybe it’s merely a pose. Be it as it is, I want to state that by and large Schopenhauer’s thesis is false. I agree that people become bored after some time once a desire has come true, so they start to strive again. It shows that man is made for acting. But does this make suffering the foundation of life? I think that there is much that denies it. When I want to start a new project, once one has finished, this doesn’t mean that I am unhappy because my last project has come to an end; even not after three months. I have done a lot in my life long ago that I still enjoy when thinking of it. The thought of having done it still makes me happy. Moreover, no person is trying to fulfil wishes one after another. One is always trying to do several things at the same time. Career, being a good parent, being a good sportsman, being a good club member, having relations with other people, to mention only a few things, are activities one does simultaneously. Most times moments of happiness and moments of being less happy go together. Life is a stream of concurrent activities, which are often a pleasure to do. And even if these activities are guided by aims, achieving these aims needs not be most important of what one is doing. Often it’s so that going on the road is more important than reaching the end of the road. The desire as such is often less important than Schopenhauer thinks. It is often a guide and not a purpose as such: One can be happy in the doing as such; not only for a moment by the fact that a wish has been fulfilled. All this makes, I think, that suffering is rather an extreme phenomenon of life than a basic fact of life.

But it is true that once I have finished Schopenhauer’s book, I want to read another one (not counting the fact that I am always reading several books at the same time), but it doesn’t involve that I am continuously suffering.

The function of books

Four years ago I posted here a photo of my study by way of illustration of a blog: http://www.philosophybytheway.blogspot.nl/2009/09/reading-book-makes-my-quiet.html. The walls of the room are full of books, as you can see; not only the one in the picture, but also the other walls. Once I have finished reading a book, I put it there. The books yet to be read have a special shelf. Books are the wall paper of my study, so to speak.

I have uploaded the photo of my study also to a social networking website. People there often ask me: Have you read all those books? Actually, I find it a bit a silly question. For why else should I have my books? Okay, I did not read the dictionaries and the atlases, for one doesn’t “read” such books but one uses them. But I have read my books insofar they have been published for reading in the normal sense. All of them? I must admit that the answer is “no”. Indeed, there are a few books that I didn’t read for some reasons, or I did only for a part. Why? Some had been so long on the waiting shelf that I wondered why I had ever bought them. Again and again I postponed reading them, because other books I had bought later looked more attractive and got a preferential treatment. Now I have solved the problem by reading books more or less in the order I have bought them: It has no sense to read a book ten years later when your interest has changed. Another reason why I sometimes postponed reading a book is that it looked so difficult to me that I found it better to read it with extra attention instead of reading it quickly and a bit superficially, as I often do. However, I did not make time for doing it and in the end the book came in the “Why had I ever bought it?” category. And there are also those books that I started to read but I found them so boring or incomprehensible or obscure that I put them aside before having finished reading them. Without a doubt there are other reasons why I didn’t read some books, but these are some of the most important. In fact, it didn’t happen so often so when asked “Have you read all those books?” I can honestly answer: “Yes, I did, or at least, say, 95% of them”.

Nevertheless, I always feel myself a bit ashamed when admitting that I haven’t read all, for in the end that’s why I bought them. But is this feeling right? Maybe my idea that books are there only for being read is too narrow minded. I got the idea that they can have other functions, too, when I read Arthur Schopenhauer’s preface to the first edition of his The World as Will and Representation, where he said:

“The reader … has bought the book for cash, and asks how he is to be indemnified. My last refuge is now to remind him that he knows how to make use of a book in several ways, without exactly reading it. It may fill a gap in his library as well as many another, where, neatly bound, it will certainly look well. Or he can lay it on the toilet-table or the tea-table of some learned lady friend. Or, finally, what certainly is best of all, and I specially advise it, he can review it.”

When writing this blog, I still have to read the rest of Schopenhauer’s book, which will be quite a job, for it has nearly thousand pages. But even if I’ll not succeed to read it till the end, I’ll have learned at least one thing: A book can have many functions. Using it as wall paper is acceptable even if you haven’t read it (so Schopenhauer). Improving the relation with an intelligent lady friend is good, too (how about a gentleman friend? Schopenhauer doesn’t talk about it). Writing about it makes also sense (it seems that Schopenhauer supposes that you do not need to read a book in order to criticise it). And certainly there are more usefull applications for a book as well (like supporting a wobbling table). And in the end a book has another possible function as well, for you can read it, too.

Double truth (2)

In my blog on double truth last week I argued that the truth of a statement must often be put into perspective and that it may depend on the position of the person who utters the statement. I expressed this by saying that truth can be double or even multiple. Is that all there is?

I begun to think about this question, when I heard about a new doping scandal in sport. This time it is not in cycle racing, which gradually seems to become cleaner. No, the present scandal is in athletics, where recently a range of athletes, among them several Olympic gold medal winners, have been exposed as doping users. This raised in me the question: Has there always been doping?

When searching for the answer on the Internet, I discovered that it is yes and no. Since sport in its present manifestation goes back to classical antiquity I wondered how it was in those days and what I found was double: yes, doping existed; no, it did not exist. I’ll not go into the details, but indeed, it was so that in Greece and Rome athletes and their trainers of all kinds of sports had discovered that there are nutrients but also, for example, mushrooms that improved the sporting achievements. The answer is no, since there was no doping in the modern sense for there were no rules that forbade the use of doping. Paraphrasing Feyerabend, it was “everything goes”. Doping as we know it today, so drugs that are explicitly forbidden because they improve the results, is a recent phenomenon. One website says that it was in 1865 that in modern times the positive effects of doping were established for the first time, when Dutch cross-Channel swimmers used caffeine. The first sportsman who died by using doping is said to be Arthur Linton, the 1896 winner of the Bordeaux-Paris cycling race, who died eight weeks after his victory. Since then gradually rules have been made that forbid the use of doping in sport, and now the list of “List of Prohibited Substances and Methods” is long. However, developing rules and adding drugs to the prohibited list is not one-way. Sometimes drugs that were once not allowed have been removed from the list again. Caffeine is a case in point. Until 2004 it was on the list when a certain threshold value had been exceeded. Then it has been dropped from the list, and a sportsman or sportswoman can drink as many cups of coffee and other caffeine containing drinks as s/he likes.

What does this mean for my theory of double or multiple truths? The statement that a range of athletes recently has been exposed as doping users is true from the present perspective: According to the present sport laws they simple are doping offenders. Using oxilofrine and other dope, as they did, is a sports offence today. But if they had used the same drug on, say, the Olympic Games of 676 BC they would have been no more than smart athletes who followed the rules and who would have been honoured as decent winners. Using oxilofrine was no offence at all. Even if the use of dope could and would have been established afterwards then, nobody would have thought of depriving them of their titles. They would have been honest winners.

The upshot is that truth cannot only be double or multiple if we take the perspective of another person or of other persons, it can also be double or multiple from the perspective of time: what is true at one point in time need not be true at another point in time. We can also say: Truth has both a synchronic and a diachronic dimension.

Double truth

In my last blog I criticized Wittgenstein’s remark in On Certainty 80-81 that asserted that whether I understand what I state depends on whether it is true or false what I state. My objection was that it is easy to give examples of false statements that have nevertheless an obviously clear meaning for the speaker, for instance that the earth is the centre of the universe. What I actually want to say in my criticism is that truth, at least empirical truth, is often a matter of perspective and that it is often not possible to say “This statement is true and the opposite statement is false”. It’s a bit surprising for me that two paragraphs later in his On Certainty Wittgenstein actually says the same:

83. The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference.

Without a doubt, it will be possible to give a sound explanation or interpretation of this remark by Wittgenstein in the context of his On Certainty. However, here I’ll leave it as it is.

Probably some readers of my blogs find the remark that truth may be a matter of perspective (or a matter of frame of reference, in Wittgenstein's words) a bit shocking. But is it really so shocking? Isn’t the phenomenon of double or even multiple truths, as I would call it, something that abounds in daily life? Take for instance the caption of the photo in my last blog: Does the sun go down or does the earth come up? The former is true from the perspective of what we see; the latter is true from the perspective of astronomy.

Actually, the perspective or contextual dependence of truth is not limited to such rather trivial examples as the question whether the sun goes down or the earth comes up. It can be a source of serious social and political conflicts. I’ll give two examples:

- Ethiopia has started to construct a barrage in the Nile. Egypt, which is downstream of the new barrage, is afraid that this will be detrimental for the water supply in the Nile and it threats to take measures. It’s a case of double truth, I think, where both countries are right in a certain sense from the perspective of state autonomy and the right to defend its interests.

- Terrorism is a threat for the world, so you are allowed to collect any data that might help to prevent it. Citizens of a state have a right of privacy. Who is right? Obama or Snowden?

Maybe these cases or not well-chosen or not clear-cut enough, and that’s then my fault. Look around and I don’t doubt that you’ll find much better instances. But I think that you’ll understand the idea I want to express: At first sight, what is true is not as plain as you might think but it may depend on where you stand.

On Certainty

Does the sun go down or does the earth come up?

In On Certainty Wittgenstein writes:

80. The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements.

81. That is to say: if I make certain false statements, it becomes uncertain whether I understand them.

Broadly speaking, this is not correct. For example, when the Inquisition sentenced Galileo, because he denied the official doctrine of the roman catholic church that the earth is the centre of the universe, the inquisitors understood and knew exactly what they were talking about, although their doctrine appeared to be false – and was actually already superseded in those days – and Galileo appeared to be right. What is true is often not a matter of yes or no but it must be seen in the perspective of place and time (history). This is for social facts even more so than for physical facts.

And what to think of lies? They are produced with insight and understanding of what’s true.

There are many other instances that speak against the truth of these two combined statements, at least in general.

Double identity

Actually I need not to write about it, for it’s a well-known phenomenon: role playing. No, I don’t mean what actors do on the stage but what we do in everyday life, although in a certain sense it’s a bit like what actors do. At home, we are father, mother or child. On the workplace we are accountant, teacher, manager, or student. On the sports field we are long distance runner, goalkeeper, referee or spectator. And so on. Every position has its rules of what the holder of the position is supposed to do, what s/he is allowed to do and what is forbidden. The accountant registers the money transactions of his or her company but doesn’t take the decisions what to do with the money. That task belongs to the manager or to the director. And the worker on the shop floor is the one who factually makes the products. By analogy of what is happening on a stage such positions are called roles and the position holders are called role players. Since each person always plays several roles, daily life can be quite compartmentalized. Then you have to do this, an hour later (or sometimes a few moments later) you have to play another role and each role has its rules and requirements. This can be quite confusing. The American sociologist Robert Merton has become famous by his social role playing theory (but not only by this) but the idea that we play roles is already much older.

Because role playing is an essential part of our lives and is an essential way of filling in our relations with others, the roles we play are important elements of our personal identities (next to our experiences, for instance). Usually it is so that we not only play our roles but we are our roles. I mean, as a rule we don’t just pretend to be father, teacher or long distance runner. We believe in what we do and we do it with our whole hearts. However, it doesn’t need to be so, as everybody knows. An extreme case of pretending a role is a seeming customer who wants to observe the bank in order to come back next day as a raider. Actually it is so that in most roles we play we always need to pretend a bit as well.

For most people their different roles are well integrated. It’s true, roles can conflict, for instance, when a teacher has her own child in her class, so that the roles of teacher and mother can conflict. But most people can play their different roles openly and they can be tuned to one another, so that role conflicts can be avoided. And normally one doesn’t need to hide particular roles for other people. Nevertheless this can happen, for instance when someone doesn’t dare to say that he is gay to his parents, boss or other relevant people in his environment. If he wants to visit a gay cafe, for instance, this needs to be kept secret. Then such person leads a “double life”: two “lives” strictly kept apart. In a certain sense he has a double identity. In a more innocent way, you can say that someone has a double identity if one of the roles he openly plays actually has nothing to do with his daily life. People have hobbies, and hobbies like playing chess, collecting stamps, voluntary work, or whatever, usually involve roles that are well integrated with the other roles of the role player. But what to think of an actor or a member of a historical re-enactment group? The role as such as a player is well integrated with other social roles, but what about the role played? The actor playing Napoleon is Napoleon at the moment he is playing if he is playing well. The man playing a mediaeval knight is this mediaeval knight at the moment he is playing if he is playing his part well. In this sense we can say that persons playing the role of another have a double identity. This has been shown so well by Wim Piesen in his excellent series of photos (http://www.wimpiesen.be/category.php?catId=64338).

To what extent are double identities kept apart and to what extent can they be kept apart? And to what extent are people pretending playing the role they play not the role player they pretend to be? I think that the cases of the actor or the pretender are not problematic. Even if the actor is playing Napoleon or another role, he is always giving a personal interpretation of the parts being played. This points to an integration of his, what I would call now, “secondary identity” with his “main identity”. And the pretender pretends his role usually in function of the other roles that make up his or her identity (the customer in my example is a raider in disguise). But also the person who keeps one of his identities secret for the daily environment is actually “playing” the person he is for his environment: Much he does in his daily environment is often done  in function of keeping a part of his identity secret. This keeping secret influences the ways the “public” roles are filled in. Therefore, we can say with Montaigne, “Whatsoever personage a man takes upon himself to perform, he ever mixes his own part with it” (from “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die”).

Acting without moving one’s body

My last blog was about the moral relevance of the distinction between doing and allowing. My analysis suggested that the difference between both is not very clear-cut. Nevertheless, there seems to be a basic distinction between the concepts: Doing is making things happen and allowing is letting things happen. The former is usually interpreted that way that the making implies an intention in what we do plus a relevant movement of our body. As a rule we call such a doing an action. Allowing is usually interpreted that way that the letting implies that the things that take place will happen anyway without our intervention. However, as the two cases in my last blog show, the distinction is not as marked as it might look to us on the face of it. In Case 1 the doctor turns off the life-support machine in order to let John die. In Case 2 Bill turns off the life-support machine in order to make John die. The difference is here a matter of interpretation, but just this might cast doubt on the idea that there is a fundamental difference between doing and allowing. This may be even more so, if one realizes that allowing is not merely a matter of letting things happen and that’s it. Many things in the world around us occur and we take hardly any notice of them if we do it at all. Then we don’t say that we allow them. Especially we do not say that if we cannot have any influence on what is going on. Just the fact that we notice what is happening; that we have the possibility to intervene; and that we have a reason to intervene makes that we speak of “allowing”. In other words: Allowing is intentionally not intervening. Seen that way, the difference between doing and allowing tends to fade away, for then allowing is nothing else than a passive doing. It’s a kind of action without moving one’s body, so to speak. If we add to this that allowing is a matter of degree (see my last blog), then it’s only one step to see doing, or better acting, and allowing as extremes on a sliding scale.

Doing and allowing (2): Two cases

Case 1. By a car accident John has got a serious brain damage. He is in coma and there is no chance that he’ll recover. After several years the family and the medical staff see it as the best solution for John to turn off the life-support machine and let him die. So the doctor who is responsible for John’s treatment turns off the machine and John dies. Many people will say that this is a case of allowing (that John dies): The doctor lets John die. If there hadn’t existed a life-supporting machine, John would have died anyway.

Case 2. By a car accident John has got a serious brain damage. He is in coma and there is no chance that he’ll recover. In his active life John was a criminal who has killed a member of another gang. The remaining members want to take revenge. After a few years, Bill, a member of this gang, discovers that John lies in coma in a hospital. He wants to turn off the life-support machine and so kill John. In the meantime, John’s family and the medical staff have decided that it is best for John is to turn off the life-support machine that is keeping John alive and let him die. However, just before the doctor responsible for John’s treatment can carry out the decision, Bills sneaks in the room where John is lying and turns off the machine. When the doctor has entered the room he can only certify John’s death. Many people will say that this is a case of doing, namely murder: Bill made John die, although John would have died a few moments later anyway, if Bill hadn’t turn off the machine.

What’s the difference? Can we say that the difference between Case 1 and Case 2 is basically a matter of intention? Or maybe it is a matter of action and inaction, as some philosophers suggest in other examples?

The problem of the difference between doing and allowing is not new. It has been discussed already by many philosopher. One question is: Is the distinction between doing and allowing morally significant in relevant cases (like mine)? Is this also the case, if, as in Case 2, John would have died also if Bill hadn’t turned off the life-support machine?

In this blog I can pass only a few comments, but the answer seems to depend on many factors and cannot be clear-cut in the sense that allowing is either (morally) different from positive acting (doing) or it isn’t. Some relevant points are:

- What do we mean with “morally”? If you think that lives must be saved anyway under any condition, you might conclude that there is no difference between doing and allowing, at least not in my cases (but what do you mean then with “life”?).

- There are different types of relevance. Maybe the difference between Case 1 and Case 2 is juridically relevant (for instance, because euthanasia is legal if certain procedures have been fulfilled), but at the same time it can also be morally relevant (see the former point; maybe you accept the legality of euthanasia because, as a democrat, you accept that the law on euthanasia has been passed in the right way, but nevertheless you don’t agree with it). This shows that allowing is a multidimensional concept. Maybe there are more dimensions than the two I just mentioned. For instance, allowing can be intentional (Case 1) or unintentional (not knowing what to do) or in between (having to make a choice: see the next point for an example), a matter of unconcern (see also the next point), and so on.

- Allowing can also be a matter of degree. It is a big difference when you see a car accident but you do nothing and the victim dies, because you didn’t care or because you were on the way to the hospital with another person who was in peril of death. Or the person that you brought to the hospital was not in peril of death, but it was your father, so you were very worried, while you didn’t realize that the victim of the car accident needed immediate help. It will not be difficult to find other intermediate cases that exemplify that allowing may be a matter of degree.

There are certainly other points that can be put forward that make it impossible to say in general that the difference between doing and allowing is fundamentally relevant or just that it isn’t, although I personally think that it is not not relevant.

In writing this blog I am greatly indebted to Fiona Woollard, “The doctrine of doing and allowing”, part I and II, in Philosophy Compass, 7/7 (2012), pp. 448-469.