Entartete Kunst - Degenerate Art

“Entartete Kunst” or “degenerate art” was the name given by the Nazis in Germany to modern art that wasn’t according to their norms of what art should be. The term was especially in use during the years 1933-1945, when the Nazis were in power. Degenerate art was removed from state-owned museums. Generally it was banned in Germany, as it didn’t fit the Nazi idea of Germanhood, meaning that it allegedly was un-German, Jewish, Communist, and the like. “Degenerate” artists, so artists that made such art, were boycotted, forbidden to exhibit or sell such art, or sometimes even forbidden to produce it. Their art was often abstract. Also music could be degenerate, like “negro music”, as the Nazis called it, so jazz.

In 1937 some 5,000 works of degenerate art was confiscated from museums and art collections, including work by Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and many German painters. A selection of 639 works was exhibited in a special exhibition called “Degenerate Art”. The exhibition was shown in many towns in Germany. It’s intention was to horrify the visitors. Now that from then on artists who made degenerate art were seen as official national enemies, many fled abroad or went into “internal exile” by stopping to make the kind of art that had been forbidden.

It’s striking that one of the artists who was branded as degenerate was Emil Nolde. Nolde was an expressionist artist but he was also a committed member of the Nazi party. However, after a bitter ideological dispute, also expressionist art was seen as un-German, and in 1936 Nolde was ordered to stop his artistic activities. Among the 5,000 works confiscated in 1937 about 1,000 had been made by Nolde. The artist was upset for he didn’t understand what the problem was, but of course it was no help. After the Second World War Nolde became world-famous. He was known as an artist who had been classified as degenerate by the Nazis and whose work had been boycotted by them. That Nolde was a fanatical Nazi and an ardent anti-Semite even till 1945 had been more or less forgotten. After the war he did as if he had been persecuted by the Nazis. And so it happened that two of his paintings were on the wall of the office of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A few weeks ago an exhibition dedicated to Emil Nolde has been opened in Berlin, titled Emil Nolde. A German legend. The artist during the Nazi regime. The makers of the exhibition had made a thorough inquiry into the life and political views of the artist and had disclosed the truth: That Nolde was rather a dedicated contributor to Nazism than a victim. The intention of the exhibition is to show this. It was a shock to many.

And Merkel? She decided to remove the two paintings by Nolde from her office and to replace them by two “innocent” works. I fully understand, and I certainly would have done the same. Nevertheless there is something problematical about doing so. The removed paintings are beautiful, at least in the eyes of the highest political authority of Germany – I assume – and of others. From an “objective” point of view they are outstanding works of art. That’s the artistic side. But politically? From that point of view the paintings were not allowed to be beautiful and outstanding in a sense, not by the Nazis and not by many people today, including Angela Merkel. However, there is a difference: The Nazis banned Nolde’s paintings because of their content; now they are banned because the artist himself is considered “degenerate”, so to speak. But whatever the reason may be, apparently art is always political, anyhow. Even “innocent” art fundamentally is, for society changes and what is “innocent” today may be “unacceptable” tomorrow, both because of what or how a work of art represents and because of the ideas the artist stands for. Does innocent art really exist? I am afraid it doesn’t.

Actually, the matter is more complicated than only the political aspect just discussed. A work of art represents something, namely what you see in it (or what you think to see). By doing so, it excludes what the work of art doesn’t present, incidentally or on purpose. Take by way of example my photos. Most of them don’t have an explicit political content. However, the image in the photo takes the place of everything that is not in the image, not only because it has been incidentally left out – for I can’t capture the whole world in one shot – but also because I intentionally didn’t want to photograph it. This can happen – and usually happens – because what’s outside the image didn’t fit my feelings but also because I didn’t want to include in the picture what’s not in the image because I consider it ethically and/or politically not acceptable. Everything has a meaning, also when it hasn’t. Nobody is innocent and nothing is innocent. Which does not need to mean that everybody is also responsible, though.

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You can find my photos on https://www.flickr.com/photos/photographybytheway

Discourse on Method. Descartes

Descartes stressed that we must talk and write in a clear and distinct way. We have seen this in my blog last week. However, for him it was not only a manner how to say things but it was essential for his whole scientific approach. According to Descartes science in his time was an unsystematic gathering of facts. Moreover he was not satisfied with the syllogistic logic that had been developed by Aristotle and the logic of the scholastics, which were the accepted methods of learned thinking in those days. As such these were valuable methods, so Descartes, but they were only useful for arranging knowledge but not for acquiring new knowledge. New facts were fitted into the existing dogmatically accepted systems with the help of these systems of logic, but if this wasn’t possible, so the worse for the facts. Galileo’s problems with the roman-catholic church are a case in point. Descartes saw that the old ways led to stagnation in the development of science and that the old ways of thinking had become obsolete. Methodical thinking should have to replace the old dogmatism. For him “method” became the essence of investigating and discovering new knowledge. This made him the founder of modern science.

Trying to systematize the acquirement of knowledge, Descartes first asked what we know anyway, as an unquestionable starting point for knowledge, a so-called Archimedean point (named after the Greek scientist Archimedes, who was looking for a solid point in space in order to move the earth with a lever). This led him to his famous idea “I think so I exist”: The fact that I think shows that it is unquestionable that I exist. For Descartes this was the “first principle of philosophy”. But why is it so sure that I know this? According to Descartes this can be only so, because I see it in a clear way. By reasoning this way he got his main rule of thinking: “The things that we receive in a very clear and distinct way are all true”.

Descartes made this rule the foundation of his method. Essentially this method says that in order to get knowledge, we must either reduce existing or newly acquired insights or sense impressions to clear and distinct views or deduce them in a clear and distinct manner from other clear and distinct views. Although observations are important for getting new insights, they are not central. Most important are reason and doubt as means to determine whether the acquired knowledge is really so certain as assumed.

For Descartes “clear” and “distinct” are not vague concepts. He gives them a well defined meaning. He tells us also how to get clear and distinct knowledge and how to order our data. His method consists of two phases: First comes analysis and then synthesis. Here I cannot specify them in detail, but by analysis a phenomenon is unravelled into its most elementary parts, until one knows each element in detail and knows what makes it different from the other elements and what the relations with the other elements are. If possible one must try to grasp not more elements in one thinking than one can handle. In the phase of synthesis a theory is built up. It’s just the opposite of analysis. All the elements are fitted together into a deductive system in such a manner that one gets insight into the way the elements cohere. In a sense, the situation that existed before the analysis begun is restored but there is an important difference: Before the analysis took place the coherence of the elements was confused, after the synthesis it has become visible how the elements cohere. In short (my words) confusion has been transformed into knowledge.

Descartes’s systematization of knowledge acquirement led to a methodological turn in science. No longer the fixed and usually traditional ideas became the measure of new knowledge, but the question whether we got our knowledge in the right way. Knowledge was no longer true because it fitted our till then justified ideas but because we could justify the way we got it. Doubt became central to science but not the sceptic doubt that says that in the end there is no truth, but the methodological doubt that asks whether the method used is right; the doubt that says “better is not good enough”. This kind of doubt doesn’t bring the idea of truth into discredit but it brings truth nearer, step by step just by questioning it.

Sources

Descartes’s ideas on method can be found in his Discourse on Method and his Principles of Philosophy. 

Rules for the mind

If I say “Descartes”, many people will say “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think so I am”, and that’s it. Even if they can explain what was meant with this sentence and why it was important, I think that most who are not philosophers, and maybe also many who are, don’t know that Descartes contributed to many different fields of philosophy and science. So, if it wouldn’t have been William Harvey who discovered the blood circulation, it might have been Descartes who had already made much progress in his research. He invented also analytic geometry.

Some of Descartes’s ideas are weird from the current point of view, and I assume that also already in his days they were. For instance, he thought that animals have no feelings, since they have no souls. They are not different from machines. So if you give a dog a kick and it screams, this screaming is merely a sound and not an expression of pain. Therefore vivisection was not a problem for Descartes.

If you think that philosophy is obscure, maybe you have read Hegel and Kant, but you haven’t read Descartes. Descartes is one of the most clearly writing philosophers who ever lived. His maxim was: Everything can be said in a clear and distinct way, say in plain words that everybody can understand. Otherwise it’s nonsense. He didn’t use this only as a rule of thumb but he wrote even a book with methodological rules for clear and distinct philosophical and scientific reasoning: The Rules for the Direction of the Mind. It contains 21 rules with extensive explanations. It’s a pity that he didn’t finish the book, but nevertheless it is worth reading. His explanations are as interesting as the rules themselves are and they contain also a criticism on the way many people reason. The rules are not only useful for philosophers, scholars and scientists, but for everybody who is arguing. So keep these rules also in your mind when you listen to a politician. (If enough British had done so, maybe they would never have voted for the Brexit). Take for example this quote from the explanation to Rule IX:

“It is a common human weakness to consider most beautiful what is difficult. Most people think that they know nothing when they see a very transparent and simple cause of something. Yet they admire grandiloquent and far-fetched argumentations by philosophers, even though they are usually based on foundations that nobody ever fully has understood. ... [I want to stress that] knowledge, how hidden it is, must not be deduced from important and obscure things but only from what is easy and general.”

Descartes is right, but how often does what is difficult seems more important to us than what is simple? And not only words can mislead us, but also the pose of the speaker often does, as Descartes explains in his comment on Rule XII:

“The self-confident allow themselves to put forward their conjectures as true proves; in cases they absolutely know nothing about they think to see obscure truths, as through a fog. They are also not afraid to present them and to connect their concepts then with certain terms. With the help of these terms they are in the habit to talk and to reason about many things that in fact neither they nor their listeners understand.” The modest, so Descartes continues, keep silent and let finding the truth to others, because they think that they themselves are not competent enough and they belief what the self-confident say.

Have I to add anything? Isn’t this what we everywhere see around us? But even if we have the right attitude and are honest and open, language can block mutual understanding and prevent to express what we mean. For for one a word means this and for another that and as Descartes says in his explanation to Rule XIII (a bit adapted and generalized by me) : “Questions about words happen so often that almost all controversies between philosophers would disappear, if they always agreed about the meaning of the words.”

There is a joke that says that there are two philosophical main laws:

The First Law of Philosophy: For every philosopher, there exists an equal and opposite philosopher.

The Second Law of Philosophy: They are both wrong.

Alas, often this seems true, for most philosophers didn’t read Descartes’s Rules and don’t use it as a guide. If they would, they would know that they “ought to give the whole of [their] attention to the most insignificant and most easily mastered facts, and remain a long time in contemplation of them until [they] are accustomed to behold the truth clearly and distinctly.” (Descartes’s Rule IX)

I don’t think so I am not?

I start with a joke:

René Descartes is in a tavern. He is drunk. The bartender cautions: “Monsieur, I think that you have had enough.” Descartes slurs back “I think not” and vanishes.

I hope that you understood and that you laughed, but now I become serious, for the reasoning implied is fallacious: Descartes’s famous statement “I think so I exist” may be true, but it does not imply that I don’t exist if I don’t think. And it is not so that if I exist this implies that I think. For would it be so then that I don’t exist when I am sleeping? And how about a tree? But okay, as for the latter you can object that a tree hasn’t an “I” (which is something to discuss about in another blog).

In philosophy we call this fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc, literally “after this so because of this”. In this case the fallacy is the reasoning that I exist because I think. However, thinking is only an aspect of human existence, but the cause of my existence must be found elsewhere.

I don’t know whether Descartes would have laughed about the joke, but actually he worried about the question whether he would exist, if he didn’t think. Although the “I think so I exist” doesn’t imply that I exist because I think, nevertheless it is quite well possible that I don’t exist if I don’t think. Descartes worded his worry this way in the “Second Meditation” of his Meditations on First Philosophy:

“I am; I exist – this is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking; for perhaps it could also come to pass that if I were to cease all thinking I would then utterly cease to exist. At this time I admit nothing that is not necessarily true.”

On purpose I have quoted Descartes from Sorenson’s A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities where he gives an explanation of this passage. For immediately after it Sorenson continues:

“Compare Descartes’s principle connecting thinking and human existence with another Cartesian principle connecting being extended in three dimensions with physical existence: Necessarily if a body exists, it is extended in space. If a physical thing ceases to be extended, then it ceases to exist. Similarly, if a mind exists, it thinks. And if the mind ceases to think, then it ceases to exist.”

So, after all must we conclude that if we don’t think then we don’t exist, albeit on other grounds than the false post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning? Not so, for here we have the fallacy of false analogy. Above I raised the question whether one still exists if one sleeps (and so doesn’t think). The answer is, of course, “yes”. Why? Because thinking is not a property that a mind simply has and manifests itself but it is a disposition: a property an object has even if this property is not active at a certain moment. This makes thinking different from the property “being extended”, which points to the way an object appears (in this case by having the three dimensions width, height and depth). If the disposition “thinking” isn’t active, it still doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist as a disposition. A glass remains brittle, even if it will never fall from the table on the floor and break, although it is always possible that this will happen. But if we can’t pour water in it, because it is not extended, it is not a glass. It is similarly with thinking. Even if a mind doesn’t think, the property “thinking” is still there and the mind can start to think when it needs to, for example when one wakes up in the morning. When a man is absent-minded, it doesn’t imply that s/he hasn’t a brain.

Sources

- Roy Sorensen, A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities. A Collection of Puzzles, Oddities, Riddles and Dilemmas. London: Profile Books, 2017. The quotes are from pp. 42-43.

- There are several versions of the joke on the Internet. You can find it also in Sorensen’s book on p. 42.

Terrorism

Oslo: Flowers for the victims of a terrorist attack in Norway on 22 July 2011

In his study of evil, Roy F. Baumeister tells the story of a North Korean young woman who had been chosen to become a special agent for the foreign intelligence service and then to carry out a bomb attack on a South Korean airplane. She was “explained that the airplane’s destruction would create a broad sense of chaos and uncertainty that would prevent South Korea from hosting the upcoming 1988 Olympic Games as scheduled. This in turn would lead to the reunification of Korea ...”. Later she wrote that she didn’t understand how this could happen, but she saw herself as politically naïve and she wanted to be a good patriot. Also any feeling of moral responsibility that more than hundred people would die did not come to her mind. The bomb attack was purely a technical operation, she thought. The woman successfully performed the action, but, as we know, the 1988 Olympic Games took place as planned and Korea was never reunified. The woman was captured, sentenced to death but pardoned by the South Korean government. Gradually she also begun “to feel terrible guilt much of the time” because of the innocent passengers killed, and she got nightmares.

In this case, so Baumeister, we see three characteristics typical of a terrorist act. First, the actor is not troubled by guilty thoughts that many innocent people will be killed, although such thoughts often come after the deed. Second, vicious terrorism is motivated by the highest ideals and principles, not by personal hate towards the victims or by personal gain. Third, the action doesn’t lead to the desired goal; neither a possibly short-term goal is reached, nor a long-term goal is. Even more, I want to add: What the goal is, is often vague and unrealistic. It is usually only stated afterwards, so that there is nothing to negotiate about in order to prevent it. An act of terrorism happens. (pp. 27-30)

Terrorism is a rather new phenomenon that could only develop since the end of the 18th century. There are at least two reasons for this. The media must have been developed to such an extent that the news about a terrorist act can get around on a rather wide scale and relatively fast. Otherwise it has no sense to perform it. Moreover, a human life must be seen as valuable. Before the Enlightenment life expectancy was short; not much more than 30 years. People could be sentenced to death for all kinds of crimes, including petty theft. Many people were murdered. This gradually changed since the end of the 18th century.

Although the motives for a terrorist act can be complicated and, for instance, can involve also revenge and punishment, actually such an act is a deed meant to create an atmosphere of fear: the intention is that people fear that they might be killed and that because of this they take all kinds of preventive measures that disturb their lives, if not society as a whole; or that then people or governments give in to the demands of the terrorist or his/her group. Therefore terrorism needs not be aimed directly at persons but it can also exist in, for example, poisoning water supplies. However, as said, a problem is that the demands are often vague, if the possible victim would be prepared to negotiate at all (which is often not the case). In the past revenge or punishment of a certain person was more important than it is today. Usually victims were carefully chosen and it was not the intention to kill people arbitrarily or to kill innocent passers-by. The murder of archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, which led to the outbreak of the First World War, is a case in point. Also the Red Army Faction in Germany in the 1970s and later chose its victims precisely. Today terrorists just want to kill innocent victims – as many people as possible –, although the killing of the editorial board of Charly Hebdo in Paris in 2015 shows that sometimes the victims still are purposefully chosen.

This shows another characteristic of terrorism: Man is seen as a mere instrument, as Camus makes us clear. This does not conflict with the point that for terrorism being possible man must be valuable. Just because people are valuable in the view of others, terrorists see them as instruments to draw attention to their causes. For the terrorist the ideal is higher than man, which makes man instrumental. That’s also why ultimately the terrorist is prepared to kill him or herself in the act, or that, in case of state terrorism, the people may be oppressed, for their oppression is seen as a step on the road to the ideal state. As Camus quotes Nechayev, a Russian communist revolutionary and nihilist from the 19th century: “It’s not about justice but about our duty to eliminate everything that can harm our cause.” Everything is allowed.

And this is what we see in all kinds of terrorist acts today, whether performed by representatives of organised groups or by lone wolves. Locked up in their brains they see only abstract ideals and instruments but no people, like in the recent terrorist acts in Churchland, New Zealand, or in Utrecht, here in the Netherlands. In fact, man is absent in the ideals of the terrorist. Terrorists only care for ... yes, for what?

Sources

- Baumeister, Roy F., Evil. Inside human violence and cruelty. New York: Henry Holt and Cy, 1999.

- Camus, Albert, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.

Are beliefs brain states?

In 1998 Andy Clark and David Chalmers published their article “The Extended Mind” in which they defended the view that the mind is not only in the brain, but also in the world around. This so-called extended mind thesis was the start of a discussion that lasts until today. A more radical version of this view is the enactivist approach, which I discussed two weeks ago. An important advocate of this theory is Shaun Gallagher. Although the actual discussion started only after Clark and Chalmers had presented their paper, they had forerunners. One of them was Lynne Rudder Baker. She called her account “practical realism” and she gave a comprehensive explanation of her view in her book Explaining Attitudes.

Baker’s practical realism is an attack on the – then – standard view that states that someone’s beliefs are literally somewhere in the brain. How this can be is explained by different theories in different ways, but, so Baker, “[w]hat Standard View theories have in common is the thesis that each instance of each belief is identical with, or is constituted by, an instance of a particular brain state.” In short: “Beliefs are brain states” (p. 12). Although without a doubt, so Baker, it is true that “[h]aving certain neural states is, presumably, necessary for people to have beliefs ... it does not follow that for a person to have a particular belief there is a neural state that constitutes that belief.” “[A] belief is a global state of a whole person, not of any proper part of a person, such as the brain”. (pp. 153-4) So, “[h]orses win races; legs have states. Having certain leg states is, presumably, necessary for horses to win races; but it doesn’t follow that for a horse to win a particular race, there is a leg state that constitutes the winning of the race.” (p. 154)

An attitude such as a belief, so Baker continues, can be compared with a state of financial health or a state of physical fitness. To take the first example, only in marginal cases your financial health has to do with the state of your bank account. It’s a relational concept: If the amount on your bank account is above a certain minimum, your financial state is more a matter of your pattern of spending, your financial wishes and the state of the economy (inflation, national income) than the sum of money you possess. In the same manner, a belief is not to be identified with any particular internal state of the believer. (ibid.) In enactivist terms, having a belief supposes not only a brain, but also a body and a world in which the brain and body exist. Seen this way, Baker has paved the way for undermining the “standard view”.

Nevertheless, one case discussed by her seems not to agree with the extended mind thesis and the enactivist approach. Peter asks Paul for Mary’s telephone number. Paul consults a directory, as always, and produces the correct number: 06-54321. Since Paul always has to consult a directory, “[i]ntuitively”, so Baker, Paul does not have the belief that Mary’s number is [06-54321] but only a belief how to find the number” (p. 161) and she explains that this is in keeping with practical realism. However, does the fact that Paul never remembers Mary’s telephone number makes that he does not have the belief that it is 06-54321 but only the belief how to get it? Let me take the main example from Clark’s and Chalmers’ article. Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Therefore he carries always a notebook with him and every time he learns some new information, he writes it down. When he needs some old information, he looks it up. The notebook contains also Mary’s telephone number, so when Peter asks for it, Otto looks in his notebook and says “06-54321”. However, Fred knows Mary’s number by heart, so when Peter asks Fred for Mary’s telephone number, Fred produces it by heart without any hesitation and faultless. This made Clark and Chalmers conclude, that there is no fundamental difference between what Otto does and what Fred does, but there is only the practical difference that Otto consults the extended part of his brain, and that Fred consults the internal part of his brain: In both cases we can say that the telephone number is in the brain. But if this is true, and if we apply this reasoning to Baker’s example of Peter and Paul, we can say that Paul has not only the belief how to find Mary’s telephone number but also the belief that her number is 06-54321, just as Fred has this belief. This is this fully in line with Baker’s view that a belief is not simply a state of the brain but that it is a global state of a whole person related to the world around and especially to that part of the world that is within his or her reach. So, if we correct Baker’s view this way, it is only one step more to a fully developed theory that the mind is extended if not enactivist and this makes that Baker is a forerunner of these views.

Sources

- Andy Clark and David Chalmers,  “The Extended Mind”, in Analysis, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 7-19. Ook op website http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/clark-chalmers-1998.pdf

- Lynne Rudder Baker, Explaining attitudes. A practical approach to the mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

The Constitution View. A homage to Lynne Rudder Baker

Lynne Rudder Baker

Who am I? Since Descartes asked this in his Meditations, it has been a leading question in philosophy and in these blogs as well. It has also been one of the leading questions in the philosophy of Lynne Rudder Baker. Her answer was that I am the thinking being that I am, so I am a human person. However, you can object that I am also a body, and in a sense we are body and mind at the same time. How is this possible and what then is the relation between my being a person and my being a body? Baker had a clear answer to these questions: the Constitution View. In short, it involves that, in her words, “a human person is constituted by a human body. But a human person is not identical to the body that constitutes her.” (p. 3) For most of my readers – as for me when I read about the constitution view for the first time – it will not be clear what constitution here means, so let me explain.

Actually the constitution view of what a human person is consists of two parts. First, we must know what makes a person as a person different from the body she is as well. Second, what makes a person a human person? To answer these questions, let’s start to look at Michelangelo’s famous statue of David. Actually it is not more than a piece of marble. Following Baker, let me call this Piece. Now you’ll protest. For you this object is not simply a lump of stone but it is a work of art, representing the Jewish King David. However, so Baker, Piece and David are not identical. In a world without art, for instance in a dog world, Piece would exist as a piece of marble but not as David. In such a world Piece would exist but David wouldn’t. On the other hand, David couldn’t exist without Piece. If Michelangelo would have died after he had bought Piece but before he had made David, Piece would have existed but David hadn’t. But once David exists he has properties that Piece has not. David, so Baker, “could not exist without being a statue. So, David has a property ... that Piece lacks” (p. 30), and the other way round as well, I want to add. It’s David (the person we see in the marble) not Piece that represents the Jewish king. And it’s not David that has the property “stony” but Piece has. So David and Piece are not identical, but because David cannot exist without Piece, we say that Piece constitutes David. In the same way we must think the relationship between my body and me as a person. I cannot exist without my body, but my body and I are not identical: My body constitutes the person I am.

So far so good. But if a person is not identical with her body, what then “distinguishes a person from the body that constitutes her”, Baker asks. (p. 59) For answering this question we must return to the beginning of this blog. We saw there that Baker assumed that I am a thinking being. This implies that I have an inner life. But it’s not my body as such that has an inner life, but I have. According to the constitution view, so Baker, something with an inner life is different from something that hasn’t. Having an inner life is characteristic of a person, but it is not just characteristic as such but in a certain way: it involves that a person can reflect on herself. A person can think “oneself as an individual facing a world, as a subject distinct from everything else.” (p. 60). In other words, a person has what philosophers call a first-person perspective. All this brings Baker to her definition of a human person: “[W]hat makes a human person a person is the capacity to have a first-person perspective. What makes a human person a human is being constituted by a human organism.” (p. 91)

I must leave it at this and I think that this abstract of the constitution view of identity will raise more questions than it answers, but be sure that Baker discusses many objections that you might raise against this view.

To my mind, the constitution view looks like the dual aspect theory view on man, which says that man can be considered in different ways: as a biological body or as a conscious and thinking mind, although in the end man is both together. It’s the view I adhere to. I think that LRB would not agree. Anyway, the constitution view is a well-founded and coherent theory. It helps us to fill in the idea of a person and to say what personal identity is. Much work by Baker tried to answer questions in this field and were important contributions to current discussions in the philosophy of mind. Therefore it’s a bit strange that I hardly paid attention to Baker in my writings, although I valued her work very much and although I have read much of it. That’s why by way of homage to her I have written this blog, for a few days ago I heard that Lynne Rudder Baker has died about a year ago, on 24 December 2017, 73 years old. She wrote five books and many articles and book chapters, not only on personal identity, but also in the field of action theory and ethics. Without a doubt her work will keep to rag the brains of other philosophers yet for a long time.

Source

The page numbers in the text refer to Lynne Rudder Baker, Persons and Bodies. A Constitution View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Do we think only with the brain?

Your mind is not only in your brain, but also in your body if not in the world around you or at least in some parts of it. I have sustained this view several times in my blogs. It is the main thesis of the so-called extended mind theory and also of the enactivist approach, which goes even a little bit farther. The first theory – defended for instance by Andy Clark and David Chalmers – leaves yet a rather important place for the brain as the centre where the mind processes come together, albeit so that according to this theory also much you know exists outside your brain, such as in your notebooks and your computer. The enactivist approach states that the brain has a rather decentralized function and that many cognitive processes take place outside the brain. This view is defended for instance by Shaun Gallagher. In short, the enactivist thesis says (p. 6; see “Source”) that “[c]ognition is not simply a brain event. It emerges from processes distributed across brain-body-environment.” What we see in this description of enactivism is that the brain is not the central processing unit that constitutes cognition (say “knowledge”, in order to keep it simple) but that it is only one such a unit, besides the body (and then especially understood as action, or intended behaviour) and the world around us, which comprises material objects but especially the people we interact with (significant groups and society in general). Now I could continue to give an abstract summary of the enactivist view, but instead I want to give a few examples in order to make the idea clear.

The first case that comes to my mind is not from Gallagher (whose view I want to discuss here) but it’s one discussed in an older blog (dated 20 July 2009): Holding a warm cup of coffee makes you have more positive attitudes towards a stranger than when you hold a cup of ice coffee. In other words, how we are going to act towards others – friendly, rejecting – is not only a decision taken by the brain but it is also “taken” by the temperature of the coffee we drink. This is in line with an example used by Gallagher (p. 152): A study by Danziger et al. showed that the favourable rulings by judges generally went down during the morning from about 65% to 0. After the lunch it returned abruptly to 65%. So, the fact that the judges gradually became hungry influenced their decisions! Actually it’s a phenomenon that everybody knows: Hunger affects your decisions and what you perceive. The hungrier you are, the more you see food in everything you see, and finally it forces your behaviour. It’s a phenomenon already noticed by William James, so Gallagher, who “noted that an apple appears larger and more inviting red when one is hungry than when one is satiated.” (pp. 151-2) Even the phase of your heart beat – and who is able to perceive the phase of his or her heart beat? – has an impact on what you feel, for “[w]hen the heart contracts in its systole phase, fearful stimuli are more easily recognized, and they tend to be more fearful than when presented during its diastole phase”, so Gallagher (p. 152, referring to an investigation by Garfinkel et al.). A phenomenon that many people know is the connection between the breathing and feeling excited; and that you can become more quiet by slowing down your breathing.

Yet a few other examples from Gallagher (pp. 152-5; for a part my interpretations). After a day of trekking in the mountains the next slope may look steeper than it really is, because you are hungry and tired. The next morning, when you are fresh again, it’s no problem to go up, not because the slope has become less steep, but because your affective state has changed. Intentionality can influence your perception as well. After a day of climbing and trekking you are very tired and you feel that it had been better to stop an hour ago. Or, same situation, you are sitting with your friends around a campfire at the end of the day and you feel satisfied how much you have done this day. Or – my example – after a day of trekking you may feel that the next slope is too steep, because you are tired and that’s better to pitch a camp. But what if you know that a bear is following you or that your love is waiting for you .... ?

My cases are a bit limited, but they exemplify that cognition is not simply a product of the brain. What we perceive and know is to a large extent also determined by our affects, our intentions, the state of the world, and the like. Despite challenges of the idea by some, which I’ll ignore here, I think what stands anyway is that “judgment and perhaps perceptual experience is informed by one’s present affective state” (p. 155). I would rather delete the word “perhaps”, for I think that the affective state does have an impact on perceptual experience, anyway. In more technical terms, we can speak of the “embodied-affective nature of perception” (p. 156), and I would like to add “and of cognition in general”. Cognition is not only in the brain but in the brain, body and natural and social environment together and in their relations. In order to know how we know it’s not enough to know how the brain functions, but we must understand this whole aggregate and its internal dynamic connections.

Source

The page numbers in the text refer to Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions. Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Happiness as the stream of life

Money makes you happy by having it, not by trying to have it. We have seen this last week. However, what is happiness? Many authors have tried to answer this question, but for a basic understanding one falls back on Aristotle, as so often.

Following others, happiness is the highest good in life, so Aristotle. His reasoning is simple. We choose happiness as a goal only for itself and never for reaching another goal. It’s true that there are also other goals that are often set for itself, like honour, enjoyment or intellect, but even if we don’t choose them in order to become happy, we always assume that attaining these other goals goes together with being happy. Therefore we can say that happiness is the highest goal in life. However, saying so looks like a platitude, if we don’t define what happiness is. For otherwise we run the risk that we say, for instance, that I am not happy because I am depressed and I am depressed, because I don’t feel happy. Therefore we must define happiness that way that it can be taken independently of other feelings. Aristotle gives such a definition. Nonetheless, I’ll not quote it here. Instead I’ll give my interpretation of Aristotle’s approach of the idea of happiness, in order to avoid becoming entangled in a discussion what Aristotle actually means.

If we look at the example just given about the vicious relationship between being depressed and being happy, we see that this relationship is static: the state of being happy is related to another state such as being depressed in my case. It’s not the way Aristotle looks at the idea of happiness. Although he gives the impression that happiness can be seen as a state (especially when he discusses the question, whether or not we can judge whether a person was happy only after his or her death), in fact Aristotle’s approach is dynamic: For him happiness is in the activity of the soul that makes that this soul functions in an optimal way in view of its goals. It’s true that Aristotle adds yet the phrase “in a full human life”, and just this makes Aristotle’s dynamism again static in the end. But I think that I as a living person can ignore this phrase, since I cannot judge my whole life: At the moment that I judge, I have at least yet a while to go, and who knows what will happen yet that might completely reverse my judgment, as Montaigne says somewhere? The final judgment is up to others. I can judge only as I live right now and while I am still alive, giving my judgment from my own first person point of view. Seen that way, a person’s happiness is in his or her doing, in the acting, not in the achievements.

How then about the goals? Aren’t they important? Yes, as everybody knows they are. We set goals and once we have achieved them, we feel happy, even happier than before. But as everybody knows as well, soon this extra happiness will fade away. Happiness lasts three months as psychological investigations show. And then? Then we set new goals and we begin to focus on these new goals. And that’s the function of goals: they structure a person’s life. They make that a person’s life can stream, so to speak, and it’s just this streaming that makes us happy. How then about the money you have? Don’t keep it in your pocket but spend it, on experiences, for example. It will make you even happier than you are.

Source

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 4-12

Will money make you happy?

Money doesn’t make happy. Everybody knows. Okay, when you have hardly any money, it can make you unhappy and then money can help, but at a certain level it doesn’t make happier anymore. A website that I came across when looking for inspiration for this theme gives ten reasons why:

1) Money gives instant gratification but once you are accustomed to it this fades away.

2) It doesn’t fix relationships.

3) It’s the root of all evil. Most problems are about money, some way

4) It can’t solve mental problems.

5) Money and friendship don’t mix, as 6) don’t money and family.

8) Things bought with money give only a feeling of happiness for a little while.

9) You’ll have never enough.

10) Money can’t bring peace.

(https://thriveglobal.com/stories/10-reasons-why-money-will-never-make-you-happy/)

I omitted reason 7, so actually nine reasons remain. At the end you’ll see why I did. Anyway, on the face of it these reasons seem true, and not only on the face of it, although it can be, for instance, that money is sometimes a precondition for peace or, another example, it can help you get a good psychiatrist when you have mental problems. Then the money itself doesn’t make you happier, but nevertheless because of your money you become happier.

Some years ago the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis may have agreed with these points, but he wanted to sort out how the relationship between money and happiness really was and he begun to study it. Indeed, what he found was that wanting to have more money doesn’t make happy. This is not only so when you are rich but also when you are poor. Are you surprised that bankers belong to the unhappiest people in the world? For they have already much money and still want more. And who are the happiest people in the world when we look at the way they earn their income? Here they are: Florists; then hairdressers and beauticians; and then plumbers. They don’t earn heaps of money, but they help other people and receive a lot of thankyous.

However, you had bought a ticket in the national lottery and you win the jackpot. You feel so happy! But soon your feeling of happiness will be as before. Two years later your washing machine breaks down. Two years ago it would have been a big problem to have it repaired or to buy a new washer. But didn’t you win the jackpot? Now you don’t need to worry about the money and within a few days you have a new one. Even more, studies show that, after a few months, people who have won much money in a lottery are not happier than before but after two years they are. And so it is also with salary increases. Whether you are rich or poor, after you have received it, you are happier, also in the long run, albeit so that in poor people the feeling of happiness grows more than in rich people. Money can make you happy.

So there may be a relationship between your individual income and your feeling of happiness. Even more, studies have shown that on the average people who have more money are happier than those with less money. Note that I say “on the average”, for as we have seen, bankers, who strive to have more money and usually have very much money, are rather unhappy. Now it is so that you find this relationship between money and happiness not only on an individual level but also on an international level. Which are the happiest countries? In order (in 2018) they are Finland, Norway and Denmark. My country, the Netherlands, is sixth. These countries belong to the richest countries in the world. And the unhappiest countries? These are Burundi, the Central African Republic and South Sudan, countries with the lowest national incomes. Also on this level it is so that there is a clear positive relationship between the wealth of a country and the general happiness of its population: A high national income makes a happy nation. Nevertheless there are exceptions, like the USA. This country is less happy than you would expect in view of its national income. Why? Well, on the average the Americans are rich, but the income is badly divided: There are a few very, very rich people, and many people are below average: Seeing big differences in welfare around you makes you feel unhappy.

Much more can be said about the relationship between money and happiness, but let me return to point 7) that I left out from the list why money doesn’t make happy. It says that studies show that money doesn’t make happy. Older studies said so, indeed, but more recent research makes clear that these studies are too simple and that the relationship between money and happiness must be differentiated. As we saw above, wanting to have more money doesn’t make happy. But if you have money and if your country has, you can better care for your health (you can pay or get better doctors); you feel less uncertain and safer; it gives you more respect; it gives you more autonomy; etc. All these things make you happier and all these things can be better realized if you have money. So, the upshot is: Trying to get money does not make you happy, but having money does. And the more money you have, the happier you are, even if you are already very rich. Your problem then is getting money without wanting to get it.

To end this blog, I want to make one person happy: Ap Dijksterhuis. Most information and conclusions in this blog are from his book Maakt geld gelukkig? [“Does Money Make Happy?”] (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2018). Buy this book and it will make him happy, for he’ll earn an unexpected extra income.

Selfies in the age of selfies

Montaigne’s Essays were the start of a new age: the Age of Man. We could also call it the Age of the Self. This age appears to continue till today. Look around: Nearly everybody today makes photographic self-portraits or “selfies” as we call them, and many people share them in Facebook, Instagram and other social media. Isn’t this symbolic for the era we live in? One thing that strikes me is that many people do not upload selfies showing themselves in different activities and situations but that their selfies are almost all the same: taken from almost the same position with almost the same facial expression. Why? Do these people love to have themselves seen so much that they don’t have the imagination to show at least different pictures of themselves? A kind of narcissism? The Age of the Self.

One can say – and with right, I think – that it is not Montaigne who is the father of the modern selfie, but that its forerunners are to be found among painters and not among writers. Although making self-portraits may be as old as the art of painting, it’s not before the Early Renaissance that it begins to develop as a special genre. Jan van Eyck’s painting “Portrait of a Man in a Turban” (1433) is perhaps the earliest Renaissance self-portrait. Two centuries later Rembrandt made even more than hundred self-portraits, as a kind of modern selfie taker. However, I am not here to talk about the art of painting, but I want to talk about philosophy.

Montaigne was not the first who wrote about himself. Already thousand years before him Aurelius Augustine (354-430; bishop of Hippo) had written autobiographically. However, there is one important difference: Augustine actually wrote about God while Montaigne wrote really about himself. Therefore we can say that it was Montaigne, and not Augustine, who started a new era. We might also say that the Renaissance self-portraitists – say Jan van Eyck – started the new era, but the difference between what these painters did and what Montaigne did is that the self-portraitists showed the new era while Montaigne put it into words. In the end images need a lot of interpretation: Were these self-portraits really a way of showing oneself or were they something else? The meaning of the Essays is clear: Yes, it is me and only me whom you see here. I have no other intention, so Montaigne. Maybe after having read Montaigne’s “To the reader” you would expect a kind of autobiography or perhaps a systematic treatise of his thoughts, as a modern author would write it. It’s not what Montaigne did. The Essays discuss many different themes and often the coherence seems to be missing, even within the individual essays! Where is the self? Where is the I? One often tends to ask this question. That’s one reason why these essays are often so intriguing and force you to continue reading; not only the clear statements and clearly autobiographic passages do. But Montaigne was a master in connecting personal experiences with lessons of life. Already during his life the essays had become popular and they still are, four centuries later.

Many philosophers after Montaigne have written about themselves. Descartes, Pascal, Weil, Wittgenstein, Nussbaum are cases in point. Nevertheless for most of them writing autobiographically was not a way of writing about themselves but a means to write about something else. Descartes used autobiographic elements for laying the foundation of philosophy. Pascal, who also wrote about himself, even called Montaigne’s Essays foolish! But, like Augustine, Pascal actually wrote about God. Etc.

Till not so long ago only few people had the time and means to make their self-portraits, written or in pictures; to be a “selfist”, so to speak. The arrival of the computer and the Internet changed this. Via the Internet or via the printing-on-demand system everybody can publish about him or herself. By the development of digital cameras everybody can take and publish selfies. Especially the latter has become popular. Just a click and you have a picture of yourself. Just a few clicks more and everybody can see it. Even more, today the slogan seems to be: Be yourself, take a selfie, so be a selfist. And so, in this age of individualism and ego-expressivism, the most of us do. For in an era in which appearance has become so important, you have no choice (or so you think). And isn’t it so that your picture is who you are? So show it! But as said in my last blog, each person – how honest s/he may be – always gives a self-subjective description and leaves things out that s/he considers not really important; that s/he feels ashamed of. And so it is with selfies. Selfies are selected (we upload only those we like); selfies are edited in order to improve our appearance; etc. But when everybody has become a selfist, what do we see then? Can we still see the individual? Can we still see the separate trees or do we see only the wood? Or do we now just belong to a category and is the individual self no longer important, as it was since the Renaissance, since Montaigne? If so, how contradictory it seems, but then the selfie stands for the end of an era.

I should upload a selfie to this blog, but instead I’ll put here a shadow of myself.

Montaigne to the reader

Maybe the most interesting chapter of Montaigne’s Essays is not, for instance his essay on friendship, in which he expresses the essence of friendship in the simple sentence “Because it was him, because it was me” (referring to his late friend Étienne de La Boétie). It is also not the last essay in the book (“Of Experience”), seen as such by many (the essay that ends with the phrase “When seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech.” No, I think that it is the preface of the book, entitled “To the reader”.

When you start to read the preface, you tend to think that it is what it is. Usually a preface explains to the reader what the author’s intention is and what his or her reasons are to write the book that follows. And it is true that you can read the “To the reader” this way. Montaigne tells us here that he has written the essays for his family and friends, as a kind of memory to him after his death. The essays will help them to remember what kind of person he was. Therefore Montaigne wants to give a realistic self-description and he doesn’t want to hide his bad sides. For “Had my intention been to seek the world’s favour, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties”. So, “it is myself I paint.” Therefore, he’ll be completely honest in the essays that follow. Now it is so that many Montaigne interpreters believe he is and they see the essays as a kind of self-expression by Montaigne; as a true and straightforward reflection of his thoughts and self-image. I, too, think that there are good reasons to believe that Montaigne was a very honest person, certainly considering the age he lived in and the persons in his environment. Nevertheless, I have my doubts whether the essays fully reflect the person he was. Each person, how honest she or he may be, always gives a subjective description of her or himself. Everybody leaves things out that s/he considers not really important; that s/he feels ashamed of; etc. Every self-description – even a honest one – is always a distorted description; consciously or unconsciously. Moreover, when Montaigne wrote only for his family and friends, why then had he published his book by a publisher? Why not simply having printed, say, 20, 30 or 50 copies for himself and give them away? However, he didn’t do so, and the book could be bought by everybody. So, probably Montaigne had a hidden intention with the Essays, anyway with the first editions (that comprised only the Books I and II; Book III has been added much later). I’ll not speculate what this intention was, but one possibility is, as Philippe Desan assumes, that the Essays were a kind of application for an official function, like an ambassadorship in Rome.

Montaigne gives a description of himself in the essays that follow the “To the reader”. The description is often not direct but for a part the kind of person he is must be inferred from and gathered from his discussions of all kinds of themes, varying from military affairs, the education of children, friendship, means of transport, etc., etc. However, already in the preface Montaigne starts with his self-presentation. Here already we see that he is a person who likes to talk about himself, who addresses himself in a familiar way directly to the reader; not with indirect polite language forms. He doesn’t like frills and artificiality. He would rather be seen naked than with clothes, figuratively speaking. Not to be looked upon without awe. Therefore, the preface can also be read in a second way. Then it is not a “To the reader” that invites others to read the book, but then it is actually the first essay of the series of essays that follow. Essay 0, so to speak.

All these aspects and the double status of the “To the reader” make that this preface is a special kind of document, which makes it by far more important than the essays themselves. Till the time of Montaigne people didn’t write about ordinary people, let alone that they wrote about themselves. Stories and writings went about God, the saints, knights and kings and people who had performed extraordinary deeds with a holy meaning. But this changed with the Renaissance and the rise of humanism. The holy and religious remained important, but it was no longer the centre of the mental world. In the new age man, and no longer the spiritual, became the main focus of attention. And that’s what we see also in this “To the reader”. Although Montaigne was religious, he doesn’t talk about God and the holy in this preface, and in the Essays he hardly does, if he does at all. No, in the preface Montaigne talks about himself and about nothing else. And that’s why it is the most important and most interesting text in the Essays. For this “To the reader” opens a new era. It is a declaration that opens the Age of Man. And the essays that follow? They are simply a footnote to it.

Note

You can find the text of Montaigne’s “To the reader” here:

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/montaigne/michel/essays/preface2.html

(In the original French text it’s simply called “Au lecteur”, so “To the reader”.)

Good guys and bad guys

When decisions to perform actions appear to be taken after the actions have already started, it’s no longer right to say that we decide to act. This is the conclusion drawn by many philosophers from Libet’s experiment discussed in my blog last week. However, I contended that, although we cannot say that we decided to act at the moment we started to perform the action, it is still possible that the decision to act then and there has been taken some time before the action concerned took place. Nonetheless, Libet’s experiment and other research made Wegner and others conclude that there is no free will. What we call a decision is only a kind of confabulation that fits the action. Actually it is so then that an action determines the decision to act and not the other way round.

But let’s suppose that my view is false and that there is no free will. Indeed, it is so that many of our actions aren’t really free, because they are determined, for instance, by our character or our physical constitution. For example, our character may change after a stroke or a severe damage of the brain caused by an accident. Sometimes it seems then as if the victim has become another person. Maybe it is not so that a stroke or brain injury directly determines our individual actions (which are, for instance, also dependent on the situation we act in and on the options we have), but they determine at least the range of actions we choose from. An illness that affects the brain can change a decent man into a sexual pervert. Considerations like these made Stijn Bruers remark in his book on moral illusions that, if there is no free will, then maybe we are simply destined to follow moral rules or to interfere when we see something bad happening. This raises the question, however, whether there still is room for ethics. For if there is no free will but people simply do, does valuing and judging actions and so punishing crime and other bad actions still has sense? According to Bruers, yes it has. Let’s see why he thinks so. However, before I go on, I must say that many philosophers who think that there is no free will, argue in the same way, and I discuss just Bruers’s view only in order to make my point clear.

In the end, all crime finds its cause in the brain, so Bruers, and one cannot punish a person for that, for it is nobody’s fault that his brain is structured in a certain way. Nevertheless, some kinds of punishing can make sense, if they influence a criminal that way that they discourage criminal behaviour. For often brains are made up thus that they tend to avoid bad behaviour if it is followed by punishment. Therefore it is useful to punish criminals in order to re-educate them, so that they don’t relapse into criminal activity. Likewise rewarding good behaviour makes also sense, albeit just because it stimulates pleasant feelings. So ethics doesn’t need a free will, as long its aim is to stimulate good behaviour, so Bruers. Metaphorically we need to see criminal behaviour like a kind of illness: dangerous behaviour that happens to a person and that needs to be cured, if possible. The administration of justice is then a kind of health care. Of course, in trying to cure a criminal, we have to follow the latest insights of neuroscience and psychology.

So far so good, and if there is no free will, it seems that the best we can do (and also the best we must do) is a kind of criminal justice based on the view just expounded. Nevertheless, to my mind there is a problem with such a reasoning: With the exception of a short remark  – “maybe we are simply destined to follow moral rules or to interfere when we see something bad happening”; see above – the reasoning leaves out the practitioner, i.e. the therapist who treats the criminal. But isn’t this practitioner in the same way the victim of his brains as the criminal is? The only difference is that the practitioner is on the good side, while the criminal is on the bad side. Then, just as a criminal commits a crime, simply because he “has to”, also the therapist treats the criminal just because he has to. In the no-free-will scenario it cannot be that the practitioner chooses a method to treat a criminal: His brain determines him to do so. In other words, who manipulates the manipulator? Brains that are brain mechanisms meet other brain mechanisms. Some tend to be on the good side and others on the bad side. There are good guys and there are bad guys, but it’s all determined and there is no ethics. The view that there is no free will leads to the view that the whole world is a complicated machinery of interacting mechanisms. A subpart of this world is the human world, consisting of interacting human mechanisms called men. In this world there is no sense; there is no meaning; there is no ethics. Maybe this is really the world we live in. I’ll no deny that it’s possible. However, if free will is an illusion, it is also an illusion that we can guide, steer or manipulate the behaviour of others. Everything simply happens.

Reference

Stijn Bruers, Morele Illusies. Antwerpen: Houtekiet 2017; pp. 66-71.

Freedom to act

David Papineau’s book Knowing the score shows that sport is a very relevant theme for philosophy. That’s why its subtitle is How Sport teaches us about Philosophy (and Philosophy about Sport). The world of sport is a kind of mini-society where everything happens what happens also “in real”. Therefore sport can be used as a kind of model world for learning about the wide wicked world. It is true both for team sports and for individual sports. This makes it important that everybody should spend some time on practising a sport (or preferably several sports) during a shorter or longer period; especially children should do. It’s a world where you can learn to cope with society at large. However, sport experiences need not only be positive. It’s not only about cooperation, comradeship, learning to set goals and accepting defeats and setbacks. In sport you find also much hate, jealousy and violence. Wasn’t it the outstanding Dutch football coach Rinus Michels who said “Football is war?” But besides that sport can be help to learn the practice of life, it can also be used for substantiating or refuting scientific and philosophical theories.

As for the latter, I think that the practice of training for a sport is a clear refutation of the philosophical view that says that there is no free will. Actually this view says that first you start to act and only after your act has started you confabulate a reason why you act this way. At least, I think that this is the essence of a common interpretation of the famous experiment by Benjamin Libet that showed that an action precedes the conscious decision to perform it with a fraction of a second. Libet discovered that the beginning of an action precedes the awareness of the decision to act with 200 milliseconds (a description of the experiment is easy to find on the Internet). On the basis of this experiment the psychologist Daniel Wegner argued that there is no free will but only an illusion of free will. We have a feeling that we decided to perform the action concerned, but since the decision comes after the start of the action it cannot be true that we took a decision.  It’s simply an illusion. Automatic behaviour controls our conscious decision making and not the other way round. Really?

I don’t want to deny that at the moment we act we mistakenly feel to act according the decision. But let me take an example from tennis. Say Roger Federer is playing against Rafael Nadal. At a certain moment Federer has to return the ball and he decides to hit the ball that way that it passes left of Nadal, which will make it impossible for Nadal to return. And so it happens. What would we see if we could look in Federer’s brain at the moment he hits the ball? Indeed: He first hits and then he decides to hit. However, although Federer may have taken the decision after the hit, nevertheless, he knew what he had to do in order to score and he could act according to this knowledge. How is this possible if Federer hit the ball automatically? Was it merely luck that he hit the ball in the right way and not a free action?

In order to investigate this question, let me assume now that Nadal wasn’t playing tennis against Federer, but against me, the author of this blog. It’s true, for a short period in my life I have been a member of a tennis club, but today I hardly know any longer how to hold a tennis racket in the right manner, let alone that I can return a ball if Nadal is my opponent and that I know more than the basics of the tactics of tennis. I simply don’t have the automatisms to hit and return a ball. However, hadn’t I stopped playing tennis after two years, but had I continued doing so for the rest of my life, and moreover, which is especially important here, had I invested a lot of time in training, then certainly I still wouldn’t have been able to beat Nadal even once in my life, but I surely would have possessed the automatisms I need in order to hit some balls with this top player. But it didn’t happen. I decided to stop playing tennis, and later I choose another sport. And Federer? When he was sixteen years old, he decided to go on with playing tennis and to become the best tennis player in the world (or so I assume for this example). Therefore, he invested very much time in training and in learning the automatisms needed in order to be able to react automatically in the best way when he had to return such difficult balls as in his match with Nadal just described. And that’s what makes that he is free (as a tennis player). Federer’s freedom is not that he returns the ball in the intended way at the moment he is playing, but he is free because he decided to learn to perform the automatic reactions he wishes to do at the moment he needs them to do. Actually the decision to hit the ball is not taken at the moment Federer hits but it has been taken already long before, namely during his training, and just because Federer is able to act automatically now he is free. Generally, it’s the planning, so the long term decisions, that makes us free, not the intentional momentary act itself. Being able to act automatically according our intentions makes us free. So if there is no free will, as many philosophers state, it’s not because we are not free to act but because we are not free to plan.

“There is no such thing as society” (Thatcher): A counter example

The former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is known as one of the world leaders of the second half of the twentieth century. But do you know that she has also a reputation in philosophy? She got it by her bold assertion “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and families.” I don’t know what you think of this statement, but I am not only a philosopher but also a sociologist, and certainly – but not only –from a sociological point of view I think that it is quite naive. It leaves much of what we see around us unexplained and difficult to understand. In the end such social (!) phenomena like groups, associations, society, ingroup-outgroup conflicts, but also shared values and norms would be based on nothing than selfishness if they were family-based or based on individuality. But look around and you’ll see that the world is more complicated and that many loyalties and emotional attachments to others and to organisations, let alone to the nation could not be understood, for everything beyond the family would be merely practical and based on the calculated advantages we receive from extra-familial bonds. For example, all excitement about the Brexit would be mere fuss, and an account of the economic profits and losses would give the answer to the question whether or not Britain should leave the European Union. However, a closer look at the discussion shows that the problem is about loyalties and self-determination of the Britishness. But how can there be a loyalty to something that doesn’t exist and the self-determination of an non-existing x-ness?

I would have forgotten Thatcher’s assertion, hadn’t I read it again in the interesting book by David Papineau on sport and philosophy, Knowing the Score. After having quoted Thatcher’s assertion, Papineau continues: “Teams give the lie to this individualistic vision.” (p. 155) I think it is worthwhile to present here his example of cycle racing as an actual case why Thatcher’s view is false.

At first sight cycle racing seems a sport for individuals. Of course, there are teams but at the finishing line it is the winner who gets the flowers; it’s not the team that gets them. Teams seem only practical ways to go to the race and for organising the training. The only actual sign that the team members belong together is that they wear the same shirts. Is it true? No, and then I am not thinking only of the level of professional cyclists and good amateurs where riders may cooperate because they are paid for it or because they want to show that they are good enough to become professionals. No, riders cooperate at all levels in order to make that not just they themselves win but that one of the team wins. The team counts, not because you are paid for it but because you belong to it; certainly at the lowest levels. “Once you are part of a team”, so Papineau, “... you are no longer limited to asking ‘What shall I do?’ Now you can ask ‘What shall we do?’ ” (p. 159)

Let me illustrate what I mean by pasting together some quotes from Papineau’s book. Take teams in a race. “The domestiques, as the French bluntly term the lesser team members, slave away shepherding their team leader around the course. Their aim is to increase their leader’s chance of a medal, but in doing so they sacrifice any hopes of winning prizes themselves.” (p. 148). Papineau quotes from the website startbikeracing.com: “Team riders decide among themselves which has the best chance of winning. The rest of the team will devote itself to promoting the leader’s chances, taking turns into the wind for him or her ... and so on.” (p.149) Papineau comments “[Y]ou won’t understand cycle racing unless you appreciate the complex dance of altruistic, mutualistic and selfish motives that are in play in a road race.” (ibid.; my italics)

So, as Papineau writes a few pages later, “[W]hat then are we to say about the domestiques who devote themselves to a team victory? Their goal is a living testimony to the way teams transcend their members. They want their team to win, not to win the leader to gain the winner’s medal. The leader’s prize just happens to be the symbol that cycling uses the mark which team has won.” (pp. 156-7) And what Papineau doesn’t tell us is that if a team leader doesn’t win because of his own mistakes, he isn’t only disappointed but feels also ashamed towards the team, which helped him so much, and often excuses himself.

This example refutes not only Thatcher’s assertion (for who can seriously maintain that your cycling team is your family?), but it undermines also “the economic theories of decision-making [that leave] no room for agents to care about anything but individual people.”, so Papineau (p. 156) Indeed, there are individuals, families and groups and much more, including society.

Source

Papineau, David, Knowing the score. How Sport teaches us about Philosophy (and Philosophy about Sport). London: Constable, 2017