NDPR Friedrich Nietzsche, Raymond Geuss (ed.), Alexander Nehamas (ed.), Writings from the Early Notebooks

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-12-01 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas (eds.), Ladislaus Löb (tr.), Cambridge UP, 2009, L + 274pp., $22.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521671804.

Reviewed by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Humboldt Universität

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This is the tenth volume by Nietzsche in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, giving him the most books in the series (followed by Kant with seven volumes). Like all the other Nietzsche volumes, Writings from the Early Notebooks contains an Introduction followed by suggestions for further reading, together with bibliographical notes on the texts and notes on the translation. The texts are presented in a new translation. Added to them is an impressive number of very informative footnotes that provide the biographical, historical and intellectual background without which a lot of the material would be barely comprehensible. All these features make this volume, like many others in the series, very helpful for both students and researchers.

As the title of the volume suggests, the texts it contains are a selection. They come from the vast amount of notes -- almost half of the historical critical edition of his works is filled with them -- that Nietzsche wrote down throughout his life in many notebooks. Some of these notes are just a couple of words whereas others are of considerable length, sometimes filling several pages. They contain remarks and reflections on topics that aroused his intellectual curiosity, covering just about every conceivable field of human life ranging from contemporary politics and cultural history to art and aesthetic phenomena and above all to almost all domains of philosophy both theoretical and practical. The roughly 240 pages of notes in the volume are from the period between 1869 and 1879. That they represent a very exclusive selection is documented by the fact that the notes from this period in the historical critical edition cover around 1400 pages. This raises a question about the principles and the criteria of selection. Unfortunately, neither the editors nor the translator explicitly address this question. However, I have the impression that the guiding thread for the selection was the general relevance of the material selected for what Alexander Nehamas in his introduction tells us about Nietzsche's preoccupations and main interests during that period. This impression is not just based on the notes chosen. It also suggests itself indirectly because of the inclusion of three texts discussed quite thoroughly in the introduction, two of which are normally not considered to be notes but fall under the rubric of unpublished writings (On the Pathos of Truth and On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense), while the third (On Schopenhauer) is from an earlier period. However that may be, the resulting collection is very convincing and informative.

In the introduction, Nehamas (who has done more than anyone else in the English-speaking world to secure Nietzsche his due place in the chain of serious philosophers) approaches the notes by identifying the overriding themes that occupied Nietzsche during the period. He then goes on "to discuss a few specific issues relevant both to Nietzsche's notes and to his published works in order to indicate the various ways in which each kind of writing can cast light on the other" (XIX). This strategy brings some order into the material and is very convincing. Nehamas identifies Nietzsche's dominant themes during the period as: "the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the music of Richard Wagner, and the importance of ancient Greek art and civilization for a renaissance of German culture" (XIV). There is no question that these three were indeed the dominant themes in the 70's, and they keep resonating in one way or another, and with different intensity, in all his writings and notes. The value of Nehamas' decision to focus on what is relevant to the published writings can also be seen from the fact that examining the notes with an eye merely towards what is mentioned in them most often would likely result in a list of disconnected subjects such as the philosophy of Kant, the Pre-Socratics (especially Heraclitus and Empedocles) and science and topics such as knowledge, truth and history. Such a list might be useful and even informative, but it cannot provide an introduction to the context in which the notes were written. It is such a context the reader of the notes needs; Nehamas is well aware of this.

However, a small question remains: even if we follows Nehamas' hermeneutical maxim and uses Nietzsche's published work from the 70's as a measuring stick, we might be tempted to doubt the claim that Schopenhauer, Wagner and Greek art and civilization are the topics most pressing for Nietzsche during that period. It is hard to avoid feeling that there is a rupture both in style and thematic focus between Nietzsche's published writings of the first half of the 70's and those of the second half, i.e. between The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the Untimely Meditations (1873-1876) on the one hand and Human, All Too Human (1878) on the other. Whereas The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations are indeed outstanding witnesses of Nietzsche's preoccupation with Schopenhauer, Wagner and Greek art, we might be less inclined to think of these topics as the organizing forces behind Human, All Too Human. These observations are not meant to be critical of Nehamas' suggestions -- on the contrary, I take them to be more plausible than any alternative could be. Rather they are intended to point to a more general question concerning Nietzsche-studies: does it really do justice to Nietzsche's way of thinking to give his thematically scattered reflections some kind of unity by providing a topical framework for them? Maybe there is no unity and the notes reflect just this.

A similar question can be posed about how to approach an assessment of Nietzsche's discussion of issues like truth or philosophy or art as well. In other words: what are the criteria of assessment? What is the equivalent to unity we are looking for when we are evaluating Nietzsche's views? Much of the philosophical literature on Nietzsche pursues what I would call a 'rational' reconstruction which attempts to provide the most reasonable account of Nietzsche's work. When evaluating, or even just describing, Nietzsche's positions, what basis do we have for expecting him to have a high regard for, or at least to adhere to, the standard norms of rational discourse, i.e. to norms like consistency, definiteness or awareness of consequences? Many commentators do their best to convince us that there is a reasonable or rational story to be told about the issues Nietzsche deals with, thus in some way insinuating that Nietzsche can be subjected to the standard norms mentioned. In doing so we could even appeal to Nietzsche as a witness for this way of proceeding because when discussing the work of other people he himself treats them as at least implicitly committed to these norms. This is shown quite nicely in his treatment of Schopenhauer as documented in the small text On Schopenhauer contained in this volume. Here Nietzsche criticizes Schopenhauer in an almost 'professional' way by pointing out inconsistencies, conceptual ambiguities and fallacious inferences in his attempt to establish the will as a thing in itself and to defend the principle of individuation. This Nietzschean attitude to the texts of others can be seen as an invitation to or even as a demand for dealing with his texts in the same 'rational' manner.

But somehow this does not seem to be right because such an approach tends to make Nietzsche's remarks and observations fairly tedious. Take, for example, two topics Nehamas discusses in his introduction: history and truth. Concerning history, we can find many illuminating outlines of the three ways Nietzsche says we can use to approach history and of his criticism of the 'modern' attempt to tackle history in a 'scientific spirit' because 'scientific history' has the tendency to wipe out human creativity. There is no doubt that this indeed is Nietzsche's message. But this 'discursive' or 'rational' mode of presenting Nietzsche's stance on history is in danger of giving his view a rather common-sensical, maybe even uninteresting, touch. Missing in this mode of presentation is the communication of that sense of urgency or of immediate uneasiness that seems to have been a driving force behind Nietzsche's engagement with history as a major issue. I take it that it is this unsaid background that plays a decisive role in awarding Nietzsche's material claims the status of important and interesting insights (if one is intrigued by Nietzsche's texts at all). Nehamas addresses this background in his introduction, thus opening the way to a more complete understanding.

A structurally similar objection could be raised against a 'rational' reading of Nietzsche's remarks on truth even if it is well informed. According to such a reading, we cannot avoid coming to the conclusion that Nietzsche's view on truth is deeply flawed either because it denies truth altogether, which cannot be done without self-contradiction, or because it is based on, let us say, his bad arguments against correspondence. At the same time we have the feeling that such a criticism somehow misses the mark mainly because we are inclined to think that the mistakes attributed to Nietzsche in this context are so elementary and obvious that we would have to conjure up special reasons in order to ascribe them to him. After all, Nietzsche does not seem to have been an unqualified idiot. Thus there remains that sense of perplexity and confusion which refuses to acknowledge that the normal 'rational' reading accurately captures what Nietzsche was after in thinking about truth. Though Nehamas is well aware of the problems of Nietzsche's remarks on truth, his introductory comments show that at the same time he is sensitive to, and insists on, the motivational and psychological environment in which Nietzsche's statements are embedded, thus recognizing that the picture is much more complex.

If there really are these limitations to what I have called 'rational' readings of Nietzsche's texts and if these limitations indeed encourage the suspicion that in the end Nietzsche's claims are bound to be either trivial, common-sense, or rather silly errors, then one can recommend Nehamas' approach to Nietzsche as a relieving antidote. Does this make him an 'irrational' commentator? If this term is understood to hint at the need for a richer reading, a reading that integrates more 'perspectives' than those available to rational reconstruction, then an 'irrational' interpretation might be promising. How such an interpretation might look one learns best from all of Nehamas' work on Nietzsche (and on others as well).

NDPR Debra Satz, Rob Reich (eds.), The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-11-27 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Debra Satz and Rob Reich (eds.), Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin, Oxford UP, 2009, 251pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780195337396.

Reviewed by Ann E. Cudd, University of Kansas

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This book originated in a memorial conference held in honor of Susan Moller Okin at Stanford University in February 2005 following her sudden death in 2004. The volume collects 12 original essays, by prominent political theorists and philosophers, about Okin's work and the themes her work championed. Part I of the book, "Rethinking Political Theory", includes essays by Nancy Rosenblum, Joshua Cohen, Elizabeth Wingrove, and John Tomasi on Okin's methodology and her particular form of liberal feminism. Part II, "Gender and the Family", comprises essays by David Miller, Mary Lyndon Shanley, and Cass Sunstein on Okin's theory of the construction of gender within families and related social institutions, especially religion. Part III, "Feminism and Cultural Diversity", includes essays by Ayelet Shachar, Alison Jaggar, and Chandran Kukathas on Okin's views about the contradictions she saw in combining feminism and multiculturalism. Part IV, "Development and Gender", presents articles by Robert Keohane and the late Iris Marion Young on the last turn in Okin's work toward consideration of justice for the global poor. The essays thus take up the four chapters of Okin's life work: her early work on the place of women in the history of political thought, her middle period in which she grappled with contemporary theories of justice, her later period in which she challenged postcolonial feminists and multiculturalists, and her final couple of years in which she sought to understand global gender injustice. These essays are on the whole excellent; they are each critical of some part of Okin's philosophy or method. Yet they also invariably illustrate the enormous contributions that her work made to political theory, feminist thought, and, although this comes through perhaps less clearly, methodology.

Nearly all of the articles are well worth reading and re-reading. I would especially single out the articles by Rosenblum, Tomasi, Shanley, Sunstein, and Young as excellent pieces in their own right and as particularly good interrogations of Okin's work. Rosenblum's article, "Okin's Liberal Feminism as a Radical Political Theory", does a nice job of characterizing Okin's liberal feminism and revealing its radical potential. Rosenblum compares Okin with her (flawed) hero Mill and argues that their great affinity lies in "a classic liberal opposition to absolutism and arbitrariness and a sense of the despicableness of despots, political or domestic" (21). Okin, Rosenblum points out, discounted sexual difference as the basis for feminism, and thus preferred the term humanism for her own theory. But Okin also held out hope for a genderless future, which could be achieved through a few proposals to end the vulnerability women suffer in contemporary marriage and a gendered economy, and in this way was more radical than Mill or even radical feminists.

Tomasi's article, "Can Feminism be Liberated from Governmentalism?", is the only one that emanates from a libertarian direction. Tomasi distinguishes between direct- and indirect-governmental approaches to feminist public policy. The former are legislatively enacted means of feminist social construction, while the latter refer to actions that nongovernmental institutions take to reach feminist ends, supported by governmental enforcement of constitutional rights and liberties. Tomasi recounts an often neglected history of what he calls "indirect-governmental feminist" thought, beginning with Sarah Grimké, to support his view that there can be a feminist line of libertarian thinking that upholds autonomy for women through indirect governmentalism. Okin's plan, he argues, would be troubling to such feminists because it begins with a pre-determined presumption against gender and uses government to eliminate it, rather than guaranteeing constitutional rights and liberties and allowing the future of gender to unfold as people will. Okin would have responded that the current state of gender inequality creates a bias in favor of the current structures of gender, and so we cannot hope for eventual equality unless we enact laws to counteract gender constructions. Tomasi is right to suggest that this would not pass the liberal legitimacy test, but he has no answer for her analysis of how inherently unequal gender structures reproduce themselves.

Shanley's article, "'No More Relevance than One's Eye Color': Justice and a Society without Gender" grapples with Okin's most controversial (among feminists or political theorists) thesis that a just future would be one without gender. Okin viewed gender as a "deeply entrenched social institutionalization of sexual difference" and held that ending male dominance as well as the enhancement of freedom for both sexes required the end of gender roles (Okin, quoted on 113). Yet Okin, as a liberal, also opposed dictating what people did in their private life. She proposed laws and practices that would end women's economic vulnerability within marriage, but then simply had to hope that gender roles would eventually wither away. Shanley argues that there is "a persistent tension in [Okin's] thought between her commitment to individual freedom and the neutrality of the state with respect to gender, and her belief that the world would be a better place if we could eliminate gender roles and bring a genderless society into being" (114). Shanley's article probes this central tension of liberal feminism illuminatingly and, ultimately, approvingly. She points out the optimism that Okin shares with Mill that absent the external social supports for gender, the progressive elements of the human spirit would eliminate gender.

I was disappointed only by the article by Shachar, which attempts to show that Okin was wrong not to consider group rights for women who value their religious identity. The article focuses on those cases where it seems that the women might get some benefit from the right to have a religious court's decisions enforced by a civil court. Her case involves a divorcing husband who reneges on a promise to provide a religious release for the woman to remarry. I cannot imagine that Okin would be moved by such a case, nor should she be. First, surely the burden is on such religions to release the woman on the basis of his prior promise. What religion worth adhering to would support a liar who has broken his agreement in such a situation? But that release can be attained completely within the religious court's purview; the state is not needed there. Second, the interest that women and the state have in preserving women's civil rights and freedom from the demands of religious courts must override the needs of women to have a spiritual promise enforced by a civil authority. Sunstein's article in this volume does an excellent job of balancing religious freedom against interests in upholding sex discrimination law. I am not sure that Okin would have gone as far as he does in the direction of religion, though. As many of the articles in this book point out, Okin thought gender should disappear as a determinant of any social inequalities whatsoever, a position completely at odds with all existing religions.

Wingrove's, Jaggar's, and Young's articles together portray important aspects of Okin's methodology, which I think is so far underappreciated. Wingrove's "Of Linchpins and Other Interpretive Tools" points to the important ways that empirical social science informs Okin's theory: an "approach to theory that combined an analytic orientation with an empirical sensibility" (55). She also describes it as "thoroughly naturalized" (55). Wingrove is unfortunately less clear in her more detailed account of that method, overly complicating Okin's use of empirical social science to discover and justify claims about gender injustice. I think that this aspect of Okin's work would reward a close analysis by a philosopher of social science. One very helpful point, however, is Wingrove's interpretation of Okin's use of the linchpin metaphor. While Cohen's article criticized the metaphor as reductively giving priority to domestic inequality in explaining women's oppression, Wingrove argues that the linchpin metaphor denies precisely this priority. A linchpin, she points out, "invokes relations of connectivity rather than causality" (60). So the linchpin expresses how "asymmetries of power characteristic of familial relations and the ideologies of domesticity and natural complementarity that sustain those relations secure -- connect and fix together -- the constituent parts of a perforce multidimensional structure" (61).

Jaggar's article takes up Okin's later work and the methodology of Third World feminism that Brooke Ackerly, in her dissertation written under Okin's supervision, named "listening to the silent voices". Okin enacted this through reading and citing excerpts from the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action and the 2000 World Bank publication, Voices of the Poor. Jaggar criticizes Okin for using only these sources, which is surely fair enough, but also for her method's "nondeliberative" nature (178). I take this to refer to a failure to engage in deliberation with the least advantaged. But engaging with subjects requires a completely different methodology than Okin was employing. Such qualitative, interviewing techniques are not easily or quickly mastered, and done badly are likely to produce more harm than good. One could as easily complain that Okin had not mastered econometric theory before citing statistics on the wage gap in her earlier work. Okin consistently employed the method of literature review in her application of empirical social science, and it seems to me to be just as appropriate here as in the earlier work that cited, but did not generate, work by psychologists and economists. Okin's method required her to use valid, insightful studies, not to perform them herself. The appropriate critique, I submit, would be to point to studies that did better social science, not to suggest that she do that work herself.

Young's article "The Gendered Cycle of Vulnerability in the Less Developed World", puts Okin's central argument in Justice, Gender, and the Family to work by showing a similar pattern in the vulnerability of poor women in less developed countries. This piece highlights a feature of Okin's methodology that the linchpin metaphor on Wingrove's analysis describes: Okin sought to connect the internal and external, direct and indirect, economic and psychological causes of women's oppression that make the bars of women's cages so strong and yet so difficult to see.

Satz and Reich have honored Okin in the best possible way by bringing together an outstanding volume of critical essays that document and evaluate Susan Okin's amazing career as a feminist political theorist. Among the accomplishments highlighted, these articles reveal the details and limits of her liberalism and her feminism, and they illuminate her richly empirical methods, and show how her linchpin analyses could have been further extended. By showing us what Okin accomplished and what she had not yet completed, they renew my admiration for what she accomplished, regret for what might yet have been done, and determination to carry on her legacy.

NDPR Richard Holton, Willing, Wanting, Waiting

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-11-26 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Richard Holton, Willing, Wanting, Waiting, Oxford UP, 2009, 203pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780199214570.

Reviewed by Carl Ginet, Cornell University

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This book is primarily about intention and a special sort of intention called resolution. The writing is clear and engaging. Its observations and analyses strike me as mostly acute and sensible. It makes good use of imaginary examples and empirical work from psychology. Overall it is an illuminating work from which anyone interested in its topic can reap considerable profit without undue struggle.

Its eight chapters are titled "Intention", "Belief", "Choice", "Weakness of Will", "Temptation", "Strength of Will", "Rationality", and "Freedom". Let me summarize these briefly (and perforce selectively).

Holton embraces Bratman's (and I think the now dominant) view that intentions are special mental states, not reducible to desires and/or beliefs, that stable intentions are indispensable in creatures with our cognitive limitations, enabling us to coordinate our activities with our future selves and with each other. He defines a resolution as a specific type of intention that is designed to stand firm in the face of anticipated contrary inclinations when the time for action comes: it's an intention to F at t accompanied by a second-order intention not to abandon that intention in face of expected temptations at t to do so.

Holton argues that an intention to F does not entail a "flat-out" or full belief that one will F if one tries, but at most a partial belief that one will, i.e., a belief that it is a "live possibility" that one will F that is accompanied by a belief that it is also a live possibility that one will not F. He argues that we need a corresponding notion of a partial intention (of which more below).

Holton defines choices (decisions) as acts of forming intentions that conclude deliberation as to what to do. He points out that such choices are not just routine translations of judgment into action but are often made in the absence of any judgment that the chosen alternative is the best one: either the agent is indifferent between the alternatives considered or thinks them incommensurable or (most often) simply hasn't time or resources to figure out which is best.

Holton argues that weakness of will is best thought of as failure to stick with one's resolutions when one should: "unreasonable revision of a contrary inclination defeating intention (a resolution) in response to the presence of those very inclinations" (p. 78). He details advantages of this account over the competing (and widely accepted) view that weakness of will is akrasia, i.e., failure to act in accord with one's judgment as to what is best. He points out that failure to stick with a resolution often does not involve akrasia, because it is often accompanied at the time of action with a change of judgment as to what would be best to do. Although this is what typically happens in ordinary cases of succumbing to temptation, Holton argues, citing empirical evidence, that it does not typically happen in addictive behavior, which will often display both weakness of will and akrasia.

Holton argues, citing empirical evidence, that the mental effort made in sticking with resolutions, in resisting temptations, uses up the power that it exercises, analogously to the way physically resisting a physical force uses up muscular energy. He is inclined to think that the willpower exercised in resisting temptation may be distinct from the power used in other sorts of mental work (such as deliberating or solving math problems), but acknowledges that more empirical work is needed to show this. (I'm inclined to think more philosophical work is needed to clarify just what the claim means, and what sort of evidence would show the distinction of faculties being claimed.)

Holton discusses the question of when and why it is rational to stick with one's intentions and disagrees with Bratman on the criteria for this in the case of resolutions (of which more below).

Holton argues that his account of choice and sticking with resolutions contributes to understanding how we have an experience of freedom. He spells out some confused ways in which one might come to think that this experience is illusory if determinism is true, but he explicitly declines to consider philosophical incompatibilists' ways of reaching that conclusion (of which more below).

Let me now examine three topics in more detail: (1) Holton's notion of a partial intention, (2) his disagreement with Bratman over the criteria for when it is rational to reconsider resolutions, and (3) his treatment of freedom.

1

Holton defines partial intention (p. 36) as follows:

An intention to F is partial iff it is designed to achieve a given end E and it is accompanied by one or more alternative intentions also designed to achieve E [and the agent is not criticizably irrational in having these attitudes].

What makes intentions partial is the weakening of the consistency constraints that apply to full intentions: an agent is criticizably irrational for having full intentions that are inconsistent with each other or with his full beliefs. An agent who partially intends to bring about E by A-ing and also partially intends to bring about E by B-ing, while believing that he can't bring about E in both ways, is perfectly rational, which he would not be if he fully intended those things.

Holton thinks we need partial intentions in order to describe certain sorts of cases adequately. I'm not convinced. It seems to me that descriptions in terms of full intentions will capture what is going on in his examples, provided we get the intentions' contents right. He gives three examples.

a) An agent's plan is to try first to get a fallen tree off the driveway by levering it with a crowbar, then, if that fails, by cutting it up with a chainsaw, then, if that fails, by dragging it with a car, and finally, if that fails, by calling an expensive tree removal service. Holton's description: the agent partially intends to get the tree off by levering it, partially intends to get it off by cutting it up, partially intends to get it off by dragging it with the car, and partially intends to get the tree removal service to do it, but he does not of course fully intend all of these things. I see nothing wrong with the following alternative description (mentioned by Holton): the content of the agent's full intention is a conjunction: first try levering it as a way of moving it; if that doesn't work, try starting the chain saw; if neither levering nor chainsaw works, try maneuvering the car into position to drag the tree; if none of the aforementioned attempts works, get the tree removal service. The specification of acts in the conjuncts need not be in terms of mere trying. The first can be just: move it by levering it; similarly with the consequents of the conditionals in the other conjuncts. Compatibility of all the conjuncts is preserved, since if an earlier attempt succeeds, the remaining conditional intention-contents will all be true in virtue of having false antecedents. And the whole conjunction can be compatible with what the agent fully believes.

b) An agent intends to return some books to the library on his way home but also takes his laptop so he can renew online at home in case he forgets. Holton's description: he partially intends to return the books and he partially intends to renew them online, but does not fully intend either of these things. A plausible alternative account in terms of a full intention: the content of the agent's plan is a conjunction: if I remember at the right time on the way home, to return the books to the library; and if I don't remember to return them on the way home, to renew them online after I get home.

c) There is the sort of example where an agent simultaneously tries to achieve a certain end in two different ways, only one of which, he knows, can work. One instance of this is Bratman's example of firing two different guns at a video-game target, intending to hit it one way or the other. Another instance I like is the example of an agent's intending to open double doors by simultaneously pushing on one side and pulling on the other, knowing that they open only one way but not knowing which. Holton's partial-intention description would be: he partially intends to open the door by pulling one side with his right hand and partially intends to open it by pushing the other side with his left hand. A plausible alternative account in terms of a full intention: the agent intends to pull with his right hand and push with his left hand and by one of these actions to open the door.

Holton's reasons for thinking that such alternative descriptions in terms of full intentions won't work are unpersuasive. Concerning the tree-moving example, he seems to concede that each intention concerning one of the planned attempts after the first can be plausibly treated as a full intention that is conditional on the failure of earlier attempts, but points out that the intention about the first attempt cannot be treated as conditional. True, but it can be treated as a full unconditional intention, without sacrificing consistency of its content with the other (conditional) intention-contents or the contents of the agent's full beliefs about the situation.

Concerning the library books example, he denies that the intention to return the books can be seen as conditional, apparently taking this to be in need of no argument. But it seems obvious to me that the agent's intentions are conditional: to return the books on the way home if he doesn't forget and to renew them online if he does forget. That these conditionals are part of his plan is clear from the fact that he takes steps in advance to deal with the situation in case he does forget.

Concerning the simultaneous actions aimed at the same end, he points out that the intention concerning each action cannot be conditional on the failure of the attempt by the other action, since the attempts are simultaneous. True, but my suggestion shows another way to specify the content of a full intention here -- by conjoining a conjunction with a disjunction: to act simultaneously in both ways and thereby to obtain the end in one way or the other.

2

For ordinary intentions that are not resolutions Holton agrees with Bratman that our judgment whether an agent was rational in reconsidering/not reconsidering a resolution at the time of action should be determined by whether nonreflective tendencies or habits regarding reconsideration/nonreconsideration that it is generally (in the long run) reasonable for the agent to have would on balance yield reconsideration/nonreconsideration. However, Holton but not Bratman thinks the same holds for resolutions even in cases where the agent acquires no new relevant information between the time of making the resolution and the time for action. A general habit of not reconsidering unless one acquires new pertinent information seems reasonable and supports carrying through with a resolution to F (which is precisely an intention not to reconsider the intention to F in face of anticipated temptation and judgment shift about what it would be best to do). This explains why it is rational not to reconsider one's resolution in ordinary no-new-information cases.

But Bratman thinks that in extraordinary no-new-information cases like Kavka's toxin example (where one is offered a huge reward if one will on Monday merely form the intention to drink a toxin on Wednesday while knowing that the reward will be paid on Tuesday if one succeeds in forming the intention), appealing to the reasonableness of a general habit of not reconsidering in the absence of new information gives the wrong result; for there, he thinks, it would be on Wednesday irrational not to reconsider and revise. If that is accepted, the question for Holton becomes whether the rationality of reconsidering and revising the toxin resolution can be supported by appealing to other tendencies or habits it would be reasonable for the agent to have. Bratman thinks not. Holton's view on the matter seems mixed.

He takes it to be clear that if the agent were to reconsider, his preferences at the time of reconsideration would dictate that he should revise. But whether he should reconsider is, he thinks, a harder question. One tendency with respect to reconsidering resolutions that it is reasonable to have is to reconsider when the reasons for adopting the resolution no longer obtain; to go along with this tendency in the toxin case would be on Wednesday to reconsider since one already has the money to obtain which was one's reason for forming the resolution. However, another tendency it is reasonable to have with respect to resolutions is not to reconsider in the face of a temptation to do so that was anticipated when the resolution was formed, and in the toxin case it was anticipated at the time of resolution that one would at the time of action no longer have the reason for acting that one had at the time of resolution.

So is the upshot that it's just indeterminate whether it is rational of the agent to reconsider his resolution in the toxin case? I'm unsure that is Holton's verdict. Some of his remarks (p. 104) suggest that, since toxin style cases are so peculiar and so unlikely to occur often if at all, it would not be reasonable to want to have a general tendency to nonreconsideration in such cases. So there is no reasonable-general-tendency consideration supporting the rationality of nonreconsideration, only the one supporting the rationality of reconsideration, and Holton can agree with Bratman that the agent in a toxin case should reconsider at the time of action.

Even if, owing to the one-offness of the circumstances in toxin style cases, we cannot argue on the basis of its long run benefits that a tendency to nonreconsideration in such circumstances is a reasonable thing to have, it seems as though one who is at the point of resolution in a toxin style case should hope he has such a tendency. As Holton says, if we know that we do not have the disposition not to reconsider toxin-style resolutions, "it seems likely that we will not be able to form the resolution to drink the toxin at all, let alone do so rationally" (p. 104).

This raises the question whether it can ever be rational to form a toxin-style resolution. Bratman argues that it cannot, on the basis of his "linking principle", which, as Holton rephrases it, goes as follows:

I should not form an intention that I now believe I should, at the time of action, rationally revise.

Holton argues convincingly that on one natural interpretation -- where the content of my belief is spelled out as being that if I were to reconsider I should rationally revise -- this principle is an implausibly strong constraint on practical rationality (pp. 150-2). There are pretty clear counterexamples, and it makes it irrational to form even an ordinary resolution to resist anticipated temptation and change of judgment if one were to reconsider.

Instead, he says, we should subscribe to a weaker interpretation of the principle:

I should not form an intention that I now believe I should at the time of action, rationally reconsider and revise [emphasis mine].

Holton does not spell out how this weaker principle allows us to say that it is rational to form an ordinary resolution to resist anticipated temptation and potential change of judgment, but does not allow us to say that it is irrational to form a toxin resolution.

I think an explanation of this might be given in terms of a difference that (so far as I can find) he himself does not remark. In the case of an ordinary resolution, the agent's judgment at the time of resolution is that the change in judgment he might well make were he to reconsider at the time of action, would, in light of his current values and beliefs as to the future facts, be a shift to error. Hence it is rational for him in such circumstances to hope that his nonreflective tendencies will ensure at the time of action that he will not reconsider. The same, however, cannot be said for the toxin resolution. In that case, the agent's judgment at the time of resolution is that the change of judgment he is likely to make at the time of action if he then reconsiders will be, in light of his current values and beliefs as to the future facts will, not a shift to error but just what is called for. And so it will not be rational for him to hope at the time of resolution that his nonreflective tendencies will ensure at the time of action that he will not reconsider. This seems to be the crucial difference that makes it rational, despite anticipated judgment shift, to form an ordinary resolution but not to form a toxin resolution.

3

Holton's final chapter is concerned to understand the experience of freedom. We surely have such an experience and, says Holton, Samuel Johnson was "surely right to insist that we would need very good grounds before rejecting it as illusory." The chapter does not discuss the grounds for thinking it illusory that have been proposed by incompatibilist philosophers in the last several decades. (The only incompatibilist work listed in his bibliography is Kane's The Significance of Free Will.) But the chapter does manage to convey the idea that we lack those "very good grounds".

For instance, he describes the view that determinism entails that one is never free with respect to whether one decides to F as "an instance of radical skepticism" (p. 177) and likens it to radical skepticism about knowledge, implying that it is a view that no sensible person can seriously hold. Further, he dismisses the question "whether there can be free will, and moral responsibility, if everything -- including what we choose, and whether we stick to our resolutions -- is understood as being determined" as badly formed and resting on the false assumption "that we have a clear and determinate notion of free will, clear and determinate enough that we can ask whether it is compatible with determinism." It is disappointing to see these insinuations that incompatibilism can be dismissed and no argument to back them up.

To bring out what the experience of freedom is we need, says Holton, "to identify ways in which action is experienced as something agents instigate, rather than something that just happens to them as they look passively on" (p. 168). An incompatibilist who thinks that a free choice must be an uncaused event will want a characterization that explains how, as Holton puts it, "that experience could be somehow mistaken for the experience of being an uncaused cause."

He points out that the experience of choosing differently on distinct occasions when one has the same conscious beliefs, desires and intentions gives evidence that decision is not (or not always) determined by such antecedents. According to Holton, in providing evidence of that, the experience of choice provides evidence to its subjects that "they could have acted differently given their prior beliefs, desires and intentions." If this refers to a particular choice (a natural understanding), the incompatibilist will see it as making an unwarranted inference, precisely because, as Holton goes on to say, the experience described provides no evidence that "their choices were not determined by anything" and, on the incompatibilist view, if some other sorts of antecedents determined their choice then at the point of making the choice they could not have chosen otherwise. And for an incompatibilist, it is the ease with which one's experience that one's choice is not determined by one's prior beliefs, desires, and intentions can be mistaken for an experience that it is not determined by anything that explains how the experience, or, better, the experience-caused impression, of freedom could be illusory. It's analogous to how the experience of seeing nothing there that moves the balloon in the air gives rise to the impression that there is nothing there that moves it.

Holton's own account of how the experience of freedom -- the experience that antecedent beliefs desires and intentions determine neither what choices we make nor how much effort of will we make to resist temptations -- can seem to conflict with determinism (the belief that something antecedent always causally determines what our choices or exercises of willpower will be) is rather different. It is an explanation of how determinism could be confused with what Holton calls "global fatalism", which says that "if an outcome is determined to obtain, nothing can have causal impact on it." This is a rather serious confusion, as Holton points out, and it may, for all I know, be true that people are sometimes led to the view that determinism is incompatible with freedom through this confusion. I myself don't see how it would be easy to get into this confusion, but this may be because my thinking about that incompatibility has for so long been governed by a quite different (and, as far as I can see, unconfused) argument.

NDPR Galen Strawson, Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-11-25 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Galen Strawson, Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, Oxford UP, 2009, 448pp., $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198250067.

Reviewed by Sydney Shoemaker, Cornell University

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This brilliant and provocative book is about more than its title suggests. It contains substantial discussions of a wide range of metaphysical topics, including materialism, the notion of an object, the categorical/dispositional distinction, the subject/property distinction, and the nature and experience of time. But its central focus is on what selves would have to be and whether there are any. Strawson's view, similar to a view he finds in William James, is that selves are what he calls thin subjects, entities distinct from "full human beings" which, because they exist only when there is experience, normally have very brief duration. This is the "Transience View of the self". He ends by defending the view that each self is identical with the experience of which it is a subject and with the content of that experience.

The first part of the book he describes as phenomenological: it is concerned with how we "figure" ourselves in experience, leaving it open whether the selves figured actually exist. He lists a number of features that go into the way ordinary folk figure themselves, i.e., that go into what he regards as ordinary "SELF-experience" (he uses small capital letters), and then, using what he calls the "whittling argument" (supplemented with the "building argument"), pares this list down to a smaller list of features that are essential to SELF-experience, and give us the "minimal form of genuine SELF-experience". What he calls the Equivalence Thesis says that "selves exist if and only if there is something that has the properties denoted by those thought elements that feature in every genuine form of SELF-experience" (p. 54). Something having these properties would be a "sesmet". The second, metaphysical, part of the book argues that there are thin subjects, that these are sesmets, and so are selves. He is insistent throughout that he is a materialist, so he takes selves to be physical entities -- what he calls "physical synergies" (he hopes that "the word 'synergy' can do some work against the staticist tendencies of our ordinary conception of objects", and against our resistance to the idea that objects are processes and are dynamic in nature [p. 304]).

In ordinary human SELF-experience the self is figured as a subject of experience [SUBJECT], as a thing [THING], as something mental [MENTAL], as something single [SINGLE], including both single synchronically [SINGLE_S] and single diachronically [SINGLE_d], or [PERSISTING], as an agent [AGENT], as something with personality [PERSONALITY], and as something distinct from, not identical with, the organism as a whole, the whole human being [DISTINCT]. Of these he argues that PERSISTING, AGENT, PERSONALITY, and DISTINCT are not essential. The single compound thought element composed of the rest is SUBJECT OF EXPERIENCE-AS-SINGLE-MENTAL-THING, or, for short, SESMET. So the question becomes, are there any sesmets, and if so what are they.

Strawson takes the most common view to be that selves are entities that are both inner and persisting. Given materialism, the most likely candidates for these are "brain-systems", thought of as persisting neural processes underlying consciousness. But he thinks these fail to have unity conditions robust enough to make them genuine things, and so to make them sesmets. His own candidates, as I have said, are thin subjects -- subjects whose existence at a time necessarily involves their being subjects of experience at that time, and exist only as long as the experiences exist. He thinks it is true by definition that there are such things. (I will come back to this.) Further, he thinks they qualify admirably for being sesmets. By contrast with brain systems, "a thin subject . . . considered at any given time, seems unbeatable as an example of mental unity, and therefore of physical unity, and therefore as a candidate for physical objecthood" (p. 375). He takes the synchronic and diachronic unity conditions of thin subjects to be the same as those of the experiences of which they are subjects, and is drawn to the surprising conclusion that thin subjects are identical with experiences, and with contents of experiences.

This last claim exemplifies a tendency, exhibited throughout the work, to embrace metaphysically heterodox views. He holds, for example, that the distinction between things and properties is metaphysically superficial, and that "objects are nothing over and above concretely existing properties" (p. 305). He also says that "an object is identical with its propertiedness" (p. 306) (without explaining exactly what he means by "propertiedness"). This view he attributes to Descartes. He also holds -- and here he has my warm approval -- that "an object's dispositional propertiedness is identical with it categorical propertiedness" (p. 306). He agrees (almost) with Russell (in the The Analysis of Matter) that while we have immediate awareness of the intrinsic nature of our experiences "neither physics nor everyday experience of physical objects gives us any sort of knowledge of the intrinsic nature of non-mental reality" (p. 228) (he qualifies this agreement by allowing that structural properties can count as intrinsic). In a lengthy discussion he considers and rejects a number of theses, many of them associated with P.F. Strawson and Gareth Evans, about the conditions for having self-conscious thought: that one must have some conception of other subjects of experience, that one must have some conception of body, that one must conceive of oneself as being embodied, that one can distinguish between how things are subjectively and how things are objectively, that one must figure oneself as located in, and as tracing a particular experiential route through, a world that exhibits a certain degree of order and regularity, and so on. He also rejects the Empirical Criteria Thesis, which says that having genuine self-conscious thought about oneself requires having empirical criteria of subject identity. He is attracted by pansychism, although does not defend it here, and is inclined to agree with van Inwagen that "chairs and brains aren't good enough examples of physical unities to count as objects, when metaphysics gets serious" (p. 221).

Strawson draws heavily on the William James of the Principles of Psychology, although he sometimes takes issue with him, as in his discussion of the "stream of consciousness". He sees his view as akin to that of Hume, whom he frequently cites. Also frequently cited is Kant, especially the Paralogisms. Despite his materialism, he often cites Descartes as an ally, and in the last part of the book he takes seriously Spinoza's view that, as he puts it, there is only one object. Other writers cited with approval include Leibniz, Fichte, Husserl, Nietzsche, Russell, and Nozick. Although clearly an analytic philosopher himself, he is generally dismissive of established views in current analytic philosophy of mind.

I turn now to worries that I have.

Strawson allows that there is a good sense in which full human beings are subjects of experience. But apparently he thinks that full human beings are subjects only in virtue of having spatiotemporal parts, namely thin subjects, that are subjects in a more fundamental way (see p. 329). He thinks that the word "I" is ambiguous. Sometimes it refers to a full human being, while sometimes it refers to a self distinct from the full human being. (He sometimes marks the latter use by writing "I*".) He must think that this ambiguity thesis protects him from incoherence when he says things like "when I think and talk about myself, my reference sometimes extends only to the self that I am, and sometimes it extends further out, to the human being that I am" (p. 31). This seems to say that he is (is identical with) two distinct things, a self and a human being, which on the face of it seems incoherent. Do we avoid the incoherence by saying that second and third occurrences of "I" have different referents? But then what does the first "I" refer to? And how to make sense of "In one respect, of course, we are thick subjects, human beings considered as a whole . . . In another respect, though, we are, in being subjects of experience, no more whole human beings than hands or hearts" (pp. 328-9)? Surely "we" has to be univocal here, but that lands us in saying that we are, in different respects, different objects. What can that mean?

Usually it is human beings that Strawson contrasts selves with. The notion of a person only occasionally occurs. Sometimes he seems to equate "person" and "self", as when discussing a quote from Henry James in which he says he thinks of the author of one of his earlier books as a different person (p. 9) (implausibly, Strawson takes this literally). More commonly he seems to link "person" and "human being". At any rate, he presumably thinks that if persons are what he in one passage refers to as "Strawsonian persons", subjects of both mental and physical properties, but are taken to have psychological identity conditions (a la neo-Lockean views), they are distinct from selves as he conceives them. He says repeatedly that by definition selves are entities distinct from human beings (he says, p. 18, that "selves" can for most purposes "by replaced by 'subjects of experience that are not the same thing as a human being considered as a whole'"), and I think he intends that they are, by definition, distinct from persons so conceived.

This poses a problem, given his elimination of DISTINCT from the essential features that characterize SELF-experiences and determine what would make something a sesmet. Why shouldn't persons count as sesmets, given that sesmets needn't be figured as distinct? They are conceived as subjects of experience, and as single mental things (where all that is required for something to be mental is that it be mentally propertied). And if persons are sesmets, we needn't look for something "inner" to play that role. Strawson no doubt thinks about persons what he thinks about human beings -- that they are subjects of experience only in a derivative way, by having spatiotemporal parts that are subjects of experience. Nevertheless that is something he is not entitled to say prior to establishing that the best candidates for being sesmets are things other than persons. He may be considering this possibility when he says that "the point that SINGLE-AS-SUBJECT is a necessary element of SELF-experience leaves room for the possibility that one might have SELF-experience even if one thought of oneself as subject of experience in the whole-organism sense of the term", and goes on to say "But this isn't a real possibility, or so I claim: one must in SELF-experience figure that self as it is in the living present of experience not only as single-as-subject but also single-as-subject-as-mental -- however else one does or doesn't figure oneself" (p. 166). But while there are perhaps conceptions of the "whole-organism" sense of "subject" on which the whole-organism cannot be figured as single-as-subject-as-mental, it is unclear why persons cannot be so figured, on the neo-Lockean conception which gives them mental unity conditions.

I turn to the claim that sesmets, and selves, are thin subjects. This will be plausible, perhaps certain, if there are thin subjects. But I don't think we are given any good reason for thinking there are. What he claims to be true by definition is that if experience exists there are thin subjects. Certainly experience exists, and it is surely necessarily true, whether or not true by definition, that an experience must have a subject. But whence the requirement that it have a subject that exists only when it is a subject of experience? What Strawson says is that this "makes room for a natural use of the term 'subject' according to which it is a necessary truth, no less, that there can't actually be a subject of experience, unless some experience exists for it to be a subject of at that time" (p. 329). Now there is such a natural use; if Louis (Strawson's sample person) is sound asleep he is not then having any experience, and it is natural to express this by saying that there is nothing in what Strawson calls the "L-reality" that is then a subject of experience. But that is not to say that what at other times is the subject of Louis's experience does not exist when he is sound asleep. (Why shouldn't this be Louis himself?) Understood one way thin subject would be a "phase sortal", like husband. Something cannot be a husband without having a wife, but what is a husband can exist without having a wife. So there is no reason why a person or human being cannot at various times in its existence be a thin subject of experience, in the phase sortal sense, while at other times, e.g., when sound asleep, not being one. What Strawson needs is a sense of "thin subject" in which it does not stand for a phase sortal, one such that a thin subject necessarily exists only when a subject of experience. He has given us no reason to think there are thin subjects in that sense.

Strawson frequently interrupts his text with objections, printed in smaller type, and in one of these he raises what seems to be pretty much the objection just raised. To quote from the objection,

How about the thin conception of an eater according to which . . . an eater doesn't and can't exist at any given time unless it is eating at that time? A (possibly fat) thin eater is just one of those silly putative objects that scholastic metaphysicans like to play with. It is of not interest or use in philosophy, and your thin subjects seem just as silly (p. 328).

(A footnote at this point expresses "Thanks to John Broome, who was more courteous.") Strawson's response to this is puzzling. He says that his claim that a subject of experience is something that exists only if experience exists of which it is the subject "cannot by itself do the work of showing that the part or portion of reality picked out by the thin conception of the subject is (unlike the thin conception of an eater) philosophically interesting or important" (p. 328). No doubt he thinks that things he says later do the rest of the work. But whether what is picked out is "philosophically interesting or important" is beside the point; the point is that at best what is picked out is a phase in the existence of something that, for all we have been shown, may exist at other times.

Earlier in the book Strawson prepares us for his introduction of thin subjects by discussing how he experiences himself. While allowing that some people are "Endurantists", and intuitively "figure the self as something that has long term diachronic continuity", he himself is an "Impermanentist", one for whom

the Persistence Belief is not experientially natural . . . [and] whose natural, regular, lived sense of things is that the self they now experience themselves to be is not something that was there in the remoter past or something that will be there in the further future, although they are of course fully aware of their long-term continuity as human beings considered as a whole (p. 221).

He doesn't feel that yesterday's consciousness

belongs with my present consciousness in such a way that I think that it was I* who was there yesterday (I have no Connectedness Experience) . . . Nor do I judge, or feel, that it is I* who was there yesterday. On the contrary, I judge -- feel -- that I* certainly wasn't there (I have no Persistence Belief). . . . My memory of the experience of falling out of a punt last year, for example, has an essentially from-the-inside character . . . but it doesn't follow, and in my case isn't true, that it carries any sense at all that what is remembered happened to me*; to that which I now apprehend myself to be when apprehending myself specifically as a self (pp. 225-226).

I find it hard to credit these remarks. If someone tells me that he experiences himself as an immaterial substance, I won't doubt his sincerity, but I also won't believe what he says. I feel the same way here. I have no conception of what experience of the sort described would be like if it were not pathological. And in general, I am skeptical of talk about how we experience ourselves, about what we experience ourselves as, or about what the self presents itself as. This can easily go with a perceptual model of introspective self-knowledge which I think is misguided and which I don't think Strawson accepts. For my own part, the only sense I can give to "SELF-experience" is being in states with first-person content. Strawson would agree that some of these states have contents that reach into the past and into the future, and I don't think that we have been given any reason to think that their first-person-hood is different from that of those with present tense content.

There is the suggestion in the early part of the book that resistance to the notion of an inner self is linked with downplaying or denying the richness of our inner mental lives, something that is encouraged by excessive stress on what he calls the EEE (for "profoundly environmentally embedded, embodied, 'enactive', 'ecological'") aspects of our "experiential predicament as organic and social beings situated in a physical world" (p. 23). Those who think that

in normal human experience the external world occupied the field of consciousness in such a way that we normally have no awareness of the phenomenon of our awareness . . . utterly falsify the extraordinarily rich, rapid, nuanced, complexly inflected, interdipping flow of everyday experience (p. 26).

Here he seems to me to be attacking a straw man. One doesn't have to be a crypto-behaviorist in order to hold, as Anthony Kenny does in a passage Strawson quotes, that "'The Self' is a piece of philosopher's nonsense consisting in a misunderstanding of the reflexive pronoun" (p. 21).

Having voiced my doubts and misgivings, I should repeat that I found this an impressive book. Throughout the level of philosophical intelligence is very high, and the discussion is historically and scientifically well-informed, and often insightful and illuminating. The phenomenological observations, for example those in the discussion of the stream of consciousness, are often very acute. The writing is often brilliant. Despite the felicitous style, the complexity of the issues and the arguments make it not an easy book to read. But it is a rewarding book to read, even for those, like myself, who are unpersuaded by its central claims.

NDPR Alejandro A. Vallega, Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Language, Art, and the Political

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-11-24 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Alejandro A. Vallega, Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Language, Art, and the Political, SUNY Press, 2009, 205pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781438425092.

Reviewed by Thomas P. Brockelman, Le Moyne College

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Alejandro Vallega's new book, Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Language, Art, and the Political, is admirable both in its location of finitude as the key positive insight in Heidegger and in its effort, having admitted the cogency of Heidegger's technology-critique, nonetheless to maintain a certain distance from Heidegger's univocal understanding of Western History. Vallega's text also forms a significant contribution to the reception of Heidegger's Beiträge, his recently translated 1936 text documenting the German thinker's mapping of a project that, in hindsight, seems to have remained remarkably stable from the mid-1930s until his death in 1976.^[1]

More problematically, Vallega argues for the continuity of Heidegger's thought from early through late, a task for which the Beiträge is especially handy. While, from my perspective, the chasm of his response to modernity opens between the two periods, there can be little doubt that, in some form, the question of finitude remains a constant for Heidegger. Recognizing this, the initial four chapters of Sense and Finitude use the Contributions to Philosophy to link the analyses of "mood", "thrownness", etc., from earlier texts such as Being and Time and the Basic Problems of Phenomenology to the later work with its technology critique and accompanying announcement of the "end of metaphysics". For Vallega, as was certainly true for Heidegger from 1936 onward, the task of living honestly as mortal human beings -- i.e., of living in a fashion that acknowledges the transcience of our experience and lives -- demands above all a response to modern technology as "what's happening" in our world. Of course, what "modern technology" means is best captured by the preferred term from the Beiträge, "machination", rather than any word implying criticism of technological objects or strategies: what Heidegger, and Vallega, have in mind, is the basic "way of seeing the world" that leads to the development of technologies -- a mode of being which increasingly reduces everything to its "potential usefulness" in such a project of control: "the future depends on the urgent production of results and technological implements for shaping and making the future safe and secure through the expansion ad infinitum of rational quantitative productions of meanings and goods" (p. 15).

Vallega's Heideggerian emphasis upon "safety and security" already suggests why such a transformation of societies in the image of modern technology becomes an urgent problem for philosophers concerned with finitude. That is, the very mainspring of "machination" is an effort to forget a basic insecurity at the foundation of human life. To the extent that such control increasingly becomes the mania of our world, that world distracts from what matters -- even though life within it is the only possibility for any authenticity.

The difficulty posed by technology is not simply that it is a distraction, for, as a fundamental pair of glasses through which we perceive and even produce reality, "machination" or "modern technology" distracts us so thoroughly that it actively hides finitude. In Heidegger's terms, our age corresponds to the "end of metaphysics" or the "completion of nihilism" -- when the basic impulse of Western metaphysics to reduce Being to the presence of beings comes to term in subjective representation and a complete repression of Being itself, as that which cannot be so reduced. The task of controlling nature and human nature entirely occupies our time and attention -- so thoroughly that what evades such pragmatism seems no longer to concern us. Because of this hijacking of our concerns, our age emerges, as Vallega quotes Heidegger from the Contributions to Philosophy, as "the epoch of the total lack of questioning" (Vallega, p. 13; Contributions, p. 76).

While climbing rather far into the Heideggerian hermeneutic-machine, Vallega does also insist upon a limit beyond which he can't follow Heidegger. It's important to note that, according to Vallega, the task of acknowledging finitude in the age of modern machination produces two answers in Heidegger's work: first, there's the response that Heidegger articulates most infamously in his late interview with Der Spiegel, "Only a god can save us now."^[2] That is, to provide any real hope for change, the emphasis upon a univocal history of the West demands a similarly unified (and miraculous) transformation of its course, the equivalent of divine intervention. This is the side of Heidegger that leads interpreters to accusations of quietism and fatalism.

Secondly, though, Heidegger's repeated accounts of "machination" and "the essence of modern technology" circle around an immanent possibility for challenging technological domination. Modern technology and the language carrying its dominance both suppress and depend upon something like finitude: the mania to bring everything into representational control by making it conceptually present depends, unacknowledged, upon a temporality (among other things a temporality of language) that defies it. Because of this, Heidegger and Vallega insist that the emergence of a beyond to representation and technological instrumentalization belongs to the essence of technology. But this passage beyond modern technology is just as concrete, particular, transitory and multiple as the other one is unified and unchanging. Here the philosopher is, above all, an interpreter and a figure who can, in her labors, actively struggle with technological hegemony, opening multiple new paths for understanding an otherwise technicized world.

The structure of Sense and Finitude builds off of this tension between two paths to finitude in the technological age, embracing the latter one (the immanent possibility of reclaiming the poetry already in language) while distancing the author from the "fateful" Heidegger. Thus, Vallega's initial 3 chapters -- the first three "meditations" on Heidegger's Beiträge -- not only raise the problem of finitude in relationship to modern technology but also (Meditation 2) demonstrate how the apparently a-temporal domination of the technical always also carries with it an essentially temporal "decomposition" (p. 20), and show how such decay is an essential aspect of language and "mood" (Meditation 3). Following upon these, the fourth and final Meditation in the series, criticizes the other Heidegger, the one for whom "the thought that is coming is always already situated under the one destiny, the destiny of Western thought" (p. 46). Or, to be more precise, Vallega detects in Heidegger a paralyzing ambivalence, one which immobilizes him between, on the one hand, articulating the unity of the technological world's historical arc and, on the other hand, the "joyful" task of re-temporalizing and multiplying meanings within that world we tend to see only in its unitary presence.

Having, with the 4^th Meditation in Sense and Finitude reached the extent of his argument, Vallega reserves the rest of his book for essays engaging in the opening work that he takes to be the valid form of response to modern technology. After a chapter on Charles Scott's efforts in The Time of Memory to complexify our view of the Greeks, the rest of Sense and Finitude works along two axes. First, there is a part dedicated to the concrete operations of language (with essays on Plato's Phaedrus, on Celan's poetry and Gadamer's interpretation of it and, finally, on the Derrida/Artauld relationship). Then, in the final section Vallega returns to artistic, cultural and political issues to indicate how language's work can change those fields -- here with a fine chapter on Benjamin's notion of art today but also essays on the transformation of culture by Garcia-Marquez and Fanon and, finally, on Italo Calvino's inviting notion of a "politics of lightness".

It's worth focusing a bit more closely on the Calvino chapter, which also forms the conclusion of Sense and Finitude, for it both summarizes the strategy of the book as a whole and indicates what I take to be problematic about it. Vallega admires Calvino's literary strategy when faced with increased technological homogenization of culture, a strategy of re-importing the aesthetic playfulness of language. Story-tellers -- so Calvino and Vallega -- operate in a language-world where they need not claim a "heavy" transparency of meaning, a clarity that would erase the mind's capacity to draw ever-new connections between ideas or to expand ideas in unanticipated directions.

However, having suggested the idea of a politics that would operate in this key, Vallega then checks himself, suggesting, indeed, that a philosophical text such as his own cannot attain the quality to which Calvino aspires; he admits that "it might be almost impossible to sustain lightness and quickness" when the task is philosophical, a "thinking through" of "the exactness and plurality of words" (p. 167). Indeed, Vallega seems to admit that his own writing -- which must frame the problem of modern technology in also presenting its preferred answer to that problem -- makes an irreducibly "heavy" impression for all of its virtues. Or, to put it in a slightly different way, isn't Vallega's writing (and the writing of all those who follow this later Heideggerian path to finitude) cursed with a kind of self-hatred of the philosopher, an attitude according to which theoretical reflection is itself a burden to be overcome only in a "poiesis" alien to the representational discourse of philosophy?

Sense and Finitude, then, marks its own failure to measure up to "lightness". Its author admits that he himself has come up short against his aspiration. However, rather than asserting, as does Vallega, that such failure is itself a by-product of finitude, an inevitable price for thought to pay, I would suggest that the conundrum only holds so long as we accept the thesis that Heidegger's project remains constant before and after the "turn" in 1934-5. Against Vallega's thesis, which of course itself challenges the "traditional" Heidegger of Richardson, Pöggeler, von Hermann and others,^[3] I would propose the contemporary argument of Slavoj Žižek, who would have us believe that the appearance of continuity in Heidegger's work, Heidegger's continued use of language and categories of finitude from the earlier period, is misleading.

It is misleading because the very meaning of finitude changes in a fatal way after 1934. For Žižek, finitude as it emerges in Heidegger's earlier texts, from Being and Time through Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, is a specifically modern and radically subjectivist concept. What Žižek means by this can be seen in Being and Time where the analysis of Dasein's finitude leads inexorably to the theme of an irreducible decision -- that of "anticipatory resoluteness" as articulated in section 62. The insight Žižek finds there is a doubling of the merely "existentialist" ideas according to which, as finite, mortal beings, we can never know the truth about our reality. For Žižek, on the contrary, "anticipatory resoluteness" -- as an act of decision -- is a kind of praxical knowledge of reality, one affirming that the world "is not", that it has no totality or fixed order. As a knowledge only available in acting, Žižek takes it as radically subjective, as self-consciously produced by the subject precisely in affirming the impossibility that one might discover any normative measure in the world. In other words, a sufficient understanding of the earlier Heidegger requires that we take Being itself to lack truth, to lack another, broader horizon to which one might appeal for the way "things really are". This means that the ontological horizon doesn't primarily indicate "something else/more/beyond" beings which organizes them as a whole, but rather the immanent "finitude" of the world itself, a finitude beyond which there is, literally, "nothing" -- only Dasein itself in its subjective nullity.^[4]

By way of contrast, the "finitude" of the Beiträge and later texts is an effort to re-ground the human being in a more encompassing order -- even when that order is conceived in terms of radical historicity. We are finite, over and against what is -- not Being. The inevitable symptom of such a neo-medievalism is the demand to abandon an imagined "hubris" of modern self-assertion in a response to it that emphasizes "letting be" or attunement. That's why in, for example, "The Question Concerning Technology", any intervention in the destiny of Being is conceived as a kind of mimesis, a reflection and extension of the poietic structure of Being itself.

Of course, the reason for both Heidegger's own flight from modernist subjectivism and for later critiques of such a modernist residuum lies in politics, in the politics of Heidegger's Nazi period. Žižek argues, contra-Habermas and numerous Heidegger critics, that the problem in 1933 was Heidegger's increasing ambivalence about the modern subject, his subtle retreat from a language of extra-personal and extra-communal "will" to a discourse of "the volk" and its analogue in the isolated individual (See "Why Heidegger", pp. 230-25). In other words, for Žižek, Heidegger's failure wasn't that he went too far in his modernism. Rather, for him Heidegger didn't go far enough in his subjectivism -- to an insubstantial subject and to a collective irreducible to any substantial identity.^[5]

The relevance of the Žižekian argument for Vallega's Sense and Finitude is simply that it responsibly retrieves a philosophy indebted to Heidegger on finitude from the very "heaviness" that is the inevitable price for a thought claiming to transcend all forms of the modern subject. Žižek's tack saves Heidegger from himself, from his retreat to a sterile anti-modernism. Such an approach raises two further questions, though, queries toward whose answer I can only gesture here: first, I would defend Vallega's insistence that we bring together the question of finitude with an examination of the historical present as crisis. What happens to the critique of contemporary social and historical forms implied by this synthesis? What happens to "the question concerning technology" when we keep Heidegger's valid insight within a subjectivist understanding? As I have argued in my own recent book, Žižek and Heidegger: the question concerning techno-capitalism (Continuum: 2008), the result is actually quite encouraging. Žižek himself turns out to be a more interesting critic of contemporary social forms as outgrowths of fundamental choices belonging to modernity than was Heidegger himself.

The other issue that Vallega's approach in Sense and Finitude raises for any effort to separate off a radical-modernist Heidegger deals with what I might call the poetic or even (contra-Heidegger's own usage of the term) aesthetic dimension. While Žižek makes an excellent corrective to Vallega's (and Heidegger's) over-reliance on this dimension -- to the tendency to reduce possible responses to "machination" to the limits of "poetry" -- he is perhaps too successful in expunging the "work of art", as Heidegger puns it, from the labor of political change. Žižek misses the aesthetic per se, though his work is rich in examples from the arts and cinema. I take Vallega's insistence upon and sensitivity to art's "work", particularly as exemplified in his sensitive interpretations of Paul Celan or of Calvino himself, to be a useful starting place for a dialogue between two inheritances of Heidegger's legacy in thinking about finitude. It's in this context that I welcome Sense and Finitude as a valuable contribution to contemporary continental philosophy.

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^[1] Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe Band 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983); Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1999); hereafter, Beiträge or Contributions.

^[2] The phrase comes from Heidegger's famous interview with Der Spiegel, first published in 1976 but from 1966. "Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten", Der Spiegel, 31 May 1976.

^[3] See William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963); Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, tr. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1987); Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrman, Die Selbstinterpretation Martin Heideggers (Meisenheim am Glan: A. Hain, 1964).

^[4] See, "Why Heidegger Made The Right Step In 1933" in The International Journal of Žižek Studies, vol. 1.4, p. 22; hereafter, "Why Heidegger". See also In Defense of Lost Causes, (London & New York: Verso, 2008), Chapter 3. Additionally, my argument references Žižek's The Parallax View (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2006); hereafter, Parallax.

^[5]See Parallax p. 285. For a more extended analysis, see my discussion of Žižek on Heidegger's Nazism in chapter 1 of Heidegger and Žižek.

NDPR C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-11-23 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction, Cambridge UP, 2009, 206pp., $27.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521700412.

Reviewed by Rick Anthony Furtak, Colorado College

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C. Stephen Evans has been established for decades as one of the most highly respected scholars of Kierkegaard's writings, and his newest book offers a concise introduction to Kierkegaard's thought, with particular attention to its significance for philosophy. Early on, he concedes that "there are many themes in Kierkegaard as well as whole works that this book barely touches on or omits entirely" (xi). This is inevitable for any one-volume work, of course. The task of a reviewer, accordingly, must be to comment on what Evans does an especially good job of illuminating, and also to say a few things about what else might be highlighted for the philosophical reader of Kierkegaard, beyond the themes and texts that are emphasized by Evans.

To begin with, he is entirely right to point out that Kierkegaard's interpretation of human existence, although it involves decidedly religious categories, is not relevant only for readers who are already inclined toward religion (16). As George Pattison has noted in another recent book on Kierkegaard as philosopher, judicious readers ought neither to accept nor to reject his ideas solely by virtue of their affiliation with Christianity. We should first try to decide independently whether or not Kierkegaard's writings offer "a persuasive or adequate depiction of the human condition."^[1] One reason for doing this is that we cannot appreciate Kierkegaard's distinctive understanding of religiousness if we view his works through the lens of a prior acceptance or rejection of Christianity, as we already understood it before encountering Kierkegaard's writings. This would not be an appropriate way of coming to terms with an idiosyncratic author who shares the Socratic conviction "that individuals must discover the truth for themselves", as Evans observes, and who calls for a return to the "conception of philosophy that inspired the Greeks" -- that is, as the critical search for a general understanding of reality that could inform a life of wisdom (29, 4). This affinity for the spirit of Greek thought, which is evident in many of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous and signed writings, is being increasingly recognized as a key to understanding his work. Indeed, it may be that our attitude toward the classical notion of philosophy as a way of life will serve as a better indication of how much we could learn from Kierkegaard's writings than our feelings about religion -- although this last suggestion might be taking the analogy between Kierkegaard and the ancients more seriously than Evans believes we ought to do.

Evans characterizes Kierkegaard's portrait of human life as "open-ended" and "unfinished", containing a tension between the limiting conditions of our facticity and our boundless sense of possibility (20; 48, 168). On the one hand, we are contingent beings, born into a certain historical situation, made of certain genetic material; on the other hand, we each have the capacity to imagine endless ways in which our life could unfold from any point forward. This is the "basic incongruity" that lies "at the heart of human existence": we must somehow work out a relation to "the infinite and the finite" or "the possible and the necessary" (132). A brief way to describe the "religious life" is that it is one in which we have come to terms with our finite dependency, and affirmed our highest ideals, in relation to God as the source of our being (130). But Kierkegaard spends a lot of time providing a diagnosis of other, less satisfactory, modes of existence. Evans aptly conceptualizes the "aesthetic" life, in which a person resists forming earnest commitments or developing any "enduring passions", basking in "imaginative recreation" without becoming engaged in the human world in a wholehearted and coherent way (72-79, 91). Without unifying concerns, such a life deteriorates into a series of burdensome, fragmentary moments. Since "the human self is essentially relational", this life is nothing less than a failure to attain full selfhood or humanness (47). As Evans points out, Kierkegaard's portrayal of the human condition implies that "an understanding of human existence must include an understanding of what today would be termed our emotional lives", and that we "must have emotional intelligence in order to be wise" (21, 35). It is our passions -- that is, our "enduring, sustained kinds of carings" -- that give "direction and continuity" to our life among others (34). Now, all of this may sound as if it pertains primarily to moral philosophy, yet, as Evans perceptively notes, the affective dimension of human life has an epistemic significance for Kierkegaard, no less than an ethical one. Rather than seeking a "view from nowhere" in order to find our way to the truth, we must "stand somewhere and trust that our perspective, including our emotional 'take' on the world," can provide us with an accurate view of things (64). Furthermore, any beliefs we may hold about explicitly religious matters are not insulated from the rest of our rational convictions; rather, they can be located on a continuum with countless other beliefs that we reasonably hold about issues that involve some degree of uncertainty (160).

Each of the themes I have just outlined receives its due weight, and is given an articulate explanation, in Kierkegaard: An Introduction. I now want to consider aspects of Evans's book that I find less convincing. A couple of minor issues are never worked out with clarity: first of all, Evans repeatedly states that true religiousness will be at odds with the prevailing culture, suggesting that a religious individual will not be at home in his or her society (8-9, 192); he also claims, however, that Kierkegaard "shares the Hegelian view that a self gains its identity through relations with others" (74). As far as I can see, Evans does not account for how both of these claims can be true. Similarly, he seems to have conflicting opinions as to whether or not Kierkegaard ought to be classified as an "existential" philosopher: although Kierkegaard "does not fit well into" this category, he is "justly famous" as the father of existentialism and is the source of some of the most central ideas in the work of Heidegger and Sartre (x; 18, 52). In this case there is ambiguity in the title "existentialist", for which Evans is hardly to blame, and yet a more sustained discussion of how Kierkegaard's work compares to that of other more-or-less existential thinkers, including how it differs, would be helpful. The initial claim, that Kierkegaard is simply not an existential philosopher, is likely to give a misleading impression.

My biggest difference of opinion with Evans, however, has to do with his angle of interpretation in relation to the two books ascribed to "Johannes Climacus" -- namely, the Philosophical Fragments (or Crumbs) and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Other than Either/Or (the main source for his reading of the "aesthetic" mode of life), these two texts are the most often quoted of Kierkegaard's writings, by a wide margin. Religiously significant works such as The Sickness unto Death and Works of Love receive only five and seven mentions, respectively; by contrast, the Postscript is cited on 42 pages and the Fragments on 19, according to Evans's index (204). It is primarily from the Fragments and the Postscript that Evans draws his account of Kierkegaardian religiousness: most of all, from a discussion that occupies one-tenth of the Postscript and receives little mention elsewhere in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous, signed, or unpublished writings. This is the source of the distinction between "Religiousness A" and "Religiousness B", which Evans regards as an authoritative principle of interpretation for Kierkegaard's work in general. This framework determines the structure of several chapters of Evans's book, and it is what he has in mind when he claims, for example, that "Christianity does not accept the Socratic assumption that the truth resides within each individual, but instead holds that human beings have forfeited the truth because of sin" (45). In brief, "Religiousness A" involves the immanent "recollection" of the divine, in much the same manner as Platonic recollection; on this view, the human being has an inherent and yet obscured relation to the eternal. For those who take the "A" and "B" categories to be definitive, any account of religiousness that is not specifically Christian gets lumped into the "A" category, even if it does not view the divine as "recollected" within oneself in any sense, and even if it makes no reference to the notion of "eternal happiness" that is said in the Postscript to be a defining feature of "Religiousness A". Meanwhile, on the reading that Evans favors, "Religiousness B" is equated with Kierkegaardian Christianity, in spite of controversy among scholars as to whether "Religiousness B" as described in the Postscript might be too otherworldly and isolating to be consistent with the religiousness of Works of Love.^[2] By not pausing to acknowledge this controversy, Evans presents his reading as the only correct or plausible reading, and he justifies it not by demonstrating that it is consistent with the rest of Kierkegaard's religious works, but by appealing to the intentions of the author. He accepts the assumption "that Climacus' descriptions of Christianity are ones that Kierkegaard himself endorses", and the sort of evidence he cites in favor of this is that the books ascribed to Climacus also have Kierkegaard's own name on the title page as "editor" (140, see also 32; 27). Thus, if we wish to read "Kierkegaard's authorship as a whole in light of his declared intentions", then it is safe to assume that Climacus is speaking for Kierkegaard at every step (15). What about the intention, declared unequivocally in his own voice, that we should not identify Kierkegaard himself with his pseudonyms? To his credit, Evans makes note of this request, but nonetheless he often collapses the distinction between Kierkegaard and one of his pseudonymous voices, insisting that there is no important division between them (25).

If this is a shortcoming of Evans's approach, it is not one that comprehensively undercuts the argument of his largely reliable book, and it does not outweigh the book's many virtues. My reason for lingering on this theme is that it represents a major point of contention among readers of Kierkegaard. Evans alludes to this when he distinguishes his more straightforward reading from the "radical postmodern view" of those who take a superficial interest in Kierkegaard's literary strategies (which can provide a field day for Derridean or Lacanian analysts of language and its indeterminacies) without submitting themselves to the risk of "being challenged" about "issues of ultimate importance" (12-13). Now, Evans is certainly right that Kierkegaard's texts make a personal and direct appeal to their reader, provoking him or her to think about urgent questions, and to deny this would be to miss the point altogether. But he is wrong to make it sound as if one must either take a fairly dogmatic view of "what Kierkegaard hoped we would learn from his texts" or else be a mere dilettante with no sincere interest in learning from his work (16). In other words, we don't have to choose between holding that a pseudonymous author such as Johannes Climacus is always enunciating views that Kierkegaard himself would endorse and dismissing the Concluding Unscientific Postscript as a rhetorical parody devoid of serious content. Like many other pseudonymous works, this text does include many claims with which Kierkegaard would agree -- as evidenced by the fact that he does, in his own voice, make a number of remarks that are echoed or anticipated on the pages ascribed to Johannes Climacus. Yet when Climacus says things that are not repeated elsewhere in Kierkegaard's writings, or that are sharply at odds with statements made by Kierkegaard himself, then we need to figure out how to make sense of this. Furthermore, this kind of difficulty is not confined to our interpretation of the pseudonyms. As is the case with many other philosophical authors, Kierkegaard (in his own voice) often makes claims that are in conflict with other claims he has made before, either because he has not worked out a consistent position or because his position has changed over time. It is true that Kierkegaard considered himself a religious author until the end of his life, as Evans points out, but this does not settle the question of whether the religious writings from the last two years of Kierkegaard's life are consistent with his earlier works (10-11). A look at those late writings may reveal that in many respects they are not consistent, regardless of what the author may have said about them.

Kierkegaard is a literary philosopher just as surely as he is a religious philosopher, and paying attention to the literary devices employed by his texts should not disqualify a person from being open to their transformative potential. Indeed, it may be a condition of taking these texts, and the way in which they challenge us as human beings, seriously. If we rely too much on a "top-down" appeal to the intentions of the creator, as if these could dictate a single authoritative interpretation, then we may reduce a work to something less than it is. Evans does not wish to do this to Kierkegaard's rich and complex writings, but he might have reminded us more often that he is telling only one side of the story, or that there are more stories to be told about these texts than the one that he is offering. To give just one more example, one can agree with Evans that Works of Love advocates a "divine command" theory of ethics, while wishing that he had said more about other readings that he cites as providing a complement to his own (182-183). Works of Love is a promising resource for the philosopher interested in moral perception, and it contains a number of highly suggestive remarks that hint at a fundamental ontology of human being as grounded, not in Sorge, but in agapê. To return to a point that I made in my opening paragraph, many of my more qualified remarks on Kierkegaard: An Introduction are nothing more than attempts to stress some of what else might have been said in what is admittedly a selective monograph. Evans has succeeded at telling us much of the truth about Kierkegaard's thought, but no volume on this topic could honestly swear to tell the "whole truth". That is due to the "dazzling" variety of Kierkegaard's writings, as well as the fact that he often uses familiar terms in unconventional ways (2). All of these features conspire to resist a single interpretation. So, rather than allowing this to sound like faint praise of Evans's book, I would prefer to view it as a tribute to Kierkegaard's work.

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^[1] George Pattison, The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2005), 165.

^[2] This is hardly a "fringe" position, either: one needs to look no further than Merold Westphal's discussion of Søren Kierkegaard in the online Encyclopedia Britannica [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/317503/Soren-Kierkegaard/271899/Three-dimensions-of-the-religious-life] in order to find a defense of the idea that a "Religiousness C" is endorsed in some of Kierkegaard's religious writings, including The Sickness unto Death, and that it differs significantly from either "A" or "B" as outlined in the Postscript. See also Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1996), 197ff.