NDPR Mark Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-07-02 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Mark Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 250pp., $29.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521739122.

Reviewed by Stephan Käufer, Franklin & Marshall College

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This volume collects eight previously published and two new essays Mark Wrathall has written on the topics of truth, language, and history in the work of the later Heidegger. This body of work is an astonishing achievement. Wrathall's writing is clear and comprehensive, ranging across virtually all of Heidegger's collected works. The essays are full of illuminating examples and draw with equal expertise on the history of philosophy and the literary and religious contexts that inform Heidegger's writing. Wrathall's overall interpretation of Heidegger's work is crystal clear, compelling, and relevant. Every philosopher interested in Heidegger should read this book.

Wrathall's work provides a much need roadmap to Heidegger's later work. "Later Heidegger" refers to views worked out after Being and Time. Beginning in the 1930s Heidegger no longer focuses on the phenomenology of individual existence. Instead, he turns to broader themes about the history of being, i.e., the different ways humans have experienced the being of entities, the nature of language, and the receding role of the divine in our technological age. Around the same time Heidegger also adopts novel styles of doing philosophy. He interprets paintings, poetry, and the pre-Socratics, and he often ventures poetical uses of language in his own writing. For almost half a century he produces essays, talks, letters, dialogues, and lecture notes, but no real book that sums up his views.

Clear philosophical interpretations of "early Heidegger," in particular of Being and Time, have been available for more than two decades now, and a generation of interpreters has produced excellent scholarship on Heidegger's existential analytic and its implications for the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, the philosophy of perception, and related fields. Later Heidegger, however, has largely resisted fruitful interpretations. In part this is because Heidegger's topics are so broad and abstract, and because he frequently uses language in unconventional ways. Further, the lack of a single, sustained authoritative text requires scholars to piece together a view from lecture notes and essays. Most significantly, there are some basic misunderstandings that impede progress towards successful interpretations. One reason why Wrathall's essays are so important is that he patiently and convincingly clears up some of these basic misunderstandings.

The first of these has to do with the "turning." Heidegger himself uses this word to characterize the shift in his philosophy from the existential analytic to the history of being. Reading too much into this "turning" has undermined the sense of continuity between the early and the later work and reinforced the impression that while Being and Time is at grips with fairly standard philosophical concerns, the later Heidegger is pursuing something different and mysterious, such as a cultural history or a substitute for religion.

Wrathall's sustained focus on unconcealment makes clear just how much continuity there is between Heidegger's early and later work. Heidegger uses this term as a translation of the Greek alêtheia in his analyses of logos and truth in Being and Time, and he returns to it many times in his later work. Most importantly, unconcealment is not merely one concern or topic among many that Heidegger continues to be interested in, but, as Wrathall rightly emphasizes, it is a notion that gathers and organizes Heidegger's philosophical thoughts throughout his career. "In my view," Wrathall writes, "Heidegger's thought develops less in starts and stops and dramatic turnings, and more as a gradual recognition of the implications of pursuing an ontology of unconcealment." (p. 4)

An ontology of unconcealment here means a description and analysis of the broad contexts in which entities show up as meaningful to us, as well as the conditions under which such contexts, or worlds, emerge and fade. The existential analytic of Being and Time, thus, is an ontology of unconcealment, insofar as it works out the conditions of intelligibility of entities such as the famous hammer. Heidegger's later views about the history or epochs of being, or about the role of technology, art, and the divine in structuring the intelligibility of the world, also articulate an ontology of the meaningfulness of entities and worlds and hence operate within the same conceptual frame.

As Wrathall convincingly demonstrates, then, unconcealment turns out to be the fundamental notion that binds together Heidegger's early and late philosophy and provides the proper perspective for attempts to understand the later work. Most philosophers who have addressed Heidegger's notion of unconcealment, however, have failed to recognize its importance, or even to understand what Heidegger means by it. Ever since a critique by Ernst Tugendhat in the early 1960s, unconcealment has mostly been seen as an untenable mistake that Heidegger made in his analysis of truth. This is the second basic misunderstanding that Wrathall clears up in this book.

As mentioned above, Heidegger introduces the term unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) as a translation for the Greek alêtheia. This is usually translated as truth, and for the most part philosophers have understood it in the context of propositional truth. Heidegger embraces that context, since he aims to explain the truth of propositions in terms of his views about unconcealment. However, it goes against the grain of theories of propositional truth to claim that there is a truth of entities and that there is a truth of being as such. Heidegger, however, does discuss the unconcealment of entities and being, thus stretching the concept of truth beyond its typical application to propositions. He points out that his use of the word is unusual and that he is targeting an "originary" concept of truth, from which the traditional truth concept derives. Tugendhat's critique, which has subsequently been taken up by others, asserts that Heidegger stretches the concept too far. In particular, Tugendhat argues that an account of the concept of truth must also provide an explanation of falsity, or the failure of truth. Heidegger's notion of unconcealment, however, does not address any such failure to unconceal, and hence cannot be counted as a notion of truth at all. This criticism is bolstered by Paul Friedländer's research showing that alêtheia carries the sense of propositional truth even in early Greek texts, undermining Heidegger's supposition that the Greeks had a more "originary" experience of unconcealment. Heidegger himself seems to acknowledge that he has made a mistake. In his talk "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," he states that "the question about aletheia, about unconcealment as such, is not the question about truth. It was inadequate and hence misleading to call aletheia, in the sense of the clearing, truth."

All of this adds up to the impression that whatever Heidegger was pursuing with his notion of originary unconcealment turned out to be untenable and that he consequently abandoned it. If, however, unconcealment is the basic conceptual frame of Heidegger's later thought on truth, language, and history, then this impression thoroughly misleads attempts to interpret that thought. Wrathall is thus especially careful to dissect the various ways in which the Tugendhat critique fails to hit its target. Most importantly, it is crucial to Heidegger's analysis that propositional truth is a comparatively narrow phenomenon. It is an example of unconcealment, insofar as propositions articulate features of the world and thus make them salient and available for our comportment. However, propositions are not the only way to bring relevant features of the world into salience. Heidegger is concerned to argue that for the most part we experience such features in propositionally indeterminate ways. He wants to use the word "truth" precisely in order to draw philosophical attention to such broader phenomena of uncovering. While this usage might be misleading to an audience that insists on propositional truth as a basic philosophical phenomenon, it can nevertheless be motivated by the fact that in colloquial usage a lot of things besides propositions are called "true" and that the philosophical preference for propositional truth is by no means necessary, natural, obvious, or uncontestable. Heidegger's own motivation for broadening the term lies in his penchant for what Wrathall calls the "philosophical use" of key terms, in which they are used to draw attention to phenomena that are covered up by ordinary usage.

One interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy that is especially indebted to the presumption of the turning and of the Tugendhat-style critique is linguistic constitutionalism. According to this interpretation one of the main tenets of Heidegger's later philosophy is that the being or intelligibility of entities depends on the language we use to refer to them and talk about them. Among other things, this view is supposed to make sense of Heidegger's famous phrase that language is the "house of being." Wrathall develops a clear, detailed and devastating rejection of linguistic constitutionalism as an interpretation of Heidegger's work. He shows that it relies on a superficial reading of selected passages, while ignoring much of Heidegger's own commentary on those passages. It turns out that Heidegger clearly and repeatedly rejects linguistic constitutionalism as a superficially attractive but completely untenable view. He occasionally uses it as a foil to develop his own contrasting view that entities are determined in a stable set of relationships between things and our practices.

Besides a commitment to a radical reversal in the supposed "turning" (in Being and Time Heidegger is clearly and uncontestably not a linguistic constitutionalist), and a dismissal of unconcealment as the basic conceptual structure of Heidegger's writings on language, this interpretation also requires a certain narrow-mindedness about what Heidegger means by "language." Astonishingly, given its supposedly fundamental role in constituting the things that make up our world, and given, too, the vast amount of complex and obscure discussion Heidegger devotes to the very question "what is language," proponents of this view take it as obvious that Heidegger here means a vocabulary-cum-grammar complex. But this is far from obvious and an adequate interpretation requires sensitivity to the nuances of Heidegger's attempts to try and frame the relevant phenomena at various times. Heidegger analyzes language throughout his career, under different titles. Wrathall masterfully traces the development of his view, while underscoring the basic commonality between Heidegger's analyses of discourse (Rede) in Being and Time and language (Sprache) and saying (Sage) in his later work.

I have pointed out some of Wrathall's deep criticisms of entrenched mistakes in the literature on later Heidegger. By themselves these criticisms already make this a very important book that substantially advances scholarship on later Heidegger. However, the positive achievements of this book are even more impressive. Throughout Wrathall exhibits exceptional insight into the subtleties of Heidegger's thought. He provides good translations and examples, and above all he is able to render and explain the substance of Heidegger's claims that are elusive even in the original. For example, to capture the substance of his view on truth as unconcealment, Heidegger appeals to the etymology of "truth" and "essence" and forges phrases such as "the essence of truth is the truth of essencing." And to organize his analysis of the structure of world-disclosure in our technological age, Heidegger formulates the "fourfold," in which earth, sky, mortals, and gods intertwine. These, and similarly obscure phrases, have posed substantial interpretative challenges and reinforced the view that the later Heidegger deals in mysticism, not philosophy. In Wrathall's thoughtful analysis Heidegger's phrases turn into clear and compelling views on the conditions of the intelligibility of our world. "Essencing" refers to the ways in which our practices stabilize and maintain relationships between entities so that they can become salient in our engagement. And the fourfold, refreshingly, should be taken quite literally as the conditions for leading meaningful lives given by the environment, celestial cycles, growth and mortality, and the experiences of the sacred.

The same fine phenomenological sensibility also shines in Wrathall's interpretation of perceptual errors. Cases such as optical illusions, or simply seeing something in a mistaken way, provide familiar and compelling examples of our meaningful engagement with the world that is not yet propositionally determinate. Misperceptions do not consist of false propositional content, because they do not have propositional content at all. In perception we take up a bodily attitude towards the object of perception in the context of some purposive worldly project. Misperceptions consist of attitudes that do not enable us to achieve the goals in terms of which we have the perception in the first place. Since Heidegger's analyses of perception are few and short, Wrathall here goes significantly beyond Heidegger and draws on Merleau-Ponty in arguing that perceptual failures are best explained in terms of practical success conditions, unlike those of beliefs.

There are many more instances of rich examples and fascinating discussion in these essays. As I said above, every philosopher interested in Heidegger should read this book. It is an outstanding and inspiring guide through Heidegger's later work.

NDPR Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, Dan Zahavi (eds.), Self, No-Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-07-01 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi (eds.), Self, No-Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions, Oxford University Press, 2011, 337pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199593804.

Reviewed by Robert J. Howell, Southern Methodist University

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Self, No-Self? is a welcome product of a rare endeavor: the attempt to bring insights from diverse schools of thought to bear on a question of deep philosophical interest. The question, as the title suggests, is whether or not there is a self. It's fairly common knowledge that this has been addressed by Western philosophers as diverse as Hume, Kant, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Dennett. Most schooled in parts of that tradition also have a passing sense that the topic is central to various schools of Buddhism and perhaps some other ancient doctrines of the East. But few have paid those schools more than lip-service. The editors of this volume, and the contributors to it, do us a significant service by beginning to remedy this neglect. Drawing upon considerations from various schools of Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science, the papers in Self, No-Self? cannot fail to advance both the reader's understanding of the issues at play and her grasp of the history of the non-Western approaches to those issues.

Although the self is the main focus of this collection, students of the nature and structure of consciousness will find much food for thought. There is a great deal of discussion, for example, of the "reflexivity thesis" that all consciousness is consciousness of itself. Too often this thesis is presented as an uncontroversial datum, but in this collection arguments are given for and against it, most explicitly in the papers by Evan Thompson (for) and Mark Siderits (against). In addition, there is related work on issues of time consciousness, drawing from work by Husserl, Dainton, and others, and an illuminating discussion of self-knowledge by Galen Strawson. These issues are not asides. It is a virtue of this collection that it draws attention to the connection between the study of the self and subjectivity and the issues of the nature of consciousness.

Hunters of the self often differ in the definition of their quarry. For this reason it's often difficult to get a grasp on what is at issue in debates about the existence of the self. Are we asking whether there is a soul, or some substantival ego? Are we asking whether there is a subject of experiences? Whether there are persons? Are we asking whether "I" refers, or whether "I"-statements are true? Complications multiply because philosophers also differ about what is required for something to exist. If x is reducible to y, does x exist? Must x be a "fundamental" constituent of reality? Relatedly, some denials of the self are motivated by the sense that there is something particularly elusive or illusory about the self, but others are motivated by a general commitment to a sort of metaphysical reductionism or mereological nihilism. This generates different sorts of theses. Some forms of Buddhism, for example, think that there is no self, but they also think there are no tables because everything is ultimately a manifestation of underlying flux. Denying a self for these reasons is quite different than denying it for the reasons of Sartre or Dennett.

These issues trouble the debate about the self, and the problem becomes particularly pronounced in a collection of articles such as this one. While the editors' introduction provides some help, there is sometimes the sense that the authors -- or the schools they represent -- are speaking past one another and that many issues are terminological. Even those who claim to be denying the existence of a self -- Miri Albahari, Joel Krueger, and Georges Dreyfus, for example -- agree that there is a "witness consciousness" or some other form of "minimal self." It becomes difficult to see, sometimes, how this differs from the view of Dan Zahavi or Galen Strawson who believe there is a self, though not necessarily an enduring substance outside of the stream of consciousness. All the authors, excepting perhaps Siderits, seem to admit that there is something corresponding to "I" even if it is little more than self-aware conscious states. One could be forgiven for wondering what is at stake. In fact, I think, the Buddhists have an answer that is articulated by Albahari, Wolfgang Fasching, and others: the noxious notion of self is not the thin, witness-consciousness, but the sense of self that arises from a process of appropriating objects, states, and situations as "mine." There is also the related issue, emphasized in the article by Thompson, of whether or not the self endures or whether it is simply a locus of the synchronic unity of consciousness. So despite the initial sense of confusion, the diverse approaches of the authors can bear fruit for the careful reader by helping him disentangle some of the issues that tend to get lumped together under the general question of "self."

The inclusion of diverse traditions should be praised, but it does not come without expense. Phenomenology, analytic philosophy, Buddhism, and Indian philosophy all have their various jargons and when they come together in a paragraph one can begin to choke on the soup. (If you find phenomenological terminology obscure, there is nothing like a little Sanskrit to leaven the mix.) One also suspects that some of these bedfellows are too strange to be in the same inn. Damasio, Dennett, and Metzinger certainly seem to be saying things that resonate with the doctrines of, say, Advaita Vedānta, but I'm not sure that their concepts of consciousness (or streams of consciousness) are similar enough for the comparison to be more than superficial. Finally, as a Westerner rather ignorant of other traditions, I must admit that keeping track of all the different schools of thought (Yogācāra, Abhidharma, Mādhyamika, etc.) as well as all the teachers of those schools (Śaṅkara, Vasubandhu, etc.) was difficult. It's ultimately worth it, since the other side of this neophyte's lament is that I have a new drive to familiarize myself with these canons. But it does make for a more challenging read.

The arguments of the eleven articles in Self, No-Self? are so numerous that it would be a challenge to attempt a succinct summary, though there does seem to be a common thread that is worth questioning. Even when authors are defending the existence of a self, as do Strawson and Zahavi, there seems to be a sort of anti-realism about the self such that it is not the sort of thing that can extend beyond first-personal consciousness of it. While it does seem plausible that a creature must be capable of a first-person perspective to be said to have a self, and it further seems that such a perspective is bound up with some form of phenomenal consciousness, this conception of the self doesn't preclude its being something that extends beyond this perspective. If such a realism can't be blocked, the acknowledgment of a minimal self is a dangerous first step to the recognition of the noxious, more full-blooded sort of self Buddhism wishes to dismiss. In other words, if the authors defending no-self views are comfortable with admitting something like a minimal self, they must block a realism about the self which holds that the "minimal self" is just the minimal grasp of the self which nonetheless extends beyond the first-person perspective on it. Of course, this possibility will not daunt the no-self theorist who also doesn't believe in brains; the pillar of their argument will now be their mereological nihilism which goes largely undefended.

Although there is much to quibble with here and there in the various pieces comprising Self, No-Self?, few philosophers interested in the self and consciousness will walk away empty-handed. It's a welcome addition to the recent books bringing the issue of the self back to the fore of philosophy of mind, and it offers an appealing entry into some of the schools of Eastern philosophy that too often go overlooked in the West.

NDPR Alan H. Goldman, Reasons from Within: Desires and Values

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-06-27 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Alan H. Goldman, Reasons from Within: Desires and Values, Oxford University Press, 2009, 275pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199576906.

Reviewed by Sarah K. Paul, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Alan Goldman's Reasons from Within offers a folksy, accessible articulation and defense of Existence Internalism about reasons, the thesis that the reasons a subject has must bear some connection to that particular subject's motivations. This is opposed to all varieties of the view that one can have "external" reasons that are not explained by any of one's antecedent desires or concerns. The debate over whether reasons are subjective or objective tends to proceed by way of explanatory scorekeeping, and Goldman's book nicely lays out the terrain of considerations that pull in each direction. As is well known, Objectivism about reasons is metaphysically costly: it faces obstacles in explaining how reasons motivate, why they seem to supervene on ordinary non-normative properties, and how we have epistemic access to them. Broadly Humean views on which all reasons are derived from or explained by subjective psychological facts are generally thought to be explanatorily superior in all three of these respects. Goldman's allegiance to Humean Internalism is strongly motivated by its perceived advantage from the perspective of a naturalistic, parsimonious metaphysics.

The challenge is to flesh out the details of the Humean view in a way that avoids extensional inadequacy -- its Achilles' heel in the scorekeeping enterprise. If a subject's reasons are generated by features of her idiosyncratic motivational psychology, she is liable to be in possession of both too many and too few reasons. Too many reasons because she may have irrational, rogue, or trivial motivations she intuitively has no reason to act on; too few reasons because there seem to be agent-neutral reasons of morality and prudence that apply to her whether or not she happens to be motivated by them. Goldman's strategy in defense of Internalism is to bite the bullet on the Too Few Reasons problem while attempting to block the Too Many Reasons problem. This tactic is the reverse of another recent and influential defense of Humeanism about reasons, Mark Schroeder's Slaves of the Passions. Schroeder accepts the implication that we have many more reasons than we might have thought but attempts to rescue the compatibility of Humeanism with the conviction that there are agent-neutral reasons. Together, these two approaches leave those who are otherwise impressed with the theoretical advantages of Subjectivism in the fortunate position of reflecting on which (if either) of these counterintuitive extensional implications is easier to swallow.

The problem of Too Many Reasons arises because, according to Humeanism, an agent's reasons for action are generated by her desires: she has reason to A just in case A-ing would satisfy some desire of hers. But we intuitively have no reason to indulge trivial desires to stay in bed instead of attending an important meeting or uninformed desires to drink a glass of what is in fact petrol. Goldman concedes this intuition and proposes a modification of traditional Humeanism that excludes trivial and uninformed desires from generating reasons. The strategy is to claim that reasons are not directly explained in terms of motivational facts, but indirectly by way of rationality. On his view, not all of an agent's actual desires generate reasons, but only those that would motivate a rational version of that agent to act. This is a tactic we might call "desire-laundering," familiar from the work of Bernard Williams, Richard Brandt, Harry Frankfurt, Michael Smith, and others. Reasons turn out to be non-normative states of affairs that would motivate a rational agent by indicating how a certain action would tend to satisfy her desires and concerns:

S has an F [moral, prudential, religious, aesthetic, . . .] reason R to do act A = S is F-minded, and because of that, if rational, would be motivated by awareness of R to do A (34).

Importantly, it is essential to the Internalist view that this motivational fact is explained by some antecedent concern of the agent's and not merely her awareness of that state of affairs or a belief that it is a reason for her.

So much is relatively familiar territory. Where the rubber hits the road for Goldman's version of Internalism is the demand to offer an independently plausible, naturalistic understanding of rationality that does not itself appeal to reasons. This is the task of Chapter Two. The most intriguing and original element of Goldman's proposal is that we should understand rationality as the avoidance of self-defeat. According to Goldman, rationality imposes two main requirements on us: information and coherence. First, a rational person is relevantly informed as to what it would be like to act or not act on the basis of her present desires. This will include objective information critical to the satisfaction of her desires, such as that the "gin" she wishes to drink is in fact petrol, as well as more subjective information concerning whether a course of action will serve to frustrate her deeper concerns. Second, rationality requires coherence in one's motivational set, understood as the resolution of conflict between mutually inconsistent concerns, the specification of broader concerns into more concrete goals, the adoption of means to these concrete ends, and the general coordination of one's actions with an eye to promoting the optimal mix of desire satisfaction over time. The rational pressure to acquire relevant information and to achieve motivational coherence is in each case pragmatic: these regulative ideals contribute to avoiding self-defeat, "defeat of one's own motivations" (72).

A pressing question arises here. Can the Subjectivist coherently claim that all agents are subject to normative pressure to avoid self-defeat, regardless of their particular desires? Goldman's move is to ground this normative authority in the "natural aim" of action. The idea is that agency has a constitutive aim that defines the standard of successful action, such that failing to realize this aim is a failure internal to agency as such and thus one that any creature in the agency business must see pressure to avoid. The argument appeals loosely to a natural selection analysis of function and is best understood by analogy with the capacity for belief. Goldman claims that the natural aim of belief is truth, because "organisms (systems in which beliefs function) with psychological states that store accurate information about the environments in which they live (true beliefs) are better able to act and survive . . . in those environments" (67) and that this explains why organisms with brains capable of true beliefs would be selected for. With respect to action, the claim is that the natural aim of action is to satisfy the motivation that prompted the action. "Believing is what we do when we want to arrive at the truth; acting is what we do when we want to satisfy our desires. Since desires are as natural to us as beliefs, and since as motivations they aim to be satisfied, this aim is a natural constitutive aim" (71). The conclusion is that because action naturally aims at desire satisfaction, we agents cannot sensibly raise the question of whether we have reason to act so as to satisfy our desires and thereby avoid self-defeat.

We should be suspicious about the quickness of these arguments and their ability to do the needed work in Goldman's account. First, it is not at all obvious that, as Goldman puts it, "actions are successful when they fulfill the motivations that prompt the actions" (71). Fulfilling the motivations that prompt the action seems to me neither necessary nor sufficient for successful action. Not sufficient because of the possibility of deviant causal chains, in which the desired outcome is brought about via an action prompted by that very desire but where the action itself is a failure. In Daniel Bennett's example, an unpracticed gunman may intend to shoot an enemy, miss by a mile, but cause a stampede of wild pigs with his shot that tramples the enemy to death. Not necessary because an action plan may be executed perfectly and yet leave the underlying motivation unsatisfied through no miscalculation of the agent's. The aforementioned gunman might have every reason to expect that killing his enemy will satisfy his desire for closure -- his trustworthy psychotherapist has assured him -- and might pull off his vengeful goal in just the way he had planned, only to find that he feels no resolution after all. For all that, he has successfully committed the murder he intended.

Even if we grant this standard of successful action in the particular case, it is unclear why it is constitutive of agency to aim at maximal desire satisfaction, as Goldman needs if the requirements of information and coherence are to have much bite. Does one really fail to be an agent if one aims only at local rather than global desire satisfaction? For Goldman, the fundamental source of failure is self-defeat, so falling short of maximal desire-satisfaction must turn out to be self-defeating if the rest is to follow. But in what sense could an action that succeeds in satisfying the desire that prompted it nonetheless constitute self-defeat? Goldman's thought seems to be that desires can be more or less "deep" or "central" to one's motivational set, and that these deep and central concerns might fail to motivate at a given time but nonetheless have more claim to be the concerns of the "self." Acting to satisfy peripheral desires at the expense of more authoritative concerns might then be said to constitute self-defeat.

But this line of thought is only as convincing as our ability to cash out the metaphors of "depth" and "centrality" with respect to desire. The difficulty is that Goldman needs these to be purely naturalistic notions that apply prior to any laundering for informedness and coherence, since the pressure to avoid self-defeat is supposed to justify those rational demands. This means that he cannot appeal to the Frankfurtian idea that the self emerges as the stable, wholehearted desiderative hierarchy that is the result of reflectively imposing coherence on one's desires. Goldman elaborates on the notions of depth and centrality in several ways, none of which are satisfying. First, he says that deeper concerns are "broader," both in the sense of connecting to many other concerns and in the sense of being more abstract than their more concrete specifications. But this is not elucidating until we know more about the kind of connections in question -- semantic connections? Causal connections? It is not clear why simply being more abstract or connected would entail greater authority.

Second, he claims that the state of desire typically involves an implicit evaluative judgment in favor of the object of desire, and that these judgments tend to reflect the depth of the subject's concerns in that the absence of an evaluative endorsement of a felt urge indicates that the urge is unstable and peripheral. But what exactly could the content of such judgments be? For the Subjectivist, evaluative judgments cannot be the recognition of some objective value in the desired state of affairs, but neither does Goldman want to be an Expressivist about them. This leads him to say that the concept 'good' deployed in the evaluative judgments typically involved in desire is a primitive, indefinable concept (113). This may serve to eliminate completely inexplicable urges from consideration, but I do not see how it can do the work of privileging some legitimate desires as more important to satisfy than others. For this we would need these judgments to be comparative, and Goldman's definition leaves no room for this; for all he says, these evaluative endorsements seem to be either present in a given desire or not. The upshot is that I do not see how much of anything the subject is actually motivated to do will count as self-defeat and therefore do not see how the necessity of avoiding self-defeat can ground the demand for rational desire-laundering.

Does Subjectivism need desire-laundering to work in order to be plausible? Goldman takes it to be an advantage of his version over Schroeder's that we end up with no reason to satisfy isolated whims to smash the crockery or turn on radios. But Schroeder seeks to sweeten the bitter pill of Too Many Reasons by rejecting what he calls Proportionalism: the view that when a reason is explained by a desire, the weight of that reason varies in proportion to the strength of the desire and to how well the action promotes that desire. In place of Proportionalism, Schroeder proposes an account of the weight of reasons according to which a reason has a certain weight just in case it is correct to place that much weight on it, where the correctness of reason-weighting is an agent-neutral standard and not a function of the strength of the relevant desire. If the account works, it allows Schroeder to hold that bizarre and isolated desires generate reasons of so little weight that they ordinarily escape notice altogether. The payoff is that Schroeder is also in a position to say that even if a given agent cares less for moral, prudential, or aesthetic considerations than a virtuous person would, that agent may yet have reasons to act on those considerations that are far weightier than her miserly concerns would suggest.

In contrast, Goldman accepts a version of Proportionalism according to which the strength of a set of reasons is proportional to the centrality of the concerns they reflect and to the expected efficacy of the recommended action in promoting those concerns. This is a much stronger brand of Subjectivism than that defended by Schroeder. For Goldman, the genuine amoralist, masochist, or philistine will have no reason to act on more virtuous considerations -- and perhaps more relevantly, those of us whose concerns for virtue are less central than they might be will have correspondingly weak reasons to act virtuously. This is a notoriously unappealing feature of traditional Humeanism that Goldman simply accepts as true; a large section of Chapter Four is devoted to defending the rationality of the knave. In this respect, unlike Schroeder's, Goldman's book does not represent an effort to make Humeanism any more palatable to those with Externalist intuitions -- there are still too few reasons.

This leaves a great deal resting on the arguments of Chapter Five against the notion of objective value, a commitment which Goldman takes to underlie the plausibility of external reasons. The charges here are well known. It is difficult to understand how objective values could be independent of actual motivations but rationally require motivation. To explain how objective values could be efficacious in causing us to recognize them as such and in motivating us to act, a tempting move is to claim that values are realized in ordinary physical properties, but this set of properties is so heterogeneous that they seem to have nothing in common in virtue of which they all count as values. Further, Goldman argues that if there is objective value, then we all ought to aim to maximize it. But this is both implausible and impracticable, for there is no way to measure degrees of objective value independently of how much people actually do value things. Value is only apparent to us by reference to our own concerns and projects, and it is impossible to call all of these concerns into question at once: "the view from nowhere is the view of no one" (211).

These are old questions, and Goldman does not consider new answers to them. He claims that the debate over the objectivity of values has not progressed since Thomas Nagel's (1977) response to J.L. Mackie's 'queerness' argument and so does not engage directly with more recent contributions to the debate. We should agree that Objectivist accounts fare worse with respect to the metaphysics and epistemology of value, but a more concrete examination of Objectivist attempts to mitigate these problems is needed if we are to draw any conclusions about how damaging they are. In sum, if my worries about the positive view are right, it is not clear that Goldman's book substantively changes the score in either direction. But it is an engaging and comprehensive articulation of Subjectivism and its naturalistic advantages in our understanding of reasons, and is in this regard a very welcome contribution to the literature.

NDPR Stig B=?UTF-8?Q?=C3=B8rsen_?= Hansen, The Existence of God: An Exposition and Application of Fregean Meta-Ontology

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-06-28 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Stig Børsen Hansen, The Existence of God: An Exposition and Application of Fregean Meta-Ontology, De Gruyter, 2010, 193pp., $135.00 (hbk), ISBN 9783110245356.

Reviewed by Joshua Golding, Bellarmine University

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This book aims to accomplish two different but related tasks. One goal is to present and defend a Fregean approach to meta-ontology. The other is to apply this approach to a certain question about the ontological status of God. The book has five chapters. The first two motivate and present elements of the Fregean approach to meta-ontology. The third chapter applies that approach to a certain question about God and engages in a linguistic analysis of certain passages in the Bible. The fourth and fifth chapters revert to a defense of the Fregean approach to meta-ontology against certain objections. This book should be of interest to scholars of Frege, philosophy of language, and metaphysics (particularly the realism/anti-realism debate), as well as analytically trained scholars of philosophy of religion. Biblical scholars may also find chapter three interesting, though they may have difficulty following the discussion if they are not also linguistic philosophers. Indeed, much of the book is not easy to follow unless one is well schooled in the scholarly literature inspired by the work of Frege and Wittgenstein, including the works of Michael Dummett, Crispin Wright, Bob Hale, and others.

As Hansen explains, meta-ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the meaning of the term 'existence' and related terms, such as 'entity' and 'object'. The Fregean approach to meta-ontology is characterized by the notion that linguistic categories are prior to ontological ones and is also driven by what is known as 'the context principle', which states that the meaning of a term can only be known or intelligently asked for in the context of some proposition in which that term is used.

Based on this approach, Hansen develops and defends the view that the question of whether a notion might plausibly be thought of as an 'object' (i.e., something of the sort that might or might not exist) can be settled by appeal to the syntactic category under which that notion falls. It is sometimes claimed that the notion of existence is ambiguous, and that different things must be said to 'exist' in radically different ways. (Hansen refers to this as the 'disambiguation strategy' -- though perhaps it is more aptly termed, the 'ambiguation strategy'.) Such claims have been made about numbers, universals, and, of course, God. Hansen wishes to argue against this tendency and to establish a univocal meaning for the words 'existent' and 'object.' If a term behaves linguistically in certain ways and passes certain syntactic tests, then it counts as naming an object or an entity. Basically, Hansen claims that the category of an object is derived from the category of a sortal. A sortal is a 'count noun,' such as 'man' or 'tiger', which represents something that can be counted; we can effectively count how many men or tigers there are in the room (or in the zoo). Hansen recognizes that in some cases it might be difficult to tell whether a given piece of language counts as a sortal; but in some cases, it is rather clear that some piece of language does count as a sortal. On this view, to be an object is to be a thing of a certain countable sort. It does not matter whether in fact there should turn out to be zero or only one of the items in question; so long as it is in principle possible for us to intelligently ask and answer the question, 'how many F's are there?' we can safely say that the term F is a sortal. It follows that, given that F is a sortal, anything which is described as an F is plausibly regarded as an object.

While Frege and many of his followers applied this approach to address the ontological status of numbers and other abstract entities, Hansen applies it to a question about the ontological status of God. The question is whether it is plausible to think of God as an object or an entity, that is, as something of the sort that might or might not exist. Some theists have claimed that God is not best construed as an object, and some atheists have claimed that the notion of God is so confused that it cannot be taken as naming any object whatsoever. Utilizing the Fregean approach described above, Hansen argues that the notion of God is quite plausibly understood as naming an object. Basically, he claims that the use of the term 'God' and related words as used in the Bible and in ordinary speech pass the requisite syntactic tests for qualifying as naming an 'object.' The term 'God' exhibits the syntactic behavior of a proper name, and we are also in possession of a relevant sortal, namely, the term, 'god', by which we can intelligently ask the question, "How many gods are there?" Another way in which the Bible describes God is by the designation 'king'. This term too is a sortal. It follows that 'God' is plausibly construed as naming an object.

Hansen hastens to emphasize that his claim should not be taken to imply that there are no significant differences between God and such ordinary objects as tables and chairs. God is conceived as eternal and omnipotent; tables and chairs are neither. It is also possible that the type of evidence or reasoning used to support the belief in the existence of God may be different from the type of evidence or reasoning used to support the belief in the existence of tables and chairs. More to the point, Hansen readily admits that there are various types of sortals. Still, once a sortal, always a sortal. Thus the point remains that since 'god' functions as a sortal, the notion of God is properly construed as naming an object. Finally, Hansen notes that it is not his project to enter the debate about whether or not God exists, but only to clarify the meaning of the claim that God exists. The question of whether God exists is a matter that lies outside the scope of philosophy proper, which, in Hansen's view, focuses more on the clarification of the meanings of words, and less on settling questions of fact.

So much for a summary of the book. The remainder of this review contains a few critical remarks.

Hansen argues that there is a syntactic test for determining whether 'God' names an object. This syntactic test is employed on passages in the Bible and on ordinary religious language. However, it seems to this reviewer that many theistic philosophers would readily admit that, based on ordinary language and passages in the Bible, it is more than plausible to construe 'God' as naming an object that is purported to exist. In fact, some might insist that this claim is trivially true and that it needs no sophisticated linguistic philosophical analysis to realize that the Bible speaks about God as an 'object' that purportedly exists. Yet, one might make a distinction between ordinary religious language (including Biblical language) on the one hand and a philosophically sophisticated account of theism on the other hand. As Moses Maimonides wrote, quoting from the Talmud, "the Torah speaks in the language of ordinary men." After all, the Torah also describes God as having a mighty hand, an outstretched arm, and eyes that range over all the earth, and so forth. These locutions serve a role in bringing the ordinary man closer to some understanding of divine truth, but the philosophical cognoscenti know better than to think that these locutions accurately depict God. Rather, these locutions are mere metaphors for deeper truths. Thus, it could be argued that Hansen's entire project misses the point. Of course, in Biblical and ordinary language God is depicted as an object. The question remains whether an intellectually sophisticated theism needs or wants to do this, and whether such a move will succeed in rendering a coherent notion of God.

A second critical point concerns Hansen's discussion in the third chapter of the behavior of the word 'God' in the Hebrew Scriptures. He notes that the word 'god' is of course an English word, and that the Hebrew word which is often translated as 'God' or 'god' or sometimes 'gods' is elohim. Thus the first verse in Genesis reads, "In the beginning, elohim created the world." As Hansen notes, the form of the word 'elohim' is plural, yet in most cases when the Hebrew Scriptures speak of the elohim who created the world and who speaks to the prophets, the verb forms which are used are singular, with some rare exceptions. Hansen investigates the use of the sortal elohim primarily by taking up a close analysis of the passage in Exodus where Moses is confronted by an elohim who makes various claims about himself and gives various instructions to Moses. So far so good.

Hansen then takes some pains to try to show that the notion of elohim in the Scriptures is best understood as approximating the notion of a king. Yet, he fails to note that in Hebrew, the word elohim means a judge, ruler, or a power. The word 'elohim' stems from the root el which means power or force. Thus, in some cases the term 'elohim' is applied to a human judge; see for example Exodus 22:8-9. Furthermore, when, for example, the Hebrew Scriptures (as in Psalms 136:2) speak of "elohay ha-elohim" -- which is often translated as 'the god of gods' -- this phrase is perhaps better translated as the 'judge of judges' or the 'power of powers,' or, as one might say, the ultimate judge or ultimate power. Now, it is unclear to this reviewer how this point would affect Hansen's analysis. Perhaps he would welcome this point, as it seems only to underscore the claim that the word 'elohim' is a sortal, since one can intelligently ask the question, "How many judges are there in a room?" On the other hand, it is not clear if one can intelligently ask and answer the question, "How many powers are there?" -- especially if one has in mind all the powers that are in the universe. In any case, Hansen's discussion surely would have been more complete if it took into account the plain meaning of the word 'elohim'.

A similar point concerns Hansen's discussion of the tetragrammaton. He duly notes that the proper name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is the tetragrammaton or 'YHVH' -- a word made up of the four Hebrew letters, yod, heh, vav, heh. (The proper pronunciation of this name remains a mystery to this day; thus the common practice of avoiding any attempt to transliterate this word.) Yet Hansen fails to note that the word 'YHVH' seems etymologically related to the root of the word for being in Hebrew. Thus for example, in Hebrew the words for 'was', 'is', and 'will be' are, respectively, hayah, hoveh, and yihyeh -- these words are constructed from different combinations of the yod, heh, and vav. Again, it is unclear how this would affect Hansen's analysis overall. Does the proper name for God in the Hebrew Scriptures have a meaning related to the notion of being? Could it be that the term 'YHVH' means something like, "being itself" or "source of being"? If so, what implications might this have for the ontological status of YHVH or 'God'? Is the term 'being' plausibly treated as a sortal? Hansen does not consider these important questions.

A final and related point concerns Hansen's claim that "We never in the Old Testament find a move toward monotheism -- the belief in one god only . . . except what we might call monolatry or . . . henotheism." (p. 101) Presumably, what he has in mind is that the Hebrew Scriptures teach that there are many "gods", and that the Israelites are commanded to worship only one of these many "gods." Surely, the Hebrew Scriptures teach that indeed there are many elohim, that is, there are many "powers" in the universe. But perhaps the central teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures is that there is but one ultimate power or ruler (elohay ha-elohim) who calls himself YHVH (Exodus 3:15), who created the world (Genesis 1-2), who controls nature and all of its powers (Exodus 8:6,18; 9:29), who punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous (Psalm 92:10-15) and who is the ultimate elohim both in heaven and on earth (Deuteronomy 4:39). It is not simply that the Israelites are commanded to worship one out of many elohim; rather the character of this elohim is depicted as unique and supreme. Surely, this represents a move toward monotheism, if not monotheism itself.

NDPR Giorgio Agamben et al., Democracy in What State?

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-06-26 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross and Slavoj Žižek, Democracy in What State?, William McCuaig (tr.), Columbia University Press, 2011, 130pp., $22.50 (hbk), ISBN 9780231152983.

Reviewed by Ayelet Banai, Goethe University Frankfurt

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The collection of essays Democracy in What State? encompasses eight answers by leading radical and critical voices to the question of what democracy means today -- when everyone seems to be in favor of it -- if it means anything at all? Ever since Karl Marx denounced the revolutionary constitutions of France after 1789 for proclaiming false emancipation, radical thinkers in Europe repeatedly have found themselves in a conceptual predicament. Their finest and most promising ideas -- liberty, equality, republic, constitution, democracy and the common good -- became tainted with Conservative mischief. To make things worse, during the Cold War conservative-Liberals across Western Europe and in the United States were on the intellectual offensive, actively appropriating all of these ideas to themselves -- as if that political-economic order, which no doubt had to be defended against the Soviet Union -- was delivering on the promise of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emancipation-seeking radicalism.

In the engaging contributions in this volume, prominent radicals in social and political philosophy of the present, including Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, wearily reiterate the acts of this predicament (indirectly pointing towards ways out and ahead), while the essays by Kristin Ross and Daniel Bensaïd stand out in their perceptive capacity to explicate the very problem of thinking about the radical and emancipatory currency of democracy today. "What separates our own time from the extraordinary moment of Rimbaud", Ross points out in her captivating essay about the poet's prophetic illuminations of the intimate relationship among an appeal to false democracy, rampant commercialization, and colonial subjugations, "is something called the cold war and its ending" -- a period when the word democracy came under full control of governments in the Western world "leaving nary a trace of its former emancipatory resonance" (p. 97). Bensaïd, a dedicated political leader and intellectual of the Trotskyite Left in France until his death last year, pointedly concludes:

contrary to what is widely believed, Marx was not voicing contempt for democratic freedoms when he characterized them as "formal". . . The task of revolutionizing democracy, which became practical with the revolution of 1848, remains to be accomplished, if criticism of parliamentary democracy as it really exists is not to slide towards authoritarian solutions and mythic communities (pp. 42-3).

Readers of this collection would be compelled to conclude, possibly in disagreement with the authors' own judgment, that the challenge to democrats, who take democracy to be either a form or project of human freedom in social relations, does not lie in improving the overarching theories of democracy and of its official political rules, but in making actually and practically something better out of the existing formal conditions and material wealth in Western democracies. Disappointing as this conclusion may seem at first to social and political philosophers keen to employ their scholarly skill and effort in the service of democratic transformation, the collection is an exquisite and indispensible read. It lucidly brings home the point that emancipatory potentials are unlikely to be unearthed through devising ever more elaborate theories of what democracy is and should be. These potentials are far more likely to be discovered in persistent action, which would demand that we make the formal conditions of democracy face their own self-justificatory promise and do our best to make them live up to it. In this way, the philosopher's quest is reinvented and redirected.

Giorgio Agamben's brief introductory note is concerned with the ambiguous unity that modern western-European languages and philosophy inherited from the Greek, between constitution and government; between two distinct rationalities -- the legislative power of the body of citizens and the executive power of government. "What if it were just a fiction" he asks, "a screen set up to hide the fact that there is a void at the center, that no articulation is possible between these two elements, these two rationalities?" (p. 4) Yet this undoubtedly fundamental question has been examined in theory and addressed in principle by an impressive variety of philosophers and sociologists, ranging from conservative-liberals like Benjamin Constant to anarcho-syndicalists like Rudolph Rocker, via social-democrats like Franz Neumann, and from champions of private freedom like de Tocqueville to neo-republicans like Arendt. Wouldn't we, then, be better advised to try to carry into our social realities the results that a vast variety of theories of democratic power already offer, instead of asking time and again the same questions in theory, yielding evermore intricate theoretical constructs that overwhelm action?

What features as an open question for Agamben emerges from the subsequent contribution by Badiou as a foregone conclusion: a democratic government is an impossibility. Democracies today engage in a collective death-wish "for the democratic nonworld is a leakage in time. Consumption is consuming it" (p. 14). Badiou resuscitates elements of Plato's critique of democracy as creating a world that is not really a world and an exclusively pleasure-seeking subject, which accounts for "the profound stupidity of contemporary democratic societies" (p. 12). He argues that democracy, in the literal sense of the word "the power of peoples over their own existence" can only be achieved in the withering away of the State and in communism, posited as the opposite of capitalist parliamentarism; for "it is communism, which, as Hegel said at the time, absorbs and surmounts the formalism of the age of restricted democracy" (p. 15). While there is probably not much wrong with waiting for a salvation, it is important to take the essay for what it is: a yearning for the miraculous to erupt within history and redeem the philosopher and some mythical community from the toil of transforming a really existing society into a freer one. Whereas Plato and Hegel had divinity and a philosophy of history respectively on their side, Badiou's 'democracy' has no substitute grounds (short of the miraculous) to stand on.

In contrast, Bensaïd's inspired review of the achievement and limit of democratic theory is rich with insights on democracy's political action. It underlines meticulously the main challenges to bringing some of the great radical ideas about democracy into social reality. Bensaïd calls to mind the revolutionary wisdom, following Saint Just and Che Guevara, that "the 'force of heroism' and virtue of example were not enough to bridge the tragic gap between the constituent power and instituted democracy" (p. 31). No revolutionary, he reminds us, has resolved "this mysterious democratic equation, the puzzle which they have handed on to us" (p. 32). This essay reveals a key to the collection's vital illumination of the meaning of thinking about democracy today: it is not in the escape from contradictions into a better world of refined theory, but in the "impurities, uncertainties and wobbly conventions" of "profane politics" (p. 42) that democratic aspirations become meaningful. The purpose of democratic thought today is less in resolving long-standing theoretical contradictions in the idea of democracy (in particular the tragic gap between constituent power and institutions, constitution and government), and more in working within the contradictions -- within the tragic gap -- to find out what can be achieved within it.

The subsequent contribution by Wendy Brown brings forth some of the central conceptual contradictions and structures of power within which democratic aspirations must within. Brown discerningly describes the "frontal assault" that neoliberalism

as a political rationality has launched . . . on the fundaments of liberal democracy, displacing its basic principles of constitutionalism, legal equality, political and civil liberty, political autonomy, and universal inclusion with market criteria of cost/benefit ratios, efficiency, profitability, and efficacy.

If states, rightly or not, used to justify themselves as the "embodiment of popular rule", they now figure as "operations of business management" (p. 47). Under current circumstances, which coalesce and threaten to devastate democratic freedoms that once were without reach, the question of peoples' will to freedom becomes acute: societies that have enjoyed such freedoms do not seem to resist when they are taken away. Thus, Brown remarks somewhat pessimistically that "it is hard to imagine what could compel humans to the task of ruling themselves or successfully contesting the powers by which they are dominated" (p. 56). While it is hard to say for sure that democracy is still a possibility, she concludes, struggles for it need to "reckon directly" with "the powers destroying the conditions for democracy" (pp. 56-7).

Jean-Luc Nancy in the chapter that follows immerses himself in the refinement of theory: as democracy has come to mean everything and nothing, "the task of thought is to stop letting common sense pullulate with free-floating incoherencies the way it does now and force democratic nonsignificance to stand trial in the court of reason" (p. 59). The chapter is rich with insightful considerations about the non-foundation of democracy, its incapability of "being grounded in a transcendent principle" (p. 66), and its genuine purpose in forming "plateaus of transient equilibrium" among ends conceived and attained elsewhere (p. 73). Yet, it is the very perceptiveness of these considerations that highlights the limits of theorizing democracy today. The non-metaphysical turn has been at the core of liberal and republican democratic political theory for decades, most famously (though in different ways) in the work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. It is the task of thought then to understand why such ideas, initially radical, have come to be associated with mainstream politics, and whether and how it is possible to bring what is already known into what is being lived.

In the brief and vivid interview with Jacques Rancière that comes next, a similar move transpires. Equipped as always with splendid ideas about how to conceive of democracy, Rancière reminds us of the critical function of democracy -- being "the wrench of equality jammed (objectively and subjectively) into the gears of domination, it's what keeps politics from simply turning into law enforcement" (p. 79) -- and warns that it is a mistake to believe that everyone supports democracy today, even in the "so-called ordinary sense of the word" (p. 76). Here too, from the theoretical idea comes a message of action, in order to carry on "the ongoing effort to create forms of the common different from the ones on offer" (p. 80).

The two final chapters of the book, by Ross and Žižek, resume through different and illuminating means lines of thought found in the chapters by Bensaïd and Badiou. Ross revisits Arthur Rimbaud and the brutal suppression in 1871 of the Paris Commune as anticipating the repressive elements of Western democracies today: the elites' hostility to popular mobilization within, and the triumph of markets and commercialization within and without. She concludes that rather than a critique of the insufficiency of democracy in practice, a whole reinvention of democracy is necessary (p. 99). The laudable historical perspective of the essay, in respect to the transformations of the idea of democracy in the past two centuries, raises the question, why believe that a reinvention of democracy in theory, rather than in practice, is needed. Be that as it may, this historical perspective is valuable for both theoretical and applied purposes.

Žižek embarks upon the project of (re)appropriating democracy from liberal to far-left traditions of non-Soviet communism. He takes the revolution in Haiti and present-day situation there as focal points for investigating what radical democratic politics means today, bringing into view a really existing left. The (re)-appropriation of radical democracy, however, may well be more complicated than meets the eye, if Žižek is right to argue that "leftist political movements are like 'banks of rage': they collect rage investment from people and promise them large-scale revenge, the reestablishment of global justice" (p. 111). Moreover, he notes the suspicion in the Western left towards the liberal lines taken by protestors in Iran, who are seen as not sufficiently "anti-Imperialist" and anti-American (p. 120). Since the appearance of the book, uprisings and revolutions have spread across the Middle East and North Africa (including Syria and Libya, two of the places held dear by "anti-imperialists"). A move away from this mindset in the radical left -- which has outlived its cold-war origins for too long already -- is probably the single most important challenge on the way to appropriation of democratic radicalism.

Democracy in What State? displays the richness of radical thinking about democracy today, and is therefore a valuable source for anyone interested in democracy, theoretical radicalism, and their limits in respect to political change. The book's title implicitly draws attention to where this limit is situated. Theorizing about democracy within a State may have exhausted itself, opening up two possibilities: making democracy within a State happen; or thinking, if at all desirable and possible, about democracy beyond it.

NDPR Robert Kane, Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-06-25 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Robert Kane, Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 287pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521199933.

Reviewed by Alexa Forrester, Franklin & Marshall College

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Robert Kane's Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom is an exciting and ambitious book. Kane introduces and defends a "complete ethical theory" that represents a genuinely novel approach to normative ethics. His overarching theme is that moral constraints flow from the search for wisdom in the ancient philosophical sense, which involves both "explaining what and why things have objective reality and what and why things have objective worth" (170). The latter of these two goals is Kane's primary concern.

For Kane, the cornerstone of the genuine search for wisdom regarding worth is a moral principle that he calls the "Ends Principle." At first glance the Ends Principle looks identical to Kant's Formula of Humanity: "Treat all persons as ends in every situation, and no one as means only" (48). But it differs in how it interprets 'treating others as ends'. In Kane's theory, this requires treating others with openness, which "is to allow them to pursue their ways of life and realize their desired ends without interference" (35). Like the openness scientists extend to competing theories, openness to the lives of others is not an end in itself, but rather an attitude required for a genuine and effective search for wisdom. "The [Ends Principle] posits an initial attitude or stance toward persons . . . as a way of determining who is and who is not objectively worthy of being so treated . . . The initial attitude of openness is part of a search to find this out" (187). "Openness is a way of searching for the absolute point of view, not that point of view itself" (113).

Importantly, in order for one to treat all persons with openness in every situation, it must be the case that all other persons are treating each other with openness as well. For, one cannot allow others to pursue their plans without any interference if their plans interfere with each other. Thus, in order to implement the Ends Principle, we need to establish what Kane calls the "moral sphere" -- a state in which all persons treat all other persons with openness respect, according them openness "to the degree that one can do so while maintaining a moral sphere in which all persons can be treated with openness by all others" (35).

The Ends Principle anchors a theory within which right actions are those that maintain and repair the moral sphere and wrong actions are those that threaten and damage the moral sphere. But, as Kane notes, this is not enough to answer the question of how we ought to live. To complete the picture, in chapters 5-14, he presents his theory of value, which takes value to exist in a four-dimensional spectrum.

The first dimension is made up of basic value experiences, like pain, pleasure, annoyance, delight, fear, joy, etc. These felt reactions are either enjoyable or uncomfortable and are intrinsically good or bad accordingly. The second dimension of value "includes not only experiences, but also activities undertaken by individuals in the pursuit of plans, intentions, interests and purposes" (74). Value in this dimension is a "measure of the success or failure of the practical engagements we pursue" (74). Importantly, the second dimension includes the first dimension in the sense that practical engagements involve a succession of value experiences through time. Moving up the spectrum, the third dimension includes both the first and second dimensions of value, but the value here is attached not just to what we get from our activities and experiences, but further, "how they define what we are" (86). What counts as valuable in this dimension is relative to the cultures in which we exist, since those cultures provide the roles and standards which give meaning to our identities. Of course, one can always question whether third-dimensional goods are really worth pursuing. This brings us to the fourth dimension of value. Kane writes:

What might be meant by a fourth dimension of value is not so easily described and many thinkers would deny it exists at all. But while the existence of a fourth dimension of value may be controversial, it seems to be presupposed by much of what humans have had to say about the good and the right (95).

If such a dimension exists, and Kane believes it does, fourth-dimensional value is non-relative worth, in the sense that ways of life that are worthy in the fourth dimension have worth that should be recognized from every point of view. It is exactly this kind of worth that those who seek wisdom in the ancient philosophical sense are after. And herein lies a key aspect of Kane's argument: though one can never be sure that one's life is good in the fourth dimension, if one fails to show concern for others or treats them as merely means, one guarantees that one's life is not worthy in the fourth dimension, i.e., not worthy from all points of view. Thus, concern and openness are, according to Kane, prerequisites for a life that is good in the fourth dimension.

In a nutshell, a given state of affairs or experience is valuable if and only if it is valuable (i.e., good) from at least some point of view, in some dimension, and not trumped by being bad in a higher dimension. This arrangement permits a plurality of objectively worthy lives and does not require us to adjudicate one as better than another so long as they are mutually realizable.

One area in which Kane's position is less than clear regards the conditions under which one attains fourth-dimensional value. Consider, for example, a happy and not particularly self-reflective hermit who does nothing but eat vegetables and grains and tend his garden. He lives in a way that is valuable in the first and second dimensions, and is entirely benign with regard to the flourishing of others. Is his life good in the fourth dimension? I believe Kane is committed to answering positively. Here is why.

Borrowing the term "inscape" from poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to refer to the "what-it-is-like-to-be-ness" of a given conscious point of view, Kane writes, "Our ethical obligations extend to all beings with inscapes capable of suffering" (146). So it appears that Kane believes that all beings with inscapes are initially worthy of provisional concern from others solely by virtue of their having inscapes. And while it is possible for beings with inscapes to diminish their worthiness, it seems unlikely that the harmless hermit has done anything to diminish his worthiness, given that he is not interfering with anyone else's flourishing. But Kane also believes that what is of relative value to an individual objectively worthy of concern is thereby objectively valuable. He writes, "By the worthiness of their inscapes to be and to flourish, [individuals] 'raise up' something that is valuable to them from the mere relative value to something of objective worth in the universe" (165). Thus, because the hermit is worthy of concern and his vegetable tending life is valuable to him, his vegetable tending life should be "raised up" to the fourth dimension.

Notice, many non-persons may fall under descriptions similar to the hermit: beings who a) have inscapes and b) are accidentally benign with respect to the flourishing of others. We might expect the things these individuals value -- a squirrel's stash of nuts, a wild pig's nest, a bird's unobstructed flight path, a young child's collection of pebbles -- to count as good in the fourth dimension. But this contradicts Kane's claim elsewhere that "only self-reflective beings can reach the third (and eventually the fourth) dimension of value" (144). Perhaps this confusion can be resolved by interpreting "reach" in this claim to mean, "aim for and knowingly attain." Certainly a harmless bird does not know its flight path is valuable in the fourth dimension, even if it is. In any case, one is left wanting clarity in this regard.

Additional confusion arises regarding the scope of our obligations. Kane writes, "[The] moral theory of Chapters 2-4 focused on obligations to other persons. But . . . our ethical obligations extend to all beings with inscapes" (146). His language here suggests that you can wrong non-persons by failing to concern yourself with their inscapes. But so failing does not necessarily break the moral sphere, if maintaining the moral sphere only requires us to treat persons with openness respect. Hence, treating non-persons cruelly must be wrong in virtue of something other than breaking the moral sphere.

Though Kane never makes this explicit, I believe he is committed to the view that the Ends Principle entails not only maintaining a moral sphere among those capable of regarding each other with openness, but also maintaining (what I would call) a sphere of compassionate cooperation among all those with inscapes: that is, working to establish a sphere in which we can extend concern to each individual as much as is compatible with extending concern to all individuals. In fact, Kane sometimes writes as if extending openness to persons is just a particular way of extending concern toward persons (144).

In short, it appears that extending concern to those with inscapes is actually the fundamental obligation in Kane's theory of right. But this fact is obscured by his presentation: he devotes full chapters to explicating the moral sphere, he names his theory the "Moral Sphere Theory" (MST), and he often uses the Ends Principle as if it were interchangeable with the imperative to maintain the moral sphere. In contrast, he introduces the concepts of concern for inscapes late in the book, in chapters devoted to his theory of good, not his theory of right. These expository facts suggest that Kane himself may not recognize extending concern as fundamental. Even if Kane accepts that the Ends Principle entails both maintaining the moral sphere and maintaining a sphere of compassionate cooperation, there remains the question of whether maintaining the moral sphere is just a special case of maintaining a sphere of compassionate cooperation, or whether the two are independently motivated. Again, more clarity is needed.

The later chapters of the book are dedicated to contrasting MST with the most influential ethical theories -- including contemporary versions of intuitionism, Kantianism, consequentialism, and contractarianism -- to illustrate its significant theoretical merits. Many of these comparisons are compelling, especially because MST often avoids the problems and counterintuitive consequences generated by its competitors. On a general level, Kane deserves praise for being extremely diligent and well read, extending credit to those whose ideas have shaped his and offering thorough and charitable readings of his competitors. The book is valuable not only for the novelty and promise of its central ideas, but also its clear exegesis of other important positions.

The only shortcoming in this regard is a lack of engagement with the American pragmatists, particularly John Dewey, whom he mentions only in passing (204). There are two reasons that Dewey deserves a higher profile in this work. First, there are notable similarities between Kane's approach to ethics and Dewey's. Both start from the recognition that uncertainty in matters normative is unavoidable; they both frame philosophy as a method for proceeding responsibly in the face of that uncertainty; and they both urge ethicists to approach their work more like scientists, testing value propositions in experience. Thus both Dewey and Kane can be viewed as promoters (rare as they are) of ethical empiricism.

Second, Kane's theory represents a significant improvement over Dewey's empiricism in the following regard. Since Dewey believed the quest for ethical certainty was folly, he urged us to concentrate instead on resolving the specific normative conflicts that confront us as they arise, adjusting and testing our norms as we go. However, taking this approach leads to a problematic type of disenfranchisement. Our preconceptions about who and what matters ethically speaking influence how we judge the results of our experiments in living. So, in cases where those who are affected negatively by our ways of life cannot effectively resist or object to our actions, we may judge our value experiments to be successful simply because the ill effects are not borne by us or those who we happen to care about. Kane's emphasis on aspiring to wisdom, insofar as it requires us to evaluate our experiments from all points of view, rather than simply from the perspective of those who matter within our particular value frameworks, offers a compelling solution to this shortcoming of Dewey's ethical empiricism. Kane has missed an opportunity to clarify this genealogy here.

In general, Kane's book has many strengths: It helps establish ethical territory that is neither deontological nor consequentialist. It preserves space for both ideal theory and non-ideal theory, and provides a framework for understanding the proper relationship between them (49). It grounds and unifies common intuitions regarding prima facie duties and explains when and why they are defeasible. And its central moral principle -- the Ends Principle -- stacks up well against competitors, demanding responses from the field.

In fact, the Ends Principle is so compelling that the book leaves me pondering whether there is any way to motivate it besides the quest for wisdom. The worry here is that which attends any system of ethics grounded in a hypothetical imperative. Here the imperative is this: if you seek wisdom, you must abide by the Ends Principle. But what of those who do not seek wisdom, either because they believe they have already attained it or because they believe it is not important? Do these individuals commit wrongs when they lie, cheat, steal, kill, and otherwise violate the Ends Principle?

Here is what I think Kane might believe and so should say in response to such questions: everybody values something. But the confidence dogmatic individuals have in the norms and value frameworks that shape their ways of life is unwarranted. In contrast, one who seeks wisdom in the manner described by Kane is doing the best that any person possibly can to weed out normative error (just as scientists use the scientific method to weed out descriptive error), and so whatever confidence they have in their way of life is warranted. Such persons are doing the best they can to live well. Of course, the dogmatist is not likely to concede this last point, but this is only because the dogmatist has failed to appreciate that his confidence in his own way of life is unwarranted.

This leads to a final question: does questing for wisdom in the sense articulated here by Kane really represent the best one can do to live well? The jury is out, and more clarification is needed, but if the answer is yes, then it might just be that Kane has given us everything we could ask for from an ethical theory.

NDPR Scott F. Aikin, Epistemology and the Regress Problem

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-06-24 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Scott F. Aikin, Epistemology and the Regress Problem, Routledge, 2011, 207pp., $125.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780415878005.

Reviewed by Kelly Becker, University of New Mexico

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Scott Aikin's excellent book, Epistemology and the Regress Problem, is a thorough, engagingly written, and often humorous exploration, explication, and defense of a version of infinitism about justification -- the view that the structure of epistemically justifying reasons is infinite. While Aikin's proposals are bold, his aims are modest, given the reception of infinitism to date: "the baseline objective in this book is to work out a way for epistemic infinitism to appear better than obviously wrong" (ix). The book provides an overarching narrative to motivate infinitism, responses to many well-known problems, and development of Aikin's preferred variety of infinitism, a hybrid theory that includes foundational empirical support as necessary but insufficient for justification. With utter and all due respect for Peter Klein's seminal work in the service of infinitism, this book sets the new standard.

Infinitism is motivated in two primary ways in Aikin's book. One is via the regress problem. If justification requires having reasons for belief, and those reasons can be neither circular nor fully self-justifying, then, it seems, reasons must go on forever and not circle back on themselves. Klein (1999) famously captures these conditions in his Principle of Avoiding Arbitrariness, which requires reasons for every justified belief, including the justifiers themselves, and thus seems to rule out foundationalism; and his Principle of Avoiding Circularity, which says that no belief can be in its own justificatory ancestry, and thus seems to rule out coherentism. Aikin offers his own principles -- weak irreflexivity, transitivity, and weak asymmetry -- leading to the same infinitist upshot. Weak irreflexivity ends up playing an important role in Aikin's "impure" infinitism, which is also an impure foundationalism, because it allows that some beliefs may be self-supporting and hence reflexive, but such support is insufficient for justification. Putatively foundational beliefs are insufficiently justified, according to Aikin, because he also endorses both the Principle of Inferential Justification (PIJ) and the Principle of Justified Inferential Justification (PJIJ):

PIJ: S is justified in holding that p only if (i) there is some proposition, q, that S is justified in holding, and (ii) q provides S some supporting reason for p's truth. (14)

PJIJ: S is justified in holding that p only if (i) there is some proposition, q, that S is justified in holding, (ii) q provides S some supporting reason for p's truth, and (iii) S is justified in holding q to support p's truth. (18)

PJIJ introduces a demand for metajustification. But isn't that too stringent a demand? Why does justification require metajustification?

The answer comes through in the second primary way that Aikin motivates infinitism, the overarching narrative mentioned above, which is through his notion of aspirationalism:

those who are justified are those who are maximally intellectually responsible. In essence, if you really are justified in your belief, you can answer questions about what you know until there just aren't any more questions. But, as it turns out, there are in principle no final questions. (3)

One such question is to ask why one believes that one's reasons are good -- a meta-question. Of course, one need not accept Aikin's aspirationalism, but, on the other hand, it provides a clear vision of the point of justification in our doxastic lives, and thus we owe it to Aikin to see where his vision leads.

If infinitism is the upshot of reflections on constraints on the structure of justifying reasons, why does Aikin reject it in its pure form, according to which justification is conferred on belief solely by an infinite chain of reasons? The answer is that infinitism is subject to the Modus Ponens Reductio, wherein any belief can be deemed justified so long as it is the consequent of a potentially infinite chain of modus ponens inferences. A similar concern has long been a thorn in the side of coherentism: if all beliefs are solely inferentially justified, where is the requisite contact with the world that makes them candidates for truth? Aikin's answer is that inferential reasons are necessary but not sufficient for justification because there must also be some grounding in experience. This move constitutes a break from Klein's and Jeremy Fantl's "pure" versions of infinitism, both of which receive close scrutiny in chapter 3 of the book, a chapter which also includes a discussion of C.S. Peirce's infinitism.

This foundationalist condition is what makes Aikin's infinitism "impure". And while it resolves a major issue, it throws up another large hurdle for Aikin, which is the myth of the given. Aikin needs an account of the non-inferential, supporting role of experience in justifying belief. Chapter 4 is devoted to a defense of the given. The discussion is intricate and well wrought, but I can only give a glimpse of it. According to Aikin, the given in experience is forced on us, underived, and involuntary, such that its representational content is autonomous from belief. One forms a belief, supported by the given, only when one notices salient features of it. It is not propositional, for if it were it would stand in need of justification, but when picked out demonstratively, it is conceptualized -- that green appearance. It does not fully justify basic beliefs because all justification requires inference (as per PIJ).

But we've heard all this before, and still the myth of the given looms. How can the given be a justifier without standing in need of justification? I am not convinced that Aikin's response to the myth works, but neither am I convinced that it doesn't. After all, our empirical knowledge, if we have any, must be grounded in experience, and so there has got to be some way around the myth. Aikin's way is to say that the given only grounds or supports but does not fully justify belief: "the givens are a nondoxastic determining addition to the interpretive and inferential supporting inferences necessary for justification" (117). The given supports belief because when one is directly acquainted with something given in experience, beliefs about the experience are "conditionally infallible" (129). It is not entirely clear why Aikin claims that such beliefs are conditionally infallible, especially when he gives examples of false beliefs about one's own pain (119) and heat (135) sensations. Aikin defines conditional infallibility in a way that makes the thesis true, but perhaps just trivially so:

Conditional Infallibility: If S's belief that S is being appeared to X-ly is supported by S's acquaintance with S's being appeared to X-ly, then S is appeared to X-ly. (129)

On the other hand, Aikin could probably make do with a claim weaker than infallibility about the grounding relation between appearances and beliefs based thereon, for instance that such beliefs are reliably formed or enjoy some level of default entitlement. But regardless of how one characterizes the epistemic grounding for given-based beliefs, they are not justified with only that support, because there are in principle always challenges such that one might even question whether a subject is being appeared to in the way she believes, and successful responses require reasons. So Aikin attempts to escape through the horns of the myth's dilemma: the given does support basic belief because in "taking" it, one is directly acquainted with it -- that green appearance -- but it does not fully justify basic belief (that I'm having a green experience) because justification requires (propositional) reasons, nor does the given itself require inferential support because it is non-propositional.

But didn't Sellars show that 'given' or 'appearance' talk is parasitic on object-level talk? We first learn to pick out and describe things, and 'appearance' talk comes on the scene only when we learn to hedge our assertions. If object-level talk comes first, how can appeals to appearances justify it? Are they not merely an after thought at best? Aikin argues that this confuses pragmatic warrant for using appearance talk with epistemic dependence. One is pragmatically warranted in switching from the usual object-level talk to appearance talk when one is hedging one's assertion, but it's still the content of appearance that supports beliefs about objects and their properties. Indeed, Sellars's argument actually vindicates some notion of the given, insofar as it is explicitly contrasted with talk of objects and therefore presupposed in constructing the myth. One may typically arrive at appearance talk through a pragmatic inference from object talk -- "I'm not sure that it's green, but it appears that way, and so I should only say how it seems to me" -- but that in no way implies that one infers how things appear.

In the final chapter of the book, Aikin returns to his larger aspirationalist themes. Center stage is his commitment to antidogmatism. While antiskepticism has traditionally been the focus of epistemology, Aikin worries that the emphasis is misplaced, especially because dogmatism is a far greater evil than skepticism, all the more so when the target concept is justification rather than knowledge. Aikin is primarily interested in when one can rightly claim to know, not the status of knowledge per se.

I hope to have done some justice to Aikin's wonderful book. I haven't discussed several important arguments, notably among them Aikin's response to Klein's antifoundationalist dilemma. (The main move in reply here is that Klein's dilemma wrongly confuses S's required metajustification for why basic beliefs are justified with what actually justifies S's first-order, basic belief.) But here, I suppose, I should discharge my duty as critic. A natural focus would be Aikin's resuscitation of the given, but I'll leave appraisal of that incredibly vexed issue to the reader. Instead, I shall simply suggest a challenge to Aikin's aspirationalism. Not all of his illustrative examples, but some crucial, early ones seem to stack the deck in favor of aspirationalism. For instance, in chapter 1, there are two hypothetical discussions concerning three people's opinions about the best football running back of all time. Ignoring the details, it is quite clear that, with no clear fact of the matter, any reasons in support of a belief about the all-time best back will be met with challenges, and responses met with further challenges, and so on. All the justification in the world won't produce knowledge in such exchanges, and so it is no surprise that the argument could go on forever. What does aspirationalism look like when applied to cases where the goal is actually knowledge?

Even if Aikin's impure infinitism withstands challenges to its infinitist and foundationalist aspects, does the aspirationalism that underwrites it pass muster? No matter how theoretical the belief, if it's empirical, it needs some grounding in experience. But since experience can only ground or support but not justify belief, every even somewhat thorough dialectical exchange will ultimately involve a challenge to one's experience. Aspirationalism requires that we always be open to such challenges and be prepared to answer them. Putting these points together, infinitist aspirationalism entails that dialectical exchanges will often end up with an ultimately skeptical challenge to the veracity of one's experience. That may be appropriate for conversations between epistemologists, but surely, in the management of our everyday cognitive lives that aspirationalism is meant to inspire, the desire to answer all these challenges will soon, if not immediately, devolve into the ridiculous. "You're asking me to defend the reliability of my vision again? Didn't we talk about that yesterday? Are we going to have this conversation every time I assert anything?" Of course, conversations don't typically go that far, but on the aspirationalist account, this is where they end up. Note that I am not claiming that such questions are unreasonable or at least strange in ordinary discourse. I think Aikin would grant that. I'm wondering whether aspiring to manage one's cognitive life well implies taking the questions seriously whenever they come up. So far as I can see, this concern does nothing to undermine Aikin's theory, but it raises the question whether aspirationalism is anything to which a sane person would aspire. Exasperationalism?

But don't be exasperated. Read the book.

Reference

Klein, Peter. 1999. "Human Knowledge and the Infinite Regress of Reasons," Philosophical Perspectives 13: 297-325.