Philosophy on LiveJournal

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:07:20 GMT

I hope this allowed.
My Analytic Philosophy prof mentioned this song in class today. I thought it was funny and figured I'd share:

"The Present King of France is Bald" by Andrew Pessin, Professor, Conn. College

http://oak.conncoll.edu/apessin/02%20The%20Present%20King%20of%20France%20is%20Bal.mp3

Descartes Meditations

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:36:55 GMT

In the preface, Descartes says "I would advise none to read this work, unless such as are able and willing to meditate with me in earnest, to detach their minds from commerce with the senses, and likewise to deliver themselves from all prejudice"

What does it mean to Meditate with Descartes? How do we know we're meditating with him?

Please help!

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:37:30 GMT

I have just attempted to do my first assignment, which is due in on the 16th. The only problem is, I found it very easy, so I'm rather suspicious! It was basically just to paraphrase a short paragraph:

This is what I was supposed to paraphrase:

So disputes over categories are disputes about the existence of entities of some very general kind or category. Sometimes the the parties of the dispute disagree about the existence of entities of the relevant kind; sometimes they disagreeabout whether entities of the category are reducible to entities of some more basic category. Now, to provide a a complete metaphysical theory is to provide a complete catalogue of the catagories under which things fall and to identify the sorts of relations that obtain among these categories. The latter task will involve the identification of certain categories as basic and others as derived, and a specification of just how entities from the derived categories are to be reduced to or analysed in terms of entities from the basic categories. A complete catalogue of this sort would represent a general account of all that there is. Aristotle believed that an account of this sort is the goal of the metahysical enterprise.

And here it is:

In this passage from Metaphysics M. Loux gives an account of what metaphysics is, and the role of the metaphysician. He also explains why metaphysics is a difficult subject and why conflicts arise between different parties of philosophers.

The disagreements arise when metaphysicians question the existence of entities, or items, in certain categories; categories being the most basic, or general description of all things. Other disputes are about whether these categories are truly the most basic, or whether they can be reduced further still.

Loux argues that when these disputes have been settled one will be able to identify all the categories and how the items within these categories relate to on another. To do this the metaphysician needs to ascertain how certain categories can be reduced down to the most basic and general type, so that they cannot be analysed down anymore.

Once this has been achieved, one would have a complete catalogue and account of everything there is. According to Aristotle, this is the goal of the metaphysician and he should strive to provide this catalogue.

To summarise, Loux explains that metaphysics is an attempt to reduce all that there is into the most basic categories and to identify how the entities in the catalogue relate to one another. The metaphysician’s role is to identify all the categories and how these items should fit within them.

I don't know if I've got it right or anything! It was just too easy, and it said to write 500 words or less and I've only done 230. I fear I have got it completely wrong, or left out something really important.

edited so that it makes more sense as I have never done an lj cut before!

Philosophy and the Question of Research

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 17:19:44 GMT

The status of research in, say, entomology is fairly straightforward, because the objects of his research -- insects -- confront him as natural features of his world. To become an entomologist, it is enough to adopt a certain paranoia about insects, coupled with a certain disdain for other things, that makes insects stand out from the world as particularly distinct things. We should add, of course, that the success of entomology depends upon finding the right way to pose questions at these distinct things, or we might say, pose answers to them. But so far as the question of entomological research goes, once the possibility of this paranoia presents itself, there is little mystery.

What about the research of philosophy? Let's hold on to that question.

When he's going about his business, one of the things the entomologist does is grab to hand a microscope, some stains, and other such things. Imagine now a science which goes about studying, not insects, but these things we see the entomologist taking to hand. Imagine, let's say, a physics of optics, and a chemistry of staining tests, and an inquiry into their relation with entomological study. Couldn't such a science proceed more-or-less clearly as the entomological one? Of course, this is no mere fancy, and such inquiries do indeed exist. (Imagine if, instead of grabbing a microscope, knowing it would amplify his vision, the entomology grabbed -- unconsciously -- random things and put them under his eyes when looking at his samples. This is not a very good model for progres!)

But the entomologist takes to hand some other things which are less obvious. He takes concepts and attitudes to hand, and these are no less indispensable to his work than his more obvious tools. Don't we need research into these obscure tools as well? Doesn't such a project confront us with the same urgency and clarity as the earlier one?

Philosophical research is -- though let's not suppose we've exhausted the question -- every bit a live possibility. It requires the philosopher to be present in his world -- I mean the world of his contemporaries -- to have a familiarity with it and how it goes about. It also requires him to have this familiarity with the world of the past, and to step back from both. It requires him to adopt a paranoia about the obscure tools man adopts in order to thing, and a disdain of less obscure things, so that the former stand out as features of the natural world demanding inquiry.

Frege's Puzzle

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:55:03 GMT

I had my first encounter with Frege's puzzle yesterday, and I am rather confused. You see, I don't think it's much of a puzzle.

What I have in my notes is:

"Hesberus is Hesberus" and "Hesberus is Phospherus" . These two statements both use proper nouns. Proper nouns, according to the Millian theory, can only be used to refer to something, so these two statements mean the same thing.

But, If you didn't know that the morning star and evening star were the same thing then to you they would be two completely different objects and so it does tell you something. But if you do know that Hesberus and Phospherus are the same thing then both statements do mean the same.

Does that make any sense to anyone? Have I got Frege's puzzle correct (I haven't read anything about it yet because I am a lazy bum)

How should we live? What do you think makes a person just and reasonable?

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:57:04 GMT

Some say that in order to accomplish a goal one should write it down, read it daily, and gain inspiration from this action. Henceforth, I will exercise this concept in an attempt not to veer off the course of accomplishing the goals I set. This is the fist step in becoming a wise, erudite, and scrupulous individual. The second step is to disassociate with the past negative events I’ve lived through, but not the consequences. The consequences of my poor life choices have served didactically in the sublimation of my negative propensities. Such tendencies have no place or bearing on my future decisions. Yet in a sense they will always have a place in the respect that they were the cause for the effect; the newfound choice of lifestyle. The third step is to engage in future situations with the reservation that events may not go as you plan. However, to figure the angles of failure and plan against probable failure, when possible, is the mark of a wise man. The fourth step is to develop the fortitude necessary to deal with such disappointments. One must realize it is pointless to succumb to grief in the face of failure. Instead it is more profitable to ourselves if we meet these failures head on with the notion that what misfortune has just befallen you certainly has been experienced by somebody previously. Consequently, you will have lost the right to wallow in such thoughts as, “why did this happen to me?” The fifth step is to first view yourself before passing judgments on somebody else. You must decide why you have come to such conclusions. By doing so you will be evaluating your governing faculties first and gain providence of self in future situations. For it is wise to remember that we are all human and make mistakes, but it is nobler to admit you can be disposed to the same behavior, under certain conditions. Also, keep in mind that you not be too quick to form judgments of others actions. For one is inclined to find out a great deal about a situation before rightly being able to deliver a properly founded judgment of others. It is through this manner you would like to be judged so is it unfair to ask the same of your own process? The sixth step is to not give way to frustration. To fly into a passion is not a sign of manliness, but rather, to be kind and even tempered. Not only are these qualities more manly, but they are also more human. It is the man who possesses such virtues who has strength, nerve, and fortitude, and not one who is ill-humored and discontented; for the nearer a man comes in his mind to impassibility, the nearer he comes to strength, and as grief is a sign of weakness, so is anger too, for those who yield to either have been wounded and have surrendered to the enemy. The seventh step is to be as careful not to flatter people as you are not to become angry with them, because both errors are against the common interest and lead to harm. The eighth step is to not be overwhelmed with the compunctions of others toward yourself, but rather bear through each situation and add the lessons learned to your foundation of strength. By doing so you will constantly be evolving for the better and be of more use to your fellow man.

“In writing and reading, you cannot be the instructor before you have been instructed. How much more so in the art of living.” Marcus Aurelius

It was long overdue

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:06:04 GMT

starblade_enkai will no longer be joining us for future discussions. While we are an open and tolerant community, the admission of "dragons" to our midst would surely only bring us ruin.

I urge any other dragons reading this, as well as any number of other mythological beasts like pegasii, unicorns, werewolves, or Canadians, to consider abandoning the study of philosophy and embracing a rigorous program of antipsychotic medication and electroshock therapy. It's for your own good.

Which is worse?

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:08:53 GMT

Personal hubris or ideas that insist on being right?

I know this isn't a debate community, but bear with me. I think that Socrates was the greatest philosopher of all times. He taught us that no matter how wise a person may be, to not realize he was also foolish made said 'wise' person a fool. He also was the founder of the most important tool of philosophy: The socratic method.

Now let me re-frame the question I had earlier. Is it worse to believe in a philosophy that is wrong and to believe it's right, or is it more wrong simply to believe that you are right?

I know that I know nothing, and hence why I come here. Philosophers should always be willing to answer questions, otherwise they prove that they don't know. That doesn't mean they're not right, but not knowing is a personal flaw whereas not being right is a matter of the philosophy being held.

Mentoring a high school student in philosophy

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:08:00 GMT

Our department secretary solicited graduate students in the department a few weeks ago to volunteer for a mentorship with a high school senior interested in philosophy. As I'm interested in teaching young people about philosophy and wish that I had been exposed to philosophy earlier in my life, I jumped at the opportunity.

I need to think up some direction for him, at least initially, as he purportedly knows very little about the field. I'm torn between doing a survey of some sort and touching on the major figures of philosophy or, instead, doing a careful reading of a single text or two or three. Do any of you have any experience with anything like this? Any texts that immediately spring to mind?

What would you say is the guiding force in philosophy today?

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:31:59 GMT

Are we still wondering how we can walk a mile if we must first walk 1/2 of a mile?

Did Wittgenstein ever get his point across?

Has Gellner made any impact?

etc...

The matter/form dichotomy.

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:11:01 GMT

I've been reading up on Aristotle's definition of metaphysics and I've come to this conclusion: the matter/form dichotomy overlooks the simpler explanation, that everything metaphysical in our world are combinations of matter and form. That is, it is not exclusively matter nor matter which contains form, nor is it exclusively form nor form which contains matter. Everything can be inspected to reveal a matter and/or form aspect, but you can't have one without the other. (Sorry about that part in italics but I left a hanging sentence in the original post.)

Take the color red. When we are sensing red it means light from a certain range of frequencies has hit our eyes and a synapse has fired into our brain causing us to sense red. What of the color red itself? Before we've ever seen anything red it is only a potential, but once we've experienced it we have a memory of it that is either part of a larger memory, or if we're exposed to it sufficiently and are able to abstract it, it occupies our memory in a conceptual sense.

Taking our conceptual sense of 'red', that occupies a physical portion in our mind. If we developed the technology, we could remove any trace of red in our conceptual memory, and we would be as we were before, with no knowledge of what red is. Whenever we think of red that thought generates from somewhere in our brain, though possibly nowhere specific.

It also tells us that the attributes of the world and of us are such as to allow red to be perceived. It is a signal. Signals require a source, though that is not to say anything about this source, whether it is reliable or not, whether it is 'inside' or 'outside' of us. The sum of everything in the universe, however this universe manifests, has to be able to produce red signals that somehow find their way into our minds.

Note: Yes, I'm not starting at the beginnings, and I am relying a lot on assumptions, and in philosophy these assumptions are controversial. However nobody in philosophy DOESN'T have assumptions, and this includes people who assume they don't have assumptions. This does not preclude these assumptions from being in the positive, IE true and relevant. My assumption that nobody has no assumptions, of course, apply to people in philosophy. Plenty of people live their lives without any conscious assumptions, but they are only philosophers to the extent that they do make assumptions, including the assumptions that they make no assumptions, even if these assumptions are not conscious, or if they aren't consciously aware of them.

Ye “horse’s text” in da lap

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:28:04 GMT

Is there such a thing as meaning or signification outside of a linguistic text? Jacques Derrida answers in the negative. Meaning only occurs within the “play of differences” (différance) that underlies all language or discourse.

In Writing and Difference, Derrida claims that “to write” is to know that “the law of the earth, the earth’s true Bible…does not exist and that forever there are books, against which the meaning of a world not conceived by an absolute subject is shattered, before it has even become a unique meaning,” and consists also in being “incapable of making meaning absolutely precede writing: it is thus to lower meaning while simultaneously elevating inscription” (Writing and Difference, 10). “Meaning,” then, “must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning”; further, “constituted—written—meaning presents itself as prerequisitely and simultaneously read…” (ibid., 11). It follows from this that writing is “inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word,” and thus “dangerous and anguishing” (ibid.). “It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future” (ibid.). We could, incidentally, extrapolate this to any other form of essentially linguistic or symbolic discourse.

But if there is no meaning outside of a text (“Il n’y a pas de ‘hors texte’”), then how does the extraorganismic world become significant to a nonlinguistic creature? For animals without language cannot wittingly engage in the world’s textuality (or, since this perhaps already presupposes too much, its textualizability and consequent textualization on the part of language-users). They are blissfully powerless to distinguish, from within their experience of objects, between objects and things. Is the world more than what I currently apprehend? Unless I am able to engage in reflective discourse through linguistic means (whether verbal or nonverbal), I can never pose this question, much less systematically develop it. Be that as it may, animals still experience worlds that consist of more than their own cognitive contributions. Animal cognition involves a supplementative activity that functions at the prelinguistic level we call perception (the “internal senses” of memory, imagination and estimation). Although the animal organism’s experience presupposes bodily sensation (the interface of the animal body and its physical environment), it is irreducible to the supplementarity that results. In other words, whereas the external senses of touch, taste, smell, sight and sound do not present the world as inherently meaningful to the animal organism, the perceptual or supplementative dimension of animal cognition “makes sense” of the world without thematizing the presentation—i.e., without “textualizing” it or, to speak more accurately in my estimation, without apprehending its intrinsic textuality. Hence, contra Derrida, either there is meaning outside of a (linguistic) text, or textuality must needs be expanded to include what is logically and temporally prior to language.

It is not the case that when “language invaded the universal problematic,” everything eo ipso “became discourse…that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences,” as if the absence of transcendental signification is the conditio sine qua non of the infinite extension of “the domain and play of signification” (ibid., 280). Everything is always already open to becoming discourse (whether infinite or finite), just as everything sensible is open to becoming significant or meaningful for an organism of adequate bio-cognitive structure. And, to anticipate an argument to be advanced another day, even within textualization the omnipresence of différance is a deconstructionist myth that further analysis of animal sense-perception breaks to pieces. More pithily: It ain’t traces all the way down, folks. But I defer such analysis for a later time.

studying philosophy.

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 05:13:05 GMT

I'm a community college student in California. I want to do the chinese program at my school, which takes three years. I'm also really interested in philosophy and would like to be able to do more than the basic lower-division philosophy classes that my school offers, so I began looking for online philosophy programs.

I only found one that looked good. It's offered by the U of Illinois at Springfield. It isn't Harvard, but it's the best I could find. I don't care about degree prestige anyway, since this is mainly about learning for me, and I won't be going into philosophy as an academic career.

Are there any others that I have missed? I also found philosophypathways.com; does anyone know if this is any good?

Other general thoughts on studying philosophy online will be appreciated. I've taken online classes before, including one class in western religions.

Thanks in advance.

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 01:06:35 GMT

starblade_enkai recently suggested that "greenhouses are made of glass". Apparently he knows as much about horticultural/nursery supply as he does about philosophy.

Most modern greenhouses are covered in twinwall polycarbonate glazing (e.g., Coroplast, Correx, Corriflute or Twinplast), and not glass. Today triple, quadruple, and even quintuple-layer glazings can be purchased at relatively low cost in order to construct highly energy-efficient growing spaces.

Twinwall is cheaper than glass, more durable, and has a much lower effective heat loss. The main limitations of polycarbonate glazing (namely, its tendency to tarnish or break down when exposed to ultraviolet light for long periods of time) have been largely overcome by advances in the extrusion of polypropylene resins into corrugated sheeting.

Modern greenhouses tend to be white or translucent, not transparent, for this reason.

For anyone interested in attending the Griffin Greenhouse & Nursery Supplies 2008 "Southern" Expo, it will be held this Wednesday at the Lancaster Host Resort & Conference Center in Lancaster, PA. Be there or be square.

The Way to TOE

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 23:55:34 GMT

This post is about Theory of Everything.

You probably understand what TOE should mean -
it's a theory which completely explains the construction of the universe.

As a man who has wrote one I've released some information about it.
In fact everything except the TOE itself.
I wrote an article on how I was creating it:
* motivation
* the process of creation (how it was for me)
* what TOE should cover
* and more.

This post is more not about internals of TOE, but about everything around TOE.
An example of how to create TOE.
The article is here: http://sbthebasics.com

The burden of proof.

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:14:51 GMT

After thinking about philosophy, I came upon a thought that intruded rather abruptly into my mind. While I was eager to dismiss it, as the thought itself appeared to be unfounded, I caught myself wondering about it nonetheless. Exactly why should the burden of proof be on the person suggesting a philosophical point? Are we to conclude that how we argue has any affect on how things really are? Or is it more important that people struggle to prove things than that the truth is something to which we have gotten?

If the first case is true, then we have nowhere to start when it comes to certainty about things. Whether we even know that we have an affect at all or not is itself something that can be eliminated, and perhaps the truth itself of the matter is alterable by some means of argument. I cannot explain in words the kind of chaotic metaphysics that this would require, it would transcend our thought, and our very existence, assuming that these things haven't already been argued to falsehood.

If the second case is true, we put effort on a pedistal above results, and for all intents and purposes we might as well argue as if what we say affects the truth. While there may or may not be consequences to reality in itself, it definitely has consequences to our method of not only arguing, but our method of applying the result of such arguing. Or perhaps, just perhaps, we are elevating struggling above knowledge, which has the result of merely disenfranchising people to philosophy.

Of course, it may just be that I'm wrong. But other than shifting the burden of proof onto me, what argument can you give for the opposite? If you DO shift the burden of proof onto me, you will be arguing using circular reasoning that I am wrong, simply because I can't make you believe what I am saying. The reasoning is circular because using a point in argument to argue about that point in argument assumes the truth itself of what you are saying in the first place to justify itself. Is that any way to argue?

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:02:05 GMT

why does the philosophy of consciousness pretend that the world is not just a text and that there're no problems with truth itself?

Don't hate me because I am a n00b...

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:12:10 GMT

What is the origin of *reasoning*?
It seems to be a highly valued quality yet remains kind of abstract to me.

I am not sure.
Is it synonymous with "rationality"? I often use them interchangeably, but I am not sure if they are, in fact, synonymous.

It undoubtedly comes up in all/most philosophy readings, for instance in my readings of Hobbes and Locke, that when we (humans) use our *reasoning* we can easily deduce that blah blah... whatever conclusions about "the state of nature", that our main goal is self preservation, etc.

I also know some that would say that reasonining skills, morals, etc. are some of the main things that set us apart from (and "make us better than") the rest of the animal kingdom.

It seems to be from my understanding, that to do something "rationally" or "reasonably" often involves weighing all known aspects of a problem and proceeding with action in way that maximises the positive aspects to that individual making the decision. Often involving logic (ugh! Another term that seems abstract to me!)
Is that consistent with others' understanding of reasoning and rationality (if they are, in fact, synonymous?)

Reasoning is valued over faith, atleast in the academic world, yet to have conviction in your reasoning, there seems to be a certain amount of *faith* involved in that too.... yes? no???

I don't know. I have read some about this subject, but not enough. It just seems to me that lots of people take human "reasoning" as a "presupposed obvious virtue "and proceed with their arguements from it. However, it still remains abstract to me *why* it should be trusted so much and ***what the origin of this valued quality is***(ie. evolutionary reasons, I could imagine being an arguement).

Thank you!

My exploratory thoughts on legal theory

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:13:31 GMT

There are two questions that legal theorists must answer when putting forth their explanation of “what the law is.”

The problem of existence: What is the criteria for allowing us to recognize * as member in the category law?

The problem of efficacy: What justifies us in treating * as authoritatively binding? In other words, what makes * legitimate?

What is the relationship between these two questions? If you answer the problem of efficacy first, then you’re likely to attribute fewer * as member in the category law. By answering one question first, it constrains your answer to the remaining question. I believe legal positivists answer the problem of existence first, while natural law lawyers answer the problem of efficacy first. Hart answers the question of existence while explicitly saying that efficacy is another matter (in “Are There Any Natural Rights?”), and leaves it aside. Natural Law lawyers implicitly answer the problem of efficacy first to filter their recognition of * being member in the category law. In other words, Natural law lawyers run the two questions together by saying validity criteria ARE membership criteria.

List of further questions: Are these efficacy conditions moral ones? Methodologically-speaking do theorists have to answer one or both questions to have a theory of law? If both, which order is better (and what criteria are better)? I have to discuss the problem that some people say that validity criteria are membership criteria and hence would run the two questions together.

Also, I think it is possible to give a descriptive analysis for answering the problem of existence; but only a normative analysis for answering the problem of efficacy (I am open to the possibility of a descriptive analysis, I just haven’t seen one yet).

Okay, so those are my exploratory thoughts so far.

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:48:03 GMT

hi... i'm new to this community and also new to philosophy so... please be nice...

so philosophy... i have it in school this year and while i love it, it's also freaking me out... sure i was asking myself some of this questions before... Where do we come from... What happens after we die... What's the meaning of life... What's real and what's not... but seeing them written in black and white scares me somewhat terribly... it makes me feel soo distant, so unreal... because no matter how long you think about them there is no answer... or rather there are too many answers and you can't tell which is the right one, providing there is such a thing as a right answer to questions like these... maybe there isn't and we are doomed to this uncertainty forever... but on the other hand... all the philosophers... they found some kind of answers and some of them were proved wrong later on but they must have believed their answers were the right ones... so maybe that's what it's all about... not about finding right or true answers but just finding answers you can believe in, that you consider the truth... maybe that's what can bring you peace of mind, what makes you feel safer, makes you feel complete... or does it... what if there is always a corner in your mind that doubts the answers you came to, always saying that it isn't true it isn't real... that nothings real...

also i started reading sophie's world by jostein gaarder... and there is one thing that really bothers me... in the first letter the Philosopher says that everybody has to find the answer to the questions who we are and why we live... that everybody needs it... but if that's so how come there is so many people who never touch those subjects exept in a brief passing or maybe when they are directly confronted with them and after that they forget about them and go on with their life as before... the Philosopher says that it's because they are too comfortable, too trapped in the life such as it is, that they forgot how to wonder... i suppose that's true... but my question is why is that a bad thing... what is wrong with living your life happily, contently, without wondering about things that can never be answered with certainty...

Philosophy and Way of Life

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:19:11 GMT

I have a series of questions for all you self-identified philosophers and students of philosophy. Please take the time to answer each and every question if you choose to respond.

Do you practice philosophy for fun?
Do you practice philosophy in pursuit of wisdom?
Do you practice philosophy as a hobby?
Do you practice philosophy as a career?

ETA: Why do you practice philosophy?

How does your understanding of philosophy affect your daily life?
Do your intellectual thoughts translate into action?
Do you live your philosophy?
Has philosophy improved your life?
Which thoughts have the most impact on how you live?
Which thoughts are most vital to your personal identity?

Who is the most influential person in shaping your personal philosophy? (Other than, hopefully, yourself, and your own abilities to think for yourself.)
Who has the most similar philosophical beliefs to your own?

To be fair, I will answer my own questions in a comment.

Philosophy and semiotics: what the doctrine of signs has to offer

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:59:58 GMT

As I have recently seen a few statements made in this community exhibiting a semiotic ignorance than which none greater can be conceived, I feel it is high time to raise consciousness of the philosophical import of semiotics or “the doctrine of signs,” and the impact it has had on the history of philosophy. As we shall see, semiotics—the study of the dance of signs, or “semiosis”—is in the business of retrieving lost ideas, spotlighting neglected thinkers, interrogating popular posits, and both discovering and establishing relations of significance. I will keep my remarks relatively clipped, but I encourage my readers to request further documentation and argumentation in support of what ensues as they see fit.

Semiotics offers philosophy a narrative unity. The first reason semiotics is important to the student of philosophy—and the reason to which I will presently devote the most attention—is that it provides a narrative unity to the history of philosophy. Once we don the semiotic perspective, the ages of philosophy heretofore begin to take on a new significance that incorporates the philosophical insights of the ancient Greeks, the medieval and renaissance Latin thinkers, and the philosophers of modernity from Descartes to Derrida. Moreover, semiotics belongs to a truly postmodern intellectual epoch, as opposed to philosophical developments that have been prematurely so labeled (e.g., the deconstructionist school of late modernity). Viewing the history of philosophy from the perspective of the sign enables us to see the postmodern significance of what has been thematically essential to every erstwhile intellectual era. Insofar as the fundaments and termini of sign-relations may but need not exist independently of cognition, as we shall see, reality and being as generally understood by the Greeks and Latins do not stand in essential tension with the constructive nature of the mind, which became the chief preoccupation of modern philosophy (the “way of ideas,” to use Leibniz’s phrase).

Hegel’s concept of “sublation” (Aufhebung), wherein a position or thesis is canceled yet preserved, may help us grasp the nature of the historical progression semiotics uncovers. Greek and Latin philosophers from Plato to Poinsot were driven by a desire to understand reality and being according to the mind-independent facets thereof. The moderns then took a “subjective turn,” putting ens reale (mind-independent being) under the veil of “ideas” (erroneously taken to be the termini of cognition rather than its fundamental basis). If we loosely view premodernity and modernity as thesis and antithesis, the postmodern “way of signs” may be seen as a kind of synthesis of the two.

To borrow another concept from the history of philosophy, we can say that semiotics effects a Heideggerian “retrieval” (Wiederholung) of the premodern appreciation of a world existing prejacent to experience, while further “sublating” some of the epistemological claims of modernity, opening the way for a grasp of reality that includes mentally, socially and culturally constructed reality—that “philosophically neglected dimension of the universe” I once chided certain modern followers of Aquinas (Neothomists) for having “inauspiciously neglected.”*

With that cursory background in place, let us survey some of the more semiotically explicit details. To be sure, the philosophy of the ancient Greeks contains remarks pertinent to semiotic inquiry, and a survey of the Greek philosophical age is necessary to understand more fully later developments in the history of ideas. However, it is not until Augustine (AD354–430) that we receive the first general proposal of the sign (signum) as transcending the division into natural signs (signa naturalia) and stipulated signs (signa data). His failure to theoretically justify this proposal—made worse by a definition that excludes those natural signs to which later Latin authors will give the name signa formalia (formal signs, psychological states)—is remedied by Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274). Whereas Augustine defines the sign as something that, besides the impressions it makes on our sense organs, makes something other than itself enter our cognition, Aquinas—albeit not without some textual schizophrenia—opens the way for a more generalized definition in keeping with Augustine’s general proposal: “in general we can say that a sign is anything whatsoever that is known, in which or on the basis of which something (else) is known,” so that an intellectual concept—no less than something antecedently cognized by the external senses—“can be said to be a sign of whatever is known through it” (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate 9.4 ad 4).

Other Latins close to Aquinas’s time period, such as John Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308), also help to further semiotic inquiry before the establishment of semiotics as a self-cognizant discipline in its own right (as with Scotus’s distinction between intuitive and abstractive awareness). But only when we reach the renaissance continuation of the Latin philosophical tradition—a conspicuous black hole in the standard histories of philosophy—do we find the first sustained systematic treatment of signum. This Tractatus de Signis is found within the Cursus Philosophicus of one of Aquinas’s historically distant followers, John Poinsot—a.k.a. John of St. Thomas (1589–1644). In his Treatise on Signs, Poinsot offers a definition of signum as consisting in a triadic relation whereby the fundament of a sign (what Peirce will later call the “body” of the sign and Morris the “sign-vehicle”) conveys an object of awareness (or significate) to a cognitive power (which, as we will see in Peirce, will turn out to be but one kind of interpretant). For Poinsot, these relations are presupposed to any act of awareness whatsoever. They also transcend the orders of ens reale and ens rationis—mind-independent and mind-dependent being. As remarked earlier, the fundaments and termini of sign-relations may but need not exist independently of cognition. For example, I may consider the relation of a painting to its copy even if the original has ceased to exist. Alternatively, if I am on my way home from work and, unbeknownst to me, Hurricane Ike suddenly demolishes my humble abode, the objective terminus of my cognition—founded in the notion that my home is in its usual condition—ceases to coincide with something mind-independent. Object and thing no longer coincide. The sign-relation itself has not changed, for relations are indifferent to the nature of their termini. Rather, the change is to be located in the circumstances of the significate or “object signified.” (We see from this that semiotics offers an account of how we can be in error, which explains Umberto Eco’s apt albeit one-sided remark in his Theory of Semiotics that “The possibility of lying is the proprium of semiosis.”)

John Locke (1632–1704), at the end of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), coins the term semiotike in a passage anomalous with the rest of the work. Locke proposes semiotics as “another sort of Logick and Critick, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with,” one that both resolves the debate between the Peripatetics and the Stoics as to the nature and role of logic within the body of human knowledge, and shows us the rationale of logic as a liberal art; provides us as well with a scheme according to which speculative and practical knowledge may be seen as equally dependent upon the use of signs. Though he never develops further this proposal of a scheme Leibniz fails to fully grasp and Berkeley considers an intriguing idea,** and which the rest of modern philosophy up to Peirce ignores, we can see nonetheless that Locke is certainly doing more than one of the moderators of this community recently suggested, i.e., “attempting a mere meta-reference to ‘language’” (the same is true, and even more glaringly obvious, for Peirce below). For while Locke claims that “the most usual” kinds of signs are “Words,” it is not the case that the action of signs (semiosis) is reducible to the use of linguistic signs. But what other signs does Locke’s proposal include? All natural signs? At the very least, it takes account of those natural signifiers Aristotle called passions of the soul (passiones animae for his Latin commentators), and what the modern tradition generally calls “ideas.” Whether it also provides a broader semiotic portrait like those offered by Poinsot and Peirce—one that makes room for natural signifiers (e.g., smoke signifying fire)—is perhaps more debatable.

Finally, in the writings of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1838–1914), we not only find a semiotic that is very similar to Poinsot’s in several respects (e.g., all thought is in signs, signs involve triadicity, signs transcend the orders of nature and culture, etc.), but we also attain semiotics as a discipline in its own right (as opposed to Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology as pars pro toto). Peirce considered himself “a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of clearing and opening up…semiotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis…” (CP 5.488; also in EP 2.413†). Distinguishing semiosis (also called “Thirdness” in Peirce’s philosophy) from interactions of brute force (“Secondness”), he explains that by “semiosis” he means “an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs” (CP 5.484; EP 2.411). Though he isn’t always clear on the subject, an interpretant need not be mental (CP 5.473; recall that for Poinsot, the chief interpretant would be a cognitive power, though with Poinsot no less than Peirce there is more to the story). Thus, not only thoughts (logical interpretants) and affections (emotional interpretants), but also actions (energetic interpretants) may be said to “interpret” signs. Furthermore, semiosis may exist in a virtual state, for not all sign-relations involve (or yet involve) a cognitive agent (see, e.g., W 5.307–8).

Semiotics offers philosophy a global perspective. The next reason for the student of philosophy to concern him- or herself with the doctrine of signs is that semiotics opens up new intellectual horizons. Semiotics rinses our eyes so we may attend to periods within the history of philosophy that nearly all of modern academe has forsaken (due to scholarly, religious, ideological and arguably even racial prejudices), thus expanding our current horizons beyond the Anglo-American myopia that confines many contemporary philosophers to an all too narrow view of the history of their discipline; and semiotics also, in its practical extension (semioethics), motivates us to interact hic et nunc with thinkers across the globe. Supporting the first part of this statement, we may take note that of the twenty-three Hispanic philosophers listed by Jorge J. E. Gracia in his article on Hispanic philosophy,‡ several of them—Domingo de Soto (1494–1560), Melchior Cano (1509–1560), Pedro da Fonseca (1528–1599), and Poinsot (again, 1589–1644)—are inextricably woven into the fabric of the history of philosophy vis-à-vis the doctrina signorum. It is perhaps also worthy of mention that Peirce, while apparently incognizant of the work of Poinsot, did have an awareness of Poinsot’s teachers, the Conimbricenses (1606/7).

The second part of the above claim is substantiated by the very fact that there are contemporary semioticians around the world interacting globally to expand the horizons of semiotic inquiry. That those who are presently working to further semiotic inquiry include but are not limited to Americans and Europeans is clear from the following (incomplete) list of contemporary semioticians: Marcel Danesi in Canada; Kalevi Kull in Estonia; Eero Tarasti in Finland; Umberto Eco, Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio in Italy; Lucia Santaella-Braga in Brazil; Noboru Yamaguchi in Japan; Norma Tasca in Portugal and France; Irmengard Rauch, John Deely, and myself in the United States; Paul Cobley in the United Kingdom; Pia Brinzeu, Solomon Marcus and Mariana Net in Romania; Mathias Rothe and Michael Krampen in Germany; Silvia Harnau in Moldova; Lisa Block de Behar in Uruguay; Paul Bains in New Zealand; Alexandros Ph Lagopoulos in Greece; Horst Ruthrof in Australia; Jørgen Dines Johansen and Søren Brier in Denmark; Magdolna Orosz and Vilmos Voigt in Hungary; and Maria Popova in Bulgaria.

Incidentally, the absurd comment made by one of the moderators of this community to the effect that the number of contemporary semioticians is “pretty small, since they’re pretty much all Thomists these days” is open to ridicule on a couple of grounds. First, if the above list is any indication, the number of present-day semioticians is hardly “pretty small,” and the Semiotic Society of America and the International Association for Semiotic Studies jointly serve to further dispel this myth. Second, amongst the semioticians of whom I am aware, I am the only one that (occasionally) identifies as a Thomist (and only in certain contexts), though to be sure there are at least one or two other semioticians who would readily defend the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas without branding themselves “Thomists.”

Semiotics offers philosophy a positive intellectual standpoint. In conclusion, let us consider a brief list of several ways in which semiotics offers a fresh perspective relevant to various branches of philosophy. The doctrina signorum is fundamentally a doctrine of relations—in particular, those relations on which “meaning” and “significance” depend. It insists on an interrogation of modern dilemmas (realism vs. idealism, nature vs. nurture, and so on) in the light of what is or shall become evident about the nature and operation of these sign-relations. It offers us a novel understanding of the human being as animal semioticum (“semiotic animal”), in contrast to the animal rationale of premodernity and the res cogitans of modern thought. And it urges us to see that we, as semiotic agents, are responsible for the use we make of signs. (As an example of the ethical or practical extension of semiotics, what Ponzio and Petrilli have termed “semioethics,” consider Peirce’s “ethics of terminology.”) In sum, semiotics touches philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of the human person, ethical theory, and much else besides. Further, since semiotics is an inherently inter- and transdisciplinary perspective, it encourages philosophers to seek dialogical moments of cross-pollination between and among academic disciplines—which is vital in an age of increasing intellectual fragmentation due to specialization within the academic disciplines. Semiotics as inherently “relatiological” demonstrates that no sign-vehicle is an island. In the timely words of Trent Reznor: We’re in this together now.

If there are any topics pertaining to semiotics you would like to see discussed more in depth in future posts, suggestions are more than welcome.

*“Maritain, Searle, and a Philosophically Neglected Dimension of the Universe,” presented during the 7:15–9:15pm concurrent session held Thursday, Oct. 25 at the 31st Annual Meeting of the American Jacques Maritain Association, 25–27 October 2007, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, on the theme of “The Majesty and Poverty of Metaphysics.”

**Leibniz, in New Essays on Human Understanding, Book IV, ch. xxi, understands Locke’s discussion to be merely suggestive of “different ways in which one can organize the same truths, if one sees fit to express them more than once,” so that semiotics really produces no more than “a kind of Inventory”; later, Berkeley states in his Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher (1732), Dialogue 7, §13: “I am inclined to think the doctrine of Signs a point of great importance, and general extent, which, if duly considered, would cast no small light upon Things, and afford a just and genuine solution of many difficulties.”

†“CP” refers to The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols.; “EP” designates The Essential Peirce, 2 vols.; and “W” denotes Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 6 vols. to date of a projected 20.

‡Jorge J. E. Gracia, “Hispanic Philosophy: Its Beginning and Golden Age,” The Review of Metaphysics 46 (March 1993), 475–502, esp. 486ff.

(Cross-posted to essius.)

My First Post.

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:07:13 GMT

This isn't really about Philosophy, and that being the case I wouldn't be surprised if I get flamed or this post gets deleted or any of that, but something's on my mind and I feel the need to pose a question.

I'm sitting in my room watching a House marathon, and as I watch characters dying on the screen, I feel no immediate connection with them. They're just TV characters, nothing is real. I think about the past, everyone who's died, and the future, everyone who's going to die. But I feel oddly disconnected. And then it hits me; I am one of those people. 19 and a half years ago, I did not exist. 100 years from now, I will not exist. Where was I? Where will I be? All I've known is consciousness. All we know is of life. Where was I before birth? Is there a soul? Is there anything that precedes and succeeds the human existence? I can't think about the thought of myself, my consciousness dying, without being brought to the verge of tears and hyperventilation. It's easy to believe or not to believe in anything and everything going about daily activities. But am I the only one who (as morbid as it sounds) lays in bed at night and imagines dying? Imagines being dead? Losing everything that I know? What happens? Just typing this upsets me, because it's such a foreign thought. Think 100 years from now. Don't think about where you won't be. Don't think about the future of the environment, the state of medicine and politics. Stop thinking about the Earth. Instead, think about where you will be. Will you be you? Is there something to go to? Or will there not be a you? This entry cannot possibly explain the magnitude of emotion that builds inside me when I think of things like this. There's no way to adequately explain my emotional and even physical reactions. I almost feel sick. My question is; What do you all think? Have you ever thought of it? Not just of death, the afterlife or the lack there of, but of your own role in that? Have you thought about the span of your lives, and what comes afterword?

I'm not sure I expect this to get a positive response, or even be around to get a response at all, but I feel like this is a place that I can go to get intelligent (and probably lightly sarcastic) inputs. Thank you.

Good For Whom?: A Critical Discussion of Aesthetic Value in Music

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 19:15:18 GMT

How do we explain the huge diversity of musical taste? Why do some of us prefer Brahms, but some of us prefer the Sex Pistols? How do we, at the same time as this, explain the huge concordance of our taste? This question is one which has so far, believe it or not, been very poorly explored. My aim in this essay is to explore the two dominant sides of the debate, objectivism and relativism, and then see if a tenable synthesis may be found.

I will start with aesthetic objectivism. This seems to be the most natural beginning, as we intuitively feel, I think, that there is some ‘real’ hierarchy of value between pieces of music; i.e., we think that some pieces ‘really are’ better than others. However, as my discussion will make clear, objectivism, all its implications fully understood, is far from as intuitive as it seems. It is, in fact, an extremely strong claim, and in its purest form holds that there is a strong value-hierarchy of musical goodness between completely alien cultures, not to mention a strong value-hierarchy within them. This objectivism, in fact, is so implausible that I know of no single philosopher to hae held it; and so I shall not discuss it. There is, however, a weaker and more plausible form of objectivism: its exact scope is a matter open to personal preference, but I will discuss that objectivism, the scope of which is all members of the species, Homo sapiens.

Aesthetic relativism can be subdivided into two discrete (sets of) theories: personal relativism (or subjectivism) and cultural relativism; but they fall under the same heading because they share the opinion that there is no real, or ‘objective,’ way of judging aesthetic value. The first, aesthetic subjectivism or personal relativism, denies the validity of aesthetic reasoning and criticism, because “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as they say, and what I like is just what I like. Aesthetic cultural relativism acknowledges the validity of aesthetic reasoning and criticism within a given culture, but it holds that the principles by which art is judged within the culture are essentially chosen, and have no objective (or cross-cultural) validity.

My synthesis I will refer to as that of ‘appropriateness.’ I rather like it.

Objectivism

In the introduction, I dismissed ‘pure,’ universal objectivism. But how particular (non-universal) can an objectivism be, before its name becomes a complete misnomer? I think the answer is interest-relative. If, hypothetically, in thousands of years’ time, humanity had made contact with other imaginative beings, whose artistic cultures were fundamentally different to ours, a theory of objectivism could only have the name if it tried to take into consideration all the alien cultures. By contrast, European philosophers before the discovery of America could be content to call that theory objectively valid, which applied to all of the discovered world and Ancient Greece. For our historical position, I think, such a theory would need to be applicable to all of humankind. And exactly that thesis is proposed by Immanuel Kant.

Kant

Kant’s attempt to ground an aesthetic objectivism is to be found in his Critique of Judgement of 1790. He starts by distinguishing three ways in which we can judge something pleasurable or displeasurable: “We call agreeable what GRATIFIES us, beautiful what we just LIKE, good what we ESTEEM” (§5, Ak. 210). Kant argues that the agreeable cannot be objective, because we are partial with respect to it: ‘Hunger is the best sauce,’ as they say: someone who is hungry will find any food tasty (i.e., agreeable), regardless of how tasty it ‘really’ is. Only when there is no desire or need such as this can we judge food’s taste objectively. However, when that happens, it is by definition no longer a judgement of the agreeable. The same is true for judgements of the good (by which Kant means the morally good): when there is a conflict between the moral and the aesthetically pleasing, we are no longer free to judge aesthetically, for our moral sensitivities encroach upon our aesthetic instinct. For example, we are psychologically incapable of impartiality on the aesthetics of a murder. So, in other words, only when we have no interest in the existence of something, as we do in something that may gratify us or is of moral worth, can we be impartial.

However, there are more constraints on our capacity to be impartial. Kant distinguishes between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ judgements of taste. A judgement can be impure in two ways: it can be influenced by the object’s sensory or emotional appeal (charm or emotion), or by being contingent on a certain concept’s applying to the object, so that the object is judged as beautiful qua belonging to this or that kind (i.e., we judge a three-legged dog as ugly because it is not what a dog should look like, even though it would otherwise be beautiful). Each of these ways damage the impartiality, and thus objectivity, of a judgement. For charm and emotion affect different people in different ways – the charm of a baby in a picture will affect, say, new mothers more than teenage boys – and people will subsume objects under different kinds (/concepts), depending on their experience and interests.

The key assumption behind all this, of course, is that humans all share something significant – and this assumption is by no means a hidden one. Kant’s term for what we share is sensus communis – a ‘common sense,’ and he argues for the legitimacy of this assumption in §21 and §§35-8. His thought is basically that we can assume that what we ordinarily call ‘common sense,’ viz., sound judgement in everyday matters, is shared by everyone, and hence can assume that the cognitive powers presupposed by this common understanding are shared universally as well. In other words, we all agree about colours, physical objects, etc. But our agreement on these matters presupposes the existence of the faculties of understanding and imagination. As it is these same faculties that come together to allow us to experience beauty, and because they come together in a way very similar to the way in which they come together in making judgements about colours, etc., we have reasonable grounds for speaking with a priori certainty of a sensus communis.

Kant’s objectivism is very impressive, and very elegant, but it is susceptible to criticism on many fronts. We can accept his edifice, but question whether it is relevant to music (or art more generally); or we can accept its relevance, but criticise his thought at various points, for instance, by challenging his claim that we have a ‘common sense’ to any interesting extent. I will consider these now.

Kant’s theory’s relevance to music is unclear. His theory is primarily concerned with beauty in nature; and art’s value is, in a way, derivative. He says: “the purposiveness of [fine art’s] form must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature” (§45, Ak. 306). However, art does have a purpose; “every art presupposes rules” (§46, Ak. 307). But if these rules or purposes show through in the listener’s aesthetic perception of the work, then, according to Kant, we will judge it through concepts. To do so would be to not make a pure judgement of taste; and as we have seen above, Kant does not consider such judgements judgements of beauty, and grants them no claim to universality. To judge a symphony as good as a symphony, i.e., to judge that it accords well with the form of symphony, would be to judge the symphony as “mechanical art;” but we should only judge it as good simpliciter. Genius is the capacity that Kant considers those who successfully endow their works with this purposiveness have.

The problem with this, of course, arises if we never can judge art simpliciter, which is surely a possibility. Indeed, it is uncertain that we judge anything as beautiful simpliciter. When we see a rose, do we judge it simply as beautiful, or as a beautiful example of a rose? If we link this with another related problem, then we have laid serious doubt about the usefulness of Kant’s idea of sensus communis. This other problem is: How do we know that when we judge something as beautiful, we are unaffected by “charm or emotion”? Does the gorgeous colour in Ravel’s orchestration of his Boléro – without which the piece would just be a theme played ad infinitum – count as “charm or emotion,” or is it a formal property? In attempting to make pure judgements of taste, then, we are in a very uncomfortable position. On the one hand, our judgements can be impure by our being affected by sensuousness; on the other, they can be made impure by our having a moral opinion toward the object of judgement. Steering a clean middle way is very, very difficult, and because it is hard to even know when we are mistaking, for example, charm for beauty, even if and when we successfully make pure judgements of taste, we don’t know we are making them.

Peculiarly, however, Kant seems untroubled by all this. He writes that

even if a mistake be made on the…point [of pure aesthetic judgement], this amounts to nothing but an incorrect application, in a particular case, of an authority given to us by law, and in no way annuls the authority itself (§38, n. 15).

Peculiar though this concession may be, especially considering the bulk of the Critique, Kant’s analysis is nonetheless valuable, and its modest conclusion is, I think, correct. He is, I believe, mistaken in how untroubled he is, because he seems to imply that mistakes are rare, and somehow peripheral, whereas in fact they damage the theory’s practical import significantly. Perhaps this is because of his eighteenth-century viewpoint. It is hard to know what part of our love of art is due to its ‘form of purposiveness,’ and what part is due to sentiment and cognition (which we can perhaps expand to include things such as our upbringing); but the latter is undeniably a large part, and, I think, much larger than Kant assumed. What I suspect are his prejudices will be brought out below in my discussion of and reply to Hume, who was more or less contemporaneous with Kant.

But he is nonetheless right that “incorrect application[s]… in no way annul[] the authority itself.” To make an analogy with his theory of reason (which he obliquely refers to in §22), the principle of a ‘pure judgement’ of taste can act as a regulative, rather than constitutive, role in our aesthetic judgements, perhaps rousing us to transcend charm, emotion, cognition, etc., when listening to music, and when appreciating beauty more generally.

Hume

Kant’s theory is objectivist because it applies to all humans; but it is surprisingly weak, and one wonders if perhaps a stronger one is to be found, that is, one that makes greater claims on the quantity of agreement demanded. Such a theory is (seemingly) presented in David Hume’s essay, On the Standard of Taste, which presents his mature view on aesthetics.

Hume certainly does seem to express a strong theory of aesthetic objectivism. He writes:

The same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London. All the changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory. Authority or prejudice may give a temporary vogue to a bad poet or orator; but his reputation will never be durable or general. When his compositions are examined by posterity or by foreigners, the enchantment is dissipated, and his faults appear in their true colours. On the contrary, a real genius, the longer his works endure, and the more wide they are spread, the more sincere is the admiration he meets with… In each creature there is a sound and defective state; and the former alone can be supposed to afford us a true standard of taste and sentiment. (On the Standard of Taste)

This is all very strongly put. There is an objective aesthetic value-hierarchy, and it is possible to be quite simply wrong about one’s value-judgements. In fact, Hume goes on to qualify his position so that it is even stronger: He takes an analogy from Book II of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, where Sancho Panza recounts to another squire of how some of his relatives had superb palates for wine. On tasting an allegedly fine wine of a hogshead, two of them both discerned a hint of something peculiar – one tasted iron, the other, leather. Although ridiculed initially, they were later vindicated in their judgements as the hogshead was emptied, revealing an old key attached to a leather thong at the bottom. Hume takes this example as an analogy to argue for the ‘realness’ of beauty: Beauty really exists in a work of art, whether or not we have the acumen to perceive it, just as a taste of leather in wine really is there. Even if the majority of the world does not see beauty in something, then beauty may nonetheless be there, and the majority wrong in their opinions.

But how do we know if something really is beautiful? Simply, one must possess delicacy, good sense, and be free of prejudice. These three qualities are very hard to acquire, though. To acquire them, one “must place [one]self in the same situation as the audience” to which the artwork was addressed; one must possess “a perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object;” One must also spend a lot of time with art, comparing artworks, to learn how to look at them; and being patient with them, instead of judging by first impressions. In short, taste is something learned, and to be really discriminating takes years of devotion.

However, near the end of his essay, almost as if an afterthought, Hume dissolves his rigid objectivism, and writes that

notwithstanding all our endeavours to fix a standard of taste, and reconcile the discordant apprehensions of men, there still remain two sources of variation, which are not sufficient indeed to confound all the boundaries of beauty and deformity, but will often serve to produce a difference in the degrees of our approbation or blame. The one is the different humours of particular men; the other, the particular manners and opinions of our age and country.

These two “sources of variation,” Hume insists, are not the result of a want of taste or delicacy, or the product of prejudice, and are “entirely blameless on both sides.” As such, we cannot say that some men’s humours or countries’ manners are superior or inferior to any others’. He elaborates, saying that, for example, young men will be “more sensibly touched with amorous and warm images,” than older men, who take more pleasure in “wise, philosophical reflections, concerning the conduct of life, and moderation of the passions.”

The critic might reply that these differences of humour, manner and opinion would surely be so great as to render Hume’s objectivism uninterestingly modest. Although Hume is, perhaps, overly optimistic about the potential for agreement in art, he does have a reply to this scepticism. To understand it, we must realise that Hume’s main interest, and the field from which he takes the vast majority of his examples of art, is literature. Furthermore, literature was the only art in which he was well read in other cultures’ traditions – in particular, he was very familiar with classical literature. Literature, it seems, is easily translatable to other tongues and cultures, and Hume’s favourite authors were Homer and Virgil, who lived in very different cultures to him. So it is understandable that he thought there to be a supracultural aesthetic value-hierarchy, and why he says, “the difficulty of finding… the standard of taste, is not so great as it is represented” – and this is surely broadly true for Kant, too.

However, my question is whether this can be said for music. If anything can hope to be subject to a true and meaningful supra-cultural objectivity, then it must be literature. This is because literature is representational – it represents joy and suffering and all else that is inextricably human, and the beauty of delivery (the ‘form’), which very much depends on the music of the language and other particular things, while not unimportant, is not the only important aesthetic element; the form of music, however, is the only important element. But music may well have a form that is universally appreciable; to find out, we must look at what evidence we have.

There are undoubtedly some things about our perception of music that are common to all of humanity. Take, for example, the perception of octave equivalence – i.e., our perception that all Cs (and Ds, Es, etc.) are ‘the same’ –, or our perception of melodies ‘going up’ or ‘going down’ in tonal space. But unfortunately for the objectivist, these similarities are very thin on the ground. Hermann von Helmholtz attempted to show that Western classical music’s tonal structure is somehow the most natural one, superior to other systems of organisation – but it fails. The pertinent counter-example is that we hear major triads in a very low register as more consonant than minor ninths in an upper register. According to Helmholtz’s theory, the reverse should be true. The reason for why we hear low triads as more consonant than high minor ninths is very telling: it is because we hear a low triad as ‘the same as’ a triad in a more agreeable register, and hear it as consonant for that reason. In other words, our experience of consonance and dissonance is dependent on our sensitivity to a tonal system; our perception of the harmonic structure or ‘force’ of the triad allows us to overlook its impurities.

This observation generalises. If it is true that tonal systems play a far greater role in our perception of musical sense than the direct physical properties of the sounds, then it follows that people from different cultures will hear music through different ears, ears grown used to very different tonal systems – and from this it follows that a supra-cultural principle of musical sense, beyond such things as octave equivalence, cannot be tenable.

The objectivist theories of Kant and Hume are the finest and most influential versions of objectivism there are. But in this section, I have shown that their strong theses have dissolved – in Kant, because ‘pure judgements of taste’ seem to be very rare, and because we can’t know when we’re making one – and in Hume, because his theory, to be interesting, posits an implausibly large consonance of musical taste between people of different cultures.

Theories of Aesthetic Relativism

Aesthetic relativism taken on its own is an incomplete concept. For it to make sense, it has to be a relativism of something – it needs a qualifier. Although there can be as many relativisms as there can be qualifiers, the only two qualifiers of which I’ve ever heard are ‘personal’ and ‘cultural.’ Personal relativism, or subjectivism, holds that people’s tastes are incorrigibly particular to themselves, and that artistic criticism, the giving of reasons to support one’s opinion of art, is a foolish and rationally ungrounded enterprise. Cultural relativism is in one sense the same as personal relativism, except that it operates at a much larger level. Given personal relativism, art criticism between people is silly; given cultural relativism, art criticism between cultures is silly. And just as, given personal relativism, it makes sense for any particular individual to prefer some art to other art, given cultural relativism, value-hierarchies within cultures make sense.

Subjectivism

Subjectivism is the view that holds that our aesthetic opinions differ, and that there is no way around this: no way to justify arguing for a consensus of our taste, and no reason to expect one to become prevalent in a way not explained away by fashion or aesthetically arbitrary reasons more generally. When I say, “this sculpture is good,” I am in fact saying nothing more profound than, “I like this sculpture.” There is no rational justification for my aesthetic preferences, because there is nothing objective about what I like or dislike that merits my attitude, and further, there is no rational justification for imposing my aesthetic preferences on others.

As a purely descriptive thesis, subjectivism is not particularly plausible. If it were true, it would surely predict very little suprapersonal consensus on artistic taste. However, that prediction is simply not borne out by reality. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is proof of that. But it is possible that the wide consensus of taste is due to non-aesthetic considerations, such as corporations having vested interests in people (qua consumers) having substantial similarities of taste. So a more interesting subjectivism, then, will be one that focuses on the (a)normative aspect: that demonstrates that what we normally think of as rational opinions are in fact purely subjective: matters of mere personal opinion, without rational aesthetic bases.

Such a scepticism is considered (but not, of course, endorsed) by David Hume, in the aforementioned essay On the Standard of Taste. He writes:

All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it… [A] thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right; because no sentiment represents what is really in the object… Beauty is no quality in things themselves… To seek the real beauty, or the real deformity, is as fruitless an inquiry, as to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter[.]

The weight of this argument rests on two premises: One is that beauty is “no quality in things themselves.” This is utterly plausible. Even Kant acknowledges it, and it doesn’t stop him trying to construct an objective aesthetic theory. The other, allegedly following from this, is that as our sentiments are necessarily true, to correct or improve them is incoherent – how can we improve what is right? We can change them, presumably, but surely criticism considers itself to be doing something more worthwhile than idly playing with people’s tastes?

Such a theory undermines the claim to coherence of a lot of art criticism. It is surely not implausible to suggest that one of the central aspects of art criticism is the giving of relevant reasons to support one’s aesthetic evaluation of a work. These reasons, if they are to be reasons at all, must be ones that others can accept, and they have to in some sense justify the conclusions they are allegedly supporting. A successful refutation of the validity of this reason-giving would surely engender a radical subjectivism of art (and so music). But because the thesis that criticism is irrational is so counter-intuitive, to win adherents, it needs to show why our current way of going about it is deficient in some insurmountable way; if it engendered a contradiction or an absurdity, for instance.

Colin Lyas reveals a tension in our normal understanding of taste, one that unanswered may lead to subjectivism. He tells of how two music critics, attending the same concert, reviewed one of the items on the programme (Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces) in starkly contrasting lights. One castigated it as “plinks and plonks” and “horrible sounds;” the other praised it as one of the “miracles of modernity.” Lyas writes:

Here there is a disagreement between informed critics, and the temptation is to suppose that unless one critic can be proved to be right and the other wrong all the two critics can be doing is expressing their own personal likes and dislikes. Without a procedure that will settle such disagreements, criticism seems to be an entirely subjective matter. (‘The Evaluation of Art,’ in Hanfling (ed.): Philosophical Aesthetics, p. 352)

Again, unless there is a procedure that will settle disagreements of taste, or more generally, aesthetic value, then no matter how unpalatable or counterintuitive, subjectivism must be accepted. And as the strongest contenders for objectivism have been dismissed, it initially seems that subjectivism is forced upon us.

So subjectivism is more robust theory than it initially seemed; however, I think that it has some fundamental and insurmountable flaws.

Cultural Relativism

The subjectivist’s attack on value, denying that there is any procedure by which we can judge some works as better than others, is best answered by positing such a procedure. As, given the arguments against objectivism, objectivist theories of music are untenable, we need another procedure. One candidate for this procedure is the popular theory of cultural relativism.

Cultural relativism (henceforth just ‘relativism’) is formally very similar to subjectivism; but because it operates on a much greater level than subjectivism, what seems implausible in subjectivism can seem plausible in relativism. For example, it is counterintuitive to suggest that there is no value-hierarchy between people, and that we should just accept what other people prefer, much like we allow differences of opinion in canary wine. However, that there is no value-hierarchy between cultures, and that we should just accept what other cultures prefer, much like how we allow differences of opinion in national flags, religions, and government, is much more in accordance with our intuitions. And that there is no supra-cultural value-hierarchy is one main thesis of cultural relativism.

Its other main thesis is that within cultures, contra subjectivism, there is an aesthetic value-hierarchy, and that rational reasons can be given for judging a piece of art good or bad. However, and importantly, these reasons acquire legitimacy from their being acceptable to those to whom the reasons are addressed, but are fundamentally chosen, and do not have anything like the same universality granted claims such as, ‘all triangles have three sides.’ The value we give music can be entirely explained away by recourse to historical events, biological make-up, etc.

Both of these highly interrelated positions need independent defences, and because they go hand in hand, if one is side of the thesis is undermined, then the whole system is undermined. I will try to show in the following, however, that both sides of relativism are deficient, either through improper emphasis, or simple factual inaccuracy.

Relativism Between Cultures

The problem with the first thesis is essentially the impossibility of a satisfactory definition of what exactly a culture is. In the above discussion of objectivism, it has been shown that there are some supra-cultural value-hierarchies. The relativist could, however, make the argument that these aesthetic values are also chosen, because we cannot expect echolocating aliens to agree with our fundamental aesthetic principles (such as the harmonic series, etc.). However, to do this, he must hold that humanity is a culture; and to do that, he must hold that there is a legitimate value-hierarchy within humanity, and he is beginning to sound an awful lot like the objectivist he is setting himself against.

A reasonable-sounding response to this is that the relativist should concede that values, within humanity, are not completely chosen, but that there is no interesting aesthetic value-hierarchy between cultures. Allowed this, he can then argue for an aesthetic hierarchy within cultures. However, just as the definition of a culture is interest-relative, such that it can be larger than the common-language understanding of the word and encompass all of humanity, so too can it be smaller. The difference between, on the one hand, a legitimate and insurmountable difference due to differing cultures, and, on the other, poor taste within a culture, may prove extremely difficult to agree upon. To see if it is, in fact, all that difficult, I shall now discuss one attempt to ground the second horn of the relativist thesis; i.e., to ground a value-hierarchy within a culture.

Objectivism Within Cultures

Let us briefly remind ourselves of the subjectivist challenge: It seems to be an incorrigible fact that informed critics will always disagree on the value of art. I gave Lyas’s example of Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces, which got polarly opposed critical reviews. The relativist’s task is to posit some procedure by which disagreements of aesthetic value can be settled. In positing such a procedure successfully, they will synonymously be positing a procedure by which people can agree about the value of art. When people of a culture genuinely agree about the merit (or otherwise) of a work of art, then, to the relativist, what they like is good. Relatively good, to be sure: good for them, and not necessarily for any other culture – but the relativist doesn’t demand the latter.

Lyas suggests, in a manner reminiscent of Hume, that the grounding for relativism is to be found in education. The critic’s task is to convince others of her aesthetic judgements. In other words, her task is to give reasons that her interlocutors can accept, such that these reasons lead her interlocutors to agree with her aesthetic judgement. Of course, such ‘reasons’ are not reasons as we normally understand them. Aesthetic judgements must be based, in the end, on our own subjective experience of the aesthetic object. We must see for ourselves whether an artwork is good or bad. All the critic can do is try and make us see what she sees, by pointing out features of the work we might otherwise miss, using similes and metaphors, and so on.

Lyas does not demand that there be universal agreement for there to be a meaningful objectivity within a culture. After Hume, he notes that certain judgements may be disqualified: judgements made out of prejudice, out of being tone deaf, and so on. When these judgements are disqualified, he goes on to note, differences of opinion are actually very rare. He makes an analogy that sounds rather Kantian to ground this objectivity. When a motorist runs a red light, he is arrested. Perhaps the worst defence he could make is that it was green ‘for him.’ A red traffic light is objectively red, regardless of what the motorist thinks. If he genuinely can’t tell the difference between red and green, then he is branded quite simply wrong, because he does not see what is, objectively, there. Unless there is some reason to think that aesthetic judgements are unlike perceptual judgements, then the analogy must follow, and it must be the case that when we say that an artwork has beauty, then we are making a claim that may be true or false, depending on whether there is, in fact, beauty in the artwork.

But, having made this strong statement – which sounds more like objectivism than relativism, Lyas backs off, and says that judgements are not, in fact, completely analogous with our sense-perception. Rather, “[t]hey are affected by our culture, race, gender, traditions, education, and individual psychologies” (p. 376).

I think that the disanalogy is more pervasive than Lyas implies. When we say that someone has bad taste, we are attaching a value-judgement to our claim. His taste is bad, it is inferior – and what possible grounds are there for such a claim other than that his taste does not accord with what is really there? It makes sense to say that someone’s sight is bad if they cannot see well enough to find a single of the ten or so members of the People’s Front of Judaea in a small room, even when the members are hidden extremely poorly; for example, behind a curtain that doesn’t hang low enough to cover the aspiring revolutionary’s legs. The person is not seeing what is there. But given the disanalogy with sense-perception, can we really say the same of aesthetic perception? The relativist, to remain a relativist, needs to argue that because of our “culture, race, gender, traditions, education, and individual psychologies,” that yes, we can – but only insofar as all these criteria are the same, and the relativist, therefore, must hold that the latter five criteria are synonymous with the former. For if they are not, then there is no reason to believe that all people within a culture will perceive the same qualities in artworks – and if they do not perceive the same qualities, then the claim to objectivity within a culture is erroneous – and surely holding that the latter five criteria are synonymous with the former is absurd. Combined with the fact that the contention that there is a relativism between cultures is either erroneous or not relativist, depending on what you take a culture to be, the conclusion must be that the thesis of cultural relativism is mistaken.

A Third Way

I have so far kept fairly quiet about what is true in objectivism and relativism, as my aim has been to present them in opposition. But there is a lot to be said for both thesis and antithesis, and my task now is to combine these merits into a new – and better – theory. The origins of this theory, however, are not salvaged from the truth in the husks of the above-discarded ones. Rather, they are to be found in the same place as the others’ origins – simple observation.

When I first became interested in music, I listened to pop-rock; then to heavy metal; then to progressive rock; then to classical music and jazz. At all these stages of my development, the music I listened to fulfilled me in a deep way, such that I would feel euphoria in the sense that is applied to the most sublime masterpieces of high art. At each stage of my development, the stage I was at was right for me. If you were to make me listen to Schoenberg when I was sixteen, it would have ‘gone over my head;’ if you were to make me listen to pop music now, I would be entirely unmoved.

On a different level, I have since my youngest days adored Bach and Shostakovich. When exposed, I saw in Miles Davis a similar genius; and my opinion of these men has never changed. Indeed, I have almost never heard of anyone speak of these men with anything less than the highest of praise. From this, two possible conclusions present themselves: either these musicians are ‘objectively’ good; or that they are ‘appropriate’ for the sort of people from whom I hear aesthetic value-judgements. Let us consider the latter option, the former having been earlier discarded.

It suggests something that fits into none of the above theories: Some music is appropriate for sixteen-year olds; other music is appropriate for twenty-year olds; other music still for forty-year olds. So there is a sort of relativism here (though it is neither personal nor cultural) – but at the same time, some music is appropriate for people of all ages, so there is a weak sort of objectivism here. But there is more

If one were to play Schoenberg at a rock concert, it would go utterly unappreciated. It is not appropriate there. Schoenberg’s music is superb, but only within the tradition for which it was written. If you take it outside that tradition, then it becomes a cacophony. People who listen to rock music have not gotten accustomed to the tonal system of late-Romantic Germany by listening to Mahler and Wagner, and so Schoenberg sounds not like a very extreme take on that sort of tonality, but completely atonal and senseless. Those who grew up on rock music listen to music in a different way to those who grew up listening to classical music. They have not integrated the habits of picking out themes and formal structures. Conversely, those who listen to classical music all the time are not adept at picking out harmonies and melodies through the very thick distorted sounds of rock music; they look too hard for subtleties that simply aren’t there; and they haven’t integrated the dominant formal structure of popular music, and so the structure can seem forced, it may not be picked up on, or, in the case of some progressive bands, such as Yes, in which the structure is bent and stretched hugely, it can be imperceptible, and so the music seems senseless.

Music can, as well as being appropriate for certain people and social events, be appropriate for certain historical periods. Just as some music suits one’s adolescence more than one’s adulthood, so some music suits certain points in a culture’s history better than others. Take, for example, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet in F# Minor. In a local newspaper, the performance was reviewed in the crime column(!), attracting such colourful pejoratives that they merit repeating.

[A]nxious to make the acquaintance of the composer Arnold Schoenberg at last, we were completely cured by a String Quartet by that gentleman, allegedly in F sharp minor… The caterwauling turned what would have been an artistic event into an event of quite another nature, by provoking an unparalleled scandal; similarly, the composition is not an aesthetic but a pathological case. Out of respect for the composer we will assume he is tone-deaf and thus musically non compos… otherwise the Quartet would have to be declared a public nuisance, and its author brought to trial by the Department of Health. We cannot imagine in what way the subscribers of the Rosé Quartet concerts had sinned, to cause the leader of that group to programme such a worthless assault on their ears. The members of the Quartet and Frau Gutheil-Schoder, who affixed to the fiddled abomination two sung ones with turgid texts by Stephan [sic] George, have been punished enough.

This exact same piece is now considered a minor masterpiece.

So appropriateness can operate on personal and cultural levels, and operate on these different levels simultaneously. It operates within someone’s life and mood, and within a culture’s; it operates within counter-cultures, and between them; it operates between genders and races and economic conditions, and it allows for people with disabilities to attend to art at their own level without being branded inferior in any way. But it also operates on far grander levels. Some music may be appropriate for all human beings; some, perhaps, for all imaginative beings – and this latter is why I shun the word ‘relativism’ in explicating my position.

This last sentence is particularly important, because it is, I think, why we tend to feel that people shouldn’t listen to certain music. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Brahms is more appropriate for people in Western society than the Sex Pistols. Say, for example, that the counterpoint and melodies are good for our souls, and that his music imparts a euphoria that the Sex Pistols simply cannot. It is impossible, within a relativist framework, to reconcile this with the equally undeniable fact that the Sex Pistols are more appropriate for teenagers in punk clubs; but the reconciliation is easy in my theory. It is a complex matter as to whether it is more important that teenagers who want to listen to the Sex Pistols should listen to them or that they should listen to Brahms; that is, it is hard to know which ‘level’ of appropriateness is more important. Is the joy you get from Brahms’s Second Symphony more desirable than the catharsis that can be felt in listening to punk music? However, I think it is the case that when these teenagers’ parents say that ‘They should listen to more classical music,’ they are implicitly saying that the more universal level is the more important.

There is truth in objectivism, and there is truth in relativism. The objectivist is right to insist on the existence of good. She is right to insist that there is more to music than mere opinion; that there is a deep value in music. But the relativist is right to insist on the importance a whom: of experiencing subjects, and the huge diversity thereof. Both theses’ problems arise by their focussing on one aspect to the exclusion of the other, and both must be rejected for essentially this reason. My theory, I hope, surmounts them; it synthesises the positions into an accurate theory of aesthetic value, which gives both the good and the whom of music the appreciation they must be given, if we are to ever formulate a coherent account of what it is that is so precious in music, that we value it as dearly as we do life.

If you want the full, fully-referenced version, let me know. (I have to tell you this, or I'll be rightly done for plagiarism; to make the post tidier, I've taken the quotation marks out of one or two secondary-literature quotations, and a lot of books that've influenced my thought here have gone uncredited.)

Should dogmatic cynics be community moderators?

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 03:46:12 GMT

This may not be the most serious of questions, but would you want to go to a community knowing fully well that the moderators sneered at you, considered you stupid, called you retarded, and even deleted your posts?

I'd call the moderators trolls, but a community run by trolls is almost a contradiction. A community run by dogmatic cynics, however, is not, and since people who get called trolls are, in fact, dogmatic cynics, that is going to be the official focus of this discussion.

So the point is, would you want to join a community run by dogmatic cynics, or would you rather join a community where good use of reason is rewarded instead of punished? More importantly, ARE the people running this community dogmatic cynics, or are they simply people too hip to be labeled as anything at all?

PS, I've made a backup community in which we can debate this in case this gets deleted. Try good_philosophy. Now it can be argued that I am too OPEN with respect to who I allow to speak, but openness begets discussion and its opposite doesn't. So openness is more appropriate to a livejournal that claims to promote philosophy.