Theses on the Understanding History and Understanding Reason through Understanding History

 "You don't have to get a degree in history but you have to know it." Georg Bluhm, advice to me as a student

     I want my children to understand their history. I don’t think anyone who doesn’t understand their history can make competent judgment over a large range of issues, political and ethical. I don’t think anyone who does not have a grasp of history can really be said to know themselves. Most people and regimes turn history into a fantasy (which may be partly based on facts) that props up the ego or the regime. We tend to have a sentimental view of history: idealize this or that as innocent or evil to produce self-gratifying feelings, to be able to imagine ourselves as part of a story that features us as good guys. Most people who are interested in history are so for the same reason men with boring jobs and a tyrannical boss like Rambo: we seek compensation through fantasy, through vicarious living in socially constructed narrative, for what we lack in our real lives. I still remember the transformation that took place for me as a teen when I was being confronted with irrefutable evidence that to its shock and self-image my ‘I’ – my ego – was nothing special (not rich, that super-talented, not super-interesting, etc.) and then nationalism appeared: I was a equal member (as good as any rich, talented person) of the greatest, most powerful, and most morally righteous nation in the history of the world! Boy, that inflated by ego. And I defended all historical narratives that propped this fantasy up with a violence that would surprise me if I didn’t know my ego (i.e. my very “identity”) was at stake. The version that propped me and my “identity” up was true because it propped me and my “identity” up. It was “my truth”. Attack it and you cut the thread on which my ego was hanging, threatening to confront me again with the reality that I was just another person.

  

   So I can perfectly understand Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants that fanatically defend their version of the history of Ireland as their “identities” depend on it. Or history according to Israeli Zionists and Palestinians, the same. This is the kind of thing that makes true historical understanding impossible.

 

But what is that, to understand your history?

 

    Well, I would recommend that they read a variety of books, written by the best historians, different historians investigating different aspects of history from different perspectives. Histories of groups large (e.g. a nation state, a complex civilization) and small (a region, a town, a family, an individual). Histories of the state and histories of social groups. Histories of ideas and histories of technology in its economic applications. Anthropology and sociology may help in some cases. Also the complex interaction between culture and the nature of the place. You need a good understanding of what competent historians both agree and disagree about. Finally, some philosophical reflection on the nature of truth in history and its connection to different approaches to doing history. Though it is surely good to be able to discuss history with a competent practitioner and scholar, you don’t have to study history at the university. You do have to understand it to some meaningful extent. No one understands it completely – except God. Indeed, metaphysical speculation about the ends of history is important, but always necessarily speculation. (That is where Hegel and Marx went badly wrong.)

      So having given my advice to someone who wants to understand history, what does it all imply about the nature of historical reality, historical truth? Here some theses.

 

Thesis 1

History is analogous to a most complex text. While part of history deals with accumulating evidence and facts that are relevant to a particular understanding (explanation) – mostly only through the witness of people long dead – the understanding itself necessarily involves interpretation. History is like Shakespeare’s Hamlet: to reduce it to one narrative, one interpretation, is to become historically blind.

 

Thesis 2

As with written texts in general, and poetry in particular, the form the expression of historical truth takes is part of that truth. To choose narrative (storytelling) as a form of historical representation presupposes that history itself has a narrative dimension. Sociological, objective descriptions or an uncommented presentation of historical facts presuppose that another aspect of history cannot be captured by narrative. The representation of history in film or literature may capture aspects of history imaginatively. Imagination is surely essential to understanding people and place who are no longer present. The danger: to assert that only one form of representation, corresponding to only one aspect of history, is rational or legitimate; that all other forms necessarily falsify history. That leads to a kind of tone-deafness and color-blindness in understanding.

 

Thesis 3

Of course, every form, every approach that is grounded in this reality of history – some may not be, but I don’t want to say which here – is subject to a critical vocabulary. To be truthful, imaginative works of history must avoid the temptation to sentimentality or to sacrificing historical truthfulness for cheap plot effects. To be truthful, narrative accounts must not smooth over ruptures and discontinuities for the sake of a coherent narrative. To be truthful, descriptive presentations must not falsify the data in the service of a political agenda. Indeed, using to history to promote a present political or a religious agenda is a terrible sin against history, in effect killing historical understanding by turning it into propaganda, by weaponizing it. That is perhaps the original sin against history.

 

 

Thesis 4

Obviously, if truth in any form is nothing but what is in the interests of the power of groups or individuals, then there is no truth, no reality, but power – a dark, nihilistic view. History presupposes a love of truth, truthfulness as a spiritual demeanor, an openness to a variety of possible forms of understanding and interpretations of reality.

 

Thesis 5

I think it presupposes a profound love of the world, which may seem farfetched given the horrors to be encountered in history. But imagine the kind of history that would interest a person who thought of himself as an individual and nothing but an individual – say a narcissist like Donald Trump. It would be autobiography through a beauty filter; fantasy in other words, revolving around the sovereign individual, others or a community coming into play as less-than-real sentimental constructions that in some way glorify the hero – the backdrop or stage on which he acts. That is the anti-thesis of history. And the anti-thesis of the heroic individual are people who are rooted in a community and tradition that find worth preserving. (And if you are not involved in history, have no interest in historical truth, then that could be evidence you are such a sovereign individual.)

 

Thesis 6

History is a complex reality, but it is a reality. Different versions of history do not implies different historical realities – each version in effect giving birth, or constructing its own reality. That would only be true if we were nothing more than a collection of borderline psychotic narcissists. History gives rise to a plurality of forms and interpretations because we are in it, and we are who we are: a perspective on the world, a perspective within history, within a culture with conceptual space for history. We each have our own set of histories that make sense only with the larger set of possible understandings of the larger history of which we are a part. This is the precondition that any of it could be meaningful or valuable. If our intellects could be disconnected from our reality, we could be no more historical than, say, the artificial intelligence that designed the Matrix (in the film of the same name). That intelligence sees no history in the virtual ‘world’ it constructed. It is important to me to understand the Civil War, for example, in all its complexity. It would not be vitally important for someone from Mongolia, say, except as a curiosity or as food for understanding history as such. It would not be important for any being outside human history – excepting God.

 

 

Thesis 7

History can disappear from human consciousness, leaving us less than human. When I read in Orwell’s 1984 how the state simply rewrote history depending on its present interests – deleting some from existence, etc. – I misunderstood it. I though Orwell was talking about the dangers of one power being able to construct history to fit its needs. But I think what he was pointing out is this: if you can construct history arbitrarily, truth itself disappears, becomes unintelligible. And so history itself disappears along with the rest of reality. If Marx is right, and historical, philosophical, political ‘truth’ is defined as anything that advances the power of a group – be it the proletariat or any other group – then we lose history along with the rest of reality.

 

Thesis 8

History presupposes a free space for conversation and thinking in a real community. This space is clearly threatened by media developments in modern times, developments which promote narcissism and unreality on a scale never before seen. The printed word, the lecture, the conversation, and even (despite the dangers) the film, all connecting people who are connected to one another through care for some community: that is the ideal in which historical understanding thrives. To be uprooted is a terrible thing, because it means losing one’s history. Corporate capitalist society uproots. Therefore, corporate capitalist society tends to erode history.

 

 

Thesis 9

The point of history is not to make you feel good or proud of your group – contra the populist nationalists. History is not a fantasy novel, with your country as the hero. Nor is it a platform to debunk heroes. It has nothing to do with heroes one way or other, unless it is the understanding of some cultural figure as a hero. History is about truth, judgment, wisdom. It is about understanding where your community has been so that you know where you are and what you need to do to get to where you would like to be.

 

 

Thesis 10

History is an analogy for understanding other aspects of reality, as well as reality as such. I could substitute philosophy for history in the preceding theses, and with only minor adjustments it would ring true. Or the study of literature. This is not accidental. History, like reality is bigger than our finite (and fallible) mind’s ability to comprehend it as a whole – from the outside looking in. We thus only have a limited perspective from within history – and reality. The very idea of ‘reality’ is bound to our finitude. In a literal sense, God is beyond reality – at least as we humans can only imagine it.

 

Thesis 11

Without a profound understanding of history we have no moral starting point: my relations to African Americans are conditioned by history. To be blind or indifferent to that history is to be morally obtuse. Like being a character in a story in which the previous chapters have been erased from your memory. Like amnesia.

 

Thesis 12

Without a true understanding of history, you are not real, you live a lie. The most obvious example of this are the Trump cultists who must accept the “Big Lie” that Trump won the election of 2020 to hang on to the “identity” they (with the help of the whole propaganda machine behind Trump) constructed for themselves. Indeed, the MAGA cult is premised on a full-blown myth that has replaced history. There you can see how important history is. 

Interpretation and Subjectivity in History

There are two kinds of relation between our deeper attitudes towards self, others, world (and nature), and the moral, political, together with the metaphysical or religious convictions that arise from them, and historical reality (what really happened and why; or how things really were in a certain context). The first is analogous to the position of a scientist studying global warming. Either the climate is warming due to the human burning of fossil fuels or it is not; the answer to this vastly complex question is ‘out there’; the subjective needs and wishes of the scientists are irrelevant to the answer – at best they may serve as a kind of external incentive to get to the truth of the matter; at worst, they may skew their judgment: the Republican activist may be tempted to interpret the data in self-serving ways that hide the industrial impact on climate change; the Greenpeace scientist may be tempted to exaggerate the situation to promote change. In either case, the reality of the matter is the same for both camps; it is independent of their attitudes and convictions.

          Clearly, part of history involves a relationship like this: no more than one can change the basic plot of a Shakespeare play when interpreting it – Macbeth and not Banquo must murder Duncan – can one change the historical record; Truman and not Stalin ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And even in the vastly more complex task of giving explanations, the historian cannot ascribe to Truman a sadistic lust for blood as an explanation of his order if no evidence speaks for this explanation and everything speaks against it. Even complex questions like the relation between social and organizational structures, ideology, and individual actions involve realities that no matter how seemingly impenetrable are not a blank canvass onto which we can paint our fantasies.

            The second kind of relation seems to involve an intimacy between one’s attitudes and convictions and what one takes to be real. Perhaps this is best illustrated by an intractable moral debate: abortion. Whereas one person, when confronted with the image of a living fetus, sees an unborn child or baby, an intelligible object of love, a precious new life, another sees nothing but a biological fetus. Some see the fetus as utterly precious, a ‘gift of God’; others see it nothing but part of the biological material of the mother’s body. Some pregnant women are filled with joy, tenderness, love, and expectation upon receiving news of the pregnancy; others, under much different circumstances, might be filled with bitter resentment. Behind all these different attitudes towards this reality are not only differing ‘conceptual frameworks’ but different lives in all their particularity. So imagine all are viewing an image of the fetus: what is it, really? Can we ‘see’ that it is precious or nothing but biology? Does the image tell us the answer to that question? Does a medical textbook tell us the answer, even if it included everything possible that science could know about it? It seems not; we can only see it as precious or biological, as making claims on us or not, given who we are and what attitudes towards life we bring to the seeing.

         Anything that would count as evidence for one view of the other, moreover,  has already been conditioned by that view. To see the fetus as an unborn baby might be based on evidence of mother’s loving their unborn child, and our refusal to call this love sentimental. But other women can have an abortion with little or no ability to find remorse an intelligible response, which would be the case had they been able to see the fetus as a baby. What such responses ‘prove’ is already conditioned by the way one sees the fetus, and so from the perspective of the opponent will always seem circular as an argument. Some woman do feel remorse over the aborting of their fetus, but that will count as evidence for the reality of the fetus to a convinced pro-choice person only if that person can see it as non-sentimental; and her ability to see it as non-sentimental is conditioned already by how she sees the fetus. If she is a convinced pro-choice person, then she must see the remorse as sentimental, whereas the pro-life person would see it as evidence that the fetus is ‘bearer of human dignity.’ There is no independent perspective from which the only kinds of evidence available must count as evidence for both sides; such ‘evidence’ will always be interpretable in incommensurable ways from both perspectives. There are no ‘facts of the matter’ that are just there to see independently of one’s core convictions as there are in the case of global warming.

            Now this in itself does not constitute an absolute gap between the two kinds of relation. We are all familiar with the temptation in cases like abortion to skew our ‘seeing as’ through wishful thinking, rationalization, ideological blindness, or opportunistic spin-like ways of avoiding truth. In the case of abortion, a pro-lifer’s seeing the fetus as a precious gift may be heavily influenced by an unconscious desire to feel morally superior over the opponent; may reveal resentment against the intellectual pretentions of ‘liberals’ or ‘feminists’; may reveal lack of empathy or a failure to grasp of the difficult situation many women find themselves in; or may involve any number of infantile fears. A pro-choicer’s seeing the fetus as nothing but biological material may likewise hide a bad conscience, functioning as a rationalization for something the deeper heart speaks against but the narcissistic self requires. In the case of the history of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fervent patriotic may be incapable of criticizing anything his country has done; racism may color the seeing; or the horror of the event may be relativized by the need to see the country as a source of good. All these attitudes may, at another level, arise to deal with inferior complexes the individual sublimates by identifying himself with the greater collective. One could imagine many such ad hominem explanations for seeing something as something – interpreting it as something – on any side of almost any issue.

           The point is that we can also recognize such ways of seeing as deeply flawed, in a similar way that the Greenpeace activist or the Republican Party activist may skew their scientific work on climate change. Good interpreters of whatever convictions are aware of such influences and minimize their influence by valuing truthfulness and knowing how to get deeper into the truth of things. That is not to say that their attitudes and convictions are irrelevant: what they see is conditioned by these attitudes. But it is one thing uncritically to project one’s attitudes and convictions onto reality; it is quite another to enter into a kind of metaphorical ‘dialog’ with reality in which one makes sense of what one sees in terms one’s deeper commitments on the one hand, and allows one’s commitments to be challenged by aspects of reality – and the way others see it – on the other. Considering the way of seeing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an act of mass murder carried out for reasons that had little to do with military necessity or even saving American lives forces the patriotic historian to reevaluate, to question whether his ideological commitments skew his view, to consider evidence that challenges his own view, or to judge from a more universal human point of view. If his original way of seeing withstands this probing, honest scrutiny, then the patriotic historian has deepened his view; if he must qualify his view, then that is also a deepening. Reality is ‘talking back’ even if reality turns out to be morally charged.

           Of course, at the deepest level, only some congruence on attitudes and convictions makes common ground in interpretation possible. If the patriotic historian sees the world as did the Roman Cato, who cold-bloodedly advocated genocide for Carthage and eventually had his policy put into terrible practice, then there will be a deep incommensurability between his way of seeing the use of the atomic bomb and those historians, patriotic or not, whose sense of human dignity has been inherited from parts of Christianity and above all from the Enlightenment. Can reality give rise to standards of judgment at this deep level? Not morally neutral ones, that much is clear. But it is at least plausible that there is something about human reality that makes those who respond with moral horror or outrage more in tune with it than Cato and those like him. To contemplate, plan, and perhaps witness the kinds of horrors inflicted on human beings of all kinds – the old and the young, men and women, children and even babies – at least prima facie indicates a blindness to the meaning of horrible pain and death in human life; or it indicates cruelty, evil. In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fact that the perpetrators were far away – emotionally and physically – from these consequences in no way vitiates that they brought that about.

 

           It makes all the difference whether extenuating circumstances were involved and perhaps could justify this horror, and in practice these are what historians disagree about. It is true: nothing external to moral attitudes that are intertwined with ‘seeing’ the horror and responding to it with horror justifies a criticism of a Cato-like historian; only an insider can see that reality. And given Cato’s cultural background and what I would like to think of as the moral progress since the Roman Republic, we might be justified in judging Cato’s genocidal policies in a different way that we would our contemporaries. The important point to hold on to is that if we saw the horrors we all know happened when the atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities, some of us might just  sentimentally project their own image of themselves as morally refined human beings onto the blank screen of history, but the more serious people among us may also be responding to the reality of that suffering and what it means, or ought to mean, to those with eyes to see it – eyes given us not by neutral facts but that a grasp of what that horror really means. But not everybody has those eyes, and this does not necessarily imply condemnation when due to conditions over which they had no influence. That fact does not negate the deeper relation to reality held by the historian for whom the horror inflicted on people matters, no more than the limited views about Macbeth of a high school student with only the most superficial knowledge of the play imply that the views of a Shakespeare lover, scholar, and talented interpreter are just subjective prejudices projected on the blank canvass, the neutral facts of the play.

        None of this implies that a historian who, for example, sees the photographs taken in the aftermath of the bombings – for example, of a little girl with her skin hanging off – and, filled with horror, cannot write a distorted view of that history overcome by the emotional impact of the photo. Or that a historian who has more moral distance to the events might not write a truthful history. Even the Cato-like historian, blind to the moral meaning of the events, could give us a history that at least did not falsify what happened, even though we may loath the spirit in which he recounts the events. Or, to take another example, a Nazi historian may be able to give us an accurate account of the outbreak of WWII – seeing through the façade of the official story that Poland attacked first and using documents to show that the German attack was premeditated. What I want to stress, however, is that what actions and events the historian deems significant, how a historian interprets those events has nothing to do with a flat field of neutral facts which the historian then through the lenses of his values and epistemological commitments sees some but not others, and sees those visible to him in the colors of the lenses; there are no facts in this sense, and there are no such lenses. Both a decision to drop atomic bombs, and the actual horrors that ensued in the aftermath of the bombing are infused with moral reality, and part of the historian’s job is to allow the true significance of this reality to show. 

       And I hope it is becoming apparent that the whole problem lies with taking a distinction between facts and values – which makes sense in many contexts – and making it into a kind of metaphysical absolute. In some abstract, logical sense, the number of hairs on Truman’s head, and the precise chemical composition of the toilet he sat on during the morning he gave his order have no less, or no more significance that the order to drop the bombs. Or, viewing the photograph of the little girl after the bombing, it is equally a fact that the sky is gray, that her hair is black, and that her skin has been burned off and that she is in agony (though I suppose one would have to state that last fact in more scientific terminology to make it really flat). And so in an equally abstract, logical sense it may seem coherent to view the greater significance we attach to the decision to drop the bomb and to the girl’s agony as merely ‘subjective’ projections onto a neutral screen, with their source in our ‘values.’ It is on this absurd distinction that the problems of ‘relativism’ and skepticism in history arise.

            The problem of the subjective in history – values, ideologies, worldviews, practical interests, etc – is fundamentally no different than it is in interpreting literature, law, or scripture: it is the necessary lens through which the ‘text’ or history becomes visible and important on the one hand, and the framework which can either uncritically or manipulatively predetermine the outcome on the other. Thus it is of the essence not to make the vain, foolish attempt to extract oneself from the web of meanings that power one’s need and interest in history in the first place, except to the minimal attempt necessary to determine what happened and what did not happen. But it is equally crucial to value truth – depth – over the preservation of the subjective commitments at any cost, and have the integrity to allow reality to ‘talk back.’

 

      But an interpretation is a function of the virtue and profundity of the interpreter. There is no way around that.

 

 

 

 Kant’s Logically Possible but Uncanny World Version

                                                           Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

 

         “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will.”  Why did Kant write such a thing? My children, for example, the music of Bach, the awesome beauty of the light on Hiddensee, or the poetry of Shakespeare – the list goes on – I would call good without qualification or condition. Good here means love-able in the end, worthy of love, its very existence a treasure and a gift.  That seems to me plainest common sense: the certainty that some things and people, at least, are good without reservations. For Kant common sense and I are mistaken. Only the good will – the will that informs our actions for moral reasons – is good without reservations. Why?

        For this reason, I think: Kant accepted classical mechanics (Newtonian physics) as the final word nature. When what we can know has been purged of the subjective, the poetic, the mythical, that was what remained. Classical mechanics understands nature as a closed, deterministic system. In the language of metaphysics, every change is the effect of a cause, a cause that can, in principle, be mathematically predicted or posited of the past. There is no indeterminacy in nature. Everything – my act of writing this – is just as predetermined as the orbits of the planets, part of a chain of events that stretches far back into the distant past and into a future that lasts as long as the world. That is almost everything we can know. Our emotional, ethical, and intellectual inner lives are part of this chain. If finding something good presupposes a capacity to love, and if the capacity to love is a link in a mechanical chain (evolution, ultimately physics), then no matter how intensely we experience it, it is not what it appears to be. The system of nature in classical mechanics is without intrinsic value – is neither good nor bad in itself. It is we who project value onto the mechanisms of nature, mechanisms that are indifferent to our hopes and fears. These projections are entirely subjective, poetic, mythical; they reveal aspects of our nature, of our mechanism, but tell us nothing of nature in itself.

    For Kant, as is well known, the nature that we can and (he believed) do know in the form of classical mechanics is not all there is to say. Indeed, the nature we know as a closed system is only nature as we can know it, and our knowing it bears the imprint of our minds. The world as we know it is our representation or modelling of it; it is pure appearance – not nature as it is in itself, about which we can know nothing. Space, time, causality, number, relation – all these things men once believed made up reality itself – are likewise projections of our reasoning powers, abstracted from our emotional and sensuous capacities. What is real beyond our subjective knowledge and poetic-symbolic projections of what is real is a big X – the unconceptualized reality in itself.

     By way of illustration:  To say that the tree is beautiful is, strictly speaking, wrong. Even to provide a scientific description of the tree, believing that description to be true of nature itself, is wrong. All we can do is to describe the various ways the tree appears to us – which tells us about how our mind works. It tells us nothing about that which is outside of our minds. Rather than saying ‘the tree is beauty’ we should be saying ‘the set of sensory impressions we call a tree appears to us in a way we emotionally respond to as beautiful.’ It might appear to a different species differently, or even a different culture or individual differently. The ways we experience the tree have nothing to do with the tree itself, which indeed is also an appearance and not real in a metaphysical sense. Still, what we can know, is objective in that it must be the same for you and me. The scientific description of the tree is objective. Emotive projections such as beauty may be fairly universal; but they are entirely subjective, lacking any possible ground in knowledge. Other emotion-laden projections – that a certain practice is just or unjust – conflict, and equally lack any possible ground in knowledge. But the scientific description is objective for Kant not because it corresponds to the independent reality of the tree but because such knowledge is grounded in objective structures of cognition stripped bare of all subjective, poetic, or mythical interpretations.

    Where does all this leave morals? Kant couldn’t live with the nihilistic implications of this world version. That they are nihilistic was recognized by many of his contemporaries. Here, for example, the reaction of Heinrich von Kleist (famous German playwright). He argues that it is beyond the capacity of any human being to define the truth because every individual’s definition of such will be tainted by his or her own perception of reality in the world in which they live.

 

If people all had green lenses instead of eyes they would be bound to think that the things they see through them are green…It is the same with our minds. We cannot decide whether what we call truth is truly truth or whether it only seems so to us.

 

This is where the goodness of the good will comes into play for Kant. In the experience of acting out of a sense of duty, so Kant, we have a direct experience of something outside of nature, outside the causal chain that must determine all other phenomena that we can objectively experience. When we act from a sense of duty, we act against all the natural causes that impinge on our will – emotions, cultural rules, religious prohibitions . . . everything. We experience a moment of radical freedom in which we act upon a purely rational maxim, a maxim that does not belong to nature as we know it. It is like a leak from the real (transcendent) realm. We experience directly something otherworldly, non-natural – something that cannot be explained in terms of a closed system.  We experience reality as it is in itself, and not merely as it appears to us. Act so that your action conforms to a universal maxim; act so that other human beings are always bearers of dignity (ends-in-themselves) and never merely a means to some end. That is not written into the laws of classical mechanics or any system based on cause-and-effect. It is sublime, an eruption of something sacred into the closed system of phenomenal nature, of which we are a part. Thus Kant. For Kant, the good will remains outside of nature because nature is Newtonian physics and it is outside Newtonian physics. Nature is Newtonian physics because our minds are constructed so as to perceive and know nature as Newtonian physics, leaving open conceptual space for the eruption of something sublime – outside nature – into our experience. (Kant thus leaves a window open for God and the immaterial soul as well.) In any case, given what he believes about nature, the idea of the good will being the only thing that is unconditionally good makes more sense.

      Now I see no reason why I must share Kant’s assumption that nature is reducible to classical mechanics – even modern physics is not that reductive. I see no reason to describe my experience of freedom as sublime in that sense, as I do not see nature as a mechanism driven by causality. Nor do I see the need to see it as unique. I know the tree is beautiful just as surely as I know that I can act freely (and not only in the sense of acting from duty against inclination). Beauty and freedom are both part of nature; otherwise, my experience of self and nature makes no sense.

        This is no refutation of Kant. He knew he was turning the world on its head. Whether I am projecting beauty onto the tree or freedom onto my fatherly acts, or whether beauty belongs the reality of the tree and freedom belongs to my fatherly acts – metaphysically it might be like the famous drawing of the rabbit and the duck:

                                                 

When metaphysics becomes the attempt to see the world as from nowhere in it – from God’s perspective – as Kant’s and modern philosophy since Descartes proposes, then there is no point outside of the metaphysical constructions from which to see it. You can point out internal contradictions or counter-intuitive consequences for our common sense understanding of the world. But you can’t refute it from a perspective within a competing metaphysical world version. (see the next meditation for an example). Kant can’t step out of his metaphysics, Spinoza out of his, and Hume out of his, and then compare the three with reality as it is unconceptualized – as if the metaphysical world versions were like scientific theories being tested against neutrally defined data. Metaphysical world versions determine what the data are and are not. No possibility of a neutral definition of data, theory, reason, evidence, truth, or knowledge exists since what such key critical concepts mean depends on what world version you use. You may as well be looking at a painting of an icon, of Rembrandt, and of Chagall with a view to determine which painting is the true understanding of the world.

       Nevertheless, all things being equal, a metaphysical world version that denies truth to our experience of love, goodness, truth, responsibility – all the pieces of the puzzle of our mind and spirit – well, prima facie we can’t live in it. I suppose in science fiction we can imagine a culture in which all attributions of intrinsic value are missing. Perhaps the inhabitant of such a culture might muse about how strange it is that this bundle of sense impressions that people call a tree seems so real, and indeed beautiful. Or that his compassion for human or animal suffering seems to be evoked by something real ‘out there’ and is not just a program he inherited from evolution. However, that is no form of life that is livable for me or anyone I know, no form of life that most of us would recognize as human. That is as close as we can get to a metaphysical refutation.

 

      

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afterthought on Kant

 

        For Kant any response to a situation that involved emotions was a natural response. If a response is natural for Kant, it belongs to the closed, machine-like system of cause and effect. The response is, therefore, unfree. If a response is unfree, then it has nothing to do with morality; it is not a morally good response. If an only if a response occurs solely for rational-moral reasons – if I respond to a situation in such a way that any rational creature would have to – is the response morally good. The only time a person can be sure he acted morally is when they have no inclination to do the right thing – i.e. know that nature is making no contribution – but do it anyway out of a pure sense of duty, contra the natural chain of cause and effect. This is absurd – but not logically refutable.

      Of course, duty has its place. I don’t feel like reading to my children every day, but since it is part of their life and a good part, I feel obligated to read to them whether or not I feel like it. Kant would be pleased – I act out of pure duty against all natural inclinations. I thereby lift myself out of nature and put myself on the discontinuous rational-moral plane. But surely a man who never has any desire to read to his children, who has no joy in it, but does it as an unpleasant duty is not a moral saint and is not superior to a father who loves reading to his children. This father feels pleasure rightly, a pleasure or happiness that emerges from affectionate love. Kant sees both the affectionate love that informs the one father’s reading and the absence of pleasure in the other basically as winds blindly (by chance of nature) pushing the wills of the two fathers in different directions. The both pleasure and its absence are morally neutral, natural forces. The goodness of the reading is measured by the extent to which it is informed by the rational will, by a sense of duty, by a moral requirement. This flies in the face of what we know, an example of a metaphysical theory turning the world on its head.

          The affectionate father who reads with enthusiastically will not only be a better reader, but will communicate the love he bears his children more profoundly – and love is the morally salient relationship; not duty. To love one’s children and care for them out of rational duty alone might be better than outright abuse, but I think most of us would agree that such loveless love is a form of abuse, and thus on the wrong side of morality. The difference from Kant is that natural love – however it may have evolved and whatever the biological aspect – is a spiritual response to its object i.e. one’s children. Or with other words, it is a recognition of what one’s children, natural beings all, mean. (This is what the father who acts from pure rational duty must fail to grasp.) Through love alone the children are disclosed as the beings they are: as loveable, which is to say, as creatures whose existence is wonderful. Through it alone to we know children. It is natural and spiritual; not like the wind but not pure rational will either.

          We are of nature, flesh and blood;  and we are beings whose being is disclosed not through some blind evolutionary instinct but through a felt-recognition that this particular natural being, our child, calls forth love, is worthy of love, which in turn is a recognition that the child is good, meaning that its existence is good. This is what Kant could not imagine or admit: that creatures of flesh and blood are at the same time creatures capable of spiritual recognition. As flesh and blood, as matter, Kant thought we are subject to the same laws of physics and biochemistry as a snail, an amoeba, or a volcano. As we are. But we also transcend that kind of being every second of our lives. Kant could only imagine that an immaterial ghostly substance, a form of non-matter, made spiritual life possible, but that was a metaphysical idea that had no cognitive (i.e. scientific) content. But the idea of a ghostly, immaterial substance loving our child in radical separation from nature and the body – well, is that easier to belief than the simple fact that we are creatures of flesh and blood who can read lovingly to our children? Or, denying the coherence of the ghost-in-the-machine hypothesis (as I certainly do), is believing that the experience of lovingly reading to your children is an illusion because you are matter and matter (as understood by science) is incapable of spiritual act – is that any easier than believing a truth so obvious no one except modern philosophers and scientists forgetting their science and engaging in philosophical speculation would ever think to deny it?

        That we are nature and we can genuinely love, wonder, do good, do evil, and even do physics – some of us, at least. That obvious fact, which can be doubted only in thought experiments but not in life, is the ground of the philosophy that I can take seriously. This is not a logical refutation of Kant. From within our experience of life we may not be able to doubt that we are nature and that we transcend nature as conceived by modern science. But we can’t get out of our skins to compare it with our reality as not lived and experience. (To believe science gets outside of all experience is wrong.) Perhaps we are all living in the Matrix or perhaps Descartes’ evil demon is causing an illusory experience of self and world. Such a purely speculative perspective on the world – the perspective of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant and beyond – is truly beyond the limits of reason. But I see no reason to take seriously the possibility that we live in a Matrix, that my body is a machine and nothing else, that a ghostly substance does or does not coexist with that machine, or that the full truth of nature rules out the reality of our inner lives.

      

The Intelligence of the Passions – A Meditation on a Passage from Hume

 

                                                             David Hume (1711-1776)

“'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.  'Tis not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me.  'Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater.”

-David Hume

 

“Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

-David Hume

 

People often have reasons for their morally relevant actions – not only their actions, but attitudes, beliefs, and even sense of self.  Their reasons may be more or less well thought out and authentically expressive of the person; they may be admirable and deep, or selfish and superficial.  In any case, when such reasons appeal to our sympathies and values, we will find them convincing, which in this respect makes them logically similar, for example, to our tastes in music and literature.

At the same time, other people's actions and the reasons why they acted as they did may – and often do – conflict with other people's values.  From Plato on, this common occurrence has been deeply disturbing to western philosophers, who have thus looked for a reason at a level which every human being must acknowledge independently of their sympathies and values. This philosophical viewpoint directs attention to the search for this reason-beyond-value which is to judge all values, and despite many attempts to formulate it (appealing to Nature, God, or Reason) no agreement has ever been reached.  This fact alone should make one wonder whether the whole project is not somehow flawed at the root.   This indeed was David Hume's position, who thought it guilty of a logical-semantic confusion.  Hume's point was not to call morality into question – the specter of moral anarchy (“anything goes”) is itself a bogey which arises only within the confused perspective he cogently criticizes.  His point is rather that the emotional response (“the passions”) is the only proper and possible way to see moral reality, to which reason is blind. And this insight can be best appreciated by examining it in the light of the critique of Hume's great philosophical opponent, Immanuel Kant.

               Hume's discovery of the “naturalistic fallacy” hit on something which goes very deep in morality. That no rationally binding prescriptive statement is logically entailed by any possible set of descriptive statements points to the seat of morality in the human heart.  It is not that knowledge plays no role in morality – to the contrary, ignorance about the facts of one's life or one's moral situation can be fatal. But even the most accurate description of a situation will not logically imply an action as the conclusion of a practical syllogism; nor will it imply any particular change of direction in one's life. For example, knowing that my friend's wife is ill and that she can no longer do certain things for herself does not logically imply he should tend to her in the way 2 + 3 = 5.  To call his tending to her a “rational response” to her situation strains the language. He tends to her because he loves her in a very particularizing way, because she needs tending to, because he is able to tend to her. These reasons are only intelligible within his overall response to my wife, which is essentially emotional – all the “facts” he knows about her are only meaningful in the context of a very specific relationship of love. There is no ground or foundation “behind” this to which a philosopher could appeal to make his tending seem like a rational response to an underlying reality which can be identified and known independently of his emotional response, as is possible, for example, in the sciences: my friend may want the global warming hypothesis to be wrong because he is afraid or because he doesn't want to change his consumption habits, but the truth of the matter is quite independent of his wants. Not so in moral matters.

              Hume's appeal to custom and habit as a guide to life does not undermine morality as Kant and other critics have feared, arguing that morality requires the positing of a free subject, and a free subject requires the existence of a moral ground beyond the passions. It is true: behaviorism – the proposition that we act and respond as we do, that we are who we are because we are so conditioned – is antithetical to morality. Some have argued that Hume's appeal to custom and habit imply behaviorism. On this view, my friend tends his wife because he lives in a culture that teaches him to do so; he loves his wife because he has been taught that “love-behavior” is the norm, etc.  Something like behaviorism is one implication that Kant feared from Hume's thought, but this fear was based on a metaphysical assumptions about nature which Hume was right not to share.

            According to Kant, the character of morality requires that my friend be thought of as a free subject, and a free subject must be thought of as being able to appeal over his feeling, emotions (Kant: “inclinations”) to some independently identifiable, rational principle of action.  Morality can't be thought of as merely a result of whatever emotions happen to rule in a person.  Even more, given that human psychology – and thus emotion – is part of nature, and nature is causally determined, morality must be thought of as seated in a dimension beyond nature, in so far as it requires a free subject acting according to a principle which transcends a given emotional-psychological state.  The precondition for the possibility of morality thus implies a transcendental-metaphysical picture of ultimate reality in which morality is seated in a rational subject inhabiting a human body-in-the-world, the former being free to intuit and follow purely rational principles, the latter exposed to the messy causality of phenomenal (biological, psychological, sociological, etc.) nature.  The assumption is, of course, that morality is conceptually dependent on responsibility, and responsibility is conceptually tied to freedom – a tornado that destroys a house is not morally responsible.

            Hume is more skeptical about reason's ability to make pronouncements about transcendence than Kant, though of course Kant shares Hume's skepticism concerning traditional metaphysical questions.  But for Kant, two features of morality are evident which Hume's thought seemingly cannot account for: the unconditional nature of moral response, and its sometimes antagonist relation to our wishes and desires. We need to look at these two features and ask ourselves whether Hume's or Kant's account make more sense out of whatever might be true in them.

            The first thing about Hume which disturbed Kant concerned the relation of the emotions to moral action. Kant pressed the perfectly true point that since the right thing to do is often not what we are emotionally predisposed to do, the former cannot be derived from the latter.  Perhaps my friend after hours of tending to his ill wife felt like taking a break, doing something for himself like reading a book, but the situation of his wife didn't allow it; contrary to his “inclinations,” he stayed and tended to her.  But because the right thing to do cannot be reduced to our inclinations, it does not follow that the right thing to do (or the best way to live) is conceptually independent from our conscious, value-soaked, emotion-laden (“empirical”) inner life in the way the sun's position to the earth is independent from our perception.  A deep confusion is at work here. My friend's care for his wife is unintelligible apart from his love for her; because of his love, he cares for her, wishes her well, desires to help if he can; his love places any inclination he might have to read a book.  Thus not selfish emotions verses duty as determined by independent reason is the correct picture in this case, but selfish emotions verses benevolent emotions – which corresponds to Hume's account.  Why are the loving, benevolent emotions unconditionally preferable?  Why ought my friend not read a book when is wife needs him?  Hume might say, 'well, he just ought to.  It would be out of place for me to tell you a metaphysical or religious story to explain why he ought to.  That would be to distort what morality is, as Kant should have known had he been true to his insight that morality is unconditional.'

            Of course, sometimes we must simply do our duty without having the slightest emotional resources to motivate us: trivial duties like paying bills come to mind, but also perhaps for some people giving first aid in an emergency to a person he has no emotional ties with (e. g. for many, a homeless person).  But such cases are the exception, not the rule. And to make such cases the norm seriously distorts morality.  Take the lovely example of Christopher Cordner of two fathers who both read to their respective daughters in the evening.  The Kantian father has no inclination whatsoever to read to his daughter – say, he'd much rather be reading for himself The Critique of Practical Reason.  But out of a pure sense of duty he overcomes his true desires and reads to his daughter a fairy tale which bores him to tears – a purely, perfectly moral act for Kant because performed according to a rational assessment of what duty required and not according to a contingent emotional response.  The Humean father reads to his daughter because he has pleasure from it; he has pleasure from it because he loves his daughter; has joy over her particular life; relishes her reactions to the stories and observing her development; and a host of other intangibles. Now according to Kant, all this emotion is irrelevant for the moral worth of the Humean father's reading – in a way; he is selfish for doing merely what pleases him, whereas the Kantian father is altruistic.  I think: a father who reads only from a sense of duty is the morally deficient one, and the quality of his reading will be very much worse than the reading of the father who is not only doing his duty.  A Kantian father would be to that degree a deficient father.  And the claim that a bad father is a moral father whereas a good father is amoral is absurd.  Indeed, nothing better shows the absurdity of detaching emotional response from morality than this example.

            How we feel cannot be said a priori to be – as Kant thought – the result of some biological hardware plus culturally determined psychological software.  How we feel, how we respond emotionally, is a function of who we are morally, and what lies beyond this is beyond knowledge, period.  And who we are morally is partly a function of the quality of our loves, of our attitudes towards others. Of course, our emotional lives are intimately connected with reason in many ways; how artificial to separate them.  Of course, the picture of the absolutely free subject existing in transcendental space cannot be reconciled to the self of emotionally laden moral response, which does contain an element of contingency (though subject to a degree of choice as well).  But “purity” from the contingency of emotional response does not ground morality, unless the responses of automata can be considered moral.  Kant wanted to make morality a simple operation of reaching the “correct answer” (duty) which anyone with minimal intelligence could perform, giving morality an objective, even logical character; Hume wanted to describe our moral reality as we experience it, having drawn limits to speculative philosophy.

            Now to the second point concerning the unconditional in morality, which motivated Kant to reject any contingency and thus the relevance of moral response.  Kant, I think, is right so far: an unconditional element does inhere in moral judgments. The moral quality of my friend's tending to his wife in her illness has something unconditional about it:  it would be base of him to leave in her in dire need while he went out to a bordello or to drink with the boys.  I am aware the details would need to be filled in to make the baseness fully evident, but I have no doubt that under particular descriptions such an act would be simply base.   (Some thinkers believe Hume confused matters here with his distinction between “facts and values.”  Hume never claimed that factual descriptions were value-free; he did claim that reason won't give us an independent ground why we shouldn't do  for example base things.)  To say the moral ought is unconditional means that non-tautological reasons cannot be given why an action or attitude is base: to say, for example, that if my friend neglected his wife in a moment of suffering to go out drinking with the boys, his conduct is base because his wife is in pain, because the consequence will be that she might die, because he is neglecting his obligation towards her, or because he is violating his love – these because-clauses don't really give a reason why the behavior is base so much as to simply spell out what the baseness means in this particular case.   The moral ought often implies unconditional value judgments; that doesn't imply that people may not ignore them, in which case it makes more sense to think of them as base, for example,  rather than as irrational.

            Or the point may be illustrated by Wittgenstein's distinction between absolute and relative value judgments in his “Lecture on Ethics.”  As an example of a relative value judgment, Wittgenstein gives a tennis player who is playing badly.  Upon being told he is playing badly he responds that he simply doesn't feel like playing well today – perhaps he is preoccupied with problems at work or his lover has just broken up with him.  But if this person is behaving beastly to someone, and upon being told that he is being beastly he responds that he just doesn't feel like being decent to others today, then according to Wittgenstein (and I think he is right) the matter would be fundamentally different from the tennis case: we should at the very least want to say that he ought to behave decently, that the reasons he might give for not wanting to be decent – though perhaps understandable – would not excuse him from this ought. 

            And this is a very Humean point: judgments implying the moral ought are prescriptive, which is to say express something unconditional, sui generis; that is, they are very different from the sorts of propositions which may be independently determined to be true or false, this set of propositions being identified with the range of “reason” for Hume and Kant alike; they entail a very different relation to reasons than relative value judgments, as the tennis example makes clear.  Thus it is not the case that Hume is unaware of the apparent fact of the unconditional in morality.

            Kant's problem with Hume on this score has its source in Kant's metaphysical understanding of science and the universe – it is a metaphysical, not a moral disagreement.  That Hume makes moral response dependent on emotions like sympathy and benevolence disturbs Kant because of his preconceived notion that nature – including human nature – is subject to a mechanical causality; in other words, that nature is nothing but that which is explainable by Newtonian science.  Emotional response is part of nature, and so subject to the mechanical law of cause and effect; therefore, emotional response is radically unfree, eliminating its possible connection with morality (which of course presupposes a free subject).  It follows that emotional response (which Kant reductively calls “inclination”) cannot be the ground of morality, the implication being that the emotional aspect of my friend's attending to his ill wife is no more morally relevant than the tornado's destruction of the house – both being natural events subject to causality.  In other words, within the parameters of Kant's metaphysics, Hume can only be thought of as a behaviorist.

            But Hume would rightly not only find Kant's metaphysical picture ultimately confused; in fact, he positively refuses to tie morality to any possible metaphysics – and he was surely right not to do so.  Kant's belief that nature was just what Newtonian science shows it to be is, ironically, not part of science, since statements about reality as such (or the true nature of Being) can never in principle be a possible scientific hypothesis subject to public verification or falsification (Popper).   Without being aware of it, Kant accepted a metaphysically reductive picture of reality. Our experience of morality is confused with our everyday perceptions like “the sun rises,” which science had shown to be wrong; the common sense belief that the emotional response of my friend to his wife is a very important part of moral reality as well as the everyday language of morality in which this common sense belief is expressed give way to “science.” Kant might say:  “now we know such ways of thinking and speaking are naive, since science shows us that all phenomenological reality is subject to the iron law of causality; even though we still go on saying 'the sun rises' and 'my friend's care is part of morality,' we know that the latter is really nothing but the kind of thing that behaviorist psychology (or some other reductive science) describes more accurately.”  This is the threat Kant felt he had to respond to; this is why he had to locate the seat of morality in a transcendental self beyond the world with access to a noumenal reality again beyond the world.  Hume's wonderful skepticism about knowledge of “the ultimate nature of reality” (most famously expressed in his thoughts on causality in the Treatise) meant that he felt no need to metaphysically justify the reality of moral response; he didn't see matters from the “view from nowhere” as did Kant.

             Hume's compelling critique of causality was ironically more Kantian than Kant; he showed merely the limits of reason, remaining metaphysically agnostic.  What does the unconditional nature of morality say about the ultimate nature of reality?  Well, we can't know, because such matters can never be an object of experience.  Reason can't uncover a ground of morality in the universe if there is one. Kant's transcendental philosophy is the wildest speculation.  Nothing about my friend's response to his wife depends one way or the other on such speculation, as moral certainty does not depend on an impossible (and conceptually unintelligible) metaphysical certainty. Moreover, transcendental philosophy seriously distorts the character of my friend's response. Hume's is a philosophy of common sense – one almost wants to say, of reason.  In the latter expression of Wittgenstein, Hume, too, leaves things as they are, and attempts merely to describe them as well as he can.

            Kant was bothered by Hume's agnosticism towards foundations, towards philosophy. Hume seemed to undermine the two things Kant cares most about: science and morality. But Hume didn't undermine anything. The practice of science goes merrily on despite his critique of causality just as morality is still in force despite its lack of metaphysical foundations.  Kant couldn't stop with his fundamental insights:  that morality has an unconditional element and that emotional responses were not morally self-authenticating.  He felt the need of traditional metaphysics to give morality a foundation in Being which is an object of human knowledge. He recognized traditional metaphysics failed because it did not distinguish between scientific and logical kinds of knowing on the one hand, and metaphysical kinds of speculation on the other. He believed his transcendental philosophy escaped his critique of traditional metaphysics in that it did not make positive statements about that which transcends experience, but rather directed inquiry at the metaphysical conditions for the possibility of that which we do experience – especially morality.  A brilliant move. However, although the route is different, more indirect, the result is the same: a metaphysical principle of morality, outside of the world, independent of experience, according to which worldly moral experience must be measured.

            Hume was deeper in his mistrust of reason to come up with an independently verifiable formulation, which was to serve as a procrustean bed on which to make moral reality in the world conform.   As soon as morality is given an abstract foundation, it is distorted.  Its reality involves a freedom closely tied to contingency and the lack of foundations – which leaves the unconditional force of the moral ought alone.  As Simon Blackburn characterized Hume's moral thought: for Hume, there are only reasons in moral reflection – no Reasons. The move to philosophical relativism is an equally misguided way of understanding morality in terms of an abstract schema independent of experience.  I think Hume would have only shaken his head at most of moral philosophy since Kant, including the behaviorist and relativistic directions into which his own thought was pressed.   Hume's thought undermines not science or morality: it undermines philosophy – a fact still largely unrecognized or ignored, even by modern admirers of Hume.