By: ALEXANDER GILMAN

The relationship between the liturgical, defined by Jean-Yves Lacoste as “the logic that presides over the encounter between man and God writ large,” and the ethical is deeply ambiguous. Throughout Lacoste’s phenomenological work, Experience and the Absolute, the call of man and the world is set in contrast with the call of the Absolute. In this text Lacoste begins with the Heideggerian notion of our being as being-in-the world-toward-death and explores how a liturgical relationship with the absolute subverts, but also sublates, our being-in-the-world in favor of a being-toward-God. Without rejecting Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, Lacoste aims to show how a liturgical relationship is a free choice of any Dasein. However, this turning-toward-God from being-in-the-world is not without complications. Since our ethical obligations and relationships dwell in the world, it may also be the case that ethics is subverted in the logic of the liturgical. Lacoste discusses ethics in many parts of the text, but nonetheless a thematized understanding of the exact relationship between ethics and liturgy is still necessary. There are several possibilities for how this relationship may manifest itself. The liturgical could be irreducibly separate and contradictory to ethics; the liturgical could ground ethics by creating the possibility of ethics; the liturgical could provide specific ethical content, such as virtues, laws, and commandments. In the end, we must especially look for specific ethical principles that could guide our behavior, not just a vague ethical space. I will thus maintain a basic definition of ethics as a system of moral principles that govern a person or group’s action. We must weigh these possibilities and definitions against Lacoste’s framework for the liturgical.

To help flesh out this relationship, I will also discuss Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of the religious and the ethical, giving a cross-reading of Fear and Trembling and Repetition guided by Dominic Desroches’ article “The Exception as Reinforcement of the Ethical Norm: The Figures of Abraham and Job in Kierkegaard’s Ethical Thought. I believe the relationship between the liturgical and the ethical is a fundamental problem in religious thought for it must be deciding factor in the legitimacy of any religious system. The boldness and rigor of Lacoste’s project to reconcile the Heideggarian phenomenological analytic of Dasein with the Christian commitment to being-toward-God must be weighed against a consideration of the ethical else it is in danger of being irrelevant to our own lives.

The first possibility for the relationship between the liturgical and the ethical, that they are in fact irreconcilable and contradictory, seems to be the momentum of the first several chapters of Experience and the Absolute. By chapter four, Lacoste brings to the fore what it is becoming a real problem in his analytic of the liturgical: subverting our relationship with the world in order to prioritize our relationship with an unknown Absolute. Liturgy appears from most of Lacoste’s accounts to contradict the logic of the world and consequently, possibly contradict our ethical responsibilities. Lacoste writes in summary, “We have defined liturgy as the resolute deliberate gesture made by those who ordain their being-in-the-world a being-before-God, and who do violence to the former in the name of the latter.”ii Although Lacoste is careful to say that liturgy transgresses and annuls rather than eliminates or destroys our relation to place, to history, and to the world, its implications are nonetheless disturbing.

Especially since in his framework we are subverting our relation to place in exchange for a liturgical ‘nonplace,’ our time for a ‘nonevent’ and our relationship to others or world for a ‘nonexperience,’ this free choice for the liturgical appears at first glance not only to be ethically suspect but also precarious in its logic. Lacoste even uses this latter word to describe the liturgical commitment, thus he is well aware of how it looks. On this point Lacoste expands, “Liturgy actually suffers from being in the margins and at a distance in two ways. It is removed from definitive realities, which it at best represents inchoately. And it is removed from all that which, in the domain of the provisional, justifiably demands that we take care of it.”iii It is suggested by this point that liturgy serves no reasonable purpose except as a diversion and distraction from the responsibilities of the ethical. The logic of liturgy is one “foreign to the logic of action.”iv

Thus, Lacoste must ask, “Is liturgy a form of divertissment?”v Lacoste’s answer will be a clear “no” but the question demands of liturgy to defend itself against the implications of subversion. In other words, why should we risk contradicting or distracting our ethical responsibility, which is tangible and concrete, for the precariousness of the liturgical?

Lacoste further complicates the issue by resisting an ethics gained solely from the logic of our being-in-the-world. By critiquing Emmanuel Levinas’ first philosophy and siding with Heidegger, he writes, “Yet the mute call that renders me “hostage” to others places no obligation on me that would emanate solely from the a priori conditions of my presence in the world.”vi Our initial condition of being-in-the-world is in fact also a divertissement from the ethical: “the world keeps the injunctions of the good veiled over.”vii Beyond the inferior ethics of the social contract, the ethical, similarly to the liturgical, aims to subvert the solipsism and existential self-centeredness of Dasein’s being-toward-death. Thus, we cannot simply disregard liturgy as irrelevant because our being-in-the-world does not grant us an originary ethics. Lacoste’s account of liturgy problematizes the ethical for believers as well as nonbelievers. We must then ask two additional questions: can the ethical be (re)gained through the liturgical and is there an alternate source for the ethical outside the liturgical?

In order to grant liturgy a positive relationship to ethics, either through grounding its possibility or providing ethical content, it must be through a paradox. If liturgy subverts our relationship to the world and diverts from the logic of work, but also provides something positive to the consideration of ethics, then the relationship is contradictory. This does not mean, however, that it is impossible. After thematizing the problem of ethics in liturgy Lacoste makes the bold claim that “The diversion that liturgy has as its task is perhaps alone in permitting us to rigorously ground the ethical meaning of our facticity.”viii This is indeed a surprising statement. First, it is claiming that the very diversion we questioned as ethically suspicious in fact grounds ethics. Second, liturgy is the sole ground for ethics. Third, the meaning of our facticity, our being-in-the-world, is, at least partially, ethical. Against the implications of liturgical divertissement, Lacoste wants to argue a strong, positive relationship between the liturgical and the ethical. There are three possibilities in Lacoste’s work for how the liturgical may ground the ethical. We must ask whether they are satisfying answers to the problems above.

First, Lacoste argues that time spent liturgically grants us a symbolic distance from the inherence of the world, thus unveiling the ethical from the divertissement of the world. Lacoste explores the logic of the “initial” versus the “originary” to flesh out this possibility. The initial, our everyday, already always being-in-the-world, as we mentioned above, “keeps the injunctions of the good veiled over.” The night of the vigil, the liturgical time par excellence, subverts our relation to world, brings us to the margins of our being-in-the-world in order to remove the world as a hindrance between ourselves and the Absolute. This turning toward God through the liturgical night, Lacoste argues, also has a morning in which we turn back toward the world, granted a distance that allows perspective and new clarity on the problems of our being-in-the-world. He writes, “The new day that concludes the liturgical vigil must be understood as the gift of the beginning given one again: the symbolism of the origin leads to the reality of a starting point, to the reality of a space opened to a freedom capable of willing, and indeed of doing good.”ix By subverting the inherence of the world we gain purity of vision, and possibly of intentions, prior to our initial thrownness. The liturgical returns us to our “originary” nature, suggesting a pre-Lapsarian symbolism, gives us back the possibility of being ethical without the distractions of the world. This is a useful starting place for developing a relationship between liturgy and ethics.

With this conclusion, however, we have not gained a real ethic but only a possibility for ethics. There is nothing inherent in the distance gained by liturgy to return to the world with an ethical project. In another place, though, Lacoste suggests a way in which liturgy additionally alerts us to our responsibility through the liturgical unhappiness of consciousness. He writes, “The liturgical unhappiness of consciousness reveals, not only that liturgy prevents us from doing good during the time of entr’acte, but also that we have ignored the ultimate (though veiled over) stakes of our being-in-the world, and that we can no longer continue to do so.”x This unhappiness, the one that motivates this paper, stays with the person during the liturgical. He or she feels that the liturgical vigil is time taken away from the necessary exigencies of the ethical. This perceived deficiency in the liturgical combined with the distance gained throughout it perhaps gives a possible solution to how the liturgical may more rigorously ground the ethical. Lacoste continues, “liturgy enables us to dwell in the world and on the earth by superimposing on our facticity the order of an ethical vocation that alone authorizes us to let the Kingdom invest itself in world and earth in advance.”xi The liturgical, then, allows the transcendent ethical logic of the Kingdom, of the eschaton, to come to the world. We see in liturgy how far the world is from the Kingdom and thus desire to change the world.

Here, it seems, Lacoste has reconciled ethics to liturgy, but there are some problems still lurking in this answer, or at least an incompleteness. In response to the first claim that liturgy opens a space that subverts and gives distance from the world, it must be reemphasized that this gives nothing but the possibility of the ethical. Even when the liturgical unhappiness of consciousness imbues us with a sense of the irresponsibility of the liturgical, this desire to return to the world still lacks any specific ethical principles. We are called back to the world with a clearer vision but how can we go about bringing the Kingdom to the world? If our being is fundamentally duplicitous, how can our beingin- vocation during liturgy inform our being-in-fact, ethically or otherwise? At best, this grounding of ethics is the grounding of a desire for the ethical. Lacoste’s claim lacks the kind of ethical framework we have in Levinas. The liturgical need not give us dogmatic rules, but it should give a concrete foundation for how to be ethical. Since Lacoste disagrees with Levinas that the ethical relation is original to our being, it seems he shies away from providing an ethical system at all. Despite this incompleteness, a lot has been gain by grounding a desire for the ethical. It shows that the liturgical and the ethical have a positive relationship. But thus far this relationship is still unthematized. We do not, as Lacoste assumes, have any sense of the “ethical ground of our facticity” but rather simply that the ethical is possible and desirable. This desire should want something more concrete and specific.

Although Lacoste does not relate this next concept directly to ethics, I believe there is one moment in the text that may be read as a more specific way in which liturgy provides an ethical framework. The liturgical project of abnegation aims to subvert our consciousness, our subjectivity, and our will. With regard to the first, Lacoste describes liturgy as “disoriented consciousness.”xii Liturgy places us in a relation different from any other relation, to an object for example. Rather than being strictly intentional, in the Husserlian sense, in the liturgical relationship we do not gather objects around us as the subject but “make ourselves available before God.”xiii The subject is no longer the center of the experience. Lacoste continues, “The I [le moi] can content itself with being an I. Now, it is precisely liturgical (in)experience that provides the exemplary case of a decentering and marginalization of the ego.” Through this dislodging of the I we become the other par excellence of the Absolute. But since the Absolute is not an other in the same sense of an worldly object or person, the relationship is disproportionate. Our otherness subordinates our ipseity. Through liturgy we exist primarily in the mode of You. Although this is not as originary to our being-in-the-world as the mode of I, the liturgical disorientation of consciousness forces us into a relationship that can radically reorient our relationship to others.

Ironically, this kind of reorientation recalls the philosophy of Levinas that Lacoste rejects, although in a different form. By de-centering the ego through liturgy we achieve two things: first, a greater selflessness and realization of the limitation of our subjectivity, and second, a model for ethically “making ourselves available” for others. Levinas’ conception of being “hostage” to the other thus takes on a new meaning through the liturgical and can thus be a useful category without conceding to his first philosophy. The relationship we have to the Absolute, throughout the language of a relation rather than that of Kingdom versus world, gives us a framework for applying a liturgical (non)experience to a worldly, ethical experience. If this disorientation of consciousness is not just incidental but rather essential to the liturgical, we have gained a more concrete grounding for the ethical. Yet, there is still something dissatisfying in this conclusion. It lacks specific ethical principles that could help guide our being-in-the-world. It gives a model for becoming a You that can hear the call of the other, but this relationship must be fleshed out more. Moreover, Lacoste does not directly connect disorientation to ethics, so we only have implications. An ambiguity still ultimately remains.

In Fear and Trembling Soren Kierkegaard explores a similar tension between the ethical and faith through the analysis of Abraham attempting to slay Isaac on Mount Moriah. Kierkegaard develops a framework for comparing the action of Abraham as the Knight of Faith and the tragic hero, or Knight of Infinite Resignation. The drama that Kierkegaard lays out for consideration involves heroic acts that suspend ethics. In the case of the tragic hero, the ethical is suspended in order to accomplish a higher ethic, such as Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia in order to save the polis. He stays ultimately within the ethical even when he suspends it. Abraham, Kierkegaard concludes, does no such thing but rather entirely and radically suspends the ethical for his act of faith; “in his action he overstepped the ethical altogether, and had a higher telos outside it.”xiv For Kierkegaard, Abraham’s action, although not a part of everyone’s faith commitment, is fundamental to the religious attunement. Abraham mythically dramatizes the paradox and dangerous implications of intending something transcendent, just as Lacoste’s treatment of the liturgical necessitated such radical subversion of worldliness. Kierkegaard, however, presents the problem in even starker terms.

The example of Abraham expresses for Kierkegaard the basic religious act of faith. Kierkegaard, unlike Lacoste, gives a specific definition of the ethical that he then juxtaposes with the religious. For Kierkegaard to be ethical is to will the good for the universal: “the individual’s ethical task is always to…abrogate his particularity so as to become the universal.”xv In another way, it is to put the other, as an abstract totality, before the self. The ethical is that which applies to everyone at all times. He does not flesh it out more than this, but implicit in it is an ethical attitude more concrete than with Lacoste. The religious flows through this universal but ends above it. He writes, “Faith is just this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified before the latter, not as subordinate but superior…”xvi The religious person’s relationship to the Absolute supersedes his or her relationship to the universal, to the ethical. Thus not only do the faithful appear non-ethical or neutral, in that they intend outside the ethical, but they also appear unethical, in that they negate the universal.

The religious attunement’s utter contradiction with the ethical is irreducible and pronounced in Kierkegaard, and thus unlike Lacoste, there is within the religious little room for finding an ethic. At least Kierkegaard is hard-pressed to find one, as he remarks, “I can understand the tragic hero, but not Abraham, even though in a certain lunatic sense I admire him more than all others.”xvii There is not within the religious drama an obvious ethical logic, hidden away in a nice paradox. Here it is a stark betrayal of the ethical, not just as a diversion but as a positive act: “What we usually call a temptation is something that keeps a person from carrying out a duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself which would keep [Abraham] from doing God’s will.”xviii Lacoste’s conception of the liturgical can be critiqued as a temptation in the first sense, as a hindrance to carrying out the ethical. Abraham’s act does not just subvert but negate the ethical. The knight of faith is unethical, and thus we have here an even more difficult and disconcerting problem.

Besides the subtle, and ultimately unsatisfying, suggestion that Abraham must eventually descend Mount Moriah and return to the world, there is no reconciliation of the religious and ethical in Fear and Trembling. Abraham acts on the absurd and cannot be understood in terms of the universal, of the ethical. Even if we accept Abraham’s return home as possibly ethical, since his act was a negation rather than a subversion of the ethical, it is simply not enough to solve the problem. Dominic Desroches in his essay on Kierkegaardian ethics suggests a cross-reading of Fear and Trembling and Repetition to work out this problem. In the latter text, which was actually published before Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard compares the concept of recollection to that of repetition. In recollection, one returns to a past circumstance expecting similar feelings but is naturally disappointed. Recollection ends in melancholy. Repetition, however, is a return forward, a renewed will and passion to live in old circumstances in a fresh and invigorated way. When read through the lens of Abraham and ethics, a religious repetition is willing the particular over the universal, in order to repeat the universal with new vigor. Repetition suggests that faith is necessary for the ethical, a thesis similar to that of Lacoste’s, but Kierkegaard’s idea gives a more specific ethical framework.

Yet, this conclusion seems to fundamentally contradict Fear and Trembling: how does repetition succeed in this retrieval of the ethical? In the afterward to Repetition Kierkegaard addresses the reader in terms familiar to the discussion in Fear, “The exception thinks also the universal when it thinks itself, it labors also for the universal when it elaborates itself, it explains the universal when it explains itself.”xix The exception, the willing of the particular as in Abraham, in fact strengthens the universal by underlining the meaning of the universal. In its very absurdity and insanity, the exception reinforces the logic of the universal. He continues:

“In the course of time one grows weary of the perpetual patter about the universal, always the universal, repeated to the most tedious extreme of insipidity. There are exceptions. If one cannot explain them, neither can one explain the universal. Commonly one does not notice the difficulty because one does not think even the universal with passion but with an easygoing superficiality. On the other hand, the exception thinks the universal with serious passion.”xx

Similar to Lacoste, Kierkegaard makes the argument that the religious act grants a sort of respite and distance from the ethical that actually reinvigorates the latter. Yet additionally, repetition deepens ethical knowledge. By pushing the universal to its margins, its contour is regained. The religious repetition moves forward, adding richness and understanding, just as Lacoste says, “the circle that unites liturgical reason and ethical reason is the fundamental rhythm of existence, which transgressing its native conditions, desires the accomplishment of the human beyond what can be derived from our facticity.”xxi Thus Lacoste agrees with Kierkegaard’s model but we gain something concrete through Kierkegaard that is perhaps missing in Lacoste’s analysis. Placing the relationship between the religious and the ethical in the terms of the universal and particular, a specific ethical system is suggested. Because Kierkegaardian repetition reinforces the universal, rather than just returns us to our facticity with a new clarity, it brings with it an ethical framework, an attitude that suggests, through faith, how we may act ethically. The rigorous absurdity of faith provides logic to the ethical.

That is not to say that Lacoste provides nothing in filling out this complex relationship between the ethical and the liturgical. Combining the more specific Kierkegaardian language of the universal with Lacoste’s sophisticated logic of the vigil, originary, and Kingdom, as well as the liturgical disorientation of consciousness, we have thus gained a tenable possibility for how the liturgical may be reconciled to the ethical. Nevertheless, achieving such a reconciliation necessitated a creative reading of both writers in conjunction. Also, even with his additional and useful framework, there is a lot to be desired in Kierkegaard’s ethics. We in the end still lack the more practical guidance of how the liturgical may relate to a real ethical relationship. What if there is a question about what should or should not be willed as universal, such as the famous story provided by Kant of the murderer at the door for your friend? Do you lie and betray the universal for perhaps a higher ethic such as the tragic hero? The details of such a framework are not worked out.

Thus in the end, with Lacoste and Kierkegaard, we have three specific concepts that relate the liturgical to the ethical: that the liturgical vigil opens us an pure space for the ethical, that the disoriented consciousness provides a model for the ethical relation, and that repetition reinvigorates the logic of the ethical universal. In short, we have a suggestion for the relationship between the liturgical and the ethical, but not much of an ethics. In order for this problem to be truly satisfied, more work must be done to show what kind of ethical principles can be gained from the liturgical and thus why we should think the liturgical at all with regard to ethics. Moreover, the ambiguities and implications of the liturgical, such as its successful subversion of the logic of the world, also beg the disturbing question: why think the ethical at all? Why not stay in an indefinite vigil? Why return to the anxiety-ridden logic of being-in-the-world? Ultimately, we desire not just a relationship between the liturgical and the ethical but a meaningful synthesis that can guide our entire lives from the nightly vigil to our daily interactions with people and things.

End Notes

i) From Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics, ed. Christine Daigle (London: McGill-Queen’s
University Press), 2006.
ii) Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2004), 39, emphasis mine.
iii) Ibid, 68.
iv) Ibid, 78.
v) Ibid, 70.
vi) Ibid, 72.
vii) Ibid, 73.
viii) Ibid, 70.
ix) Ibid, 97.
x) Ibid, 73.
xi) Ibid, 75.
xii) Ibid, 149.
xiii) Ibid, 152.
xiv) Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 88.
xv) Ibid, 83.
xvi) Ibid, 84.
xvii) Ibid, 86.
xviii) Ibid, 88.
xix) Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), 133.
xx) Ibid, 134.
xxi) Lacoste, 76.

Alexander Gilman (’11) is a History Major and a Philosophy Minor from Boston College

Image taken from deviantart.com

Despite the common intuition that something is very wrong with the Gettier problems, after forty years they still seem to be intractable. The responses to these paradoxes of knowledge range from complaints against their logical structure to conclusions that knowledge simply cannot be analyzed. Most philosophers, however, take a position somewhere in between these two extremes; their responses advocate changing the traditional Justified True Belief model of knowledge to something that “de-Gettierizes” knowledge. This almost always means either adding some fourth condition or clarifying or changing the definition of justification. In this essay I will consider different possible solutions to the Gettier problems. After establishing the validity of these problems by defending Gettier against an objection to the logical structure of his counterexamples, I will then look at several attempts to change the justified true belief model to avoid the Gettier problems. I will then show that when these proposed solutions fail, as many of them do, it is because of a common defect. Finally, I will suggest that Nozick’s proposition analysis of knowledge is an elegant and insightful solution to this basic problem, and defend it against an objection from Kripke.

There are really only a few general strategies that can be used to resolve the Gettier problems. First, one could concede the point and claim that Gettier beliefs are knowledge; Smith does indeed know that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket, and Smith does know that either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Brest-Litovsk. Second, one could argue that knowledge is a basic concept that cannot be analyzed. Third, one could argue against Gettier’s principle that “for any proposition P, if S is justified in believing P, and P entails Q, and S deduces Q from P and accepts Q as a result of this deduction, then S is justified in believing Q” (Gettier 121). Fourth, one could argue that justification has some necessary conditions that preclude these types of beliefs. Fifth and finally, one could argue that there is some necessary condition for knowledge in addition to justified true belief that precludes these types of beliefs.

I. Arguments against the Validity of the Counterexamples

The first strategy, arguing that Gettier beliefs are knowledge, is a cure clearly worse than the disease. A concept of knowledge that allowed such cases would be strongly counterintuitive. The second strategy, arguing that knowledge is a basic concept that cannot be analyzed, certainly has its merits, but it is mostly beyond the scope of this paper and I can do little more than give a broad objection it: it simply feels wrong. There are many basic concepts, but for the most part they are self-evidently basic; we feel no compulsion to try to analyze them. Knowledge intuitively seems like something for which there are fairly strict, logical conditions, and if it were a basic concept it would be unique in not being obviously so.

The third strategy, arguing that being justified in believing a proposition does not necessarily make one justified in believing all propositions entailed by that proposition, shows more promise. In “In Defense of Justified True Belief,” Irving Thalberg argues against the transitivity of justification using the analogy of betting. For instance, in the case in which Smith believes the proposition “the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket,” Thalberg argues that though Smith may be justified in believing the propositions “Jones has ten coins in his pocket” and “Jones will get the job,” he nevertheless may not be justified in believing even the conjunction of these two propositions, let alone the general proposition containing the denoting phrase “the man.” To explain why this is so, Thalberg considers the conditions for betting on each proposition. Even if Smith were willing to vote independently on the proposition “Jones will get the job” and the proposition “Jones has ten coins in his pocket,” he may still be unwilling to bet on the conjunction of these two (Thalberg 798). Conjoining propositions increases one’s possibilities for error, as a falsehood in any one of the conjuncts renders the entire conjunction false. This reasoning presupposes that the justification of a proposition is simply one’s reliable judgment of the probability that the proposition is true. If this is the case, then the justification of a conjunction will only be as strong as the probability that the entire conjunction is true, which is obtained by multiplying together the probabilities of all of the conjuncts. A belief is justified if the probability that it is true is above a certain cutoff, which may vary according to circumstance. Therefore, while two propositions composing a conjunction may be justified, the conjunction itself may not be.

Of course, this argument relies on the assumption that justification is a matter of probability and that it admits of degrees in the way that Thalberg believes it does. But even if this assumption is granted, the argument still has problems; Thalberg’s point about the intransitivity of justification in conjunctions may be valid, but his argument against the Gettier problem arising from disjunction is seriously flawed. Thalberg believes that Smith’s compound belief that either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Brest-Litovsk is invalid for basically the same reasons that the compound statement is invalid: since justification is based on probability, a proposition may be less justified than its premises. In this case again, Thalberg states that adding a disjunct to the proposition “Jones owns a Ford” alters the odds that it is true. However, Thalberg does not seem to appreciate how different this case is: here, rather than making the compound proposition less probable, it makes it more probable. If justification is indeed a matter of degree and is based on accurately judged probability, then the proposition “either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Brest-Litovsk” is more justified than the proposition that entails it. Extending the betting analogy, Thalberg states “no bookmaker would permit Smith to gamble on (the disjunction) under the same conditions as he bets on (the original proposition). . . Smith might be justified in accepting (the disjunction) whenever he is justified in accepting (the original proposition), but we might not be justified in allowing him to shift from (the original proposition to the disjunction)” (Thalberg 798). But why should Smith care about what we are justified in allowing him to do? This must be an entirely different kind of justification that Thalberg is talking about; whatever this justification is, it shares no connection with the kind of justification we are concerned other than name. The kind of justification that matters here is Smith’s justification in believing this series of propositions. In fact, the reason that we are not “justified in allowing him to shift” is that it is more probable that it is true; far from making Smith less justified in believing the proposition, this is rather precisely what makes him more justified. Therefore, the Gettier paradox is still present; by Thalberg’s admission, Smith is justified in believing a proposition which is true, but in circumstances that do not intuitively seem to constitute knowledge.

II. Truth as a Redundant Condition

As Gettier points out, his counterexamples rely on two principles: first, it is possible to have justified false beliefs; and second (as discussed above), justification is transitive from a proposition to any propositions entailed by that proposition. We have just seen the failure of an argument against the second of these principles. However, this strategy of challenging whether Smith’s beliefs are justified is certainly the minority. Most philosophers concede Gettier’s point and attempt to either strengthen justification or add some other condition that avoids such problems. But unless justification is strengthened to the point that justified false belief is impossible, Gettier problems will always arise. If both justified false belief and unjustified true belief are possible, one can always make a Gettier problem from them by putting one of each together in a disjunction.

This same general principle applies to models adding some other condition to justified true belief. However many conditions are added, if it is possible that all of these conditions (except truth) can be fulfilled and the belief still be false, then a Gettier problem can always be made by forming a disjunction by adding a belief that fulfills the truth condition but not some other condition or conditions. In any analysis of knowledge, truth must be a redundant condition. If the other conditions do not already guarantee truth, a disjunctive Gettier problem can always be made. This means that, despite what many philosophers have assumed, the analysis of knowledge is not a matter of what conditions to attach to truth and belief to get knowledge; truth must be a necessary consequence of the other conditions. Therefore, there is no such thing as “knowledge minus truth”, or beliefs that qualify as knowledge in every condition except that their propositional content is not true (I will henceforth refer to these beliefs as “condition-fulfilling false beliefs”).

Based on this criterion that truth must be a redundant condition, it seems that any analysis that merely strengthens the justification condition will end up being very counterintuitive. Justification that entails truth seems too strong, but if it does not entail truth, an analysis that only contains the conditions of justified true belief will always be subject to Gettier problems. If justification is taken to be normative; that is, if an unjustified proposition is one that we ought not to believe and a justified proposition is one that we may or should believe, then clearly truth cannot be a necessary condition for it. Certainly there are sometimes propositions which we have every reason to believe, which we do not violate any epistemic duty by believing, and even which we would be violating some duty by not believing, but which are nevertheless false.

III. The Basic Fourth Condition and Defense of Nozick

It seems then that if we hope to analyze knowledge in a way that conforms to our intuitions, we must add some fourth condition to justification, belief, and truth; or more precisely, we must add some condition to justification and belief that necessarily entails truth. Many further conditions have been suggested. Some of these allow for condition-fulfilling false beliefs and therefore fail. Others explicitly forbid justified false beliefs, and still others do not commit themselves either way, but can be interpreted as forbidding such beliefs. For example, consider Lehrer and Paxson’s theory of knowledge as undefeated justified true belief. According to this theory, a belief is knowledge if it is justified and true and if there is no other true proposition that the subject justifiably believes to be false and which, if known, would render belief in the original proposition unjustified (Lehrer and Paxson 227). Though Lehrer and Paxson do not say so explicitly, this clearly disallows any condition-fulfilling false beliefs, because in such cases there will always be a defeater: namely, the true proposition “this belief is false.”

There are several other possibilities given for conditions added to justified true belief that will avoid Gettier problems. Goldman’s causal theory, Plantinga’s theory of proper function, the many variations on the theory of “no false lemmas,” and all other theories proposing adding conditions to justified true belief all avoid the Gettier problems to the extent that they succeed in connecting the subject’s belief necessarily to the truth of the proposition. The condition must be such that condition-fulfilling false beliefs are impossible, and therefore such that the proposition’s being false is sufficient to preclude belief in it. Robert Nozick recognized this most basic element of any condition added to knowledge and formalized it as “if p weren’t true S wouldn’t believe that p” (Nozick 211).

This condition, I believe, captures the essence of the Gettier problems and provides an elegant way to avoid them. However, it is not without its critics. Kripke proposes as a counterexample a variation on the traditional “Barn County” thought experiment. In the original thought experiment, Matthew is traveling through Barn County, in which, unbeknownst to Matthew, there is only one barn but thousands of barn façades. Matthew sees the one real barn and forms the belief “I see a barn,” though it is by sheer luck that Matthew happened to see the one real barn instead of one of the thousands of facades. The justified true belief account would consider this knowledge. Nozick’s account deals with this easily. Even if Matthew had seen a façade, rendering the belief “I see a barn” false, Matthew would still have believed it. Therefore, Nozick’s added condition is not fulfilled, and Matthew’s belief is not knowledge.

Kripke’s counterexample adjusts Barn County so that only the one real barn is painted red, and all others are left unpainted by law. Matthew sees this barn and forms the belief “I see a red barn.” This, Kripke claims, counts as knowledge under Nozick’s definition, because if this were false and Matthew did not see a red barn, but rather saw an unpainted façade, he would not have believed the proposition. But if this is knowledge, then Matthew knows that he sees a red barn, and from that can deduce that he sees a barn, which is what we rejected in the first place (Luper-Foy 265).

This objection, however, is flawed. Kripke states that when Matthew believes the proposition “I see a red barn,” this qualifies as knowledge under Nozick’s definition because if Matthew hadn’t seen a red barn, he would not have believed that he saw a red barn. But Kripke seems to have formalized this sentence incorrectly. He is treating Nozick’s condition as though it were “there is some state of affairs such that p is not true and Matthew does not believe p.” One might as well say that Matthew’s original assertion, “I see a barn,” qualifies as knowledge because there exists some possible state of affairs, say, if Matthew had been blind, such that if this state obtained, Matthew’s proposition “I see a barn” would have false and he would not have not believed it. But Nozick’s condition is more stringent; it is that every time and under whatever circumstances p is false, S will not believe p. And in Kripke’s counterexample there are clearly cases in which it is false that Matthew does not see a red barn and yet believes that he does; for example, in the next county over where all façades are red and all real barns are unpainted.

IV. Conclusion

In this essay, I have defended both of Gettier’s foundational principles: the transitivity of justification and the existence of justified false beliefs. By delving further into the reasons why objections to the second principle fail, and concluded that the central issue was that in any analysis of knowledge, truth must be a redundant condition. With this core insight in mind, Nozick’s theory of knowledge, which does not have truth as an explicit condition, seems to be the simplest and best solution to the Gettier problems. The implications of Nozick’s theory are yet to be fully developed, but I believe they have the potential to both challenge and hone many of our intuitions about what knowledge is, and particularly to give us greater understanding of the role of truth.

Works Cited

Gettier, Edmund. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23.6 (1963): 121-23. Print.

Lehrer, Keith, and Thomas Paxson. “Knowledge: Undefeated Justified True Belief.” The Journal of Philosophy 66.8 (1969): 225-37. Print.

Luper-Foy, Steven. The Possibility of Knowledge: Nozick and his Critics. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987. Print.

Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Robert Nozick, 1981. Print.

Thalberg, Irving. “In Defense of Justified True Belief.” The Journal of Philosophy 66.2 (1969): 794-803. Print.

Steve Tensmeyer (’11) is a Philosophy and International Relations Major at Bringham Young University

ABSTRACT: The Fool offers a famous objection to Hobbesian ethics: if practical rationality is rooted in self-interest, then isn’t it rational to abandon ethical reasoning when doing so “conduces to one’s benefit”? In this paper, I examine Hobbes’ reply to the Fool as it reveals the limitations of the moral theory presented in Leviathan. I begin by sketching out the reply and two traditional ways of interpreting it – the “case-by-case” interpretation and the “rule-commitment” interpretation. I argue that for empirical reasons both these interpretations fail to answer the Fool’s challenge. I then turn to an interpretation that I think a more promising answer to the Fool: Gauthier’s theory of conventional reason. This theory, I argue, contains a crucial insight that the first two interpretations lack: what Hobbes really needs to do to reply to the Fool is not to reconcile covenant-keeping with self-interest, but rather to show how constraints on the pursuit of self-interest can be rationally justified. Gauthier’s attempt to do so within Hobbes’ framework fails, but this failure illuminates a fundamental problem with Hobbes’ moral theory: that moral constraints on the pursuit of self-interest cannot provide reasons to a Hobbesian agent.

At the beginning of Chapter XV of Leviathan, Hobbes introduces an ethical antagonist now famous in the literature on early modern philosophy: the Fool. The Fool says in his heart, “there is no such thing as justice,” and alleges that it is rational to break covenants when doing so “conduces to one’s benefit” (90). That a character who reasons in this manner makes an appearance in Hobbes’ treatise follows in a long tradition; like Plato’s Thrasymachus, Grotius’ Carneades, and Hume’s Sensible Knave, the Fool allows his creator to confront the threat of ethical skepticism head on.

In what follows, I examine Hobbes’ reply to the Fool as it reveals the limitations of the moral theory presented in Leviathan. I begin by sketching out the reply and two traditional ways of interpreting it – the “case-by-case” interpretation and the “rule- commitment” interpretation. I argue that for empirical reasons both these interpretations fail to answer the Fool’s challenge. I then turn to an interpretation that I think a more promising answer to the Fool – Gauthier’s theory of conventional reason. This theory, I argue, contains a crucial insight that the first two interpretations lack: what Hobbes really needs to do to reply to the Fool is not to reconcile covenant-keeping with self-interest, but rather to show how constraints on the pursuit of self-interest can be rationally justified. Gauthier’s attempt to do so within Hobbes’ framework fails, but this failure illuminates a fundamental problem with Hobbes’ moral theory: that moral constraints on the pursuit of self-interest cannot provide reasons to a Hobbesian agent.

The Fool makes two claims, which, when combined, yield a conclusion hostile to the authority of Hobbes’ laws of nature. The first is a claim about practical reason: “every man’s conservation and contentment being committed to his own care, there could be no reason why every man might not do what he thought conduced thereunto” (Hobbes 90). On this view, practical reason is a purely selfish endeavor. The reason you have to do X is determined by the expected utility of X to your interests. This conception is recognizably Hobbesian. As Hobbes explains in Chapter XV, “of the voluntary acts of every man the object is some good to himself” (82), and what is “against benefit” is “against reason” (91). This egoistic theory of practical reason saturates Hobbes’ discussion throughout the Leviathan; he makes use of it especially prominently in his discussion of covenant (82), gratitude (95), and the nature of law (100). On the Fool’s first claim, then, he and Hobbes seem to agree.

The Fool’s second claim is an empirical one: that sometimes violating a covenant is in an agent’s interest. Combining this claim with the egoistic theory of practical reason, the Fool reaches the conclusion that “to make or not make, keep or not keep, covenants was not against reason, when it conduced to one’s benefit” (90). Indeed, as Kavka (1995) points out, the Fool’s reasoning applies not just to the keeping of covenants, but to all of Hobbes’ laws of nature – Gratitude, Complaisance, Equity, and the all the rest (Kavka 3). If the Fool is right, then whenever one of these laws compels an agent to act in a manner contrary to her interests, it is rational for the agent to violate the law.

For Hobbes to refute this reasoning, he needs to show that a rational agent should not break a covenant purely out of unilateral considerations of self-interest. He does not have to show that a rational agent should never break a covenant, period. It is plausible that, at times, other laws of nature will compel a rational agent to break a covenant, or that the spirit of Hobbes’ “easy sum” of all the natural laws – “Do not that to another, which thou wouldst not have done to thyself” (Hobbes 99) – will run contrary to covenant keeping. Indeed, as Kavka points out, Hobbes deems acceptable a particular type of violation of the laws of nature – what Kavka calls a defensive violation (4). A defensive violation occurs in response to a violation undertaken by another party, and it works to protect an agent from being taken advantage of by other violators. An offensive violation, by contrast, is chosen simply because an agent has calculated that violating will be to her advantage. It is this second type of violation that Hobbes is trying to prove irrational.

It is possible to interpret Hobbes’ goal differently: perhaps he accepts the rationality of such offensive violations but simply wants to modify the Fool’s (and the reader’s) calculation of how often a good chance to offensively violate occurs. The problem with this interpretation is that it has Hobbes introducing an antagonist with whom he is in fundamental agreement – a view that clashes strongly with the manner in which the Fool is presented. Hobbes does not say to the Fool, “you’re right, but it happens less than you think,” but rather, “this specious reasoning is nevertheless false” (91). It seems that Hobbes takes the issue to be one of principle, not quantity of cases. In addition, Hobbes’ linguistic choices – naming his interlocutor “The Fool,” referring to the Fool’s reasoning as “successful wickedness” (90) – suggest that he does not consider the Fool an intellectual bedfellow. These texts present prima facie evidence that Hobbes does not want to show the reader merely that the Fool has overestimated a fundamentally sound conclusion, but rather that the Fool’s reasoning itself is misguided.

How does Hobbes attempt to do so? His answer consists of two parts. First, Hobbes provides a clarification about what it means to make a rational decision. This clarification does not contest the Fool’s view that ultimately, practical reason derives from considerations of self interest, but it does introduce an important distinction: “When a man doth a thing which…. tendeth to his own destruction (howsoever some accidence which he could not expect, arriving, may turn it to his benefit), yet such events do not make it reasonable or wisely done” (91). On this view, the reasonableness of an action is not determined by its actual outcome, but rather by the outcome that could be reasonably expected from an agent’s deliberative standpoint. An example makes this distinction clear: imagine a man who, in exchange for 500 dollars, jumps out of an airplane with no parachute. Unbeknownst to him, the plane just happens to be passing over the world’s largest pile of pillows, on which he lands safely. He walks away 500 dollars richer, but the choice he made was not rational, because he could not have reasonably expected to benefit from it (even though, in fact, he did).

The second step in Hobbes’ reply is this: because of the way the state of nature works, violating covenant is the equivalent of jumping out of a plane with no parachute, in that 1) it tends toward the destruction of the person who does it, and 2) the person cannot reasonably expect to avoid this destruction. Hobbes derives 1 from the necessity of cooperation: “In a condition of war wherein every man to every man … is an enemy, no man can hope by his own strength or wit to defend himself from destruction without the help of confederates” (91). But no one will cooperate with someone who breaks his covenants, particularly not in the kind of iterated collective action problems entailed by a confederacy. Therefore, a covenant-breaker can only be received into society “by the error of them that receive him,” an error that “he could not foresee nor reckon upon” (92). Such an error is Hobbes’ version of landing on the world’s largest pile of pillows; it cannot be rationally expected.

Important to this reasoning is the notion of decision under uncertainty. When a choice is being made under conditions of uncertainty, a rational agent must take into account not only the value and probability of different possible outcomes, but also the reliability of her calculations. The evidence she is using might be faulty, or incomplete, or she might be biased, ignorant or deceived in a way that is leading her to misinterpret the situation. These possibilities introduce a degree of uncertainty to the decision-making process that must itself be factored into evaluating a decision’s rationality. Hobbes seems to think that the decision to keep or violate a covenant is made under this type of uncertainty, and that even if all of an agent’s evidence suggests that violation of covenant will be beneficial, the reliability of that conclusion will be uncertain to such an extent that it will not be rational to risk the drastic consequences – in Hobbes’ view, certain destruction – of getting it wrong.

I will examine two interpretations to which this reply has given rise, though there are many others^[1]. One is called the case-by-case interpretation^[2]. On this view, Hobbes is arguing that, given the uncertainty inherent to decision-making and the dire consequences misjudgment, there will be no cases in which you can reasonably expect to benefit from covenant violation. This interpretation is close to traditional readings of Hobbes, and it follows easily from the text of the reply, which is framed in terms of individual decisions. If the reasoning is sound, then Hobbes has successfully answered the Fool’s challenge.

However, one of the reasons this answer has drawn so much attention is that there seem, on the surface, to be obvious problems with it. Are there really no cases in which it is possible to reasonably expect that violating a covenant will be more beneficial than keeping it? They do not seem difficult to imagine. For example, suppose that, while on a trip around the world, your one-person plane breaks down in Egypt, and you hire a nameless, friendless, deaf mute orphan boy to help you fix it, promising him $2,000 in exchange. He does his work beautifully, and once he finishes and you have tested everything to make sure it works, you load yourself into the cockpit. You are about to close the window when the orphan boy holds out his hand, expecting to receive his money. In this situation, it seems reasonable for you to expect to benefit from closing the window, revving the engine, and flying away. No one else knows about your covenant with the boy, and he won’t be able to tell anyone. Even if he could, you would be long gone, and whatever bad reputation you develop in that particular Egyptian town would not touch you in America. Of course, there is some uncertainty (what if you break down in that town again? what if the orphan boy grows up to wield great power and to use it expressly to revenge this offense?), but the uncertainty is not sufficient to undermine the reasonableness of your expectation. Why would it be irrational simply to fly away?

Cases like this seem to be what the Fool is talking about, and they are more common than the strangeness of the example might suggest. All that is necessary is a situation in which, even after considerations of consequence, probability, and uncertainty are taken into account, the risks of covenant-violation are calculably low, and the benefits calculably high, such that it is reasonable for an agent to expect violation to work to her advantage. The frequency of such cases can be disputed; that they do, sometimes, occur cannot. And, on the case-by-case interpretation of Hobbes’ reply, this seems to be all that the Fool needs.

The force of this objection has led some interpreters^[3] to abandon the case-by-case interpretation and present instead a “rule-commitment” reading. On this view, Hobbes is arguing not just against a particular decision – to break covenant – but against an entire paradigm of decision-making – namely, case-by-case reasoning – when applied to covenant-keeping. On this view, Hobbes thinks it irrational to attempt to calculate, in each new situation, whether violating a core moral rule like covenant-keeping will be in your interest. Rather, the best thing to do is to commit to a rule or cultivate a disposition that will govern your behavior in all cases. If this interpretation of Hobbes is correct, then the real disagreement between him and the Fool is about what type of decision-making process is most rational. The Fool implicitly accepts case-by-case decision-making, while Hobbes argues that if you commit to a rule such as “never break covenants,” you will ultimately benefit more.

Why would commitment to this rule yield such a benefit? Interpreters give different arguments. Gauthier focuses on the social benefits: if an agent’s commitment to never break covenants is adequately discernable by potential confederates, then those confederates will have reason to choose partnerships with that agent rather than with others who are suspected of case-by-case reasoning. Indeed, because it is in the interests of potential confederates to become as skilled at such discernment as possible, the easiest way for an agent to withstand their scrutiny will be to actually commit to the rules beneficial to confederacy. This advantage means that rule-committed reasoners will be offered better opportunities for cooperation than case-by-case reasoners, and will therefore do better in the long term, even though they will pass up chances to violate that would have worked to their short-term advantage.^[4]

In addition to these social benefits, committing to rules solves technical problems often encountered during deliberation. Kavka argues that trying, in the face of each opportunity to violate covenant, to systematically anticipate all of the advantages and disadvantages of various possible outcomes, calculate the probabilities of those outcomes, and reckon with the uncertainty of your calculations is a taxing process, and the energy saved by committing to a simple rule can be put to much more beneficial use elsewhere (Kavka 21). What’s more, rule commitment avoids recognized problems in the psychology of human decision making, such as the tendency to succumb to the temptation of short-term reward without adequate recognition of the potential long-term costs. It therefore reduces, in the long term, the number of mistakes that an agent makes, and ultimately yields a net gain (Kavka 21).^[5]

Such considerations may begin to build an argument for committing to rules rather than reasoning case by case. But is it, in fact, the argument that Hobbes makes against the Fool? On the surface, the text of the reply itself suggests otherwise. Hobbes frames his discussion with the Fool as an analysis of which individual actions are most reasonable, not which type of practical rationality. Nowhere does Hobbes mention the notion of rule commitment, nor does he explain why such commitment would be more beneficial in the long term than reasoning case by case – an explanation presumably necessary for showing why the Fool’s approach is wrong. If Hobbes’ real intention in his reply to the Fool is to prove the fallacy of case-by-case practical reasoning, then he is doing so in a manner both singularly indirect and contrary to his usual, geometric style of explanation. Of course, it is possible that Hobbes explains the value of rule commitment elsewhere in Leviathan, or that he simply takes it for granted. Kavka seems to take the former view, and he cites as his evidence the passage in Chapter 15 in which Hobbes explains that the laws of nature are both prudentially grounded and, in Kavka’s language, “general prescriptive rules of conduct” (Kavka 1986, 360). Such textual evidence, however, is far from decisive, as the passages are perfectly compatible with the case-by- case interpretation as well; Hobbes could believe that what makes the rules general and prescriptive is that adhering to them will be more prudent in each particular case.

Nevertheless, a rule-commitment interpretation of Hobbesian practical reason does have a few theoretical advantages to recommend it. For one, it helps explain some of Hobbes’ political doctrines that a case-by-case theory has trouble with, such as the absolute authority of the sovereign and the reasonableness of remaining in the social contract even when it seems against your interest.^[6] It also allows Hobbes both to disagree substantively with the Fool and, at least in Kavka’s view, to defeat him, thus saving Hobbes from the embarrassing choice of having introduced either an opponent he fundamentally agrees with or an objection he fails to meet. For these reasons and others, scholarly debate about the rule-commitment interpretation remains vigorous.

Even if this is the correct interpretation of Hobbes’ reply, however, I believe that, like the case-by-case interpretation, it ultimately fails to refute the Fool. Even if we grant Kavka’s/Gauthier’s empirical claims about the long-term advantages of rule commitment (many of which are open to objection), there will remain situations in which the long- term benefits of breaking a rule are calculably greater than the long-term benefits of keeping it. In such situations, a rule-committed reasoner will be voluntarily doing something that she can see quite clearly is not to her benefit. There are two arguments against accepting this scenario. One, given by Hampton, is that Hobbes’ egoistic theory of motivation renders it impossible.^[7] This first argument, though, may be surmountable by appeal to the agent’s belief that her policy of rule commitment is ultimately in her interest, so I will focus on the second: even if such an action is possible, it is nevertheless irrational, because a much better approach is available. Rather than following the rules rigidly, even when doing so is obviously disadvantageous, an agent will reap much greater rewards by following the rules generally – thus reaping the benefits of rule- commitment – and also remaining able to identify and take advantage of opportunities in which breaking the rules is calculably beneficial. Kavka argues against this conclusion by citing the uncertainty inherent in trying to identify such opportunities (Kavka 1995, 22- 23), but he ends his paper with a question that undermines his argument: “is uncertainty really so widespread, and benefit so unlikely, that we cannot reliably determine of potential rule violations ahead of time when they ‘conduced to one’s benefit’?” (30). The obvious answer seems to be no. Imagine, again, your plane’s break-down in Egypt. While you are watching the orphan boy repair your plane, you have quite a bit of time to calculate whether this would be a good time to break your general rule of keeping covenants. Such situations are common – so common, in fact, that, it may be to your substantial disadvantage to adopt of a mode of practical reasoning that leaves them unexploited.

I conclude, therefore, that both a case-by-case interpretation and a rule- commitment interpretation fail to answer the Fool’s challenge. Case-by-case reasoning leads to the violation of covenant in cases like the breakdown in Egypt, and rigid rule- commitment seems irrational compared to general rule-following and occasional rule- breaking – a policy that also compels leaving the orphan boy empty handed. Either way, the Fool has triumphed, and the boy goes hungry.

In what remains of the paper, I will explore one more interpretation of Hobbes’ reply – Gauthier’s theory of conventional reason. This interpretation has at its core an insight that the other two lack. Both case-by-case and rule-commitment interpretations have Hobbes playing an empirical game with a Fool – a game, I have argued, that the philosopher loses. Gauthier, by contrast, wastes no time with empirical speculation; rather, he focuses on a much more central feature of the Fool’s argument – the egoistic conception of practical rationality. Both case-by-case and rule-commitment interpretations take this conception for granted, and they are thus stuck forever on the Fool’s turf. Recognizing this, Gauthier rightly searches for a new playing field. His failure to find one also compatible with Hobbes’ thought illuminates a fundamental barrier to Leviathan’s moral project – Hobbes’ inability to rationally constrain the pursuit of self-interest.

Gauthier’s move is to attempt to develop a conventional standard of rationality that allows Hobbes a way around the egoistic notion of practical reason that grounds the Fool’s argument. He does so through appeal to Hobbes’ notion of right reason: “when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord set up for right reason the reason of some arbitrator or judge to whose sentence they will both stand” (Hobbes 23). According to Gauthier, this notion contains the “germ” of an adequate reply to the Fool – albeit, a reply that Hobbes does not make explicit (Gauthier 1979, 557). It is this: only in the state of nature do people reason solely for the sake of personal advantage – a type of practical reason that Gauthier calls “natural reason.” Once they come to understand that this manner of reasoning leads to a war of all against all, they agree to renounce it and set up a conventional standard of reason that compels each person to seek something everyone wants – peace. This renouncement, according to Gauthier, is inextricably tied to the limiting of natural right: “if one lays down some portion of one’s right to do whatever seems conducive to one’s preservation and well-being, so that one may find peace, then one renounces preservation as the standard of reason, in favor of peace” (Gauthier 577). This “conventional reason” functions in a manner similar to the judge Hobbes advocates erecting to settle disputes, in that it unites previously subjective, competing “reasons” under a shared standard. On this view, the Fool errs because he appeals to an egoistic standard of reason that the social contract renders obsolete. Once an agent has laid down part of her natural right, she will no longer accept arguments of the Fool’s form: “X is irrational because it doesn’t conduce to an agent’s interests.” Rather, she will only respond to arguments like, “X is irrational because it does not conduce towards peace.”

Gauthier does not claim that Hobbes actually makes this argument against the Fool. He does claim, however, that Hobbes could make it using resources in the text already available to him, and that doing so would be consistent with everything else in Leviathan (Gauthier 548). This latter claim, I will argue, is incorrect; central points of Hobbes’ system cause serious problems for Gauthier’s theory. One is the role of covenants in the state of nature.^[8] According to Hobbes, the capacity to make covenants for the sake of temporary safety and mutual defense is extremely necessary in the state of nature. As Hobbes makes clear in the reply to the Fool, no man can hope to survive without the confederacies that covenants make possible. Granted, such covenants are easily voided by “any reasonable suspicion” (84) that one party will violate, but they are nevertheless valid provided conditions of mutual trust (84). Indeed, covenants had better be possible in the state of nature, because at least one is required to get out of it – namely, the covenant to establish a mutual sovereign. But Gauthier’s “conventional reason” applies as a standard only after agents have left the state of nature. How, then, can he answer Fool-like reasoning about covenants prior to the social contract – in particular, the covenant to establish the contract itself? He cannot appeal to “natural reason,” because that would simply leave us back where we started, and he cannot appeal to “conventional reason,” because such a convention has not been erected. This poses an obstacle to Gauthier’s ability to answer the Fool on Hobbes’ terms.

A bigger obstacle, though, is Gauthier’s need to transition social contractors from natural reason to conventional reason – a transition which seems incompatible with Hobbes’ psychology. For Gauthier’s theory to work, participants in the social contract must actually replace their natural pursuit of preservation and advantage with a new, conventional pursuit of peace. But Hobbes does not present the natural pursuit of advantage as a merely contingent feature of human life that can be discarded at will, like a hat that goes out style. Rather, he presents natural reason as fundamental to human nature – so much so, in fact, that he tries to ground a political system on it. It is therefore difficult to see how the transition Gauthier needs could take place. Man’s fundamental selfishness cannot be simply willed away by the social contract. Indeed, Hobbes’ psychological picture of reason makes this clear. According to Hobbes, reason is simply the “scout and spy” (41) of human desires, which in turn are the result of mechanistic processes in human physiology. Entering into a social contract does not fundamentally alter the physiology of people’s desires, so it cannot fundamentally alter their reason. This suggests the conclusion that Hobbes seems to take for granted throughout his discussion: that people within the social contract retain the same fundamental (selfish) nature that they had outside of it. Unless Gauthier proposes that participants in the social contract undergo some kind of physiological restructuring, then, he faces a serious barrier in explaining how conventional reason can actually replace natural reason.

In response to this objection, Gauthier could argue that the conditions of the social contract, including the mutual acceptance of conventional reason, enable natural desires normally stifled by the state of nature – such as the desire for peace – to take hold over the human will, such that reason will be the scout and spy for a new master. On this view, the peace-seeking standard of conventional reason will retain natural, psychological endorsement so long as the social contract remains intact.^[9] But this view seems to render Gauthier’s whole theory unnecessary. If the social contract is sufficient to create conditions such that the desire for peace holds sway naturally over human psychology, then there is no need to erect a convention. Natural reason will be perfectly sufficient on its own. And then we are simply back where we started with the Fool’s original objection.

Indeed, the persistence of natural reason thus puts Gauthier in a serious and, I think, decisive bind. If the acceptance of conventional reason is perfectly continuous with natural reason, then such a convention is simply the extension of the natural pursuit of advantage. In that case, it does none of the work that Gauthier needed it to do – namely, allowing him to rebuff the Fool’s appeal to the natural pursuit of advantage. But if the dictates of conventional reason actually diverge from natural reason in a manner that would constrain the pursuit of advantage, then natural reason alone cannot compel obedience to them. The Fool would put it thus: if participants in the social contract accept conventional reason only for the sake of their individual advantage, then when such acceptance runs contrary to individual advantage, what reason does an agent have to continue with it? Hobbes’ assumptions about human nature give Gauthier no resources with which to answer.

I conclude, therefore, that because Gauthier cannot escape the fundamental selfishness of Hobbesian natural reason, his innovative approach to the Fool’s challenge ultimately fails. Nevertheless, his insight is keen. Gauthier sees that in order to answer the Fool, what Hobbes really needs to do is not to justify obedience to natural law in terms of self-interest, but rather to justify natural law as a constraint on the pursuit of self-interest. Such a constraint would take Hobbes’ theory beyond the realm of simple prudence and into the realm of actual morality,^[10] thus allowing him to answer the Fool with considerations other than advantage and disadvantage. Gauthier’s conventional reason attempts to ground such a constraint, but Hobbes’ fundamental assumptions about human nature do not allow it traction. Gauthier’s failure is thus illuminating: the text keeps dragging Gauthier back to the Fool’s egoistic arena because, at bottom, it is Hobbes’ arena too.

In a sense, then, the reason Gauthier fails is the same reason that any attempt to constrain the self-interest of Hobbesian agents will fail: the practical rationality of a Hobbesian agent is fundamentally selfish. This assumption cuts down any possibility of a rational constraint on the pursuit of self-interest. If morality dictates something that is not to the long-term advantage of a Hobbesian agent, it will not be rational for a Hobbesian agent to do it. Indeed, even theorists who interpret Hobbes’ morality in non-prudential terms are forced to limit their concept of obligation such that it only applies to acts that can be adequately motivated in Hobbes’ world – that is, only to acts that can be done for the sake of personal advantage.^[11] As Nagel and Plamenatz convincingly argue, such interpretations fail to present a system of moral obligation as it is normally conceived.^[12] Plamenatz puts its forcefully: “when someone is morally obliged, there is something he ought to do, whether it is to his advantage or not” (3). This is precisely the type of rational constraint Hobbes needs in order to answer the Fool, and precisely the kind he cannot have. He is left with only an empirical appeal to prudence – an appeal my discussion of case-by-case and rule-commitment reasoning has tried to show insufficient.

Those of us who regularly get our planes fixed in foreign countries, however, need not worry too much that we are acting irrationally when we choose to pay the orphan boys who help us. Hobbes’ assumptions about practical rationality are deeply suspect. Surely it is possible to act both rationally and contrary to your expected long- term interest. Indeed, any substantive notion of morality will require that we do so, and in some cases will render considerations of self-interest in some sense beside the point. To answer Fool-like challenges to other injunctions of morality – do not murder, do not rape – in terms of prudence is both implausible and almost offensive. The reason you should not rape someone has nothing to do with whether or not doing so would be to your long- term advantage. If we seek a plausible account of the ethical rationality, Hobbes’ reply to the Fool is not the place to look.

Work Cited

Darwall, Stephen. Philosophical Ethics. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998).

Gauthier, David. The Logic of Leviathan. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969).

Gauthier, David. Morals by Agreement. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) 162-182.

Gauthier, David. “Thomas Hobbes: Moral Theorist,” Journal of Philosophy 76 (1989): 547-559.

Hampton, Jean. Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986).

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Edwin Curley. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994). Originally published 1668.

Kavka, Gregory. Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986).

Kavka, Gregory. “The Rationality of Rule-Following: Hobbes’ Dispute with the Foole.” Law and Philosophy 14 (1995): 5-34.

Nagel, Thomas. “Hobbes’s Concept of Obligation,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 69, No. 1 (1959): 68-83

Plamenatz, John. “Mr. Warrender’s Hobbes,” Political Studies Vol. 5, No. 3 (1957): 295-308Warrender, Howard. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of

Obligation. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).

End Notes

^[2] Hampton, for example, takes this view in Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 92-94.

^[3] See Kavka, “The Rationality of Rule-Following: Hobbes’ Dispute with the Foole,” Law and Philosophy 14 (1995): 17-30. Also Gauthier, Morals by Agreement, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) 162-182.

^[4] For a more detailed explanation of this analysis, see Gauthier, Morals by Agreement, 162-64

^[5] Kavka fails to note the potential disadvantages of rigid rule commitment, such as the inability to adapt to new situations, respond flexibly to nuance and detail, or test out new maxims of action in low-risk situations.

^[6] See Kavka, “The Rationality of Rule Following,” 19

^[7] See Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, 93

^[8] This point was suggested to me Stephen Darwall, who elaborates on it in Philosophical Ethics (Westview Press: Bounder, 1998) 103-104.

^[9] I am grateful to Stephen Darwall for suggesting that I consider an objection of this sort.

^[10] Of course, more work has to be done to build a rich moral system than simply justifying constraints on self-interest. As Darwall points out, real morality constrains not just the pursuit of your own good, but also the pursuit of any good, and such constraints implicate distinctly moral notions of blame and censure. Hobbes may be helping himself to such notions in places in Leviathan, but he has not earned them, and they clash both with his psychology and his deterministic metaphysics.

^[11] See Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 212 and Taylor, “The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes,” 408.

^[12] See Nagel, “Hobbes’s Concept of Obligation,” 68-83 and Plamenatz, “Mr. Warrender’s Hobbes,” 295-308. Indeed, Warrender’s thesis sometimes seems to have given rise to a whole generation of criticism. Gauthier even claims to have been inspired to study Hobbes by its inaccuracy (see Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan, p. v).

Joseph Carlsmith (’12) is a Philosophy and Humanities Major at Yale University

Image taken from DeviantArt.com

(http://wangblad.deviantart.com/art/Selfish-Black-and-White-66265848?q=boost%3Apopular%20in%3Aphotography%20selfish&qo=57)

In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, he writes that the ideal philosopher “treats a question; like an illness” (PI 255). This move from treating a question as something to be answered to treating it as something to be cured might encapsulate the focus of the Investigations; it certainly sums up Wittgenstein’s approach to various problems relating to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of logic, and the philosophy of mind. In this sense, Wittgenstein considers his method therapeutic and concludes that philosophy should do nothing more than demonstrate how its own questions are rooted in mistake. But Wittgenstein does not treat one particular question which, in light of his therapeutic method, seems particularly problematic: “What ought I to do?” i.e. the ethical question. This paper seeks to perform Wittgensteinian therapy on that question. In section I, I present my interpretation of Wittgenstein’s therapy, which I argue entails both intellectual and aesthetic reversals. In section II, I use my interpretation of his therapy to begin treating the ethical question, attempting to at least provide a model of the therapy which intellectually treats the question. In section III, I show that a full treatment of the ethical question will necessarily entail a positive ethical account, and suggest one such account by an appeal to a religious aesthetic rather than a philosophic one. I conclude with a discussion of the ethical purpose of the Investigations in light of this positive account.

I. Philosophy and Therapy

In order to establish a firm understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophical therapy, we must start with the so-called illness. What, exactly, is the philosophical condition which Wittgenstein intends to cure? Though it is tempting to answer with “participating in the western philosophical tradition,” i.e. engaging in the content of most western philosophy courses, it is not clear that Wittgenstein’s project is focused upon targeting such a broad, academic audience; since Wittgenstein himself fails to specify exactly who he is targeting, it is helpful to situate him within his philosophical milieu. G.P. Baker and P.M.S Hacker portray Bertrand Russell, one of Wittgenstein’s influences, as representing the antithesis of Wittgenstein’s philosophical therapy in his advocating philosophy as “the most general of sciences” (Baker and Hacker, 458). In reaction to the worry that philosophy has, after two millennia, achieved no concrete breakthroughs comparable to those of the sciences, Russell sought to develop a philosophical system that could support an accumulation of theories and therefore provide an avenue for progress. As Baker and Hacker write, Russell thought that philosophy’s lack of progress “is a symptom that philosophers have been mistaken in their methods. The remedy is to emulate the method the sciences follow with such conspicuous success” (ibid). Without further investigation of Russell’s theory, we already have a clear illustration of a condition that Wittgenstein intends to cure. The philosopher finds that he is dissatisfied, for the intellectual tradition that he finds himself within has apparently failed to provide adequate answers to the problems that it poses. His dissatisfaction operates on two levels: (i) meta-philosophically, in his dissatisfaction with philosophy as a whole – for example, the realization that philosophy has made such little progress while the sciences have, and (ii) philosophically, in his dissatisfaction with his own answers (or lack of answers) to the questions of philosophy. This dissatisfaction, as Baker and Hacker note, is unconsciously taken as a “symptom”: but rather than the symptom prompting a diagnostic process, i.e. the description of why one feels as one does, it prompts the philosopher to seek out a novel way of solving the problems, as Russell did. Wittgenstein rejects this second method as the appropriate response to philosophical dissatisfaction.

In writing “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’,” (PI 123) Wittgenstein implicitly identifies this condition of dissatisfaction with Plato’s aporia, the state of being at a loss that one finds himself within upon realizing that he lacks knowledge. Wittgenstein’s remark highlights that philosophical problems are formally aporetic; it is the nature of a philosophical problem to effect aporia. Where our portrait of Russell depicts him as unconsciously taking aporia as a symptom of philosophical failure, Wittgenstein contends that philosophy is essentially aporetic: to engage in philosophic discourse is to be at a loss. And it is a specific kind of lostness that Wittgenstein describes as the aporetic condition, one produced by grammatical confusion rather than lack of knowledge. The problems of philosophy begin in mistake. He writes, “what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them in speech, or see them written or in print. For their use is not that obvious” (PI 11). Here Wittgenstein, in highlighting the uniform appearance of words, may be noting a variety of phenomena: that a sentence in our language always requires a subject and a predicate, that we have adjectival and nominal forms of the same word (e.g. happy and happiness), that our verbs alternate between different forms (is, to be, being), etc. Whatever the nature of the uniformity, it produces problems which arise when the use of a word is not obvious and therefore is confused with a different, unintelligible (thought seemingly intelligible) usage. This may be the moment when, for example, we see that “His sermon was very meaningful,” is an intelligible sentence, and so we begin to wonder, “Is life meaningful? What is the meaning of life?” although that usage is not grounded in the same practice as the former. And at this stage, language is officially suspended: “For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (PI 38). And so the formal beginning of philosophy – the articulation of a philosophical problem – arises out of a mistaken approximation as to the usage of certain words and phrases.

There is, however, an additional element which contributes to the philosopher’s aporia: what more idealistic thinkers have termed “wonder” concerning the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein discusses in terms of “captivation”. In comment 114, Wittgenstein includes a confessional remark regarding his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which he claims that the prior work was an attempt at capturing the essence of reality; immediately following, he writes, “A picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably” (PI 115). This confession introduces the aesthetic relationship of the philosopher to the question: the aporetic condition extends beyond a misunderstanding of language to a seemingly inescapable attachment to that misunderstood language. The picture held them captive because it was captivating, being rooted in the language they had adopted and deeply seated within their aesthetic framework, i.e. “the frame through which we look at it” (PI 114). This aesthetic results when a philosopher, having been mistaken about his language, becomes wedded to the philosophical vocabulary; this contributes to “an urge to misunderstand [the workings of our language]” (PI 109). This urge is motivated by some attractive ideal located within the philosophical vocabulary: in Wittgenstein’s case, he reports that this ideal was the “crystalline purity of logic” (PI 107). Robert Fogelin, however, discusses how this aesthetic might develop given any philosophic vocabulary, and that the general process runs thus: “Impressed by a certain feature of language, we elevate it to the status of a model for the description of all language. We become absorbed in certain similes and distort phenomena to fit under them” (Fogelin 141).

It is this distortion that characterizes Wittgenstein’s aporia, as the philosophical language begins to conflict with the language from which it was derived. This leads the philosopher to the form of the philosophical problem: “I don’t know my way about” (PI 123). The philosopher unconsciously abandons language informed by practice, and thus loses the ground upon which he conducts his reasoning. For philosophical discourse is conducted in language – yet Wittgenstein maintains that the philosopher is only utilizing the appearance of language, a confused language, not a language legitimated by practice. The tension produced by the conflict between this pseudo-language and legitimate language effects aporia: “We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers” (PI 106). Moreover, the philosopher’s aesthetic binds him to his aporia, as he remains attracted to his mistaken notion of an ideal because of its sheer impressiveness. It is this combination of mistaking language’s usage and adopting the philosophic aesthetic that constitutes aporia; aporia is therefore not, as the traditional philosophers might say, an indication that one doesn’t “actually know” something. As Wittgenstein would say, this response would itself be grounded in the mistaken language.

Wittgenstein’s response, on the other hand, is therapy . I will present a plausible account of Wittgenstein’s “justification” for his therapy later in this essay, as I find that it is deeply intertwined with the possibility of positive ethics stemming from the Investigations; for now, our interest is in the therapeutic method itself. As aporia results from both (i) the mistaken application of language and (ii) the philosophic aesthetic engrossed in that mistake, effective therapy would require both an intellectual reorientation and an aesthetic reorientation. This, I argue, is just what we find in the Investigations.

The intellectual reorientation occurs upon the moment that the philosopher realizes his error and corrects it. Having realized his mistake, the philosopher will reappropriate language grounded in usage, and his philosophical problems will disappear; as such, there will be no need for them to be answered. Wittgenstein’s greatest challenge here is resisting a method that itself adopts a philosophical vocabulary and thereby fails to adequately escape aporia . In order to avoid this, he resists explanation and emphasizes description: “All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light – that is to say, its purpose – from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; but they are solved through an insight into the workings of our language” (PI 109). This process appears to operate sequentially: (1) the philosopher realizes that he is at a loss, having engaged philosophically with a problem; (2) he, or his therapist, engages in the explanatory process of describing the language which the problem is couched within (i.e. the description gets its light from the problem); (3) the philosopher experiences an “insight” as to how the problem illegitimately arose, and he thus abandons his philosophical vocabulary and returns to legitimate language. Wittgenstein here uses the vague term “insight” intentionally, as he is avoiding positing a theoretical model as to the nature of “understanding” and is instead using experiential language to convey the immediate reality of the event. Such language, I might add, is grounded in usage, as when we say, “It all just clicked,” or, “A light bulb went off in my head”. Wittgenstein would betray his own position if he were to explain the nature of the insight.

Wittgenstein does, however, allow for more concrete methodological techniques in his therapy. He writes that some of our misunderstandings “can be removed by substituting one form of expression for another; this may be called ‘analyzing’ our forms of expression, for sometimes this procedure resembles taking a thing apart” (PI 90). Wittgenstein’s allowance for this being called “analysis” is explained by its common definition, “to take apart, to break up and examine”. More importantly, though, Wittgenstein’s remark is self-referential: in substituting “analysis” for “substituting one form of expression for another”, he demonstrates the spirit of his remark. For he does not intend to claim that such an analytic method would constitute a process that would reveal the “real meaning” of an expression; rather, he intends to show that it effects different ways of beholding the same expression. By beholding “analysis”, “substituting one expression for another”, and “taking apart and examining”, simultaneously, we may be able to grasp the ethereal connection between the three and understand how we came to assign “analysis” a special meaning, if we did at all. Thus the analysis does not provide an explanation, but rather arranges the circumstances such that an “insight” can occur; it is a method conducive to description, not explanation. Nevertheless, this method does allow for concrete, therapeutic techniques, should we find them amicable to achieving an insight.

Wittgenstein, however, does intend to push against a rigorous, singular methodology in the Philosophical Investigations: he makes this point clearly, in saying, “There is not a single philosophical [therapeutic] method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were” (PI 133, my note in parentheses). This remark respects the individuality of each patient’s experience, allowing Wittgenstein to avoid positing a theoretical and comprehensive model as to the phenomenology of aporia. It also, though, calls attention to the norm which Wittgenstein intends to effect through his therapy: a true aesthetic reversal. James Peterman describes this in saying: “Philosophical therapy, like aesthetic critique, is designed to get someone to change a philosophical view and ultimately his or her philosophical sensibility” (Peterman, 123, my italics). I will clarify, or perhaps dispute, Peterman’s word choice when he claims that philosophical therapy initially changes someone’s “philosophical view” – I maintain that Wittgenstein intends to defy the terms of philosophy altogether in effecting a non-philosophical view of a certain phenomenon in language. And ultimately, following Peterman’s claim, Wittgenstein intends to effect a non-philosophical sensibility, which is not a manner of beholding a single proposition or phenomenon but one’s entire world.

This distinction explains Wittgenstein’s intention in saying that “the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear” (PI 133). Questions disappear when we, in a sense, stop asking them. For the elimination of one philosophical problem through therapy cannot guarantee that the real problem is in fact treated, which is that the philosopher finds himself so wedded to the philosophical vocabulary. And so Wittgenstein’s positing that philosophy ought to be inherently therapeutic is done with an eye to effecting a sensibility that beholds language and phenomena in such a way as to not give rise to philosophical problems. This will entail a permanent abandonment of the philosophical vocabulary and a complete return to legitimated language. So, we take again our caricature of Russell. As we portrayed him, Russell’s philosophical problem was that, loosely speaking, philosophy had not quite uncovered truth as a result of deficiency in its methods; and so he developed an entirely new philosophical system that might be able to adequately answer the problems of philosophy. But let’s say that we now performed therapy on Russell, and through analysis got him to see that his new philosophy somehow stemmed from a misappropriation of language. Might we expect that his next move would be to develop an entirely new philosophical system? Because Russell (as we characterize him) is obsessed with finding the answers of the philosophical problems – and though we may have succeeded in getting him to realize that his one particular view was mistaken, there is no guarantee that this will make his philosophical problems completely disappear. What will make those problems completely disappear, though, is a total change of sensibility. James Edwards illustrates this nicely: “The change in belief about the temperature might well leave every other belief unaltered; the aesthetic reversal could not but bring about other differences in its train: hence calling it an alteration in sensibility” (Edwards, 135).
And, Wittgenstein posits, one of those “other differences” that the aesthetic reversal is supposed to bring about is peace. “The real discovery,” he writes, “is the one that enables me to break off philosophizing when I want to. – The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question” (PI 133). The state of being wedded to the philosophical vocabulary is characterized as torment – presumably because philosophical thinking is categorically at odds with the language from which it developed, and so can never provide adequate answers to its own questions. The philosophical sensibility will therefore live in continual disappointment – Russell’s realization that philosophy has provided inadequate answers to its own questions will continually happen. And so the aesthetic reversal, i.e. the “real discovery,” will allow the philosopher to not only abandon a philosophical issue but to stop philosophizing completely. This in turn will bring peace – freedom from philosophical captivation.

II. Treating the Question

And so, in summary, the cessation of philosophy brings the philosopher peace. It is in (i) treating the particular questions of philosophy – and experiencing an insight as to what mistake brought each question about – and (ii) in experiencing a change of sensibility which frees us from even wanting to engage in philosophy, that we are freed from philosophizing altogether and can then go about living our lives peacefully. This process, on some level, may intuitively strike us as plausible, even desirable, when we have philosophical questions in mind that seem categorically unsolvable and somewhat superfluous: for example, certain questions of metaphysics and epistemology (e.g. What is being? Is the cat on the mat?). I think, however, that this process seems deeply disturbing when applied to what I will call “the ethical question,” of which a common formulation is, “What ought I to do?” Nevertheless, the history of philosophy suggests that this question is distinctly philosophical – and certain formulations or treatments of this question have undoubtedly slipped into the kind of philosophical mistake that deserves therapy. I will attempt, using the methodologies outlined above, to hazard a Wittgensteinian treatment of this question. I do not intend to demonstrate that Wittgenstein’s method especially applies to one particular tradition, nor do I intend to claim that Wittgenstein himself would support my analysis. Rather, I intend to show how such a treatment remains consistent with Wittgensteinian therapy.

Stage 1: Aporia

The salient characteristic of any philosophical problem, and the indication that it deserves therapy, is that it effects aporia. In what sense might “What ought I to do?” be understood as formally aporetic? This particular question resembles Wittgenstein’s formal definition of the philosophical problem (PI 123) in two striking and distinct ways: (i) it is a confusion in language, in that it indicates that the philosopher does not know how to properly apply certain linguistic concepts (such as the word “ought”), and (ii) it is a clear articulation of ‘not knowing one’s way about’ in a very practical way, for it indicates that the philosopher very literally does not know his way about life. As such, the ethical question participates in the form of the philosophical problem in a much more apparent way than many philosophical questions: we could imagine a philosopher saying, “What ought I to do? I don’t know my about,” including the second sentence by way of explanation of the first. That is, the ethical question not only follows the aporetic form; it itself is also an expression of aporia. And if this is the case, then the question itself – when asked in a philosophical way – can legitimately be taken as a symptom of philosophical aporia. The therapist, therefore, has grounds to proceed.

Stage 2: Analysis

Given that the analytical process is one of the few concrete methods that Wittgenstein provides in the Philosophical Investigations, I will attempt to demonstrate it here as applied to “What ought I to do?” Recall that this will entail a type of “substituting one form of expression for another” (PI 90) that may provide the conditions under which an “insight” might occur. Firstly, let us examine the many different iterations of the question in an effort to perceive the language within which the question is buried. For example, the question may appear as: What ought I to do; What should I do; What is the right thing to do; What is the best thing to do; What is the best way to live; What is the right way to live; What action is the most moral; What is the moral life; What is the good life; etc. From this we see that the ethical question is intimately tied to language of compulsion (ought, should), language of correctness (right thing to do), superlative language (best thing to do, best way to live, most moral), language considering orientation towards life (the moral life, the good life) and language of value (moral, good), among other linguistic tropes.

Here we must tread carefully, for Wittgenstein stresses that therapy must abandon explanation and instead hinge upon pure description in order to legitimately free itself from philosophy. Thus, rather than attempting to reconstruct how these regions of our language brought about the ethical question, we will rather investigate those regions further. Compare these uses of such regions:

1. You really should go to the store; we’re out of cereal.
2. You ought to call her back, you said you would.
3. Everyone should donate around Christmas time.
4. Given the choice, you should fly Alaska instead of United.
5. It’s better to give food, and not money, to homeless people.
6. The right thing to do would be to pay for the parking ticket.
7. One should act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will to be a universal law.
8. Oh, I should just go to sleep, I won’t get anything more done tonight.
9. You should love your neighbor as yourself.

Which of these different uses, the therapist might ask, were you thinking of when you asked the question “What ought I to do?” Being generous, we might say uses 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9 broadly fall under the question when asked philosophically, whereas uses 1, 4, and 8 certainly do not. However, the philosopher might really only have wanted an answer like 7 or 9 when they asked the question; or perhaps only an answer like 5. The important thing, though, is to notice that the grammar of example 1 is related to the grammar of example 7 – for both answers would function as appropriate responses to the question “What ought I to do” if it were asked under different circumstances.

Stage 3: Insight?

And having received such therapy – and, undoubtedly, much more – we are thus in a condition to experience an “insight” into the nature of our problem that allows us to dissolve it. I maintain that such an insight is ineffable under Wittgensteinian therapy – to articulate the insight would be to posit a theoretical model of the origin of a philosophical problem which would itself lead to philosophical problems. For example, one might be tempted to think that because obligatory language is utilized in example 2, we were tricked into applying that language to a non-existent universal standard, thereby making the question “What ought I to do?” misguided. But here, we have already slipped back into making a philosophical claim – namely a claim about the ontological status of a moral standard. And so a traditional philosopher might retort to our insight, “But how can you really know that the standard does not exist?” and we would have to defend ourselves philosophically. If, on the other hand, we allow our insight to remain an ineffable experience, taking the form of a realization that shakes us from the philosophical vocabulary and returns us to everyday language, we have legitimately escaped the problem.

III: A Religious Aesthetic

The second and more meaningful aspect of Wittgensteinian therapy is its emphasis on the aesthetic reversal. As I have argued, therapy is not complete until the philosophical questions have completely disappeared, and as such our therapy on this question is not finished until we have stopped asking it. And yet – can we stop asking such a question? As I have discussed, philosophical therapy intends to alleviate aporia, but it seems as if denying the meaningfulness of the ethical question is in fact condemning the philosopher to eternal aporia. For if we cannot ask “What ought I to do?” then what do we do? If we are not allowed to formulate theories concerning how to live our lives, then how will we live? Having treated the ethical question, it seems as if the philosopher might still be at a loss, if not intellectually then practically; for he remains without direction. For this reason, I argue that an effective aesthetic reversal will not only be one that entails the cessation of asking the ethical question, but also be one that includes an ethical reversal. For the patient cannot stop asking “What ought I to do?” until he knows what to do. In other words, the possibility of positive ethics must be included in any account of treating the ethical question with Wittgensteinian therapy; I will spend the rest of this paper discussing this possibility.

There is little help from within the Philosophical Investigations that aids in the construction of this positive account. Wittgenstein does, however, stipulate some provisions as to how we ought to go about it. The only clearly relevant remark that he includes is within proposition 77. Embodying a traditional, philosophical voice, he articulates the worry that his critique of philosophy will lead to the assertion that “everything – and nothing – is right.” Wittgenstein’s response, of course, neither directly attacks nor defends this claim; instead he notes that, “And this is the position in which, for example, someone finds in ethics or aesthetics when he looks for definitions that correspond to our concepts” (PI 77). Notice that the worry Wittgenstein’s interlocutor articulates is an expression of the aporetic condition, i.e. the form of the philosophical problem. And Wittgenstein’s response is to point out that aporia results when we look for ethical definitions that correspond to his concepts. Wittgenstein’s provision here is: do not attempt to draw absolute, one-to-one correlations between the thoughts presented in the Philosophical Investigations and ethics; this will lead to the formalization of a philosophical theory and therefore to continual enslavement to philosophy’s error. The particular position that Wittgenstein is guarding against is the ethical stance that “because I have performed therapy on the ethical question, everything goes.” This would represent a lapse into the philosophical sensibility, as it would continue to assume that ethical standards have ontological status (either “there” or “not there”) and that this status informs ethics.

With this in mind, I will turn to one more place in the Investigations that might prove useful in constructing a positive ethical account: Wittgenstein’s saying, “Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’”(PI 217). The corresponding ethical definition to such an attitude might be construed as a kind of “everything goes” morality of the variety that Wittgenstein dismissed above. That is, we might be tempted into thinking that Wittgenstein is denying the need for justification on philosophical grounds and that therefore we are authorized to act in any manner whatsoever without justification. Yet we are trying to escape the kind of morality that needs “authorization”, and such a position would itself be appealing to a type of justification.

It seems clear, then, that a positive ethical position stemming from the Investigations will be one that does not rely on philosophical justification at all because, in a sense, it justifies itself. We will not be able to arrive at such a position through argument. Instead, I propose that we must arrive there through a movement of passion. In the compilation of Wittgenstein’s remarks Culture and Value, we find a caricature of religious conversion that will serve as my model for the aesthetic-ethical reversal which can legitimately overcome the ethical question. Wittgenstein writes:

“It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation. Instruction in religious faith, therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to conscience. And this combination would have to result in the pupil himself, of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of reference. It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of my rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it.” (CV, 64)

This caricature both contains all the necessary elements of the aesthetic reversal and provides an avenue through which they might legitimately occur. The process follows a familiar pattern: (i) the pupil realizes that he is living in aporia. The teacher helps him do this by showing him the “hopelessness of [his] situation”. Of course, it is in seeing that he does not know how to live that the pupil is brought to a place in which he can legitimately learn, just as the philosopher must realize that he does not know his way about in order to find it. (ii) the pupil is instructed in the means by which he might escape aporia. This resembles the therapist describing the features of language that a philosophical problem is couched within, except the religious instructor describes a system which is wholly new. What is most important, though, is that the instructor is appealing not to the pupil’s philosophical sensibilities, but to his conscience. Again, I take it that Wittgenstein purposefully uses a vague term – to demand that he give a metaphysical account of “conscience” would be misguided, as he intends to convey the immediate reality of the experience of encountering the doctrine. (iii) the pupil actively develops a passion for the doctrine, and seizes upon it. This is the moment of the aesthetic reversal. For the philosopher beholds an ethical position in light of its justification; our convert beholds his faith in light of his passion. He has thus changed his “way of living, [his] way of assessing life” not only in content, but also in form. And in evaluating his own position, the convert does not have to appeal to a philosophical vocabulary in order to justify his actions. Rather, he is legitimately able to say, “This is simply what I do” (PI 217). It is significant that the convert cannot be lead to his faith by the instructor, as this would align more with the philosophical aesthetic. In philosophy, the recipient of one’s argument ought to have no choice but to concede; in religious training, by contrast, the pupil ought to have total control of his choices. This insures that the pupil does not convert because of some justification provided by his teacher and therefore that he does not slip back into the philosophical mode.

From here we can consider whether the ethical question has completely disappeared for the convert. One the one hand, it is clear that the convert is no longer at a loss. He is committed to a system of reference and therefore knows his way about. On the other hand, the convert also has abandoned the philosophical aesthetic, having underwent an aesthetic reversal which brought him to an ethical view rooted in passion. And so the question “What ought I to do?” appears to have legitimately disappeared. If this Wittgensteinian therapy has been successful, the convert’s movement will bring him peace; Norman Malcom, an associate of Wittgenstein’s, illustrates how this might plausibly happen: “The function of the words, ‘It is God’s will’, when said religiously and seriously, in a time of trouble, is not to offer the final explanation, nor any explanation at all. Instead, they are an attempt to bring an end to the torment of asking ‘Why did it have to happen’ – an attempt to give the tormented one rest, to provide peace” (Malcolm, 86). In other words, the claim “It is God’s will” functions not as a justification but as a description of a situation, and it is by beholding a situation in this way that its philosophical potentialities disappear.

Conclusions

James Edwards, in his final analysis of Wittgenstein’s work, advances the claim that, “Wittgenstein’s later work… is itself intended as an ethical deed” (Edwards, 219). When we understand that Wittgenstein’s therapy is not justified by an appeal to philosophical reasoning but that it ‘is simply what he does’, as if religiously, then we can finally appreciate the gesture that the Philosophical Investigations communicates. The Investigations can present its therapy because its author came to his ethical position through therapy. The work thus represents a therapeutic aesthetic which justifies itself. As such, it need not be defended, at least philosophically, for presumably it is more a labor of passion than of duty. Moreover, we can view the nature of the “religious” conviction that Wittgenstein emulates as being a bit broader than we might have initially conceived. For there is nothing “religious,” in the common sense of the word, in writing a therapeutic book. There is, however, a certain religious attitude that Wittgenstein must have adopted as the driving force of the work. This attitude perhaps explains his comment to M.C. Drury: “I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view” (Malcolm, 1). It is in presenting an account of therapy, without justification, that Wittgenstein embodies the ethical message of the work: that we must be completely free of the need for justification, relying solely upon our aesthetic orientation, in order to legitimately live.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Ed. G. H. Von Wright and Heikki Nyman. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980.

Michael Putnam (’13) is a Philosophy Major at Whitman College

ABSTRACT: One of the most imposing problems facing the modern theist philosopher is the ‘problem of Hell,’ or the problem of how to make the Bible’s depiction of Hell as a place of eternal punishment logically consistent with the generally held theist idea that God is perfectly loving. This issue has been dealt with by a number of philosophers; some have attempted to re-imagine Hell into something less severe than eternal punishment, and some have attempted to give justifications for the traditional version of Hell. An overview of these various views and attempts will conclude that universalism—the idea that all souls must eventually be saved—is the view most compatible with a loving God. However, this paper will go on to argue that universalism’s inconsistency with the Biblical portrayal of Hell still creates a problem for the theist philosopher; as the Bible is the primary authority for the idea of Hell, any inconsistency between the Bible and our logical conclusions must make us doubt the Bible’s authority on the matter of Hell. And, as doubting the Bible in one aspect frees us to question its veracity in others, it will be argued that the problem of Hell ultimately allows us to wholly reject the Bible’s authority.

Even for those who whole-heartedly accept the idea of a loving and perfect Christian God, the thought of that God sending sinners and unbelievers to burn forever in Hell can be highly unnerving. Many believers find that the concept of Hell puts them in a bit of a bind; on the one hand, Hell is clearly a well-established idea within Christianity, and on the other, it seems almost unthinkable that a truly loving God could ever allow his creations to suffer infinitely for sins committed in a finite life. Some philosophers, such as Lewis, have used this apparent contradiction as grounds to reject Christianity and support atheism. Theist philosophers have responded by putting forward several possible solutions to the problem. For example, some attack the idea of ‘eternal’ punishment, and argue that all souls will eventually be saved (or annihilated) so that Hell will one day stand empty. Others allow for eternal punishment, but suggest that Hell is not literally a fiery lake of torture. Still others accept the fiery lake but argue that some people freely choose Hell, or that infinite punishment is somehow justified. Out of these various solutions, the idea that all souls will eventually be saved seems to follow most logically from the concept of a perfectly loving deity. Many philosophers who agree with this position, universalism, drop the issue here. However, it is highly arbitrary to pluck the idea of Hell from the Christian Bible and then fail to accept all the characteristics that the Bible attributes to Hell; the Bible is, as it turns out, alarmingly consistent in its portrayal of Hell as a place of eternal, consciously endured pain. This being the case, I must conclude that there is a contradiction between the Biblical idea of Hell and the Christian idea that God is perfectly loving; as both cannot be true, I believe it is the Biblical idea of Hell that must be rejected, and that such a rejection strongly supports a total rejection of Biblical authority.

For the purpose of later comparison, we can begin with a brief overview of the Biblical concepts of ‘Hell’ and ‘God’, the Bible being used here exclusively because it is the source that has most informed our modern understanding of both God and Hell. The Biblical facts about Hell, as Christians themselves are often quick to point out, are that everyone “will exist eternally either in heaven or hell,” (that is, heaven and hell are the only two options), that Hell is “conscious torment,” and that Hell is “eternal and irreversible” (Litke). As Lewis reminds us, such a view of Hell is actually somewhat necessary in Christianity because the whole point is that “Jesus was born to save us from something. The condition from which we have been redeemed must be truly horrible. What can be horrible enough except for eternal punishment?” (Lewis, p. 476).

Standing in contrast to this terrible, eternal Hell is the Biblical concept of God. Christians believe in a God that is omnipresent (for example, see Psalm 139:7-12), omnipotent (Genesis 18:14), unchanging (Psalm 102:25-27), omniscient (Psalm 139:2-6), and eternal (Jeremiah 10:10). God is thus incredibly powerful, but God is also merciful (see Daniel 9:9) and perfectly just (Deuteronomy 32:4); by ‘just,’ it seems to be meant that God will neither allow righteous and/or innocent people to suffer nor evildoers to have any sort of impunity. (This does seem to leave open the possibility for mercy, for it can be assumed that someone who asks God’s forgiveness is experiencing spiritual pain which may count as sufficient punishment for sins.) Perhaps the most significant Christian concept of God, though, is the idea that God is perfectly loving because God is love itself. This is made plain in 1 John 4:8, which says that anyone “who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” With this idea of God at its core, Christianity apparently sets itself up as a love-centered religion, and most believers firmly hold that their god is a god of perfect justice and perfect love.

The philosopher’s concept of God is very similar to the believer’s (or at least to the believer’s as just given), and the theist philosopher in particular usually assumes with the believer that God is morally perfect, perfectly just, and perfectly loving. We can thus turn to the various ways in which theist philosophers have tried to reconcile this idea of a perfect God with the idea of Hell. In all of the following attempts, Hell is assumed to be a reality in at least some form or other; this is maintained partly because Hell comes up so frequently as a concept in scripture, but also because several philosophers believe that God’s ‘perfect justice’ does indeed demand some sort of painful punishment for evildoers that goes beyond making them feel sorrow for what they have done. The two ‘facts’ of a perfect God and an existent Hell being assumed, the nature of Hell is then decided in each argument by what the philosopher deems logically compatible with God’s perfection. It should be noted that some philosophers’ definitions of Hell will be seen to differ drastically from the Bible’s, but this can usually be attributed to the treatment of belief in a perfect God as more basic than the belief in a strictly doctrinal Hell; as we will find, most theist philosophers who find the idea of a perfect God and the Biblical Hell incompatible choose to alter their idea of Hell rather than give up their idea of a perfect God. Again, then, the philosopher’s goal in each case is simply to find the most reasonable resolution of the main issue: under what circumstances could God allow Hell?

Addressing first the most radical alteration of ideas about Hell, we start with the theory of universalism, supported by philosophers such as Thomas Talbott and Kerry Walters. Universalism holds that a loving God must eventually save everyone, and that while there is something we could call ‘Hell,’ it is by no means a place of eternal torment. Rather, ‘Hell’ in the universalist definition is essentially purgatory, endured only for so long as people choose to be there. In other words, people may be punished in ‘Hell,’ but it is punishment inflicted with the aim of reforming sinners, and this reformation eventually comes about for everyone. As Talbott says, anything less would imply that either the sinner somehow deserved eternal punishment (which universalists reject as even possible for humans who live finite lives), or that sinners are allowed to keep sinning and thus to keep choosing separation from God in Hell (which also strikes the universalist as rather absurd). The theories that punishment is deserved and that sin does continue in Hell will be addressed shortly, but the universalist’s main objection to a traditional Hell seems to be that it would constitute a logically impossible victory of the human sinner over almighty God; in Talbott’s words, “Why should creating beings with free will (of the standard libertarian kind) include even the possibility of God’s justice (or his love) suffering an eternal defeat?” (Talbott, “Freedom,” p. 432). Or, to put it another way, a God who creates human beings and who, being omniscient, supposedly knows each individual completely should be able to ‘outsmart’ even the most freely resistant souls and bring them into a position to be saved. God should, according to the universalist, be seen as a “grand master in chess who permits a novice to move freely…and still manages to checkmate the novice in the end” (Talbott, “Freedom,” pp. 432-33).

The primary objections to universalism are that it limits free will and/or undermines justice, but both of these objections fail to really harm the argument. As for free will, the idea is supposed to be that if we know that we will all eventually succumb to God, it is no longer really a choice—but this doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Firstly, Walters correctly points out that even though “it is logically possible for an individual to refuse grace, it is not necessary that she do so” (Walters, p. 178). True free will must therefore include the possibility that all individuals will freely choose salvation, and, to bring us to the second point, why should they not? If the choice we face has only two options, that of either God (love and salvation) or Hell (the torment of separation from that love and salvation), “it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that it is not the external coercion of God which ultimately wears away our original (and freely chosen) attitudinal obstinancy. It is rather the pain and misery…which we’ve brought on ourselves that erodes our resistance” (Walters, p. 181). Or, in the words of Talbott, “how could anyone, rational enough to qualify as a free moral agent, choose an eternity of horror over an eternity of bliss…?” (Talbott, “Freedom,” p. 429).

The other objection to universalism—that God’s perfect justice will be unsatisfied if the ‘bad’ people are initially punished but are ultimately taken to Heaven and treated just like the ‘good’—holds no more weight than the free will argument. There is, for example, an obvious difficulty in saying that a finite human being could have done something so terrible that it justly deserves infinite punishment (again, the defense of this idea will be given further on). Another problem with this objection is that it can be reasonably met by the universalist’s contention that there will be “a proportionality between the degree of obstinate wickedness and the degree of purgative suffering necessary to enable the sinner to freely choose an attitudinal change”—that is to say, the natural rewards of evil will punish the evildoers until such time as they are persuaded to repent (Walters, p. 183). A further way to meet the objection lies in Talbot’s assertion that God’s justice is not at all opposed to His mercy, for God’s “mercy demands everything his justice demands, and his justice permits everything his mercy permits…‘mercy’ and ‘justice’ are but two different names for God’s one and only moral attribute, namely his love” (Talbott, “Punishment,” p. 153). This seems like a plausible idea, and it is made especially attractive by the unity it attributes to God’s character; rather than being driven sometimes by the need to bring souls to happiness in Heaven and sometimes by the need to punish evildoers so as to afford justice to the victims of evil, God is driven only by love for all souls. As it stands, then, it would seem that despite contradicting the Biblical version of Hell, universalism presents a reasonable picture about what could be expected of a loving God.

Other ideas about re-imagining Hell into something less dire don’t strike me as equally plausible. For instance, an alternative theory dealing with the problem of ‘eternal’ punishment is annihilationism, the view that God will simply erase intractable wrongdoers from existence. This theory looks at Hell as “a metaphorical description of non-being”; it is meant to assure us that God doesn’t punish sinners any longer than justice demands, and perhaps doesn’t punish them at all before annihilating them (Kvanvig, p. 60). However, this still seems nonsensical. In the case that sinners are punished first, we have what is arguably the moral repugnance of punishment that is non-reformative; there may be some who are in favor of this, but it seems to me utterly unnecessary, cruel, and inconsistent with God’s supposedly loving nature. (This is by no means a conclusive objection, but I cannot presently take on a fuller exploration of ideas about justice.) In the case that sinners are not punished but are simply annihilated, we are left with the question of why God would have created such people in the first place; if we answer, say, that they were instrumental in bringing others to God, this still fails to seem satisfactory. Could God’s resourcefulness not have found other ways to bring certain people to belief? Does he not care for the souls used as conversion tools? In any case, can we really just discard entirely the idea that Hell is put to use, seeing as it is such a persistently present concept in Christianity? There may be some way to smooth over all these difficulties, but I do not know it, and on the whole universalism still seems more compatible with the Christian idea of God as a being of perfect love.

The third and final alternative to universalism is the idea that Hell is painful separation from God, but is not really ‘torture’ (or is at the very least bearable), and is thus a rational choice that someone could make. As Yandell argues, it may be possible that a Hell that is “a punishment, known to be a punishment, involves no fellowship with God, is bleak on any sensible standards…might still be the longish end of a life that one could rationally prefer to not existing at all” (Yandell, p. 90). There might simply be some people who are so determined not to come to God that they prefer to spend eternity apart, not facing the horror of oblivion but neither accepting the supposed horror of subordination to a will other than their own. The immediate problem here is an issue that Talbott raised earlier; how could an agent rational enough to be called ‘free’ ever prefer their own misery to the joy of being with a perfectly loving deity? In the short term it is perhaps understandable, and even over years, but across infinity? A loving God would not keep someone in Hell if they freely turned to Him (and would not punish them unless such a turn was still possible), so any change of heart must bring them to God. Wouldn’t this change be bound to happen eventually, as in universalism?

Of the ‘softer’ versions of Hell, universalism thus remains the most likely—but what of the justifications for traditional models of Hell? What of, for instance, the idea that eternal torment in Hell is justified by libertarian free will? In the words of Van Holten, “I am not sure whether God’s love entails that he may not create persons with libertarian free will, all the while knowing they will not be saved. If his infallible foreknowledge is compatible with the creature’s freely choosing damnation, then presumably, God is not to blame for it,” just as God is not to blame for any evil actions a person may have chosen to take during their lifetime (Van Holten, p. 51). As I see it, part of the problem with this criticism (aside from questions about the intelligibility of libertarian free will) is the idea that anyone forced to a decision between God and Hell could ‘freely choose damnation’; if we continue to assume that God is perfectly loving and that Hell is a place of torment, such a choice is in no way rational, and it seems highly doubtful that it could ever be made in full consciousness by a rational agent. And if it is not a rational choice, then is a person’s mere uncertainty about God during their finite lifetime really to be punished with infinite pain? Furthermore, it seems incorrect to compare evil action, allowed on Earth so as to bring about other goods, with the choice not to believe in God, which simply leads to an eternity in Hell. Perpetual, punishment, if it really does go on for infinity, can’t bring about any positive results; it’s whipping a dead horse, so to speak, to know that the person in Hell will never get better but to continue to torture them anyway. It quickly begins to seem cruel and unfair to punish the sins and bad choices of a finite life with the infinite suffering of non-reformative punishment, and again, such cruelty would seem incompatible with a loving God.

What if, though, we move to the second argument contradicting universalism, and expand the libertarian free will argument to say that the sin continues once in Hell; that is, we could say that a sinner retains their free will, continues to choose Hell over God, and thus solve the difficulty of eternal punishment for finite sins. As Seymour puts it, “Any individual human sin, it is true, is finite in seriousness; but an everlasting series of sins is infinite in seriousness and so deserves infinite punishment. By preserving freedom in the afterlife we can suppose it possible that the damned commit such a series of sins” (Seymour, p. 83). However, we again run into problems; for example, we are once more confronted with the absurdity that any could, in full freedom, choose Hell. The universalist Talbott objects that “only someone mired in illusion or deception of some kind would be free, given the standard libertarian analysis, to choose evil…the way in which clarity of vision and knowing the truth compels obedience is very different from the way in which the medieval practice of pressing might compel a plea of guilty or not guilty” (Talbott, “Freedom,” p. 428). I agree that it seems unbelievable that anyone should, for eternity, keep choosing to suffer Hell if they knew the true nature of Hell and God, and likewise incredible that a loving God would leave someone in the dark for eternity so that they could never make the rational choice of happiness with God.

Nevertheless, there persists the idea that some sinners must be in Hell for eternity, and one argument claims that this is because there simply is no possible world in which we are all saved. Craig argues that “it is possible that some persons out of self-will or perversity would freely reject God no matter what the circumstances He placed them in,” and that the complexity inherent in a world actually makes it unsurprising “that there should be no feasible worlds available to God in which all persons are freely saved (unless, perhaps, those worlds are radically deficient in other respects, say, by having only a handful of people in them)” (Craig, p. 308, p. 300). In other words, Craig argues that the world is such a complicated mechanism that the billions of little pieces (that is, souls) can never work together in complete harmony; there will always be some pieces that fall off or become damaged, and likewise there will always be some souls who face damnation. Craig further argues that since the blessed in Heaven will suffer if they know of the suffering in Hell, God will simply shield the blessed from this knowledge; the “tragic fact that every world feasible for God is one involving persons who are lost would not force Him to refrain from creation or to annul creaturely freedom lest the blessedness of the saved be undermined, for it is possible that the reality of lost persons is a fact the pain of which He alone shall endure for eternity” (Craig, p. 308).

This argument for the inevitability of Hell would be fine if we imagined God as a mere supernatural ‘organizer,’ a being who is given billions of fixed personalities and must sort them into certain circumstances so that the greatest number of souls end up in Heaven. However, I find this argument far less reasonable when God is also considered as our creator. After all, God not only makes the conditions, he makes the people, and that means heavily influencing the genetic and psychological factors that will guide each person’s choices. This being the case, I find it difficult to imagine that there is no possible world at all in which all individuals choose God. Craig argues that universalism does not prove the logical necessity of universal salvation, but it is precisely here that he seems to miss the point; after all, universalism just says that there is at least one possible world in which everyone is saved and that this is the world God would have chosen to create. It is, in fact, Craig who fails to prove logical necessity, for he gives no reason to believe that damnation is a logically necessary consequence of free will. And I have further problems with this argument; in what way, for instance, is a world with fewer people ‘deficient,’ if all of these people eventually get the ultimate joy of eternity with God? And how could God be justified in deceiving the blessed about the condition of the damned?

I am thus unimpressed by all the arguments that Hell must be (or even logically could be) a place of infinite suffering, and I maintain the position that universalism is the best available philosophical option. Universalism seems to be not only the idea of Hell most compatible with a loving God, but also seems to make the most intuitive sense. It is also worth pointing out that the vast majority of objections to universalism are grounded in the fact that it disagrees with the Bible; in other words, the objections are not philosophical or rational in nature, but are rather based on scripture. And must a philosopher really take scripture into account?
Well, yes, for in this case it would seem shortsighted to do otherwise. As demonstrated earlier, the philosophical concept of God is at the very least heavily inspired by the Bible, and ultimately rests on Biblical authority for justification. The concept of Hell likewise relies on Biblical authority, but if this is the case, then it seems completely illogical to ask what kind of Hell we could rationally expect from God without checking our conclusion against the Bible itself. And, as also demonstrated earlier, what the Bible says is clear, consistent, and decidedly opposed to the views of the anti-Hell philosopher. As Litke points out, it is flatly contradictory with scripture to accept the “second chance view” (the view that one can escape or be redeemed from Hell), “Universalism,” or “Annihilationism.” What, then, are we to do with the philosophical conclusion of universalism, the Bible’s depiction of Hell, and the idea of a loving God that is held by theist philosophers and by Christians in general?

Faced with the contradiction between the Biblical assertion of an eternal Hell and the logically superior universalist view, our options can be summarized as follows:

1. Finite sin can deserve infinite, non-corrective punishment.
2. God is not perfect, or has standards of morality that differ from ours: the Bible is wrong in saying that God is morally perfect, or we are wrong in thinking that our ideas of morality accord with God’s.
3. Hell does not exist (or is never used), and the Bible is misleading about Hell.
4. Hell does not exist (or is never used), and the Bible itself is simply wrong and unreliable.

The first option has no arguments in its favor that I find convincing, and is irreconcilable with any God deserving of worship and love. The second option simply states that God isn’t deserving of worship and love, so Hell could exist as a place of torment, but then any individual worshipper would be morally culpable in praising a God capable of such “divine evil” (Lewis, p. 480). This does not seem to solve anything, for it is completely incompatible with everything the Christian asserts about a perfect God and especially contradicts the common theist belief that God is morally perfect. The third option could be a way out for the Christian, but it also seems ridiculously arbitrary; why trust the Bible about so many aspects of faith, but not Hell? One could claim that Hell-talk is some sort of metaphor, but aside from the fact that Hell is talked about in a consistent and blisteringly straightforward manner, it is also insisted on repeatedly by Christ himself (as in Mark 9:47-48). What reason could there be, then, to reject traditional notions of Hell without also rejecting the authority of Christ? It would thus seem that we are left with nothing but the fourth option; as the existence of both a loving, perfect God and a Hell of eternal punishment are incompatible, the Bible that says that both of these things exist should be concluded to be wrong. Of course, both God and Hell being such vital components of Christianity, and the Bible being its primary voice of authority, the foundations of the religion itself become very dubious at this point.

Again, I am inclined to accept universalism as the only outcome that a perfect, just, and loving God would find acceptable. However, I also agree with Lewis when he says that universalism is essentially “a fantasy”; it is divorced from all characteristics of Hell as given in the Bible, and without taking scripture at its word, what is the basis for any talk about Hell at all (Lewis, p. 481)? And for that matter, if there is no way to logically salvage an important Christian tenet like Hell without ignoring everything that Christians appear obliged to believe about Hell, then doesn’t the depth of the contradiction make rejection of the Christian Bible seem a more rational route? What’s more, as Lewis points out, theists may even be guilty of wrongdoing if they do not make such a rejection; modern Christians often “dodge the consequence [of Hell] by keeping it all in soft focus,” but if one worships and loves a God who creates the Biblical Hell, a place with “billions of damned souls writhing in eternal agony,” what does that say about one’s morality (Lewis, p. 480)? For Christians who wish to be rational in their theism, it would thus seem that the problem of Hell calls for a hard second look at belief.

Works Cited

Craig, William. “Talbott’s Universalism.” Religious Studies 27.3 (1991): 297-308. JSTOR database. 17 Jan. 2011 .
Holy Bible: New Living Translation. Wheaton: Tyndale, 2004.
Kvanvig, Jonathan. “Review: [untitled].” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 36.1 (1994): 59-61. JSTOR database. 2 February 2011 .
Lewis, David. “Divine Evil.” Arguing About Religion. Ed. Kevin Timpe. New York: Routledge, 2009. 472-481.
Litke, Sid. “What the Bible Says About Hell.” Bible.org. 1998. 18 Jan. 2011 .
Seymour, Charles. “Hell, Justice, and Freedom.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 43.2 (1998): 69-86. JSTOR database. 17 Jan. 2011 .
Talbott, Thomas. “Freedom, Damnation, and the Power to Sin with Impunity.” Religious Studies 37.4 (2001): 417-434. JSTOR database. 17 Jan. 2011 .
Talbott, Thomas. “Punishment, Forgiveness, and Divine Justice.” Religious Studies 29.2 (1993): 151-168. JSTOR database. 17 Jan. 2011 .
Van Holten, Wilco. “Hell and the Goodness of God.” Religious Studies 35.1 (1999): 37-55. JSTOR database. 10 Jan. 2011 .
Walters, Kerry. “Hell, This Isn’t Necessary after All.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 29.3 (1991): 175-186. JSTOR database. 10 Jan. 2011 .
Yandell, Keith. “The Doctrine of Hell and Moral Philosophy.” Religious Studies 28.1 (1992): 75-90. JSTOR database. 10 Jan. 2011 .

Erin McDonnell (’13) is a Philosophy and Studio-Art Double-Major at Cornell University

ABSTRACT: The present study seeks to put together a critical assessment of the role that that “Will,” actualized through techné, played in Aristotle’s physics. It will be shown how said concept of Will led to a theoretical fissure of the Aristotelian cosmos between the natural and the artificial, which was finally detrimental to the sustainability of his scientific proposals. Furthermore, light will be shed on the incompatibility between Aristotelian physics and mathematics, an area of knowledge that was to become the primordial tool of modern scientific inquiry. As a manner of conclusion, brief remarks will be made on the progress—if any—of science across history in light of Karl Popper’s views on the subject.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn argued that the dynamic evolution of science is not explained by the linear accumulation of new knowledge. On the contrary, science undergoes periods of theoretical revision that often destroy, not build upon, previous paradigms. Aristotle, whose ideas regarding physics dominated most of the history of western thought, formulated a framework of the cosmos where a rational account of Will brought about the principle that governs the world around us. The present study has been broken into two sections. The first section seeks to shed some light on the role that “Will,” actualized through craftsmanship, played in Aristotle’s physics. Secondly, some of the reasons that finally lead to a scientific paradigm shift away from Aristotle’s theories during the Age of Enlightenment will be examined.

I

It is difficult, from a modern perspective, to understand exactly what the study of physics meant for the ancient Greeks. When we talk about physics, we often refer to the study of matter, its properties, and its motion. Physics, in the modern sense, governs over everything that we can perceive through our senses (light, sounds, objects of any sort, etc). Yet, this is not what Aristotle had in mind. The word physics etymologically stems from the Greek word physus, which is often translated to English as “nature.” However, “nature,” a relatively ambiguous word in the first place, did not have the same meaning for the Ancient Greeks. When discussing nature[1], or physus, they were referring to something that had to do with change and growth. We could say, to use the word in the Aristotelian sense, that the “nature” of an acorn is to become a tree or that the “nature” of an egg is to become a chicken. Nature, for the ancient Greeks, entails a principle of motion that is dictated internally by the object’s essence[2].

Objects such as animals, plants, the earth, water, air and fire, belong to the Aristotelian class of natural entities (192b8). He claimed that such subjects have an independent and spontaneous Will to change into various forms. Static entities, such as a stone or the sand in a dessert, were not strictly speaking the main constituents of Aristotle’s natural world. Stones can move only insofar as the river’s current carries them along or insofar as a human grabs them and throws them in the air, for instance. Likewise, the dunes of the dessert move, not due to an internal principle of motion that guides their behavior, but only to the extent the wind blows them across the plains. However, stones and sand do belong to the natural world in the sense that they are constituents of an entity that has an internal principle of motion —earth, in this case (193a15). In Aristotle’s words, nature is “a type of principle and cause of motion and stability within those things to which it primarily belongs in their own right and not coincidentally” (Aristotle 192b22). Unlike the wind, animals, or water, stones and sand do not have a spontaneous Will to act.

Objects that are a product of human craftsmanship (of techné), such as a house or a bed, are certainly not part of nature (Aristotle 192b15). According to Aristotle, these kinds of things come to be not due to an internal principle that dictates what it is for them to become, but they are only insofar as a human being manipulates them or crafts them according to their various uses —their being is contingent upon the Will of humans. According to Aristotle, we, individuals endowed with the ability to make choices and capable of initiating motion, are able to shape wood into a bed in order to fulfill a functional purpose —in this case, resting more comfortably on an elevated surface. Likewise, we are able to literally “give form” to a lump of bronze that lacks a crafted shape. This takes us to the four causes that are necessary in order to explain the change of an entity that does not inherently contain the principle of spontaneous movement. The four causes are: (1) the material cause, which explains the physical component of the entity; (2) the formal cause, which explains the form or shape to which a thing corresponds; (3) the efficient cause, which is what we generally mean by “cause,” the original source of the energy that allows for the change; and (4) a final cause, which is the purpose it fulfills. For instance, bronze (the material cause) is shaped (the efficient cause) in order to constitute a statue (the formal cause) by the artist, who designates the purpose of its existence (the final cause). Thus, in Aristotle’s view of the cosmos there is not only matter and form, but also purpose. He says, for instance, that the existence of bricks is not coincidental; they have the purpose of becoming the material cause of a house (Physics, 200a25).

Aristotle, I believe, uses the previous principle of change in artificial objects in order to develop an analogy that may apply to natural objects as well, with certain adjustments. The logic, though very similar, has two basic differences. Let us proceed to construct the analogy in gradual steps: In regards to the material cause, just like the statue is made out of bronze, a musician is made out of flesh and bones. In terms of the formal cause, just like bronze constitutes the statue, flesh and bones constitute the form of the human being who is trained in the art of music. Yet, with regards to the efficient cause, the reasoning is somewhat different for natural and artificial objects. We discussed previously how natural objects have an internal principle of motion which artificial entities lack. In that sense, while the craftsmanship of the artist is a necessary condition for a statue to come to be, a man can become a musician by virtue of his own Will. Consequently, while bronze is potentially a statue contingent to the existence of an artist that makes the process come to be, a human is potentially a musician by virtue of his own ability to chose to become one. In that sense, the change that governs upon artifacts is contingent upon the Will of an external mover, contingent upon techné. Ultimately, with regards to the final cause, there is also a significant distinction between natural and artificial objects. In artificial objects, as discussed, an unmoved mover provides the final cause. For instance, the artist designs the end of the statue, and he will initiate motion in order to actualize what is potentially a statue (256a11). In natural objects, on the other hand, a first unmoved-mover gives the purpose. “We find, then, that among things that come to be and are by nature, things that are for something,” says Aristotle (199a8). This has to be the case since we would have an infinite regress otherwise, had we not had a first unmoved mover to designate the purpose of existence of the natural objects. An infinite regress, for Aristotle, is unfeasible. It is necessary for anything that moves, to be moved by the activity of some mover. This may be due to the intervention of an unmoved mover, like for artificial entities, or due to the involvement of a first mover that is not moved by anything else[3] (256a15). Since motion must be “everlasting and must never fail,” Aristotle posits the existence of an eternal, ever powerful first mover (258b10). Aristotle’s teleological world eventually leads to the thesis of a creator, a designer, a first mover. In The Metaphysics, Aristotle says, “there is something that initiates motion without being moved, something that is everlasting and a substance and actuality” (1072a25).

It must be the case—thought Aristotle— that what is true of the relationship between the artist and the statue, is true about the natural world and the first unmoved mover. Just like we shape the bronze and give a meaning, a telos, for the statue to be, the first unmoved mover gives us —natural entities— the essence, end, and meaning of existence[4].

Aristotle’s world, hence, is one governed by Will. That is one of the reasons he rejects the existence of randomness; everything has a reason to be, be it due to the Will of a natural entity —through techné— or else the Will of the first unmoved mover. It is true, however, that he does say that animals, entities of nature, do not have the capacity of Will. The fact that spiders build webs is not due to personal Will or deliberation but due to instinct—claimed Aristotle. This is evidence of the teleological design present in nature, he concluded. Since a spider’s web or a bird’s nest cannot come to be out of sheer randomness, and since birds and spiders do not have the capacity of Will or, as a result, techné, then they must be a direct creation of an external entity. In other words, it would seem to follow, animals and plants are entirely bound to the Will of the first unmoved mover.

II

Aristotle’s physics were the scientific paradigm until Galileo. However, Galileo’s observations of Venus’ phases, which were incompatible with the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos, over which Aristotle had a great deal of influence, set the evolution of science on a completely different path. It would be futile to enumerate particular flaws in Aristotle’s Physics in light of what is accepted today in modern science. Indeed, it is unlikely that “heavy things naturally move downward and light things upward,” as Aristotle claimed (200a3). A modern scientist would explain that the earth’s gravity causes all matter to move towards the earth’s core —what Aristotle called downward?— but denser fluids put pressure on lighter fluids in a way such that the latter seem to go upwards, away from the earth’s center of mass. However, Aristotle’s “mistaken”[5] argument regarding gravity seems like one that someone with the information and technology available to him at his time could reasonably make.

Therefore, it is more important to focus in broader aspects that —I believe— finally led to the paradigm shift away from Aristotle’s theory. At the most basic level, Aristotle made a big assumption when he divided the cosmos between natural and non-natural entities. In contrast, I do not see, based on what I can perceive, anything in reality that does not belong to the realm of nature. In other words, because humans shape their surroundings in different ways, the surroundings themselves do not cease to be natural. There is no fundamental distinction between the relation of a spider to its web or the relation of a human being to his or her house. In that sense, we either have no free Will, assuming that is the intrinsic nature of animals, or both animals and we have the capacity to develop techné, where free Will is a necessary condition.
Aristotle might argue in return that a house or a bed are not natural since they do not have the capacity to be self-sustaining. Aristotle argues, “a man comes to be from a man, but not a bed from a bed. In fact that is why some say that the nature of the bed is not the shape but the wood, because if it were to sprout the result would be wood, not a bed” (192a10). In that sense, a bed requires an “artificial” action by a human, a bed-maker, in order to exist. That is, Aristotle claimed, a proof that there is a distinction between the products of nature and the products of human beings (which can create objects that are outside of nature, or in other words artificial). However, just as a bed, a mule (the offspring between a female horse and a male donkey) does not have the capacity to be self-sustaining either. Mules are sterile; a mule does not come to be from a mule! Yet, it is very clear, even for Aristotle, that a mule is a natural creature[6]. Therefore, it is not the case that a natural object must be self-sustaining—mules are not, after all. Consequently, reductio ad absurdum, there is no reason to suppose that a bed is not a natural object. Similarly, a volcano, what Aristotle would define as a process of “nature,” is the consequence of tectonic pressure underneath the earth’s crust. A volcano does not come to be from a volcano. Yet, again, a volcano is clearly a natural process. Furthermore, we can create machines that can put together other machines like themselves. As a result, theoretically, machines (which would not be part of Aristotle’s natural world) can come to be from machines.

Beds, as Aristotle rightly argued, do not come to be from beds. Indeed, a human being is a necessary condition to bring about their existence. However, a human being by itself is not a sufficient condition to bring about the existence of another human being. The growth of a fetus requires nutrients external to the mother, oxygen, a certain temperature, etcetera. Thus, it is not the case that we —according to Aristotle, natural beings— move and shape a static and independent world spontaneously. We are both shapers and shaped by our surroundings[7].

Why was this distinction between the natural and the non-natural so misleading for Aristotle’s theories? He saw that human beings, through craftsmanship and Will, could bring about changes in order to create artificial objects that, he thought, were not part of nature. An artist, through his talent and Will to act, could actualize a lump of bronze or marble that could potentially become a statue. By use of the analogy previously described, I think Aristotle thought that a similar method applied to natural processes. The first unmoved mover is to natural agents what natural agents are to artificial objects. In other words, God is to humans what Michelangelo is to the David. He thought that the end of our existence and our essence had to be defined by a macro first unmoved mover —a supernatural Will. Darwin was a fundamental figure in challenging the views of those that, like Aristotle, saw the human being as a special and elevated entity.

The work of the ancient atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, would resemble more what science was to become after the scientific revolution that Copernicus started in 1543 with the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. The atomists believed that there was no meaningful end or purpose in nature. All there is is atoms colliding against each other in the void. Atoms, they believed, are indestructible; the have always been and will always be. Since all there is is matter, and matter can be calculated mathematically, everything that will happen, like mathematical proofs, has to happen necessarily—a deterministic view, in other words. Aristotle, on the other hand, rejected the explanatory powers of mathematics (194a), an instrument that would become the nucleus of the scientific world after Galileo. The Atomists asked not “What purpose did this event serve?” like Aristotle, but “What earlier circumstances caused this event to be?” (Russell 67). From a pragmatic point of view, it seems to be the case that the latter question, the one the Atomists dealt with, has given us more answers regarding the reality that surrounds us. In other words, as Thomas Kuhn would say, modern physics increased the power to predict natural phenomena by embracing a non-teleological view. The former question, Aristotle’s question, led science in the road of superstition and theology for centuries.

After Newton, adopting related principles to those outlined by the Atomists, it seemed like scientific knowledge had finally reached solid foundations and the future of the discipline would only build up[8]. However, just like with Aristotle, we were mistaken. Albert Einstein revised most of the principles that were thought to be rock-solid. Consequently, Karl Popper proposed a theory of the development of science that cannot achieve ultimate certainty about anything. The material world, he claimed, exists independently from the human mind. Given the fact that their ontological nature is separate, the physical world is ultimately impenetrable and incommensurable to the human intellect. Therefore, like in other fields, problems start to arise when individuals and institutions become fanatical on their views of “certainty.” However, how is Popper so certain? I am troubled with whether or not Popper’s theory can be turned against itself. Could it be that his theory could be revised opening the possibility to find scientific certainty? After all, Popper is arguing that we can never be certain about knowledge, and I suppose that also applies to his own theory. So, will science ever reach certainty? I think it is impossible to know[9]. But again, how could I be even certain about that?

Works Cited

Aristotle. Introductory Readings. Indianapolis: Hackett Company, 1996. Print. (refer to this source for both Physics and Metaphysics)

Bertrand, Russell. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Touchstone, 1967. Print.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Vol. 3. University Of Chicago, 1996. Print.

Popper, Karl. Open Society and its Enemies. Abingdon: Frank Cass, 1973. Print.

Notes

1. Thereof, the word “nature” will be used in accordance to the Ancient Greek connotation unless stated otherwise.
2. The essence of X is the answer to the question: What is F?
3. It is interesting how it seems impossible for Aristotle to have an effect without a proper cause in nature, but when he talks about the first mover having this particular quality the paradox instantaneously dissolves.
4. Such explanation is parodied in Voltaire’s Candide.
5. According to Karl Popper science can only work in the negative sense. That is, a scientist may only, with certainty, reject a theory as non-scientific but cannot, with certainty, put forward a theory as scientific.
6. After all, mules seem to have the “internal” principle of motion that Aristotle emphasized so much.
7. It would me interesting to wonder whether, in some ways, a bed can be a first cause. Imagine that your new bed is very uncomfortable. After a week of sleeping on it, you realize that you have developed problems in your back and you have to go to the doctor. Could it be said that the bed is the unmoved cause of these back problems? Aristotle would say no immediately (only natural objects are first causes). However, I think the answer to this question is not so clear.
8. In the Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper heavily criticized Plato, Marx, and Hegel (tracing the theories of the latter two to Aristotle) for formulating teleological theories of history and science that unfold in accordance with universal laws.
9. If we are aware that our theories have holes that remain unexplained, it seems clear that we have not reached ultimate certainty. On the other hand, even if it seems we have reached a “perfect” theory, we do not know what the future will bring and there is always the possibility that in the future a brilliant scientist will make us realize how wrong we were about what we though was certain (after all we ended up revising Newton’s physics).

Juan M. Botero-Duque (’10) is a Philosophy and Economics major at American University.

ABSTRACT: Advancements in the field of medicine have created several novel ethical concerns. Developments in neuroscience, for example, have resulted in the creation of a new field called “neuroethics.” This paper addresses the neuroethical issue of psychopharmacological enhancement; should society have rules against psychopharmacological enhancement or “brain steroids,” particularly in academia? If so, on what guidelines should the rules be based? I argue that there should be no major restrictions against enhancement itself, although drugs that are blatantly harmful should be prohibited as with therapeutic drugs. In Part One, I provide arguments in favor of psychopharmacological enhancement. In Part Two, I describe and refute arguments against such enhancement. Finally, in Part Three, I provide some conclusions regarding psychopharmacological enhancement and brain science in general.

Consider the following examples:

• You are an undergraduate student aspiring to go to medical school. You have been studying for the MCAT for the last 3 months of summer, grinding for eight hours per day. The test day finally comes, and you do well and score 30 out of 45. Your friend, meanwhile, has been enjoying his summer—going to the pool, to the beach, and hardly studying. Four weeks before the exam, however, he started taking a new pill, with no known side effects, that improved his attention and short term memory. His big day came and he scored a 33.
• You have discovered that your spouse has just been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Surgery is very risky with minimal chances of survival. Two doctors in the area are willing to perform the surgery. Your friend from college is one of the surgeons. He tells you that he has been taking the same pills throughout medical school and even takes them now during surgeries—they improve his memory, concentration and focus, and reduce the natural tremor of the hands (effect proven through research trials). The other doctor that is willing to do the surgery is “normal” and refuses to take such a drug due to his desire to be “natural.” Which surgeon do you pick?

Most people have a different emotional response to the same person of each scenario. Many would view the friend in example one as “cheating” or taking the “easy way out” without putting in effort; they would be against the friend using the enhancement pill because it is “unfair.” In the second scenario, however, most people would side with that same “cheater” and would effectively choose the friend surgeon to operate since he improves the chances of the spouse’s survival. What is the difference between the two situations?

These examples raise a variety of difficult ethical questions in relation to the emerging field of psychopharmacology. As Walter Gannon writes in Defining Right and Wrong in Brain Science, “the oldest and most difficult of these questions is how to weight the potential benefits of psychotropic drugs against the risks (233). Since the brain is the most complex and least understood organ in the body, “there may be unforeseen adverse effects of altering neurons and neural systems” (233). Many “psychotropic drugs can have both positive and negative effects on the brain and mind” (233). Although the “general aim of psychopharmacological intervention in the brain is to restore dysfunctional systems responsible for psychiatric or neurological disorders,” many techniques are being used to enhance already normal brain function (233). Currently, “a number of pharmaceutical and nutritional supplement companies are interested in selling drugs that…allow individuals to go without sleep for longer periods of time than they otherwise could or herbal substances that allegedly improve memory” (Caplan, 272). Scientists realize that “a drug capable of helping an Alzheimer’s patient retain memory function might also provide some enhancement to those who simply have poor memory skills and that the market possibilities for selling a drug such as a memory enhancer are huge” (Caplan, 272). Many students, for example, “are keenly interested in any drug that might improve their ability on tests or in musical, dramatic, or athletic performances by allowing for increased short-term memory, greater attention span, or reduced anxiety” (Caplan, 273).

Should society have rules against psychopharmacological enhancement, particularly in academia? If so, on what should the rules be based? I will argue that there should be no major restrictions against enhancement itself, although drugs that are blatantly harmful (e.g., death or serious injury) should be prohibited as with therapeutic drugs. In Part One, I will provide arguments in favor of psychopharmacological enhancement. In Part Two, I will describe and refute arguments against such enhancement. Finally, in Part Three, I provide some conclusions and final thoughts about psychopharmacological enhancement and brain science in general.

I. Arguments for the Use of Psychopharmacological Enhancement

Psychopharmacology has always had great potential. As Martha Farah states in Emerging Ethical Issues in Neuroscience, “the enhancement potential of some psychiatric treatments is, in itself, nothing new” (20). In reality, pharmacological enhancement has begun and “is arguably being practiced now in several psychological domains: enhancement of mood, cognition, and vegetative functions, including sleep, appetite, and sex (20). Of special interest are the manipulations that “alter cognitive abilities, including attention and memory” (22). Attention includes “active use of working memory, executive function, and other forms of cognitive control” (Farah & Wolpe, 50). It also includes sustained effort and resistance to distraction and is “primarily modulated by dopamine and norepinephrine” (Farah, 22). In addition to providing a therapeutic effect for children with ADHD, stimulants, such as Adderall and Ritalin may induce cognitive changes in normal individuals: they may enhance “vigilance, response time, and higher cognitive functions, such as novel problem solving and planning”—an effect many healthy individuals have discovered and are utilizing. (Farah, 22). In some school districts “the proportion of boys taking [Ritalin even] exceeds the most generous estimates of ADHD prevalence” (Farah & Wolpe, 50). Meanwhile, current advances in neuroscience are paving a variety of new therapeutic techniques to fight dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Although they are developed to treat memory-related disorders, “many of them will be put to use—and will be efficacious—in people who are not ill,” proving to be of special interest to normal people (Ackerman, 77). One drug specifically developed to treat narcolepsy, for example, can actually “prolong alert wakefulness for days” (Farah, 23). Recognizing the “desire of most people for quicker, sharper, and more reliable memories,” many researchers are “explicitly pursuing drugs or pharmacological agents that might improve our ‘normal’ capacity to remember, that might enhance the cognitive performance of both underachievers…and overachievers, and that might prevent, halt, or reverse age-related memory decline” (President’s Council on Bioethics, 237-8).

So what is the problem if college students use Adderall to study for the MCAT? They are, in effect, improving their cognitive functions. Such drugs can be beneficial for a person’s individual well-being. He/she will become more attentive with greater memory functions; “memory enhancement could benefit individuals by enabling them to access a broader base of factual and conceptual information, as well as to process this information more effectively in decision making and other cognitive tasks” (Glannon, 265). This may help him/her to be more capable, to reach specific goals in life, and to overall live a happy and successful life.

Psychopharmacology may also be seen as advantageous for the well-being of the community and for the public good. Students and individuals may become better, more attentive citizens, engineers, doctors, and lawyers; society as a whole may benefit. Doctors that are more attentive and alert may save more lives; scientists that can stay awake longer may have more breakthroughs. Humanity is always trying to move forward and improve, and this is certainly one way of improving humanity, the quality of life, and the standard of living.

There is also the issue of autonomy and individual right. It would appear to be an infringement on personal freedom to restrict access to safe enhancements (if they are too risky, however, it may by interpreted as beneficence). If a free individual decides to tamper with his/her own brain, it should be generally allowed. After all, that brain is the property of that person. If a person wants to and is allowed to tamper with and augment breast size, why can’t a person be allowed to augment his/her brain?

II. Arguments against the Use of Psychopharmacological Enhancement and Refutations

Despite all the aforementioned benefits of psychopharmacology, there still seems to be “something wrong” with it. As Farah writes, “most of us would love to go through life cheerful and svelte, focusing like a laser beam at work and enjoying rapturous sex each night” (24). Yet most people “also feel uneasy about the idea of achieving these things through drugs” (24). What can this gut feeling be attributed to?

The first potential problem that springs up is the “possibility of serious side effects for the individual, including long-term or delayed effects that might evade current FDA safeguards” (Farah, 24). Even more risky is the “off-label use” or the use of drugs for “purposes for which [they] were not originally designed and for which they did not initially receive FDA approval” (Gannon, 233). If allowed, will psychopharmacology be detrimental to the well-being of the individual? After all, this neuroscience-based enhancements intervene “in a far more complex system,” the brain, than other enhancements for the body (Farah & Wolpe, 52). As a result, we are “at greater risk of unanticipated problems when we tinker” (Farah & Wolpe, 52). A young, ambitious pre-medical student may get into Harvard Medical School and attain a prestigious job thanks to enhancement. He may also get a chance to save many lives and benefit society. However, this early success may unfortunately be followed by a “middle-age of premature memory loss and cognitive decline” (Farah, 22). If the enhancement drugs are taken at too early of an age, they may have some detrimental effects: “empirically, prodigious memory is linked to difficulties with thinking and problems solving, and computationally, boosting the durability of individual memories decreases the ability to generalize” (23). Would “endowing learners with super-memory interfere with their ability to understand what they have learned and relate it to other knowledge” (Farah & Wolpe, 52)? It appears that “normal forgetting rates may even “be optimal for information retrieval” (Farah, 25). In other words, if you remember too much or if you have too much clutter stored, you might have difficulty retrieving specific information. That is part of the reason why interest in memory enhancement has thus far just “been confined to the middle-aged and elderly, whose memory ability undergoes gradual decline in the absence of dementia,” even when healthy (Farah 23; Farah & Wolpe, 50). Although “few consider memory enhancement for the young to be a goal,” it is still important to consider the possible ethical implications. Drugs aimed at enhancing attention, however, can be aimed at children or young adults.

Despite all the recent advances, still very little is known about the complex brain and even less is known regarding which limitations “are there for good reason” (Farah, 22). From an evolutionary standpoint, there might be “hidden costs” to enhancement; since we “understand little about the design constraints that were being satisfied in the process of creating a modern human brain,” we do not know “which ‘limitations’ are there purposefully” (Farah, 24). Walter Glannon echoes this idea and states that “the limits we have in our capacity to remember only so many facts or events may be part of a natural design that is critical for our survival” (266). Sometimes forgetfulness is beneficial and allows a human being to cope with stressful or traumatic experiences (in addition to the aforementioned effect of improving ability to retrieve information, generalize, and problem solve in kids). If a person lives and intensely remembers all the bad that has happened, he/she would be constantly tormented.

The brain remains to be “the most complex organ we possess;” no other system “has so many roles and consists of so many interoperating parts” (Leshner, 76). This “interconnectedness of its parts and the multitasking nature of [the brain’s] individual structures means that any intervention, however small or precise we try to make it, is unlikely to have a single consequence” (Leshner, 76). Cognitive functioning, for example, is part of an “interconnected system in the mind” that involves emotional processing so “trying to enhance cognitive processing could impair emotional processing,” making an individual indifferent and unable to experience life’s pleasures (Glannon, 268). Altering the brain may have several other effects in other areas, some that we cannot even imagine today.

None of these potential risks to the individual, however, warrant complete restriction on the use of pharmacological enhancement, although it is true that long-term consequences have not been fully investigated. It is possible that the long-term effects will not be known for a long time since clinical trials are very slow and expensive—is it worth waiting to find out the possible effects (if any)? This involves potentially great cost-benefit tradeoffs. Furthermore, “a concern with long-term or hidden side effects is not unique to enhancement but applies to therapeutic treatments as well” (Farah, 24). That implies that psychopharmacological treatments for dementia, Alzheimer’s, or narcolepsy would all have to be outlawed. In reality, “drug safety testing does not routinely address long-term use, and relatively little evidence is available on long-term use by healthy subjects” (Farah & Wolpe, 52). It is important to note, however, that “although safety is a concern with all medications and procedures,” our “tolerance for risk is smallest when the treatment is purely elective” or is for enhancement purposes (Farah et al., 294). Different people will also be willing to take different degrees of risk to achieve the enhancement they desire.

Short-term consequences, on the other hand, are being studied and it is possible to counteract and prevent them through the use of other drugs. Psychopharmacology has always been considered for enhancement but hardly implemented solely for the reason of safety. The enhancement aspect has remained the same but what has changed is the side effect and risk aspect of the treatments: “with our growing understanding of neurotransmission at a molecular level, it has been possible to design more selective drugs with better side-effect profiles” (Farah, 20). Prozac actually belongs to a class of drugs named “SSRI” in which the first letter stands for “selective” (Farah & Wolpe, 47). Farah states that “adjuvant therapy with other drugs is increasingly used to counteract the remaining side effects” (20). The result of both new and adjuvant drugs is the same: “increasingly selective alteration of our mental states and abilities through neurochemical intervention, with correspondingly less downside to their use by anyone, sick or well” (Farah & Wolpe, 48). It is important to keep in mind that even “normal” drugs against illnesses or disorders have side effects; anti-depressants may even increase the risk of suicidality in young adults or children yet these drugs are not restricted (Leon, 1787). Similarly, psychopharmacologically-enhancing drugs should not be prohibited. However, people do need to be educated and informed about the possible side effects so that they can make informed risk-benefit analyses, decide which risks are “acceptable in view of a drug’s benefits,” and determine whether to take the drugs or not (Farah et al., 295). Of course, more research is necessary to determine all the possible risks. Contrary to popular belief, however, Farah and Wolpe state that so far, medications and stimulants “have good safety accords, and their long-term effects may even be positive” (52).

Paul M. Matthews states in Transforming Drug Development Through Brain Imaging that novel testing techniques in the future, including brain imaging, may speed up the long, tedious, and expensive process that entails “develop[ing] a compound, test[ing] it in the laboratory and then in clinical trials, and finally obtain[ing] approval for it as a new drug” (153). A faster process may result in more drugs being more thoroughly tested and may, in effect, reduce the amount of negative side-effects, making more drugs safer and more efficient. However, as Henry T. Greely states in Knowing Sin: Making Sure Good Science Doesn’t Go Bad, we cannot make “prinum non nocere, ‘first do no harm,’ a binding obligation” since too often harm will occur” and inevitably does (93). Nonetheless, “doing no harm can be an inspiration” and researchers and physicians still need to “think about the ethical, social and legal consequences of [their] work” so that enhancement medicine, for example, does not become riddled with negative side effects, whether they be physiological, social, or ethical in nature.

The third main argument against psychopharmacological enhancement in academia stems from potential harm to society if use becomes widespread. There are worries that these enhancements or drugs will not be fairly distributed or may create more separation between the classes. As Donald Kennedy states in Neuroscience and Neuroethics, “perhaps it is our belief that the playing field should be level—we worry about the students who can’t access the drug” (59). It is “likely that wealthy and privileged will have the choice of self-enhancement and the less privileged will not” (Farah, 25). Ritalin use by normal healthy people, for example, ís highest among college students, an overwhelmingly middle-class and privileged segment of the population” (Farah et al., 295). There will be “cost barriers to legal neurocognitive enhancement and possibly social barriers as well for certain groups” (295). Others in opposition to neurological enhancement are concerned that allowing such enhancements to be undertaken will result in higher levels of normalcy that will put others—those who choose not to enhance or those who cannot choose to enhance, including the poor—at a disadvantage. This, in effect, would be a form of indirect coercion. “Employers will recognize the benefits of a more attentive and less forgetful workforce” while “teachers will find enhanced pupils more receptive to learning” (Farah et al., 295). Merely competing against “enhanced coworkers or students exerts an incentive to use neurocognitive enhancement,” whether it be to keep a job or stay in school (Farah et al., 295). As Chatterjee points out in The Promise and Predicament of Cosmetic Neurology, some people might be coerced “to make use of every possible advantage, including enhancements, just to stay in place” (307).

If these are seen as potential harms that justify prohibition, then many other activities that are normally accepted should be restricted also. As Farah states, “our society is already full of such inequities” and unequal access itself “is generally not grounds for prohibiting neurocognitive enhancement, any more than it is grounds for prohibiting other types of enhancement, such as private tutoring or cosmetic surgery, that are enjoyed mainly by the wealthy” (Farah, 25; Farah et al., 296). Kennedy echoes this response by asking “what about the kids who can’t afford a preparatory course for taking a standardized test” (59). MCAT classes are certainly not evenly distributed at a price of almost $2,000, yet they are still allowed. What differentiates MCAT classes from a pill if “both raise the same questions about distributive justice” (Kennedy, 59)? Both seek to enhance cognitive functions and both can be successful; “the brain makes no distinction between psychopharmacology and experience” since both are able to cause physical changes in the brain (Ackerman, 57).

Nobody seeks to “prohibit private schools, personal trainers, or cosmetic surgery on the grounds that they are inequitably distributed” (Farah, 25). If anything, these activities stem from our capitalistic society; some people get ahead, pursue, and hope to attain further opportunities to excel. Moreover, in the United States, “wide disparities in access to and quality of health care and education are tolerated” (Chatterjee, 306). If such atrocities are tolerated and if there is unequal access to these “life enhancers,” how is pharmacological enhancement any different?

Also, consider the alternate to the idea of coercion of the poor: people living in poverty may choose to spend their money on these drugs in an attempt to get out of poverty; “in principle there is no reason that neurocognitive enhancement could not help to equalize that opportunity in our society” (Farah et al., 296). In comparison with other forms of enhancement, from good nutrition to high-quality schools, “neurocognitive enhancement could prove easier to distribute equitably” (Farah et al., 296). If these drugs succeed in increasing memory and performance in school, this might be “the way out” of poverty. As Walter Glannon states in Psychopharmacology and Memory, memory enhancement “could promote greater opportunity for individuals to have better education and more lucrative employment” (265). Janet Radcliffe Richards had a similar argument against those who believe organ transplants exploit the poor which I adapt to psychopharmacological enhancement: “as we contemplate with satisfaction our rapid moves to…protect the poor, we leave behind one trail of people who [simply want to enhance], and another of people desperate [and willing enough to take the medications to get out of poverty]” (533). This intervention thus seems “in direct conflict with all our usual concerns for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (533).

Radcliffe further states that “coercion is a matter of reducing the range of options there would otherwise be;” in other words, coercers come and take away options until the best available is the one they want (535). Offering enhancement medicine for academic purposes, however, does not restrict the range of options; it actually may provide a vehicle to get out of that poverty. Even if the widespread use of enhancement drugs does serve as an act of coercion on the non-poor, it would be as “much of an infringement on personal freedom to restrict access to safe enhancements for the sake of avoiding the indirect coercion of individuals who do not wish to partake”(26). It is also worthwhile to “consider a scenario in which the entire populace is given full and equal access to Ritalin, Prozak, and other enhancers” (Farah, 25). Even if the drugs are proven to be completely safe, most people would still feel uneasiness, so it is more than likely that their “qualms about enhancement” are not linked to equal opportunity (Farah, 25).

The final concerns regarding psychopharmacological enhancement in academia stem from the belief that it goes against some widely-shared intuitions. This group of concerns results “from the many ways in which neuroscience-based enhancement intersects with out understanding of what it means to be a person, to be healthy and whole, to do meaningful work, and to value human life in all its imperfections” (Farah & Wolpe, 52). First, “brain steroids” lead to the moral objection to “gain without pain.” As the common saying “no pain, no gain” demonstrates, most people in our society “feel that there is value to earning one’s happiness, success, and so on” and that “accomplishments in life are made meaningful partly by the efforts they require” (Farah, 25; Farah & Wolpe, 53). Some argue that engineered improvements in performance, however, “are not authentic, not earned, and therefore not morally commendable” (Caplan, 273). Enhancement may be seen as a “moral shortcut” that “undermines the natural development of the human being to become self-reliant and to overcome obstacles” (Ackerman, 16, 57). If a student takes Adderall to study for the MCAT, it might be interpreted as “cheating,” “taking the easy way out, and lacking dignity or value;” Adderall enables him/her to study for less time and absorb about the same amount of material. Enhancement as a whole may reduce the effort needed for personal accomplishment.

Although people “recognize the value of earning life’s rewards, our lives are [still] full of shortcuts to looking and feeling better” (Farah, 25). For example, “we do not disapprove of people who dislike vegetables improving their health by taking vitamin pills” (25). “Nor do we begrudge” medical school applicants their MCAT books or Kaplan classes (25). As Farah states, psychopharmacological enhancement “can therefore be seen as fitting in with an array of practices that are already accepted and widespread” (25). Although it does feel exciting to achieve our goals after testing our limits and “striving, struggling, and working to overcome innate boundaries,” it is also “very satisfying to have benefits that simply come from out of the blue or through good fortune” (Caplan, 275). Life is full of those pleasures and, consequently, “we do not always have to ‘earn’ our happiness to be really and truly happy” (Caplan, 275). Even if the “no pain, no gain” idea was held up, it would be difficult to determine “who decides which pains should be suffered to build character and which can be reasonably avoided,” something that would be necessary to transform this concern into public policy (Chatterjee, 306).

Some proponents of restriction on enhancement in academia argue that “the happiness or satisfaction achieved through engineering is seductive and will lead to a deformation of our character and spirit” (Caplan, 273). They also state that “to accept enhancement for our children will undermine and deform the role of the parent” (Caplan, 273). The President’s Council argued that enhancement will “distort or deform our character” and asked this question: “why would one need to discipline one’s passions, refine one’s sentiments, and cultivate one’s virtues—in short, to organize one’s soul for action in the world—when one’s aspirations to happiness could be satisfied by drugs in a quick, consistent, and cost-effective manner” (Caplan, 273)? In essence, if we enhanced ourselves and “our achievements and enjoyments came easy, why would we continue striving to be good and virtuous people” (Caplan, 274)? These critics seem to appeal to virtue ethics, claiming that through the use of enhancement, people will cease to desire to be good, honorable, hard-working individuals with good traits of character. Furthermore, if people “seek to perfect” their children through enhancement, the kids will no longer be seen as “gifts”–now possibly an appeal to religious ethics—and the parents may not be taught humility or be as “open to the unbidden” (Caplan, 276)

This argument, however, falls short in many aspects. As previously mentioned, there are already many people taking shortcuts—not necessarily neurological—that may be looked down upon but aren’t. In fact, we “generally encourage innovations that save time and effort, because they enable use to be more productive and to direct our efforts toward potentially more worthy goals” (Farah et al., 296). In addition, “laying the blame for vice at the foot of enhancement ignores the inconvenient fact that the desires for quick returns, easy money, and instant gratification have nothing at all to do with enhancement” (Caplan, 274). Instead, they are “traits of many, if not most, human beings” (Caplan, 274). Even if enhancement is prohibited, individuals will probably still desire to “cheat” or take “shortcuts.” If children cannot take a pill to focus and memorize more for the test, they just might look over and copy someone else’s answers. Just because a person is enhanced with a better attention span or memory does not mean he/she will not be ready for challenges in the real world or will be “weak and spineless” (Caplan, 274). These characteristics are innate and improving performance “is not necessarily toxic to virtue” (Caplan, 274). Regarding the enhancement of children, a parent “can accept a gift, embellish, tweak, noodle, and modify it in order to improve it, and still cherish what was given as a gift” (Caplan, 276). It should not be necessary to accept a “random draw of the genetic library” or accept a “random point mutation” simply to learn to value and “abide the unexpected” (Caplan, 276). Overall, “should the state be allowed to interfere in how parents choose to raise their children” (Greely, 92)? In our free, capitalistic society, many believe that “it is their right to do whatever they can to minimize their distress and maximize their achievement. They may believe it is their duty to give their children every advantage” (Ackerman, 62).

Since psychopharmacology changes brain function and the brain is generally associated with the “self,” other pro-restriction arguments state that such drugs would undermine the commonly held idea that “persons endure over time” (Farah & Wolpe, 53). Although some of their characteristics may change, “there is a self that remains constant for as long as the person can be said to exist” (Farah & Wolpe, 53). What makes the brain so special “is that it is the seat of the mind;” it is the “essence of the ‘self’ and, therefore, “altering how a person’s brain works may be altering who that person is” and his/her essential being” (Leshner, 76; Gannon, 233). If you change your brain and mind, are you actually changing yourself and your personhood? Since the brain is the final common path for the experience and expression of mental activity, “any intervention in our brains raises the specter of not only causing potential physical disability but also changing our cognition, emotion, or even our personalities” (Leshner, 76). Some people thus argue that “the changing of abilities, memories, and mood at will by swallowing a pill may undermine the idea of a constant ‘self’” and, consequently, is wrong (Farah & Wolpe, 53).

A similar objection to such enhancement stems from the Natural Law theory. Altering brain structure and function, specifically for enhancement purposes, is not natural (it is, after all, an enhancement of the human condition). The same issue arises with other types of enhancement. Gregory Pence mentions in Re-Creating Medicine how in medicine today, “many naysayers warn that we must accept natural limits…that we are too materialistic…that we are narcissistic in wanting better bodies than we inherited…and that all the above show our warped priorities” (161). This line of thought opposes enhancements of the mind and body and considers improvements improper.

After further investigation, however, this argument falls short of justifying restriction on psychopharmacological drugs in academia. There are plenty of current practices that are similarly unnatural and change the self and personhood. If drugs that alter the brain and, in effect, alter the self should be prohibited, then anti-depressants, for example, should be outlawed since they also change the self (from a depressed individual to a happier individual). That treatment, however, can be argued as therapy to normalize a “deviation” so another example is necessary. Martha Farah and Paul Root Wolpe in Monitoring and Manipulating Brain Function state that “the attempts of human beings to use chemical substances to alter normal affective and cognitive traits is as old as the drinking of alcohol” (48). Shouldn’t alcohol be prohibited if it temporarily changes the self, making some individuals polar opposites from their normal, sober selves? There are also a plethora of other procedures being done that are not natural. Consider “cosmetic surgery and the use of human growth hormone for healthy children who are naturally short” (Farah & Wolpe, 51). Although they do not specifically affect brain function as do psychopharmacological drugs, they are nonetheless enhancements that are generally accepted. Is laser eye surgery, a procedure that “sometimes can give eyes better than 20-20 vision” immoral or wrong (Caplan, 271)? Caffeine can also act as a stimulant (and some people do indeed use it for academic purposes) yet it is not prohibited. Meditation, tutoring, and psychotherapy are all enhancement techniques, although non-neuroscience-based, that affect brain function and the person yet are not seen as objectionable (in fact, these are “often seen as laudable”) (Farah & Wolpe, 52).

Further opposition to enhancement states that maximizing performance of healthy individuals through such drugs is in a sense commodifying human abilities. A commonly shared intuition is that “persons have a kind of value that is independent of any commodity or capability they bring to the world”—Kantian ethics (Farah & Wolpe, 53). People have value “independent of how well they do what they do” (Ackerman 81). We do not value a spouse or a child “because of how well he or she performs,” like we would a car. We value them “because of some essence of their personhood that we care about—the very essence that we instinctively feel comes under threat of distortion or replacement whenever a medical intervention touches the brain” (Ackerman, 81). By taking the drug and altering our neurochemistry, it is almost as if we are improving our performance and abilities “the way we would improve the performance of a car, opining the hood and going in and tinkering” (Ackerman, 81). Psychopharmacological drugs can indeed maximize the performance of an already healthy, functional person and this “can be viewed as commodifying human abilities” (53).

This idea is again contradicted by the number of other practices that similarly commodify human abilities; it is not simply “unique to Ritalin-enhanced executive ability” (Farah et al., 297). It is probably more baldly on display “in books and classes that are designed to prepare preschoolers for precocious reading, music, or foreign language skills, but many loving parents seek out such enrichment for their children” (Farah et al., 297). If such activities are not prohibited based upon the idea that they “commodify” human abilities, then there is no reason to justify the restriction of enhancement psychopharmacology.

III. Conclusions & Final Thoughts

Although some of the arguments against brain enhancement are valid, I do not believe they are sufficient to restrict the use of enhancing psychopharmacological drugs in academia. As Arthur Caplan states in Staining their Brains: Why the Case Against Enhancement is Not Persuasive, “each argument carries some emotive force but is not a sound basis for rejecting choices that individuals might make to improve or optimize themselves or their children” (273). It is true that there “may be unforeseen adverse effects of chronically altering brain circuits with psychotropic drugs” but I believe it is up to the individual to “weigh their short-term benefits against their long-term risks” (Gannon, xvi). It will be up to the person to decide whether “the benefits of performing better on exams or having better memory [is] worth any risk to other mental functions” (Gannon, xvi). Nonetheless, these concerns do not warrant restriction. William Safire in Visions for a New Field of ‘Neuroethics’ asks “what is there to stop us from using such a ‘Botox for the brain’” to make a person more “intellectually attractive” (10)? I believe the only factor that will warrant restriction has to do with safety; only if studies show a severe and dangerous correlational or causative effect of the drugs on the body or brain, will restriction on that particular drug be enforced. Restriction on enhancement in academia itself, however, will not come to fruition.

From a practical viewpoint, it would be hard to regulate psychopharmacological enhancement in academia (for example, to prevent “cheating”). Millions of prescriptions are written every year for drugs that act on the brain yet, as Sandra Ackerman writes in Hard Choices, Hard Choices, “it is startling to remember that there are no objective tests for mental disorders” (55). Farah states in Emerging Ethical Issues in Neuroscience that “the line between healthy and sick is a fuzzy and perhaps arbitrary one” (21). It will be difficult to distinguish between kids with ADHD who need stimulant medication for therapy and normal, healthy kids who might want it for enhancement: “as with affective disorders, it is difficult to locate a discontinuity between normal attentional functioning and ADHD (22). If doctors intervene too “high up” on the continuum, they would be practicing enhancement. Farah even states that “pharmacological enhancement of children’s attention is routine in some communities” (22). Parents are eager to “give their children every edge in school” and “press their pediatricians for medications” (22). Teachers, meanwhile, “often welcome the greater orderliness in a classroom of attentive students” (22). And since ADHD in children is “diagnosed primarily on the basis of parent and teacher questionnaire responses, it can be difficult to free the diagnostic process from the values and standards of the respondents” (22). This difficulty to separate enhancement from therapy will make monitoring and restriction of psychopharmacological enhancement very difficult.

If a law was to be developed, what features would the “FDA take into account when weighing whether or not to approve a drug that might be taken by healthy people to augment or improve some aspect of themselves” (Ackerman, 59)? How sure can we truly be that the medicine is safe and how much benefit outweighs the risks? The safety criterion is an issue in itself since testing has to be done on healthy people who may just end up with getting sick. Whether healthy people “will risk endangering their health for the sake of mental improvement remains to be seen” (Ackerman, 59).  And, in an extreme case, will society “be willing to relax the safety standards for an enhancement drug that produces a very substantial effect, catapulting the user from, say, average intelligence to brilliance in one dose” (Ackerman, 59)? All of these issues will make the development of regulations very difficult.

Enhancement of cognition in normal people has become and “is now a fact of life, and the only uncertainties concern the speed with which new and more appealing enhancement methods [with less adverse side effects] will become available and attract more users” (Farah, 24). Overall, I feel the public fear or feeling that brain enhancement and manipulation is wrong and dangerous will pass. It is a possibility that our innate fear of the new and novel leads to the questions and concerns about psychopharmacology. As Donald W. Pfaff writes in A Brain Built for Fair Play, this fear may then manifest in and serve as a basis “for the human instinct for fair play” (41). Are we trying to protect the vulnerable because “at some time in our lives, we will all be vulnerable” (Ackerman, xii)? Are we simply afraid and do not want others to propel ahead of us in academia, for instance? This fear may cause us to apply the Golden Rule and then use the inequity reason as a basis for rejecting enhancement.

There were many novel techniques that were historically looked down upon but are currently widespread. Paradigms change as do standards in society; as Mark Waymack states in Philosophy of Medicine, “history is replete with medical innovations that were reviled, contested, and that some medical authorities tried to prevent, but which we now gladly accept as valuable, appropriate, and perhaps even at the core of good medical practice” (91). Gregory Pence, in Re-Creating Medicine, points out that as late as the mid-19^th century “it was considered unprofessional (and unethical) for a physician to visually examine a woman’s genitalia” (91). For many years, “women in childbirth were not offered painkillers” (91). These practices were thought as morally wrong but were adapted as time progressed. A “similar uneasiness” was even “evident in the early discussions of the human genome project;” it is a “control issue and a fear that at some point scientists are going to unalterably change the fundamental sense of what it means to be human or to control one’s world” (Ackerman, 114). Most people accept the “augmentation of our facilities on the outside of the skull, comfortably wearing glasses or contact lenses or even cochlear implants, yet feel uneasy at the prospect of someone tinkering with the equipment inside” (Ackerman, 113). I believe this barrier partially has to do with “a shortfall in the public misunderstanding of science” so educating the public to allow them to perform more realistic risk-benefit analyses is critical. With education and time, I believe society will adapt to the use of psychopharmacology for enhancement as it has to the plethora of other treatments or activities.

As I hope to have shown with the example at the beginning of the paper, the decision about whether using “enhancement drugs” is ethical “does not require long thought or debate when the life of someone we care about might hang in the balance; an ethics of enhancement would play no part in this choice” (Ackerman, 75). Not all enhancement is bad and if a person wants enhancement, it does not have to be bad (Caplan, 285). Instead of “looking inward to our own nature…to see what is or is not permissible,” we need to “look outward to the world that we create, to the institutions that shape our societies, and to the relationships, especially the most intimate and enduring relationships in our lives—those with our parents, our partners, and our children—those relationships that are so central to our flourishing—and to ask, ‘What will be the likely impact of any particular enhancement technology on the possibility of fulfilling those relationships” (Ackerman, 76).

I have come to a conclusion that there would be no detrimental consequences and, consequently, psychopharmacological enhancement should not be prohibited or restricted upon. This does not imply, however, that individuals should not think for themselves and perform risk-benefit analyses about whether to take specific enhancement medication or not. It is essential that consumers do not take “unknown risks for scientifically but well-advertised benefits” (Greely, 90). We, as a society, must also not become over-reliant on drugs to make us better or to fix our problems (which, consequently, may eliminate the intimate doctor-patient relationship.

I believe the practice of cosmetic neurology is inevitable. Many people are “predicting that the 21^st century will be the century of neuroscience. Humanity’s ability to alter its own brain function might well shape history as powerfully as the development of metallurgy in the Iron Age, mechanization in the Industrial Revolution, or genetics in the second half of the twentieth century” (Farah et al., 289). There is always the possibility that good science aimed at the treatment of neurological disease may be applied for enhancement purposes. We must never cease to examine the “benefits and dangers of neuroscience-based technology, or ‘neurotechnology,’ and consideration of whether, when, and how society might intervene to limit its uses” (Farah et al., 289). Until we have “disentangled the a priori from the empirical claims, and evaluated the empirical claims more thoroughly, we are at risk of making wrong choices” (Farah et al., 297). Thinking about and considering such neuroethical problems “may help us maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of the revolution in brain science” (Greely, 94). When we deal with brain science, we are “dealing with the organ that makes us unique individuals, that gives us our personality, memories, emotions, dreams, creative abilities, and at times our sinister selves” (Ackerman, xii). We, as a society, must remain careful and attentive since the brain is, after all, “the seat of what we consider our humanity” (Ackerman, ix).

Psychopharmacological enhancement will go on to challenge current philosophical beliefs as it already has. As Farah and Wolpe state, “brain-based enhancement [is] forcing us to confront the fact that we are physical systems. If specific abilities, personality, traits, and dispositions are manifest in characteristic patterns of brain activation and can be manipulated by specific neurochemical interventions, then they must be a part of the physical world” (54). This realization and idea, however, “does not mesh easily” with our intuitions about personhood and the traditional ideas regarding the soul or the “nonmaterial component of the human mind” (Farah & Wolpe, 54). If the self or soul can be changed physically and chemically, is it truly immaterial?

Regardless of the answer to that question, we should not be afraid to challenge current beliefs and progress. As Pence states, “we are on the age of exciting new frontiers in medicine” (290). “Medical advancement can reshape what it means to be human: better athletes through enhancement medicine, brighter and funnier children through cloning, and three careers instead of one-plus-retirement as longevity increases” (180). Instead of being fearful, we need to embrace this “exploding knowledge” that “is giving us new opportunities, if not for ourselves, then for the next generation” (180). Hippocrates once said that “life is short, science is long; opportunity is elusive, experiment is dangerous, judgment is difficult.” Psychopharmacological enhancement has a possibility to increase opportunity and make our judgment sharper, making science easier and our lives, longer, better, and more pleasant.

Bibliography

1. Defining Right and Wrong in Brain Science, essential Readings in Neuroethics (edited by Walter Glannon, Ph.D.)

1. Visions for a New Field of “Neuroethics” by William Safire [from Neuroethics: Mapping the Field (Dana Press, 2002):3-9]
2. Emerging Ethical Issues in Neuroscience by Martha J. Farah [from Nature Neuroscience 5 (2002):1123-1129]
3. Monitoring and Manipulating Brain Function: New Neuroscience Technologies and Their Ethical Implications by Martha J. Farah and Paul Root Wolpe [from Hastings Center Report 34, no. 3 (May-June 2004):35-45].
4. Neuroscience and Neuroethics by Donald Kennedy [from Science 306, October 15, 2004].
5. Ethical Issues in Taking Neuroscience Research from Bench to Bedside by Alan I. Leshner [from Cerebrum 6 (2004):66-73].
6. Better Memories? The Promise and Perils of Pharmacological Interventions by President’s Council on Bioethics [http://www.bioethics.gov/background/better_memories.html]
7. Psychopharmacology and Memory by Walter Glannon [from Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (2006):74-78]
8. Shall We Enhance? A Debate by Arthur L. Caplan and Paul R. McHugh [from Cerebrum 6 (2004):13-29]
9. Neurocognitive Enhancement: What Can We Do and What Should We Do? by Martha J. Farah, et al. [from Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 (2004):421-425]
10. The Promise and Predicament of Cosmetic Neurology by Anjan Chatterjee [from Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (2006):110-113]

2. Hard Science, Hard Choices: Facts, Ethics, and Policies Guiding Brain Science Today by Sandra J. Ackerman [Dana Press, 2006]

3. Philosophy of Medicine by Mark Waymack

4. The Dana Foundation’s Cerebrum (2007)

1. Transforming Drug Development Through Brain Imagining by Paul M. Matthews
2. A Brain Built for Fair Play by Donald W. Pfaff
3. Knowing Sin: Making Sure Good Science Doesn’t Go Bad By Henry T. Greely, J.D.
4. Re-Creating Medicine by Gregory E. Pence

5. Nephrarious Goings On: Kidney Sales and Moral Arguments by Janet Radcliffe Richards [from Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 21 (1996)532-544]

6. Hippocrates, Hippocratic writings. Edited with an introduction by G.E.R. Lloyd. Harmondsworth (Penguin), 1978, 206.

7. The Reviewed Warning for Antidepressants and Suicidality: Unveiling the Black Box of Statistical Analysis. Andrew C. Leon. Am J Psychiatry 164:12 December 2007.

Gennadiy Katsevman (’10) is a Philosophy major at Loyola University Chicago.

Art courtesy of adnrey

ABSTRACT: The following paper will seek to do two things: succinctly outline Dennett’s defense of propositional attitudes as having causal powers over human behaviour using the intentional stance, and subsequently analyze the specific downfalls in his position which render his argument ineffective. Dennett’s wish to validate propositional attitudes stems from the desire to retain a certain degree of scientific certainty without doing away with the language of beliefs, values and intentions. His answer to the body-mind problem is to explain the how abstract sounding phenomena such as intentions are able to affect the physical actions of humans. A critical analysis, it will be argued, exposes the limitations of Dennett’s argument. Potential defenses Dennett might offer will be considered. However, each will be shown to either fail to meet the challenge set by criticisms, or else appeal to faulty reasoning. It will be concluded that the intentional stance is ultimately flawed.

A propositional attitude is an umbrella term used to refer to a certain set of beliefs one holds towards a certain state of affairs. The topic of propositional attitudes is met with controversy when discussion of their nature and function is raised. The question of the causal powers of propositional attitudes and their ability to affect intentionality is hotly debated among philosophers and psychologists alike. There are those adopt the realist stance, discarding propositional attitudes as folk psychology that only works in limited domains and is unreliable as a scientific theory. In opposition to this are interpretationists, who argue that the commonsense psychological approach of propositional attitudes is viable and that it provides a satisfactory explanation of human actions. In general, one might say that realists treat intentions as objective criteria, while the interpretationist view considers beliefs in a way that renders them relative and purely subjective. In his article “True Believers: The Intentional Stance and Why it Works”, Daniel Dennett expresses his views on the legitimacy of propositional attitudes. In relation to the polarizing positions of realism and interpretationism, Dennett occupies somewhat of an intermediary stance; he accounts for propositional attitudes as objective phenomena that may be explained through an appeal to rationality and beliefs using the intentional stance. This approach will be analyzed; following an exegesis of his position, the strengths and weaknesses of Dennett’s theory will be evaluated.

Work Cited

ABSTRACT: Despite agreeing on the importance of irony, Richard Rorty and William Connolly differ sharply on its role for the individual, and for society more broadly. That is, Rorty understands irony as of strictly personal use, whereas Connolly bases an entire public realm on ironic discourse. I will, in this paper, analyze each thinker’s views on irony’s ultimate function. That is, I will articulate Rorty’s view of ironist theory as problematic, and will attempt to apply Rorty’s claims regarding the ironist theorist to Connolly’s project. Also, I will attempt to support Rorty’s argument for liberal democracy as a savory alternative to public irony.

Despite agreeing on the importance of irony, Richard Rorty and William Connolly differ sharply on its role for the individual, and for society more broadly. That is, Rorty understands irony as of strictly personal use, whereas Connolly bases an entire public realm on ironic discourse. I will, in this paper, analyze each thinker’s views on irony’s ultimate function. The first section will be concerned with Rorty’s view of ironist theory as problematic. This discussion will explicate Rorty’s view both generally and as applied to Heidegger. In the next section, I will attempt to apply Rorty’s claims regarding the ironist theorist to Connolly’s project. Also in this section, I will argue that Connolly’s project suffers from yet another difficulty, namely that it is cruel. In understanding Connolly’s work as ironist theory, and in characterizing it as cruel, I hope to bring out a number of difficulties in Connolly’s  position on irony’s place in the public realm. Finally, in the third section, I will attempt to support Rorty’s argument for liberal democracy as a savory alternative to public irony. The purpose of this paper, in short, is to make questionable Connolly’s extension of irony into the public realm.

The Problem of Ironist Theory: Rorty on Heidegger

Rorty understands theory as pertaining only to the ironist’s personal project. However, within the ironic realm, theory has played a role in broader projects than those concerned only with personal redescription. In attempting to explicate this notion of the ironist theorist, Rorty discusses theory’s function in the later work of Heidegger. Within this discussion, Rorty characterizes Proust as using irony more successfully than Heidegger, due primarily to Proust’s making use of the novel, as opposed to Heidegger’s use of theory.[1] In the end, Rorty understands the novel as a vehicle better suited to the ironist than theory.

Before discussing these specific ironists, it is necessary to elucidate Rorty’s notions of metaphysical theory and ironist theory. Rorty’s notion of metaphysical theory complies with the common view of philosophical discourse. Namely, metaphysical theory is concerned with that which lies behind what is normally perceived as reality, or that on which all things are universally and fundamentally grounded. Ironist theory, on the contrary, does not begin with the idea that there is anything fundamental or universal on which all other things rest. Instead, ironist theory tries to understand and redescribe metaphysical theory, such that it may do away with the necessity for metaphysical discourse.[2] Once this weight of metaphysical theory has been lifted, the ironist is able to create her own final vocabulary, and live on her own terms. The specific topic of ironist theory, then, is redescription of the Plato-Kant canon in order for a redescription of the self.

For Rorty, there are two problems with ironist theory that do not also affect the ironist novel[3]. The first of these problems is given as the problem of self-reference. This problem pertains to a certain paradox that comes from a combination of redescription and finitization. That is, the ironist theorist who is aware of her own finitude does not only redescribe, but finitizes old discourse. However, to finitize this discourse requires a break from her own finitude that the ironist does not want to make. The problem with this leap beyond redescription lies in creating a new set of possibilities out of the old discourse, and outside of that discourse. In doing this, the ironist theorist does not allow for her own reinterpretation, at least not outside of her new discourse.[4] The ironist novelist, however, does not experience the problem of self-reference. That is, she is not concerned with the way that her redescriptions are understood outside of her own project, or in the public realm. Further, she is not concerned with how someone else may redescribe her own view, as this view is only meant to be her own redescription towards autonomy, and is not meant to be universally applicable. The ironic theorist, therefore, falls prey to the problem of self-reference whereas the ironist novelist does not.

According to Rorty, the ironist theorist’s second problem is the quest for the historical sublime. This quest for sublimity entails an effort towards something universal or infinite, which is larger than the theorist herself. The ironist theorist, so as not to fall into metaphysical discourse, understands the necessity of remaining within the realm of history. However,  the sublime that the theorist must relate to in order to claim autonomy entails a clear break from the redescribed past.[5] In contrast, the ironist novelist remains content in her search for beauty, which remains in the realm of the temporal, the private, and the finite. Similar to her ability to avoid the problem of self-reference, the novelist avoids the problem of the historical sublime because she welcomes redescription and finitization within another’s quest for beauty. Therefore, the ironist theorist, once again, is subject to a problem that the ironist novelist may avoid.

Above, I have attempted to elucidate the distinction between the ironist theorist and the ironist novelist, and have also tried to make clear the problems that the ironist theorist is sure to face. Next, I will discuss Rorty’s critique of Heidegger’s ironist theory. This critique is important, as I will later argue that Heidegger and Connolly suffer from similar problems.

Heidegger’s project is not wholly sound as an ironic project, on Rorty’s view.[6] The most important mistake that Heidegger made in attempting to merge metaphysics with irony is his universalization of specific elementary words. That is, the words that Heidegger understood as elementary, those words used by the metaphysicians that have created a certain final vocabulary, were supposed to apply to the final vocabulary of all of Europe. The importance of such a universalization, in critiquing Heidegger’s role as an ironist, is that these words were meant to apply to more than just his own project, or were meant for the public at large. However, for those who do not associate with metaphysics, or those who do not see such discourse as important, there is no way that these elementary words may apply to them, or be vital to their own redescription and self-creation.[7] In universalizing these elementary words, Heidegger suffers from both problems of the ironic theorist. That is, he attempts to reach a sublime foundation from which to make broadly “European” prescriptions, and from which he might not be redescribed. Therefore, in as far as Heidegger aspired to a merging of metaphysics and irony, his project was not wholly satisfactory.

This discussion of Heidegger, and of ironist theory more generally, is important for Rorty’s support of private, not public, irony. That is, the ironist theorist’s failure lies in her necessity to apply ideas further than her own redescription. More explicitly, Rorty understands irony as “of little public use… Metaphysics hoped to bring together our private and our public lives… Ironist theory ran its course in the attempt to achieve the same synthesis…But the attempt was hopeless.”[8]

On Rorty’s view, the ironist should be content with a certain split between the private and public realms, and should not attempt to bridge a gap between these realms. Such a split entails a separation of private and public final vocabularies. The ironist may question and redescribe her private final vocabulary, but may not search for foundational claims as to why, in the public realm, cruelty is the worst thing that can be done.[9] Therefore, for Rorty, the combination of self-creation and politics is destined to be unsuccessful.

Connolly’s Ironist Theory: Explication and Problems

Here, I will explicate Connolly’s view as to how and why irony and self-creation are to be extended into the political, or public, realm. After characterizing Connolly as in favor of public irony, a characterization that he explicitly recognizes, I will attempt to show that Connolly succumbs to the same problems as does Heidegger. If this attempt is successful, Connolly may be understood as an ironist theorist, and as subject to the Rortian criticisms of such a position.

Connolly argues that an ethos of critical responsiveness is necessary in order to enact a pluralization of pluralism. This pluralization is a way in which a new understanding of identity, and this identity’s relation to other identities, may break free from traditional standards of political judgment. That is, within the pluralist framework, certain dominant moral and political relations between constituencies have become impediments on these constituencies’ self-creation. Such an impediment has occurred, at least in large part, due to what Connolly understands as a “primacy of epistemology”. This primacy of epistemology allows a historical regime to be concerned only with a very limited understanding of truth, such that ideas that question the fundamental principles are excluded.[10] Questions regarding the specific onto-political interpretations on which contemporary pluralism is founded, then, are left out of most discourse. Those ideas that rely on notions of truth and falsity are within the accepted epistemological realm, whereas those that rely on “untruth” are not. In clarifying the divide between these ideas, Connolly evokes the Foucauldian concept of the transcendental doublet. This transcendental doublet is that aspect of one’s mode of thought that is, paradoxically enough, always present as a certain governing agent of thought, but is unable to be successfully identified.[11] A pluralization of pluralism, in Connolly’s view, will reduce the gap between the thinking subject and her double, will recognize the paradoxical nature of authentic constituent identities, and will allow for a broadening of the way that these different constituencies may relate to one another.[12]

Connolly suggests a way in which this primacy of epistemology may be re-evaluated, after which a pluralization of pluralism may be sought. This re-evaluation, as I will characterize it, may most succinctly be understood as a combination between Foucauldian genealogy and a democratic reassessment of Nietzschean self-creation. Nietzsche’s influence, first, comes in his profound rejection of commonly held, but historically contingent, moral dualities. For Connolly, this rejection may be adopted as a way to step outside of the paradigm of contemporary pluralism, or that paradigm which is founded on the primacy of epistemology, and work towards an alternative strategy of ethical cultivation.[13] This ethics of cultivation is defined by an engagement with a diversity of life that lies outside of pluralism’s hegemonic modes of identification. In Connolly’s own words, the importance of such an ethics for a pluralization of pluralism is its attempt to

“…Thaw out frozen perspectives, to identify arbitrary threats to difference created by the dogmatism of established identities, and to advance accounts of danger and possibility crowded out by established regimes of thought. You draw from this protean care for difference as you move and you tap into numerous points of resonance and affinity with others as you proceed.”[14]

Another of Nietzsche’s influences on Connolly’s ethics of cultivation, then, comes from Nietzsche’s non-theistic gratitude for a rich diversity of being.[15] This gratitude may be understood in contrast with an atheistic drive towards rationality. From this gratitude comes an explicitly public coexistence between a larger variety of identities, which may be derived from the realm of  “untruth”.

Foucauldian genealogy plays an important role in Connolly’s pluralization of pluralism through its strategy of detachment from the metaphysical. Connolly adopts this strategy of attachment, but refines it in order to establish the concept of “positive onto-political interpretation”. First, Foucault’s genealogies of certain widely accepted concepts and practices, such as madness, sexuality, and medicine, have stripped these ideas of their supposed transcendental grounding.[16] That is, this sort of genealogical investigation locates the establishment of certain conventions within the context of specific events, or other historical and social contingencies. This way of understanding ideas as within the realm of the historical allows Connolly to promote the creation of new identities, which must not rest on universal principles. Further, as no one concept or identity may be understood as more transcendentally valid than another, there is no basis for an appeal to ideological superiority within inter-constituency engagement. However, these new identities, and their engagement with one another, may only come about if genealogy is taken as a necessary, but not as a sufficient, condition for detachment from the contemporary political realm. That is, when engaging in such detachment based on genealogical investigation, it is impossible not to reattach oneself to another set of dispositions.[17] For Connolly, then, it is important to engage in positive onto-political interpretation, or to articulate a certain set of dispositions. This articulation must take place only after acknowledging the inability to prove these dispositions’ universal validity, as well as the irrelevance of doing so. Connolly’s specific, and certainly idiosyncratic, account of positive onto-political interpretation is as follows:

“To practice this mode of interpretation, you project onto-political presumptions explicitly into detailed interpretations of actuality, acknowledging that your implicit projections surely exceed your explicit formulation of them and that your formulations exceed your capacity to demonstrate their truth. You challenge closure in the matrix by affirming the contestable character of your own projections, by offering readings of contemporary life that compete with alternative accounts, and by moving back and forth between these two levels.”[18]

This combination of positive onto-political interpretation, which is derived primarily from Foucauldian genealogy, and an ethics of cultivation, which is derived from a democratized Post-Nietzscheanism, informs the majority of Connolly’s claim for the pluralization of pluralism. That is, in employing ideas, Connolly puts forth a notion of public and political engagement that is influenced by an awareness of contingency, and a respect for ironic self-creation outside of the contemporary pluralist matrix.

As Connolly can now be understood as approving of public irony, I will now compare Connolly’s ideas to those of Heidegger. With this comparison, I hope to show that Connolly suffers from those same problems of ironist theory as does Heidegger. First, both thinkers are quite aware of the explicit problem that they face in doing ironic theory. That is, there always remains the prospect for the ironic theorist, in criticizing and redescribing metaphysics, to engage in metaphysics herself. In both Heidegger and Connolly’s cases, Nietzsche’s sort of “anti-metaphysics” seems to be the paradigm case for such a problem.[19] In his discussion of positive onto-political interpretation, Connolly explicitly articulates ironist theory’s danger of a relapse into metaphysics. Here, Connolly emphasizes a “moving back and forth between these two levels,” where the two levels seem to refer to metaphysics and ironist theory.[20] Such an emphasis is reminiscent of Heidegger’s claim regarding elementary words, which concerns the ability to speak metaphysically and finitely at the same time. Similar to Heidegger, Connolly’s reason for grappling with this problem at all comes directly out of his desire for political, or public, irony. Specifically, if Connolly’s concern for ontological interpretation was confined to the private realm, there would be no need to attach oneself to a certain set of dispositions in order to articulate those dispositions in public discourse. That is, the first step towards a positive onto-political interpretation, which is the detachment from the contemporary pluralist matrix, would suffice for a private redescription. From here, the ironist is able to freely engage, albeit privately, in any ontological interpretation that she chooses. In my understanding, Connolly’s criticism of Foucauldian genealogy, regarding its insufficiency for critical detachment because of a “refusal to affirm any positive directions or reforms of its own,” would not hold from Rorty’s point of view.[21] For Rorty, it is this refusal to make any sort of positive public claim, from the ironic standpoint, that prevents the ironist from contradicting herself. Therefore, both Connolly and Heidegger, in attempting a more careful way of doing ironist theory, remain steeped in metaphysics. For Heidegger, this position involves the use of elementary words, while for Connolly, it involves positive onto-political interpretation.

Heidegger and Connolly both go beyond redescription of small, personal contingencies. Because of this effort to attach himself to a larger project, Connolly, like Heidegger, suffers from the problem of self-reference, as well as from the historical sublime. That is, Connolly makes numerous references to his public project as involving

“…a new possibility of being [which] both disrupts the stability of established identities and lacks a sufficiently stable definition through which to present itself. This is because to become something new is to move the self-recognition and relational standards of judgment endorsed by other constituencies to whom you are connected.”[22]

or

“…the introduction of a new possibility of being…[includes] the drive to recognition…”[23]

Connolly’s attempt to bring about this “new possibility of being” must be understood with regard to his familiarity with the failure of inverted metaphysics, as in Nietzsche’s case.  Like Heidegger, who understood the use of elementary words as a pertinent prescription for all of Europe, Connolly seems to take his Foucauldian-Nietzschean derived project as relevant to all members of contemporary liberal society. Further, as the quotes above clearly demonstrate, Connolly’s project may only be undertaken publicly, as the inter-relatedness of different identities and constituencies is crucial to his notion of self-creation.[24] In attempting to rise above both Foucault and Nietzsche through a publicly and universally applicable extrapolation of their ideas, Connolly goes far beyond private redescription. It is here that his sort of irony suffers from the problem of self-reference, as the success of his new possibility of being, which may only be universally and publicly successful, understands “the realm of possibility [as] now exhausted”.[25] However, this decisive exhaustion’s appearance through a theory based on contingency and irony seems paradoxical. This paradox, similar to that created by Heidegger’s universalization of elementary words, is created by the problem of self-reference.

Similarly, Connolly’s universal and theoretical approach evokes an attempt at the historical sublime. That is, on Connolly’s view, one will cease to find identity within a supposedly natural, already constructed set of identities, and will instead create an identity out of critical engagement with others. This universal prescription involves historical investigation through genealogy, and is employed as a seeming end to metaphysics. Connolly’s task as involving this end to metaphysics, which is applicable to all members of pluralist society, may not be “redescribed except in [his] own terms…[or may not] become an element in anybody else’s beautiful pattern, one more little thing”.[26] Instead of being content to associate with the beautiful, Connolly’s explicit reference to a “new possibility of being” straightforwardly correlates to an attempt at the sublime, or an attempt to “make a pattern out of the entire realm of possibility”.[27] Therefore, in doing a similar sort of self-aware ironist theory as Heidegger, Connolly also succumbs to the problems of self-reference and the historical sublime.

Connolly may, however, argue against the claim that he is engaging in a definitive and universal project, or a project that necessarily implies a complete paradigm shift. Such a defense may rest on Connolly’s emphasis on an “ethos of pluralization”. That is, in suggesting a critical responsiveness towards those who redefine their relational identities, as well in suggesting a resistance to entrenched interpretations of constituencies, Connolly argues for an ethos from which new relations may form.  “Another way of putting this,” Connolly maintains,

“is to say that the recurrent disjunction between the injuries suffered by particular constituencies and that barriers to their reifications posed by cultural codes of morality and normality requires mediation by an ethos of critical responsiveness never entirely reducible to a code.”[28]

This statement seems to exempt Connolly from Rorty’s criticism of the ironic theorist. That is, Connolly’s thrust towards an ethos or critical responsiveness that is not foundationally bound addresses his attempt against a relapse into metaphysics. On my view, however, Connolly’s declaration of concern does not translate into an escape from these problems. Rorty’s account of Heidegger already points to a specific ironist thinker’s inability to remain consistent with his initial, historically contingent project. In particular, Rorty characterizes Heidegger as falling into the role of metaphysician after having previously denounced the legitimacy of such a role. I hope to have already shown, through a critical discussion of Connolly’s project, that Connolly’s initial denunciation of cultural and moral “codes” does not relieve him from the public ironist’s collapse into metaphysical discourse.[29] Indeed, such reliance on the metaphysical can be seen in Connolly’s shared problems with Heidegger, or in the problems of self-reliance and historical sublimity.

My final criticism of Connolly’s public sort of irony is that, on my view, such an extension of irony into the public realm may be understood as cruel. This kind of criticism against public irony is informed by a combination of similar views given by Rorty and by Judith Shklar.  In Connolly’s universally prescriptive application of irony, which must be grounded in interaction between individuals and constituencies,  it seems essential that all members of contemporary pluralist society undergo self-creation. This self-creation, which is necessary for critical engagement between constituencies, occurs before this critical engagement. However, it is also motivated by an urge to interact. That is,

“…the drive to recognition precedes consolidation of the identity to be recognized, and the panic it often induces in the self-confidence of established identities tempts them to judge the vulnerable entry through disabling identifications already sedimented in the old code.”[30]

It appears, then, that the individual is unable to engage with others within a “pluralized” pluralist society if she is not willing, or able, to undergo self-creation.

My previous characterization of Connolly’s view as universal requires that all undergo self-creation, and that no one’s identity is off-limits to critical responsiveness. Rorty addresses the implications of such a situation in which the individual is not taken on her own terms. For Rorty, public redescription is “potentially very cruel” towards those being redescribed, as “the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless”.[31] Indeed, the very idea of public redescription is an engagement between self-created individuals towards a dialectical transformation of both identities. With this transformation comes new, more informed versions of previously created identities. However, those who believe strongly in their present identities, whether these identities have been self-created or not, do not wish to be redescribed by others. It is, presumably, from these already-present identities that certain individuals derive meaning in life.[32] Here, the cruelty and humiliation involved with such a publicly redescriptive enterprise becomes apparent.

The consequences of Connolly’s project for the redescribed individual may also be understood in light of Shklar’s characterization of humiliation as cruelty. For Shklar, cruelty is “not just a matter of hurting someone’s feelings. It is deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else”.[33] This characterization of humiliation seems applicable to the content of Connolly’s agonistic politics. That is, the individual who is tied to her identity may very well experience this humiliation at the hands of the ironist. I will, here, apply Shklar’s characterization of humiliation in a step-by-step way to Connolly’s project. That is, as Connolly is explicitly prescribing a publicly critical view of one’s own identity and of the other’s identity, this critical engagement is obviously deliberate. Further, this public criticism, or irony, is sure to be persistent, as Connolly’s agonistic politics are  meant to be pushed “into corners that may seem unnecessary or excessive to liberal perspectives nested within the comforts of the normal individual, the private realm, the neutral state, and justice as fairness”.[34] Finally, the individual’s inability to trust herself or anyone else is not only a product of Connolly’s deliberate and persistent public irony, it is also precondition for this sort of engagement. More specifically, in adopting Shklar’s logic, the deliberate nature and persistence of such humiliating criticism leads to a certain incapacity for trust in the individual against whom this criticism is  directed. However, the individual who chooses to engage in “critical responsiveness” will also experience a certain inability to trust her own place in the public realm, as her place is necessarily unfounded and contingent. Therefore, in using Shklar’s characterization of humiliation as a seemingly adequate standard of judgment, it seems that Connolly’s public irony is cruel and humiliating for both the ironist and her victim.[35]

Private Irony, Public Liberalism: The Rortian Alternative

I have argued above that Rorty’s broad critique of public irony may apply to Connolly, and that Connolly’s public irony engages in Shklar’s and Rorty’s understandings of cruelty. Here, I would like to briefly elucidate Rorty’s vision of the individual’s role in the public sphere.

As previously explicated through a critique of public irony, Rorty understands redescription as a wholly private affair. There is, for Rorty, a definite split between the public and private realms, and this split calls for a separate final vocabulary for each realm. The final vocabulary necessary for the public sphere is founded upon Rorty’s self-proclaimed liberalism, and is that final vocabulary which allows us to avoid engagement with cruel or humiliating acts. This vocabulary, then, pertains directly to our relations with others, and to the effects of our actions on others.[36] Therefore, as cruelty is to be strictly avoided in liberal society, Rorty’s conception of a public final vocabulary is founded upon the avoidance of cruelty, not upon the individual’s personal redescription.

Rorty relies explicitly upon his pragmatism in arguing for a public language that is not grounded in philosophy or ironic redescription. That is, those who share Dewey’s views will say of liberal democracy that

“although it may need philosophical articulation, it does not need philosophical back-up. On this view, the philosopher of liberal democracy may wish to develop a theory of the human self that comports with the institutions he or she admires. But such a philosopher is not justifying these institutions by reference to more fundamental premises, but the reverse. He or she is putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit.”[37]

Fundamental questions are, then, unnecessary for and possibly detrimental to politics. Instead, liberal society is comprised of individuals who find themselves facing the same problems within the same historical context.[38] When discussing social policy within this context, the pragmatist search for efficacy towards a broad, non-philosophical notion of justice takes precedence over philosophical discourse. Even those who engage in a private self-creation of identity must, for pragmatic reasons regarding liberal sorts of freedom, engage in liberal democracy. Further, these self-created citizens are to be grateful that the “models of human self that they develop…are not the concern of such a state”.[39] For Rorty, the active avoidance of cruelty must be the primary goal of public life.

In conclusion, Rorty argues against ironist theory’s aversion to mere redescription. This aversion subjects the theorist to the problem of self-reference, as well as the problem of the historical sublime. Heidegger, through an implementation of elementary words, suffers from both of these problems. As the ironist novelist is content with redescription, and as she does not, then, suffer from the theorist’s problems, Rorty favors the ironic novel over ironic theory. It is my view that Connolly, in advocating the pluralization of pluralism, as well as in outlining positive onto-political interpretation, joins Heidegger as a problematic ironist theorist. It is also my view that, in universalizing a critical responsiveness in the public realm, Connolly’s view suffers from a tendency towards cruelty. This tendency may be brought out through Shklar and Rorty’s common interpretations of cruelty and humiliation. Finally, Rorty’s alternative to Connolly’s public irony entails a grounding of liberal democracy on pragmatist conceptions of progress, and is concerned with the prevention of cruelty. It has been my aim to showcase the inconsistencies and dangers that come with a public utilization of ironic redescription.

Endnotes

[1] Due to the length constraints on this paper, as well as the irrelevance of Rorty’s description of Proust to the overall argument, I will not discuss Proust as the quintessential ironist novelist.

[2] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University         Press, 1989), 5.

[3] I have explicated the differences between the ironist theorist and the ironist novelist in a longer version of this paper. It enough to say, though, that the ironist theorist engages in grand historical investigation, whereas the ironist novelist is satisfied with personal redescription.

[4] Ibid. 104.

[5] Ibid. 105.

[6] Again, this previous description may be found in a longer version of this paper. It is important only to note that Heidegger suggested a redescription of the “elementary” metaphysical vocabulary towards a description of “Da-sein”.

[7] Ibid. 119.

[8] Ibid. 120.

[9] Ibid. 120.

[10] William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 5.

[11] Ibid. 11.

[12] Ibid. xv.

[13] Ibid. 27.

[14] Ibid. 28.

[15] Ibid. 31.

[16] Ibid. 34.

[17] Ibid. 35.

[18] Ibid. 36, italics mine.

[19] Connolly’s hesitancy to take Nietzsche as having been a theorist without fault can be found in Identity\Difference, as he states: “…I owe my most salient debts to Nietzsche and Foucault. Not to Nietzsche alone or Foucault alone, but to each as a…corrective to the other…A critical extrapolation from this combination is needed after one has linked Nietzschean affirmation of the ‘abundance of life’ to Foucauldian care for identity and difference.” (ID, 10) This Foucauldian care for identity and difference, then, is a corrective to Nietzsche. This correction seemingly alludes to Nietzsche’s inability to take the identity seized from metaphysics’ destruction as merely one of many possible identities.

[20] Ibid. 36.

[21] Ibid. 35.

[22] Ibid. xvi, italics mine.

[23] Ibid. xv, italics mine.

[24] A further discussion of the foundational roles of identity and difference may be found in Connolly’s aptly titled work, Identity\Difference. As identity, for Connolly, is only coherent with regard to the individual’s relations with others, self-creation may only take place if its results are to be extended into the public realm.

[25] CIS, 104.

[26] Ibid. 106.

[27] Ibid. 105.

[28] EP, xvi, italics Connolly’s.

[29] This “metaphysical discourse” includes, as previously alluded to, a post-metaphysical reliance on the prescriptive power of historical investigation. This sort of discourse may be characterized, “ironically” enough, in Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche. Rorty writes: “This was Heidegger’s point when he called Nietzsche ‘merely an inverted Platonist’: the same urge to affiliate with somebody bigger which had led Plato to reify ‘Being’ led Nietzsche to try to affiliate himself with ‘Becoming’ and ‘Power’.” (CIS, 107).

[30] Ibid. xv, italics mine.

[31] CIS, 89.

[32] In fact, on some existentialist views, it is from a self-created identity that one may engage in an existence-justifying free project.

[33] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 37.

[34] EP, 29.

[35] In regards to the role of one’s self-created identity in the public realm, I will only say that Rorty regards personal irony as a means to autonomy, which must certainly be useful for public engagement (CIS, 97). A similar, yet more eloquently worded view may be found in George Kateb’s discussion of the democratic individuality in Emerson. Kateb argues, in analyzing one of Emerson’s passages, that individuality may be expressed publicly only “when one rids oneself of the possessive grip of those qualities in oneself that one has tried hardest to acquire as distinctive, that one is proudest of. Even if they are not merely socially induced characteristics, but the attainment of positive individuality, they are minor in themselves, and serve only by their alienating effects on individuals…” (Kateb, 345, italics mine).

[36] CIS, 141.

[37] Richard Rorty “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 282.

[38] Ibid. 286.

[39] Ibid. 292.

Works Cited

Connolly, William E. The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Rorty, Richard. 1990. “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” In Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski, 282. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.

Shklar, Judith. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Matt Friberg (’10) is a Philosophy and Politics major at Oberlin College.

Art courtesy of crayon2papier

ABSTRACT: This paper will attempt to work through Gilberto Perez’s theory of film narrative, clarifying his distinction between drama and narrative as relevant to understanding the singular form of cinematic narration employed in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939). We will also be examining some key features of the implicit audio-visual (cinematic) narrator debate pertaining to claims I-IV. Rather than thinking of film as being of one primary form or another, one should recognize that a) such terms are primarily of functional value and should not be taken as actual properties of film, that b) broadening our terms to include drama—showing as means of enacting—and narrative—showing as means of telling (mediating for the film camera)—gives us more insight in talking about film and frees us from the ontological commitment of having to posit invisible, effaced narrators in film where there is clearly no evidence of them. As illustrated in the discussion of The Rules of the Game, whether a particular film has an audio-visual narrator depends on how the film uses a range of narrative strategies specific to film; an audio-visual medium capable of both showing and telling.

In his essay, The Narrative Sequence[1], Gilberto Perez rejects a priori arguments for the necessity of implicit, audio-visual (cinematic) narrators in film. Such necessity arguments usually suppose that:.

1. Film functions solely as a narrative medium; i.e. that every film is a narration
2. The narrative structure (the showing and telling of a story) is independent of its medium of representation: the same for film, literature, theater etc.
3. There is undeniably a governing intelligence—one in place of and/ or in addition to explicit film narrators, i.e. character narrators or voice-over commentators—that, from a favored, inside point of view, directs our view through the fictional world on-screen and that
4. This cinematic narrator should, even in cases where no narrative presence is obvious in the telling of the story of the film, be assumed to be radically effaced or suppressed,

For Perez, these assumptions stem from a general lack of distinction between the dual elements of drama and narrative working in film and the tendency to want to ascribe a literary paradigm of narration to film. In particular, case III) for the necessity of a cinematic narrator could be explained as either a) mistaking the hidden god-like, governing intelligence for the implied author or auteur inscribed in that film or b) mistaking dramatized showing (directing) or just showing as means of enacting (drama) for cinematic narration.

This is not to say that films do not use narrative techniques or that cinematic narrators never figure into the ontology of films but rather, that these conditions depend very much on how the camera mediates between us and the world of the film. In Renoir’s The Rules of the Game for example, Perez describes an audio-visual narrator who, being neither the actual or implied author, gives us a mediated account of a world that is clearly too large and too complex for any one observer to adequately survey. As with words in a narrative sequence, the mediating gaze’s order, subject and manner of visual capture implies a degree of choice: i.e. who to follow when amid the complex interlocking action simultaneously entering and leaving our field of view the night of the party at le Chesanye’s chateau? Ultimately, it is through our awareness of what is not on the screen and our realizing that we are only being shown so much that, according to Perez, a film like Renoir’s The Rules of the Game functions as a narrative with a distinct audio-visual cinematic narrator.

This paper will attempt to work through Perez’s theory of film narrative, clarifying his distinction between drama and narrative as relevant to understanding the singular form of cinematic narration employed in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. We will also be examining some key features of the implicit audio-visual (cinematic) narrator debate pertaining to claims I-IV noted above.

Perez’s theory of film narrative, as set forth in The Narrative Sequence, takes film to be a medium poised between drama and narrative, between enactment and telling or—in the context of the camera—between enactment and mediation. If a narrative is the telling of a story (something that happened, is imagined to have happened, is invented etc.) then a narrative sequence, by Perez’s terms, is a story told in a given order or succession. Such an arrangement is necessarily incomplete, open-ended and subject to the narrator’s arbitrary choice of sequence (beginning, middle and end) and content. Of course, the camera itself is not making any narrative choices about sequence and content (this task falls to the director, or camera “pointer” as we will see later). The camera is, however, mediating between us and the world it captures in its fictional “gaze,”[2] much like the words of a narrator mediate between us and the world they are telling us about.

On the distinction between drama and narrative in film, Perez is notably suspicious of any attempt at erecting positive distinctions between film forms (i.e. film as either drama or narrative) or of assigning as defining properties what are merely useful ways of talking about them.

“Why distinguish between drama and narrative in film, it may be asked, if film is both a dramatic and a narrative medium? For the same reason one distinguishes between a particle and a wave even if the kind of thing that skips around in quantum physics behaves like both” (64).

In citing the famous wave-particle duality paradigm from physics, Perez adds an important qualification to his endeavor and notably gives himself some conceptual leeway when it comes to positing cinematic narrators. By recognizing that films can work sometimes more like drama and sometimes more like narrative (or sometimes more like both) then, we end up with a less tidy but ultimately richer understanding of how the film works, without being wholly committed to the implications of a single conceptual model. Returning briefly to claim I) for the necessity of a cinematic narrator, the implication of the physics duality paradigm is that, because not all films are necessarily narrative, we need not posit invisible, effaced narrators where no such storytellers are present (claim IV) for the sake of adhering to the literary model of narration.

Given the strong theoretical links between literature and film and the large amount of work already done on narrative and forms of narrative communication/ the narrator in literary fiction, it is not surprising that film theory should use the literary model of narrative as its primary reference point. Of course, one necessarily runs into some theoretical problems when attempting to apply the conditions of literary narration (verbal only) to an audio-visual medium like film where both verbal and visual narrations are possible. One case of false opposition of terms worth mentioning here is the relationship between showing and telling in film. While showing and telling are usually opposed in literature (i.e. a scene shows and a summary tells), in film, showing is often the means of telling. Returning briefly now to Perez’s distinction between drama (enacting) and narrative (telling), it is worth noting that showing is not the same as dramatizing, since drama takes more than just seeing something to make a story feel present before our eyes. To be clear, we would say that narrative is showing as means of telling (visual representation used to unfold a story) and drama is showing as means of enacting (unfolding a story in the form of action).

As if issues with terminology weren’t enough, transposing the literary model of narration onto film also seems to encourage, according to Perez, the insistence for audio-visual narrators in all films. The audio-visual cinematic narrator in film is distinguished from explicit character narrators and voice-over/ omniscient commentators (also present in literary fiction), in that it is an implicit entity that visually guides us through the events on screen. This “cinematic narrator” is posited to be present regardless of whether the film has explicit narrators (in such cases it is said to be suppressed or effaced) and is assumed to be on the same ontological level as the characters and events it observes. Because the implied filmmaker or auteur would necessarily present the world of the film as a fiction (from the outside) it is argued, fictional cinematic narrators are necessary entities in films.

Looking first at claims I) that film functions solely as a narrative medium and II) that the narrative structure is independent of the medium of representation; the implication is that filmic narration cannot be structurally different from the narration in other mediums (literature, theater, dance, music, art etc.) Given that the defining features of literary narration are usually taken to be the defining features of narrative structure in general, claim II) is tantamount to saying that filmic narration cannot be structurally different from literary narration. Since it is generally accepted that literary fiction has at least two levels of narration[3]: the fictional narrative (the story) and, more relevant to our discussion, the fictional narration that presents the narrative as a series of actual events (the narrator), the implication is that all films must also have a fictional, cinematic narrator inside the world of the story (to make sense of the film as a “narrative” and perhaps to compensate for the fact that explicit filmic narrators are not always present). Ultimately, assumptions that a) there is some necessary, causal connection between the narration (telling) and the narrator (the agent who carries out the narration), b) this model somehow guarantees the presence of a narrator in every narrative and c) there is no remarkable difference between modes of narration among media that would warrant against such generalizations, do not seem at all obvious for either literature or film.[4] Though this is a vast oversimplification of the debate, the conclusion Perez wants to draw is that the exclusive use of the literary model of narration, without regard for the drama aspects also working in a particular film (claim I), will commit one to positing hidden, effaced narrators (claim IV) and confusing a range of dramatic and narrative strategies operating in that particular film.

Returning finally to the issue of necessary cinematic narrator and the implied author or auteur, let us look at claim III) that there is undeniably a governing intelligence—one in place of and/ or in addition to explicit film narrators such as character narrators or voice-over commentators—that, from a favored, inside point of view, directs our view through the fictional world on-screen, in reference to Gunning’s[5] quoted argument. In literary theory of narration at least, it is customary to distinguish between the author and the implied author of the work. Depending on how the work is written, the implied author may gives us a sense of his personality or character (which need not coincide with the traits of the real author) and/ or somehow make us aware of the construction of the work without necessarily detracting from our engagement in the story. Contrasting the implied author to the narrator, the implied author is the agent to whom we attribute the work/ fictional story while the narrator is, as noted earlier, a part of the work, an entity telling or showing us the events from within the world of the story. Carrying over this distinction to film, the implied author would coincide with the implied filmmaker, director or auteur of a film and the narrator would coincide with an implicit, audio-visual (cinematic) narrator.

The  “governing intelligence” that Gunning terms “narrator” in his discussion of D.W. Griffith’s works is, according to Perez, really meant to be the implied author or auteur of the films. Through decisions in staging, editing, cross-cutting, long shots, close-ups and other dramatic techniques, the director’s camera thus makes an action present on screen and directs our vision around the fictional world.  Even though Perez is clearly an auteurist, his rejection of necessary narrators does not require that one hold this view: as he puts it, “whether or not an implied author is inscribed in a film, whether or not this is the director, [it] is not a matter of narration” (62). In other words, the showing as means of enacting or dramatization on screen may very well be achieved by the work of the implied author, director, filmmaker (or the unified creative agency responsible in highly collaborative projects) without necessitating explicit or implicit narrators. In response to the claim that a fictional narrator entity is necessary to tell a fictional story as actual, Perez’s own formulation suggests that, at least for dramatic film, an actual author can choose to show us fictional events as actual without the added use of fictional narration. Lastly, by merely noting that we experience film as “a work,” or an intentional product of human intelligence and making, Gunning has not really justified in his argument why this should necessarily apply to cinematic narrators over other creative agents of film.

Perez notes Renoir’s camera style in The Rules of the Game (1939) for it ability to unsettle our expectations of where our attention should be directed and for providing a clear instance of an autonomous, mediating gaze (cinematic narrator) working in narrative film. Usually, the “mediating gaze” of the film camera is indistinguishable and subservient to the drama; doing little more than unfolding the plot, the characters’ actions, perceptions and associated circumstances without a distinct point of view. In the case of the dramatic camera then, we may readily assume that what we are being shown is the best possible view of the action. In the case of Renoir’s narrative camera however, we immediately note a distinctive, autonomous gaze that, by its own way of seeing and rendering things on screen, creates a discrepancy between what we know is happening or is claiming our interest in the world of the film and the extent of it that we are actually being shown on screen. Using long takes and a greater depth of field for example, Renoir’s narrative camera (the mediating gaze of our audio-visual narrator) makes us especially aware of what is taking place just outside our field of vision and in the background. Much like the real world, what happens there can be just as important (if not more so) than what we do manage to see center screen.  As with our working thesis of narrative, the sense is that any overview of events is necessarily partial, fragmented and incomplete: just one individual’s account of the world, one’s choice of what to tell/ show us.

Renoir’s chosen audio-visual narrator gives us the sense of one struggling under the perceptual limitations any embodied observer would face in trying to keep up with the guests and staff at the La Colinière country estate. Like an “explorer who hasn’t gone ahead to scout the territory for us” (91), the audio-visual narrator seems to be making things out as he goes along and is often just as surprised as the audience by the sudden turn of events. This especially reflected by the manner in which he comes upon characters—by spotting them at a distance, obscured by furniture, watching them leave the frame and then suddenly re-enter it in close-up, interrupting and then redirecting his attention from one to the other’s plot as they appear, etc.: all as if by happenstance. Recalling Perez’s assertion that a narrative camera “imitates a gaze,” it is worth noting how this narrative camera achieves this gesture of looking.

In the famous party sequence at the chateau, complete with an amateur stage performance and une danse macabre for the entertainment of guests and neighbors, we spot the estate gamekeeper Schumacher looking for his wife Lisette (maid of the lady of the estate; Christine de la Chesnaye) whom we have just seen kissing Marceau (apprehended rabbit poacher-turned-house servant). Beginning at one doorway, the visual narrator follows him on his search, allowing him to become obscured behind walls and then picking him up again at the next doorway. During one of those intervals, the camera stumbles upon another couple: Christine and guest St. Aubin on a couch in a corner (we know she has recently discovered her husband Robert de la Chesnaye’s infidelity with mutual friend and guest Geneviève, but were given no indication of her having liked St. Aubin until this point; she must be with him on a whim). Surprised as we are, the visual narrator pauses us briefly to look at the odd pair before picking up Schumacher again at the final doorway, where he’s found Lisette and Marceau watching the masquerade performance along with the other guests. After a brief pause on this love triangle, the visual narrator strays a little to the side, only to come upon a sulking Andre Jurieau (the pilot and national hero who has recently completed a solo trans-Atlantic flight and is also desperately in love with Christine). Following Jurieau’s angry gaze back in the opposite direction, the narrator retraces the doorway space, where we catch a glimpse of Marceau sneaking away and Schumacher keeping Lisette from following him, only to come upon Christine and St. Aubin again on the other side. Now feeling Jurieau’s accusatory gaze, Christine and St. Aubin swiftly get up, walking out of the room and out of the camera frame. The camera’s moving and pausing and moving again in this sequence is something we would clearly associate with the act of looking. What differentiates this distinctive narrative view from say, a dramatic point of view shot is that, while the latter gives us a shared glimpse of someone’s consciousness for that given moment or merely imitates the perspective from a given point in space (anyone else standing there would theoretically be able to see the same thing), the narrator’s POV gives us a “compass” for understanding the world of the story.

Taking up this scene again in terms of the narrator’s POV being a “compass” for understanding the story, the fact that we are shown the two plots simultaneously in one uninterrupted sequence (not counting of course the minor developments/ subplots also going on with the servants and other minor guests in the background at the same time) allows us to make parallels between characters that are not immediately obvious but nevertheless important in the context of the story.  Though we can attribute the choice of making this sequence one continuous shot to the director Renoir, we may just as well attribute this distinct view to the visual narrator who, presumably out of curiosity, chose to follow the two love triangles simultaneously. Watching Schumacher, Jurieau, Marceau, St. Aubin, Lisette and Christine, we naturally make a parallel between the two female characters. Though we know Lisette to be flirtatious by nature and uncaring for her husband (she prefers Schumacher to stay in the country while she stays in town as Christine’s maid), Christine’s uncharacteristically taking up with stranger St. Aubin tells us something about her disillusioned conversion from the naive Austrian, unacquainted with the ways of French society (i.e. taking romance seriously), to just another society woman following the rules of the game. Similarly, one would not readily compare Schumacher, the cuckolded gamekeeper, with Jurieau the ridiculous aviator in pursuit of someone else’s wife. But because they never really interact throughout the film, this particular sequence is one of the few instances that allows us to understand why it is that their destinies do come together toward the end of the film (Schumacher ends up shooting Jurieau dead by case of mistaken identity). Unlike the other two men, Schumacher and Jurieau labor under the illusion that they are sincere. They are in effect the only ones that play by the rules, just not the same rules as the others.

Finally, looking at another key sequence where the visual narrator actually takes up another character’s POV (one of a few instances in the film), we are still able to recognize an autonomous gaze with unmistakable insight into the world of the story. Taking up Berthelin’s binoculars with Christine to look at a squirrel on a nearby tree during the hunt, we hear that his instrument is in fact so refined that an observer could “live every detail of the squirrel’s life with it.” As we hear these words, Christine perhaps, magnifies the shiny-eyed squirrel to the point where it is no longer recognizable. Though Christine seems to think nothing of it, we as viewers (courtesy of the narrator’s visual emphasis) are struck by how the small creature’s experience and sensibilities are so alien from our own and how, upon closer scrutiny, all we have done by zooming in is to further distance ourselves from any possibility of understanding the details of that squirrel’s life and habitat. Significantly, it is with these very same binoculars that Christine spies on her husband embracing Geneviève and confirms the adultery that was common knowledge to all but herself. Such focused scrutiny again keeps her from understanding the full context of the situation—that Robert was at that point ending the affair for his wife’s sake—and sets in motion the series of chaotic pairings and elopements at the party.

True to the thesis of narrative in film, the audio-visual narrator chosen by Renoir to mediate between us and the world of The Rules of the Game provides a distinct, perceptive account of the action with noticeable choices in gestures/ manner of looking, subjects of interest, and points of visual emphasis. Unlike Antonioni’s completely alienated, “estranged”[6] visual narrator that deliberately moves counter to the emotions enacted on screen or gives us views that are noticeably incongruous with the tone of the scene, Renoir’s visual-narrator is enough of an outsider from the drama to be bewildered and unable to anticipate character actions and motives—thus supplying the noticeable tension between the action and the picture. Still, the visual narrator is invested enough in the unfolding of the story that he consistently strives to keep the progressively complex and chaotic action under surveillance. The implication is that, regardless of how great the depth of field or how fine the optic focus on a world this large and this complex, one cannot presume to give any real, complete, or accurate account of a world so large and so complex (unless one is working with drama). As in the case of the squirrel, to do so would only create further distortion. Though narrative accounts are the product of one individual’s arbitrary choice of what to show and can be of questionable epistemic focus, tainted by bias, fragmentary, and incomplete, by making us aware of what one is not shown and by assembling choice fragments of specific events as in The Rules of the Game, such narratives do reveal a great deal.

In positing a veritable audio-visual narrator in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, Perez is not contradicting his general theory of film narrative, which, as per the wave-particle duality paradigm of physics, asserts that there is much use in distinguishing between the dual drama and narrative aspects working in film. Rather than thinking of film as being of one primary form or another, or, even worse, of becoming entrenched in the theories of the literary model for film and being forced to posit necessary cinematic narrators for every film, one should recognize that a) such terms are primarily of functional value and should not be taken as actual properties of film, that b) broadening our terms to include drama—showing as means of enacting—and narrative—showing as means of telling (mediating for the film camera)—gives us more insight in talking about film and frees us from the ontological commitment of having to posit invisible, effaced narrators in film[7] where there is clearly no evidence of them. As illustrated in the discussion of The Rules of the Game, whether a particular film has an audio-visual narrator depends on how the film uses a range of narrative strategies specific to film; an audio-visual medium capable of both showing and telling.

Footnotes

[1] Perez, Gilberto. “The Narrative Sequence.” The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998. pp. 50-91, 422-429.

[2] Strictly speaking, the camera does not embody or achieve a “gaze” but rather, “enacts the fiction of a perceiving eye” (75) or imitates a gaze/ point of view with seeming consciousness or perception.

[3] Wilson, George, Le Grand Imagier Steps Out: The Primitive Basis of Film Narration (2006).

[4] Though in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), Bordwell criticizes the need to ascribe a narrator to every film sequence (noted by Perez, p.61) and even gives an “agent-free” account of film narration, he is stuck with his dual endorsement of a version of claim II) *see above.  To deny that films always have narrators would thus be to imply that film narrative is structurally different from other types of narrative (mainly literary narrative), which would contradict his current position.

[5] In D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (1961), Gunning allegedly confuses the implied author with the narrator.

[6] Perez gives an extensive discussion of Antonioni’s work, particularly his film Cronaca di un Amore (1950), which is supposed to be an instance of what Perez calls “estranged vision” or an alienation effect in narration (90-1).

[7] On the grounds that all films are narrative and all mediums of narrative operate like literary narrative.

Natalie Rodriguez (’10) is a Philosophy and Biochemistry major at University of Southern California.