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Philosophy Now ISSUE 117 Dec 16/Jan 17
Philosophy Now, EDITORIAL & NEWS
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Editorial Beyond Physics No More?
L
et’s get meta-physical! Metaphysics is philosophy’s
oldest and most central strand. When Greek
philosophy first kicked off in the port of Miletus on the
coast of Anatolia 2,500 years ago, the biggest question
pondered by the likes of Thales and Anaximander was this:
what is the underlying reality of the universe, beneath the
surface appearances of our everyday world? Thales thought
that everything was, deep down, made of water. Squeeze
something hard enough and juice runs out – see?
Anaximander disagreed; the underlying reality, he said, was an
unobservable element called apeiron. And so Western
philosophy began, with speculations that could not be directly
checked but which might with greater or lesser success explain
those phenomena that we can directly observe. Democritus
(460-370BC) hypothesised that simplicity of explanation could
be combined with the diversity of the observed world if we
assume everything to be made up of arrangements of tiny
indivisible articles he called atoms. Epicurus a century later
agreed but added that rather than just bouncing around in a
mathematically predicatable fashion, sometimes the atoms
swerve unpredictably as they fall through the void – and this
swerve (called a clinamen), by defeating determinism, is the
source of our free will. You can read much more in this issue
about Epicurus and his theories and we have a great cartoon
strip about him too.
Such speculations didn’t have a specific label until
Aristotle’s editors gathered together his notes about them into
a volume they called ‘Metaphysics’, meaning ‘Beyond Physics’,
perhaps because Physics was the title of the previous volume.
Our metaphysics articles in this issue includes a feature on
Bishop Berkeley; so you can find out why he believed in ideas,
but not in matter, and also why he made the surprising claim
that his colourful ideas were a philosophy of common sense.
Berkeley’s idealism is well known, but it’s often forgotten he
too, like Democritus and Epicurus, believed in atoms –
though naturally he had his own unique take on what they
were. The article on Spinoza explores his reasons for thinking
that God and Nature were one and the same – but the author
goes on to argue that in the process, Spinoza gives us valuable
clues as to how to understand some perplexing puzzles in
science today. Nick Inman asks about the nature of human
identity and asks where, exactly, it is located, and Jon David
wonders whether rocks have awareness. And there you see a
sample of the themes that have preoccupied metaphysicians
for centuries.
For a couple of thousand years, metaphysics was such a
central, essential part of philosophy that for many people, it
was the real story. The majority of the great philosophical
4 Philosophy Now  December 2016 / January 2017
theories and debates down the ages were in one way or
another part of metaphysics. Metaphysics is about the deep
structure of the universe, about how things really are, as
opposed to how they look. But this question directly connects
with others which are part of metaphysics too. Does God
exist, and if so, what’s He (or She) like? How many angels can
dance on the head of a pin? How does the mind or soul
connect with the body? Free will is another perennial problem
in metaphysics, and should not be confused with Free Willy,
which was a movie about a whale.
Relatively recently, in the last three centuries or so, the
invention of new scientific instruments has revealed things
about the universe which were previously hidden from our
perceptions by scale or distance. Philosophers used to hypoth-
esise about everything being made of atoms – a recurring
subject of discussion in metaphysics for two thousand years.
Yet over the last one hundred years the structure of atoms has
become very well understood through both theoretical and
experimental physics and we can even take photographs of
them, using powerful electron microscopes. Does this mean
that the whole discussion of atomic theory has moved from
the realm of metaphysics into the realm of physics? If so,
might other discussions in metaphysics follow suit in the
future? The mind-body problem has already done so, if you
believe physicalists like Daniel Dennett, but very much hasn’t
if you agree with dualists like David Chalmers. The jury is
still out on that one, but perhaps there are other metaphysical
questions which can be solved by science. So, might
metaphysics soon become a quaint historical footnote like
alchemy?
Clearly some metaphysical questions – like the existence of
atoms – have indeed crossed into the realm of experimental
science, into a space where they can actually, finally be
answered. But there may be movement in the other direction
too. Some philosophers have recently been scrapping with
scientists like Stephen Hawking about whether the world still
needs philosophy. Hawking claimed that “philosophy is dead”,
as physics now does all the work that philosophy used to do.
Yes, retort philosophy’s defenders – that is because you astro-
physicists have all become amateur metaphysicians yourselves,
theorising about supersymmetric strings and dark energy and
parallel universes and other matters way beyond the reach of
your telescopes! So from that perspective, metaphysics is not
old-fashioned – on the contrary, it is the new black. And as we
stare out into the blackness still seeking answers about the
nature of the cosmos and the place of consciousness within it,
mere labels, such as ‘scientist’ and ‘philosopher’ may come to
seem less important than the questions themselves.
• Peter Singer wins Philosophy Now Award
• Philosophers and the US Election
• Animal Welfare: Good News & Bad News?
News reports by Anja Steinbauer.
Animal Welfare Ups and Downs I
This first of two reports on morally
ambiguous animal welfare developments
concerns male chicks, who owe their short
existences to the breeding industry for egg-
laying hens. Since they don’t have suffi-
cient body mass to justify raising them
commercially for meat, millions of male
chicks are killed every year. This is done by
gassing, suffocation in plastic bags, or
maceration, i.e. being mechanically ground
up, none of which are likely to be painless.
TeraEgg is a new technology which can
examine eggs and sex the foetus through a
non-invasive process known as terahertz
spectroscopy. This will mean that the eggs
containing male fetuses can be destroyed
weeks before hatching occurs. While this
seems a step in the right direction in that it
does reduce animal suffering, animal
welfare supporters have argued that it is a
figleaf masking the bitter reality of
continued animal exploitation.
Animal Welfare Ups and Downs II
Our second piece of contentious animal
welfare news takes us into the world of
animal use for human medical research and
training purposes. Washington University’s
medical school has announced that it will
cease to use cats in medical training after
finding that technological advances in simu-
lators and mannequins mean that they can
now adequately replace live animals. The
anatomy of a cat’s windpipe closely resem-
bles that of a newborn infant, so cats
provided the best training ground for
medical students. Animal welfare activists
had put serious pressure on medical schools
to stop using live animals, causing some
schools to change to technological replicas
before experts deemed them to be viable
alternatives, or to even be secretive about
their continued use of live animals. There is
now a new call for general ethics guidelines
on the use of animals in medical contexts.
Philosophers and the US Election
Philosophers rarely take the plunge into
the mud bath of real-life moral and polit-
ical problems, but many did comment on
the recent US presidential election,
including Brian Leiter, well known for his
widely-read Leiter Reports blog about
academic philosophy. The great majority
of philosophers quoted online opposed the
election of Donald Trump. Prof. Harry
Frankfurt, for instance, called Trump a
master of ‘bullshit’, a form of dishonesty
distinct from lying and characterised by
the speaker’s utter indifference to whether
what they say is true or not. No, Trump is
a pragmatist in the tradition of C.S. Peirce,
said Oxford moral philosopher Daniel
Robinson to Quartz magazine. A tiny
handful of other philosophers also backed
Trump. In an interview posted on his
website, the post-Marxist provocateur
Slavoj Zizek shocked many (maybe that
was the point?) by declaring that he would
have voted for Trump despite being
“horrified at him.” Zizek said: “Listen,
America is still not a dictatorial state; he
will not introduce fascism. But it will be a
kind of big awakening. New political
processes will be set in motion.”
Philosophy Now Award 2016
Won by Peter Singer
The 2016 Philosophy Now Award for Contribu-
tions in the Fight Against Stupidity has been given
to Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer.
Singer was nominated not for his work in
general but for two very specific reasons.
Firstly, for embodying the idea of a practical
philosopher who doesn’t only analyze ethical
problems but who also strives to apply a
Peter Singer
receives the award
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 5
News
Free Discussion vs ‘Safe Spaces’?
Surely universities are bastions of free
speech, where proponents of opposing
opinions on moral, political, philosophical
and social matters can test out the viability
of their views in fierce but reasoned verbal
battle? Increasingly, student unions in the
UK and US declare ‘safe spaces’ and
demand that controversial speakers be ‘no
platformed’. The idea is that the expression
of certain views might make members of
one or other minority group feel unsafe and
should therefore be prevented. This
happened to Iranian secularist and feminist
Maryam Namazie, a well-known intellec-
tual and critic of the position of women in
Islam; her 2015 lecture at Goldsmiths
University was aggressively disrupted with
repeated references to ‘safe spaces’. Most
recently, when one of Britain’s best-known
philosophers, Sir Roger Scruton was invited
to Bristol University the student union tried
to no-platform him due to the fact that
although he defends gay relationships on
the grounds of personal choice, he opposes
gay marriage.
reasoned ethical stance to the difficult deci-
sions that face us all in our everyday lives.
Secondly, in trying to prove that we have
duties to help strangers, his books and argu-
ments have set out to disturb the comfort-
able complacency with which many of us
habitually ignore the desperate needs of
others, and that certainly counts as fighting
stupidity. The Award is particularly for this
work as it relates to the Effective Altruism
movement, an attempt to use research and
comparative analysis to organize the chari-
table efforts of people in the directions in
which it will do the most good.
The (transatlantic) award ceremony was
held at London’s Conway Hall on 31 October.
After a brief acceptance speech via video by
Peter Singer, Samuel Hilton spoke to the audi-
ence about the Effective Altruism movement
inspired by Singer’s work. The 2014 Award was
given to Noam Chomsky and last year’s award
went to children’s author Cressida Cowell.
Realities
Berkeley’s Suitcase
Hugh Hunter unpacks the sources of Berkeley’s idealism.
Y
ou will be familiar, in these days of inelegant travel,
with the exercise of trying to fit everything you might
plausibly need into a very small suitcase. It sometimes
happens that there is one thing which frustrates the
process, an object with awkward contours that ensure it cannot
be packed along with the other necessities. It is of some value
to identify the troublesome object. Would it not be a small tri-
umph if you not only identified it, but realized that you didn’t
need it after all?
It was a similar realization in the realm of metaphysics that
led the young unpublished George Berkeley (1685-1753) to
breathlessly write in his private philosophical journal, “I won-
der not at my sagacity in discovering the obvious tho’ amazing
truth, I rather wonder at my stupid inadvertency in not finding
it out before. ‘tis no witchcraft to see.” (Notebooks, in The Works
of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne eds A.A. Luce, T.E. Jessop,
n.279.) Berkeley had been trying to fit together a number of
beliefs, and he found that he could not do it. Then, in a single
insight, he saw that one belief frustrated his project, and that
he could do without it.
The problem lay in fitting together a belief in perception by
means of ideas in immaterial minds, a belief in atoms, a trust in
common sense, and a belief in matter. It was the last belief
Berkeley suddenly recognized that he had never needed and
that by discarding it he could make the others fit together.
This freed him from a double puzzle of being isolated from
the physical world in two separate, if related, ways.
Travelling The Perilous Way of Ideas
Let us begin with the sort of isolation caused by a belief in
material things plus a belief in ideas.
Looking back on early modern philosophy [that is, from the
early seventeenth century on], Thomas Reid (1710-96)
observed that his predecessors had followed the ‘way of ideas’.
In this observation he was certainly correct. The reason was
that early modern philosophers could see no way for material
bodies to be present in immaterial minds: how could a material
tree be in the mind of a man? Instead there must be some
intermediate entity, an idea. Ideas tie together the material
world of bodies and the immaterial plane of minds, for ideas
can represent bodies but are present in minds. Some interac-
tion between someone’s sense organs and the tree causes the
idea to come into being with properties so as to represent the
tree, enabling the person to perceive it.
There was, of course, a great deal of dispute as to how ideas
ought to be understood. Antoine Arnauld (1612-94) thought
of ideas as aspects of the act of perception. Berkeley found this
view implausible. It seemed to him that a more robust under-
standing of ideas was needed, and he found it in the works of
Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) and John Locke (1632-
1704). Both men took ideas to be not the perceptual acts
themselves. With this Berkeley was in full agreement: what-
6 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
ever it is that we have in mind, it cannot be a material tree, nor
is anything clarified by saying that we have in mind an aspect
of the act of perceiving a tree. Rather, ideas must be entities
such that (a) we may have them in mind, and (b) they convey to
us the properties we associate with trees.
But consider now how this view isolates us, the perceivers.
Take the case of colours. Since the early modern period it has
been widely thought that colours are not in bodies. Instead,
colours are the result of interactions between the surface prop-
erties of bodies and our sensory organs; and the same is true of
smells, tastes, and sounds. As Galileo wrote in 1623, “I think
that tastes, odors, colours, and so on are no more than mere
names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned,
and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the liv-
ing creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped
away and annihilated” (The Assayer, p.274). Following the way
of ideas, then, colours and other sensations are features of
ideas, not of bodies. The world of our experience is a carnival
of smells and tastes and sounds and colour, but we carry it
about in our minds through a reality that is in itself silent, dark,
flavourless. That is what I mean when I say that the way of
ideas leads the perceiver into isolation.
Moreover, this isolated state of man invites the sceptic to
ask: How can you be sure that every property of ideas is not like
colours, and just in the mind? How can you be sure there really
is a material world at all? On this point the sceptic Pierre Bayle
joked in his philosophical Dictionaire Historique et Critique
(1697) that the way of ideas had produced a stronger sceptical
challenge than was known even in antiquity.
“Today the new philosophy takes a stronger line [than classical
Pyrrhonian skepticism]: heat, smell, colours, etc, are not in the
objects of our senses; these are modifications of my soul; I know that
bodies are not those that appear to me. Some wanted to exclude
extension and movement, but it wasn’t possible, for if the objects of
sense seem coloured to us, or hot, cold, or odorous, while they are
not these things, why can’t they seem extended and figured, at rest
and in motion, while being none of these?” (My translation.)
Bayle wrote toward the end of the seventeenth century, and
even then his argument was hardly new. The father of early
modern philosophy, René Descartes (1596-1650), had consid-
ered the question of the trustworthiness, or not, of our percep-
tion of an external world as the very origin of his philosophy,
and the power of the sceptical threat can be seen in just how far
that great man and his successors were from answering it. In the
end, Descartes argued that it would be inconsistent with the
goodness of God for Him to deceive us by presenting us with
ideas of a material world with no material world corresponding
to them. The empiricist Locke argued that a certain “sensitive
knowledge” answered scepticism – this being knowledge “of the
existence of particular external objects, [gained] by that percep-

George Berkeley
by Darren McAndrew 2016
tion and consciousness we have of the actual entrance of ideas
from them” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.2.12,
1689). Malebranche appealed to Scripture: God is said to have
created heaven and earth, after all.
These arguments are all, and in the same way, question-beg-
ging. The sceptic’s question is whether ideas do in fact reveal a
material world. To say that God would be a deceiver if they did-
n’t, or that our awareness of ideas goes even a whit toward show-
ing that they do, is to assume what is to be established. And in
order to deflate Malebranche’s reply, the sceptic need only ask,
Realities
Does Scripture say that God created a material heaven and earth?
The sceptic shows how deep the isolation of early modern
man is with regard to bodies and his perception of them. It is
here the conflict arises with Berkeley’s trust in common sense.
He wrote:
“Upon the common principles of philosophers, we are not assured
of the existence of things from their being perceived. And we are
taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under
our senses. Hence arise scepticism and paradoxes. It is not enough,
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 7
Realities
that we see and feel, that we taste and smell a thing. Its true nature,
its absolute external entity, is still concealed. For, though it be the
fiction of our own brain, we have made it inaccessible to all our fac-
ulties. Sense is fallacious, reason defective. We spend our lives in
doubting of those things which other men evidently know, and
believing those things which they laugh at, and despise.”
(Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, Preface, 1713.)
Berkeley’s closing words express his own sympathies with
common sense. It does seem to him both laughable and con-
temptible to suppose that the real world cannot be known
through the rich world of experience.
It is important to note here that an appeal to common sense is
not an appeal to everything that is common. There are many
people who do not understand Shakespeare, but so much the
worse for them. Nor is it the claim that any belief that’s held by
virtually everybody is therefore true. It is rather the claim that
there are things that people cannot help but knowing (which is
why they are common), and that this inescapable knowledge
should bear some weight in our philosophical reflection. And
two things that we cannot help knowing, according to Berkeley,
are that we directly perceive bodies, and that we see them as they
are. The way of ideas leaves us isolated, when common sense
tells us that we are crowded about with readily accessible things.
Atomic Confusion
The second type of isolation of perceivers from the material
world is caused by a belief in material atoms. Already by the mid-
dle of the seventeenth century it was observed that, “All the
Learnedest Philosophers have acknowledged that there are such
Atomes, not to speak of Empedocles, Democritus, Epicurus… And
Galen makes mention of them… And indeed every where
amongst Philosophers and Physitians both Ancient and Modern,
mention is made of these little Bodikies or Atomes, that I won-
der the Doctrine of Atomes should be traduced as a Novelty.”
(Daniel Sennert, Epitome Philosophiae Naturalis, 1618). These ‘lit-
tle bodikies’ about which everyone was talking, were understood
to be tiny, indivisible fragments of matter. Tables and chairs, our
bodies and animal bodies, all these are just assemblages, or as
contemporary philosophers tended to think of them, mecha-
nisms, made up ultimately of material atoms. In Berkeley’s time,
the English called this view ‘corpuscularianism’.
By the time Berkeley was writing, atomism had lost none of
its appeal. That is because, as the distinctive philosophy of the
early modern period grew in confidence, so too it grew confi-
dent of its judgment of the medieval period as obscurantist,
authoritarian, and confused. To do without atoms seemed to
risk a return to a medieval Aristotelian account, in which living
bodies were understood as more primary than their parts, since
on that view organisms consisted of indeterminate matter tak-
ing the determinate forms of the organisms. Much better,
thought Berkeley’s contemporaries, to have determinate matter
– atoms – producing all other kinds of entities through their
arrangements. Then, instead of a multiplication of kinds of
explanations of things (cat kinds, tree kinds, kinds of humans)
as the Aristotelian account required, the early modern intellec-
tual project became one of reducing explanations to combina-
tions of a few basic atomic kinds.
8 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
So appealing was the atomic picture that philosophers were
willing to struggle to make sense of atoms’ most puzzling prop-
erty: indivisibility. It was crucial that atoms be indivisible, for if
they were not, their changes must be explained by some even
more basic kinds. Locke thought it might be a brute fact that the
smallest things are indivisible. But why should they be? If they
take up space, why could God not separate their left and right
halves? And if some things have this brute property of indivisi-
bility, why must they be small, as all early moderns, including
Locke, supposed? Faced with this question, Democritus, one of
the ancient Greek originators of the idea of atoms, admitted that
there might be atoms as big as houses. And early modern man is
again isolated by atomism, because all that he knows or under-
stands is vastly larger than the scale on which the workings of
the world proceed. Once more, early modern man is like a Chi-
nese emperor who is born, lives, and dies in a Forbidden City of
the mind. What happens beyond its walls he does not know. As
David Hume (1711-1776) wrote in another context:
“We learn from anatomy, that the immediate object of power in vol-
untary motion, is not the member itself which is moved, but certain
muscles, and nerves, and animal spirits, and, perhaps, something still
more minute and more unknown, through which the motion is suc-
cessively propagated, ere it reach the member itself whose motion is
the immediate object of volition. Can there be a more certain proof,
that the power, by which this whole operation is performed, so far
from being directly and fully known by an inward sentiment or con-
sciousness is, to the last degree, mysterious and unintelligible?”
(An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 7.1, 1748.)
This mystery and unintelligibility, let us note, is in our own
bodies. But these are the bodies that are closest to us. Early
modern philosophy hoped to explain all bodily changes as vari-
ations of atomic motions. But even if such an explanation could
be given (and that still seems as unlikely today as it did in
Berkeley’s day), it would not free man from his walled citadel
anymore than an Emperor walks among his people because his
economic advisor explains their condition to him.
Another way to put the puzzle is this. If changes in bodies
are produced at the level of atomic motion, then the bodies
themselves seem to be reduced to a secondary explanatory
state. Material bodies are like political bodies in this sense: we
may generalize about the actions of some political party, but
we recognize that the party itself is really an amalgam of many
individuals, and that to generalize about them all is to say
something that will not do justice to any one of them.
Locke was duly troubled. He wondered whether it is consis-
tent with the goodness of God that He reserved for Himself the
true atomic knowledge of things, and gave us only the sort of
knowledge we get from our senses. Locke concludes that
although “a man with microscopical eyes” might see things
more truly, he would see things less usefully, for with our every-
day vision we can discern things on the scale which is necessary
for us to live our lives (see his Essay 2.18.12). Our creator had to
choose on our behalf between the true and the useful, and He
chose the second. This is not very satisfying justification for
God’s activities – theodicy – for surely God Himself sees both
the small and the large together; but Locke does not consider

why God did not make us so as to see that way too. As we will
shortly appreciate, Berkeley’s suggestion is that God created us
in precisely this fashion.
The Doubts & Beliefs of Bishop Berkeley
I hope it’s become clear why the recognition that there were
problems to be solved was something for which Berkeley took
no credit. Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Malebranche, Locke, and
(eventually) Hume all noticed many of the same things. Dou-
ble isolation, on account of both his means of perception and
the scale of his perception, is the sad lot of early modern man.
But Berkeley’s insight was that this depressing picture hung on
a single shaky nail: the belief in matter.
Consider first the isolation brought on by following the way
of ideas. The suggestion that bodies (things that cannot be in
minds) must be perceived indirectly by means of ideas (things
that can be in minds) hinges on the belief that bodies cannot be
in minds. Now, the reason for thinking that bodies cannot be in
minds is that bodies are supposed to be of a nature incompatible
with being in a mind: they are material. But if their materiality is
put in doubt, there would be no reason to think that bodies can-
not be in minds. And then the first sort of isolation would be
unnecessary: man could directly perceive the world he inhabits.
Doubting that there are material bodies does not entail
doubting that there are bodies. It is rather a question of reevalu-
ating the status of ideas. For most early modern philosophers,
ideas are intermediaries which bring us information about
material things. But perhaps this is like one of those fairy tales
where the messenger is really the prince in disguise; and as in
the tale, once the onlookers know, they can clearly discern the
princely features that had been there all along, for the ideas
that were considered mere intermediaries have all the features
of the bodies we always supposed they represented. All the
colours and smells and sounds and tastes which early modern
philosophy had banished to the mind are as common sense
have always supposed they are – characteristics of the thing
itself. We can therefore state Berkeley’s suggestion that ideas
are bodies in the sense that a combination of shape, colour, smell,
taste and so on is a cake, and another combination is an apple.
What Berkeley discovered is that doubting the existence of
material bodies actually removes a great many other doubts.
And so what seemed to Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke a
sceptical attack, is to Berkeley merely a purgative. Of course our
ideas do not point to anything beyond themselves, any more
than bodies point to anything beyond themselves! Or in Philo-
nous’ final words in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues, “the same prin-
ciples which at first view lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain
point, bring men back to common sense.” We find ourselves
once again believing what Berkeley was so ashamed to doubt –
that the world is rich with colours, odours, sounds and tastes.
Without matter, the second isolation, which is brought
about by scale, can also be resolved. Bodies are made of ideas;
but on Berkeley’s account, the ideas are composed of atoms.
Consider what you see before you. Berkeley’s argument is that
if you choose an object and narrow your vision, and then
repeat this process, you will soon encounter a limit beyond
which you cannot gain any more clarity. You have reached a
sensory minimum. The sensory minimum is Berkeley’s atom.
Realities
Berkeley redefines the atom, then. On this view, God has
given us simultaneously micro- and macroscopical eyes, inso-
far as perception reveals large-scale bodies, and simultane-
ously (though we may have to narrow our attention), their
sensory minima. So his redefinition is just what Locke implic-
itly takes to be impossible even for a good God to create.
Berkeley’s account also provides an elegant answer to the
question of why atoms are indivisible. They are indivisible
because they are atoms of sensation; so a limit on their divisibil-
ity is also a limit on what can be sensed by us. Another conse-
quence of this approach is that research into atoms is likely to
be restricted to those fields which study sensory phenomena,
for example optics. And although ideas are composed of sen-
sory atoms, there seems to be no reason to look to the atoms
rather than to complex ideas for explanations. In other words,
the truth about the body of a cat is as likely to lie at the
macro- as at the micro-level of perception. This is a conse-
quence of occupying the divine adjustable point of view
Berkeley opens up to us. And so Berkeley has supplied us with
the tiny, indivisible composing parts of bodies, and can also
give bodies a sort of explanatory priority without following
the path back to Aristotelianism.
Berkeley Being Realistic
With the need for material atoms or material bodies removed,
the double isolation that so troubled Berkeley and early mod-
ern philosophy is removed. On this view the true natures of
bodies, along with their atomic structures, are completely
manifest to us in perception. It is in this sense that Berkeley
can rightly be called a direct realist.
We can also see why Berkeley’s reaction to his discovery was
humility, remarking that the wonder was that he had not seen
it sooner. Berkeley understands his role as that of the boy who
first saw the emperor as naked. As in the story, pretension is
punctured, but this merely enables daily life to go on as before.
“The Philosophers lose their Matter... as for bodies &c we
have them still” (Notebooks, n.391). Descartes recommended to
his readers a process of meditation that would provide their
beliefs with a fresh firm foundation. The Berkeleian medita-
tion could hardly be more different. The meditator discovers
how unshakeable are the foundations of the beliefs he gained
at mother’s knee. Nothing changes: “the horse is in the stable,
the Books are in the study as before” (Ibid. n.429).
But a very great deal is changed, the physicist and the math-
ematician might object. Are all of our fruitful theories con-
cerning unobserved particles about nothing at all? What of our
mathematical models of material objects? These are good
questions, to which there are, I believe, good Berkeleian
replies, according to which mathematics and science are
understood as instruments for the dissection of the world of
perception. But that discussion will have to wait. Let me just
respond now with a Berkeleian question: Which is more cer-
tain, that the table is a cloud of atoms and has some indepen-
dent mathematical shape, or that is it solid, brown, scratched,
and smelling faintly of varnished wood?
© HUGH HUNTER 2016
Hugh Hunter lives in Ottawa, where he teaches philosophy at the
Dominican University College. Please visit jhughhunter.com
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 9
Realities
Nowhere Men
Nick Inman wants to know where you’re at.
A
re you ready for the ultimate trick question? Here it
is: Am I me, and are you? That is: do I and you exist?
Only a yes/no answer is allowed. It wouldn’t be good
philosophy to say that you ‘sort of’ exist, nor that
you are a working assumption pending further investigation. It
is also essential that we don’t just wriggle out of this question
by playing with words and definitions.
The easiest way forward would be to defer to the great minds
that have been wrestling with this problem over the last few
decades. Consensus among them, reached by reasoning based on
the evidence of brain science, is steadily hardening. I’m going to
attempt to show why this consensus is not only wrong – because
it is based on a dodgy premise – but dangerously misguided.
The Materialist Orthodoxy
Many contemporary philosophers begin by ruling out the
question ‘Who are you?’ as only of interest to an anthropolo-
gist: ‘who’ defines a person by his relationship to other people
– it doesn’t shed any light on human nature. The crunch ques-
tion, which is the only one a physical scientist would allow, is
‘What am I?’
Now we’re dealing with stuff. What else is there to deal
with? If everything that exists is stuff – matter – then it is obvi-
ous that if I am, I must be something too. It would also help to
say where I am because, as Eccles in The Goon Show put it,
“Everybody’s got to be somewhere.”
Well, there’s only one place I can be. Whatever my self is, it
must be me the animal, the biological organism, or part thereof.
So I am inseparable from my body: I move around with it, I rely
on it for input and output. When my body dies I will disappear.
The search for me can be narrowed down further. Although
I have a foot, I would not say that I am a foot. Rather, the part
of me that perceives and thinks is behind my eyes. “Logically,”
says neurobiologist Dick Swaab, “you are your brain” (We Are
Our Brains, 2014).
End of mystery. I am found and explained. All that is left is
to sort out the neuroscience of why I feel who I feel. I may still
believe that there’s more to me than one and a half kilos of elec-
trically active meat – that my rich inner life is more than bio-
logical. I dream, I create, I engage in abstract thought. Above
all, unlike any other species I know of, I am self-conscious and
able to tell another being about myself. There must be some-
thing more going on, surely?
Not necessarily. Experiments with computers have shown
that if you start with simple building materials (basically, stuff
capable of binary logic functions) arrange them into complex
patterns, then pile complexity on complexity and let the sys-
tem run by itself, adding to its knowledge by learning, then
you can get extraordinary manifestations of artificial intelli-
gence that can fool an observer into thinking it’s conscious.
The resultant ‘being’ appears uncanny, as if it must have been
instituted by a supernatural creator. But not at all: reverse the
10 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
procedure by stripping the complexity down into its compo-
nents, and you will see that there’s no deus ex machina involved.
The whole was only ever a sum of its parts, even if it seemed to
our minds to acquire a quality of being more than that.
It’s the same with the brain, the materialists argue. Really
complex complexity can even convince itself (ie, me) that it is
someone, a self, an entity which feels real and substantial and
of intrinsic worth. Yet my innermost self is not a ‘pearl’ – an
enduring thing of substance – but a bundle of properties that
temporarily come together to make a person. Whatever my
beliefs about God and the soul, I am nothing more than a (per-
haps gloriously deluded) biological automaton. Daniel Dennett
has described the self as a ‘Center of Narrative Gravity’, by
which he means that I am no different to a fictional character
which I and the world make up, and that my sense of self is
similar to my centre of gravity: I have to have one, although I
can’t locate it precisely. However, I wouldn’t be able to func-
tion if I knew that I was merely a coalition of my members, so
nature pulls a confidence trick. In effect, it lies to me through
my brain. In order to live well in society and to be motivated in
pursuit of its own interests, the organism needs to have the
illusion of separateness, autonomy, and significance. Therefore,
I need to believe in a self that is substantial, coherent and sus-
tainable; above all, a self which matters. That I only think I
exist has been called the ‘self illusion’ by Bruce Hood (in The
Self Illusion: Why There is No ‘You’ Inside Your Head, 2012).
When this is understood, I can begin to see myself in an
entirely different way: I am better thought of as not a noun but
a verb. What I call my ‘self’ is really my brain ‘braining’.
An intellectual consensus is coalescing around this materialist
(or physicalist) view. Many of our greatest contemporary thinkers
are quite happy to announce in public, without any irony, that
they do not really exist. It has almost become a badge of macho
pride (they’re mostly men, as it happens). It is as if we are in the
grip of a new fashion for personal nihilism. The theme around the
year 1000 AD was the end of the world; in the twenty-first century
we have gone one better and declared the end of ourselves.
I Confess To Heresy
It is not respectable any more to speak up for dualism, the notion
that there are two kinds of stuff, the material and the immaterial,
body and mind. But I would like to point out that the materialist’s
argument as I have set it out above does not run smoothly from
premise to conclusion, and that dualism is not just a theoretical
possibility. It is quite literally inescapable. You are living proof.
Half of me does not exist; or at least, I cannot prove to you
that it exists – isn’t that the same thing? And I assume it’s the
same for you. I can give you independent confirmation of my
name, occupation, address, passport number; but I find it hard,
if not impossible, to convey to your senses anything about what
I think of as the real me – the invisible, intangible, internal sen-
sations of which only I am aware, and which are wholly beyond
PLEASE VISIT WWW.STEVELILLIE.BIZ
NOWHERE MEN ILLUSTRATION © STEVE LILLIE 2016
words and demonstration.
The point I’m making is that the materialist argument as set
out above only works in as far as we must speak objectively
about the universe, and specifically, about human beings,
including when you speak about someone else. You, to me, are
an object like any other physical thing. I have no direct access
to what goes on in your mind. From outside it is quite clear to
me that you are an animal, and that everything about you can
be expressed in terms of zoology. If you say you are a con-
scious, thinking being, I may give you the benefit of the doubt,
but I am not going to accept it as demonstrated fact in the same
way that I know your hand can hold things.
However, if I turn my attention inward, everything changes.
Unlike all the phenomenon I have experienced through my
senses (including reading about them), I have certain unusual
properties:
• I am the only substance in the universe of which I have inti-
mate direct knowledge.
• I am the only substance I can experience that I cannot exam-
Realities
ine objectively, in the sense of carrying out an experiment free
of bias and error.
• I am experienced differently from the outside and the inside,
with no join between the two perspectives.
• I am the only possible expert on this aspect of myself.
• I am unique. For all I know, I may not even be like you.
I literally cannot put my finger on myself. I don’t have mass
or volume. I am not solid, liquid, gas, or even another kind of
physical substance. Some may think I am merely my brain
braining, and so conclude that my believing in my conscious
self is an ‘ego trick’, but I have good reason to believe that my
doing so is not a trick: I am proof to myself (but not to you)
that there is more to me than matter. I know it, because I am
it. This is more than “I think, therefore I am.” Trite as this
may sound, I know I am because I am.
The Nothing Beyond Words
I immediately crash into an insurmountable problem in talking
about this to you. How do I describe this self that I know to
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 11
Realities
exist? What word can I use for such a ‘non-thing’ which is not
‘nothing’? ‘Something’ and ‘substance’ will probably only mis-
lead you. To call me ‘sensation’ may make you assume that my
being is reducible to what can be sensed, and then you will fall
into line with David Hume, who wrote, “when I enter most
intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some
particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade,
love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any
time without a perception, and never can observe anything but
the perception” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part 4,
Section 6, 1738) – and so denied the existence of the self. To
call myself a ‘concept’ would assume that I am an abstract phe-
nomenon, a construct even. In order not to mislead ourselves,
perhaps we’d do better to adopt a symbol which has no defini-
tion or potential mistranslation: it stands for what it stands for.
If language is one trap we continually fall into when dis-
cussing human identity, another is false analogy. It is, for exam-
ple, erroneous to suppose that a brain is a glorified input-output
computer running a program supplied by an organism’s DNA.
The organic is radically different from the inorganic, and fur-
thermore human awareness and thought, as far as we can tell,
are radically different from anything else in organic nature.
So what am I, this ‘symbol that was formerly known as Nick
Inman’? I am a meaning-maker. The meaning that I apply to
the universe comes from me, even the meaning that I allocate
to logic, reason, and the evidence gained through the senses.
Without me nothing means anything, or to put it another way,
without this immaterial sensation of awareness I have, the uni-
verse might as well not exist. It is gobbledygook to talk, for
instance, about the laws of science as separate from the con-
scious creatures who codified them. One easy illustration of
this idea is to look at any object, remove its name and forget
everything else you remember about it: what is left has no
meaning. Anyone who doubts this must imagine an undiscov-
ered, uninhabited planet somewhere in the cosmos on which
meaning exists independent of thought. How? And how would
we ever know? We would need to imagine that such a world is
verified by a computer not build by human beings, and that
does not report its findings back to anyone.
You Need To Know Yourself To Know Anything Else
Scientists and philosophers, including the most eminent, fre-
quently gloss over an unjustified assumption: that they, the per-
son reporting their results to us, are an objective instrument. But
however much I may claim to be peddling objective truths, ulti-
mately, what I am doing is reporting my subjective experiences.
A few years ago, the British philosopher Galen Strawson
wrote a long, erudite piece for the London Review of Books (26
September 2013) which began: “I’m a naturalist, an out-and-
out naturalist, a philosophical or metaphysical naturalist, a nat-
uralist about concrete reality. I don’t think anything supernat-
ural or otherwise non-natural exists.” I tried to read his argu-
ments but I got lost on the first half of the first word. Anyone
who is going to make confident statements about the nature of
reality should first define him- or herself.
The entire project of human knowledge is back to front. The
ambition of science is to explain the universe, which means get-
ting around to explaining human consciousness whenever feasi-
12 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
ble. But without starting from the fact of consciousness, explain-
ing anything is like drawing conclusions from the results pro-
duced by an uncalibrated machine, or, if we are to be brutally
honest, using an optical instrument of mysterious hidden work-
ings to examine itself. For an immaterial entity to insist that all
must be matter, then the self must be matter; and so, since the
so-called ‘self’ has none of the properties of matter, it does not
exist. This is about irrational as you can get. I exist. Moreover, it
is only logical for me, an immaterial presence, to suppose that I
am not alone. There must be more immateriality in the uni-
verse. You, for instance, behind your eyes and beyond whatever
words you say, if you exist, must be immaterial like me.
The Pay-Off For Not Existing
So why do so many very intelligent, well-educated people in
high-status academic positions claim the opposite? I can only
suppose there is a pay off for the ‘Nowhere Men’ that makes
them hurry through the premises of their argument – includ-
ing the dodgy ideas that the world is only what exists objec-
tively, or in other words, that there is only material stuff – to
get to the conclusion of their non-existence.
There are several important victories to be gained by deny-
ing your own existence if you are a modern philosopher or sci-
entist. Some of them are to do with shying away from the fear
of not knowing and the unknowable. The most prominent of
these is that it gets around the thorny problem of conscious-
ness, releasing science from an impossible bind, since if con-
sciousness is ‘merely the brain functioning’, we don’t need to
consider an immaterial aspect to the universe. We also don’t
need to talk anymore about the mind, or the spirit or soul.
This delivers a knock-out blow to religion, which now
becomes a form of culture akin to art: indulge if you want to,
but don’t claim to be making a contribution to knowledge. At
the same time, any objection to materialism is pre-empted:
altered states – dreams, drugs, meditation, visions, and what
are merely called ‘mental’ illnesses – can be accounted for in
purely materialist terms, that is, in purely neuroscientific
terms. The emotions are downgraded, love now being defined
as one brain process communicating with another brain
process. Moreover, all competing views of reality, and all
‘weirdnesses’, such as complementary medicine and true self-
sacrifice (as opposed to the bowdlerized versions of altruism
accepted by neoDarwinists) are ruled absurd. Intuition, and
personal mystical knowledge are automatically derided. With
all the alternatives out of the way, the Nowhere Men can now
stake a monopoly on truth. Evidence becomes everything.
Eventually there will be nothing that does not fit into a model
or formula. If man is nothing but a mechanical animal, all his
affairs become predictable and calculable. Political affairs will
be judged by science, as will be ethics.
An even bigger prize would be to finally end the argument
concerning whether humans are special or not. The material-
ists would rather make us subhuman than superhuman. If the
self is illusory, if there is only biology, then the human being is
just an animal. This gets us off a really painful hook: our moral
responsibility to other species and the planet. More insidiously,
to deny the human mind and the complementary moral
responsibility of free will is, perhaps unconsciously (if you will

forgive the pun) to promote the modern project of rampant,
selfish, immoral consumerism. The modern values of
ephemerality and you-only-get-one-life-so-you-may-as-well-
do-what-you-want hedonism are triumphant.
So this kind of thinking has a very distasteful endgame,
which can play out in two different ways. One way is that
because we are nothing special, in fact don’t even really exist, it
doesn’t really matter what happens to us, or what we do to the
world. Who cares which dystopia we end up with when there
is no ‘we’ to live with its effects? The other way forward is,
that if we trust in science completely it will take over the role
of development once allocated to God, and ensure that we
evolve into successful sentient robots. Key to the modern
notion of progress is a belief that technology can and will solve
all problems. More than that, it will improve us. And if the self
is no more than the output of the machine – if consciousness is
just a sequence of brain code a bit more sophisticated than
Microsoft Office – it follows without any insuperable moral or
other difficulties that to upload a human being to something
better than a human body, is a desirable end.
Negating The Self-Negation
I suspect that many of the Nowhere Men see the absurdity of
the position they have chosen, although they don’t know how
to get out of it. Significantly, when David Hume absented
himself from existence, he left a door of hope open behind
him: “If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection,
thinks he has a different notion of himself… he may be in the
right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this
particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and
continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is
no such principle in me.”
If we are to paddle our way out of the whirlpool of oblivion
to which the materialists would apparently consign us, we must
start by accepting that we are subjective creatures, and that
reductionism in the case of consciousness only leads to misun-
derstanding. If you think you are observing reality objectively,
not subjectively, you should not forget that you are in it, way
above your neck.
We shouldn’t place all our trust only in branches of human
knowledge prefixed ‘neuro’. To do so takes us into an endless
loop of the human self exorcising the human self. On the con-
trary, quantum physics suggests that we must allow there to be
different levels of explanation to any given phenomena and
that sometimes you just have to accept apparent strangeness
for what it is. So could I be both a ‘pearl of self’ and a ‘bundle
of perceptions’, depending on which direction I look at myself
from, and at which moment?
True intellectual courage lies not in declaring yourself pub-
lically to be nothing, and your person a mere animal brain
whirring away in the service of genes. It consists in accepting
that you are something more than that, even if you can’t say
exactly what.
© NICK INMAN 2016
Nick Inman’s most recent book is A Guide To Mystical France:
Secrets, Mysteries, Sacred Sites, published by Findhorn Press. He is
also the author of Who On Earth Are You?, which began as a letter
to his bank apologizing for not being able to confirm his true identity.
Philosophical Haiku
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
(1770–1831)
Unfolding Reason
As Mind seeks to know itself
Freedom is Rational.
H
egel’s philosophical influence is out of all proportion to the
actual value of his work, which just goes to show that writing a
great deal of impenetrable prose can get you a long way.
As a young man, Hegel was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the
French Revolution. Disillusioned by the failure of the revolution, Hegel
determined to signal his profound sadness by never again writing in a
way anyone could understand (okay, I’m speculating here, but there
has to be some reason for his incomprehensible style).
History, Hegel taught, is the unfolding of the ‘Absolute Idea’ or ‘World
Spirit/Mind’. Through a series of contradictions in social structures,
Reason gradually but inevitably works itself out as human history, so
that “the history of the world is none other than the progress of the
consciousness of freedom.” With me so far? Hegel believed that by fol-
lowing his thinking we would one day come to know the world as it
really is. This moment, in turn, would represent the historically transcen-
dental stage when Mind – the active force driving history along – comes
to know itself. Only now would we live in perfect freedom. Freedom, in
other words, is attained by living rationally in a rationally ordered politi-
cal state, which means living in accordance with Mind. . . To sum up, if
you choose not to live in accordance with Reason, you are living irra-
tionally, and History will simply flatten you as it rolls on by. Hegel also
modestly believed that he had discerned the underlying structure of
reality, which is the Idea as manifest across space. Our minds are simply
part of Mind working itself out through time and space. As part of his
self-contained, self-referential philosophical system, he also has a lot to
say about politics, logic, religion, art and more besides.
As today, people in the Nineteenth Century loved this kind of thing,
and crowds flocked to hear Hegel speak. He was, alas, stopped dead in
his historical tracks in 1831 by cholera. Perhaps this was History’s way
of flattening an irritating, if not irrational, philosopher.
© TERENCE GREEN 2016
Terence is a peripatetic (though not Peripatetic) writer, historian and
lecturer. He holds a PhD in the history of political thought from
Columbia University, NYC, and lives with his wife and their dog in
Wellington, NZ. He blogs at hardlysurprised.blogspot.co.nz
(For more about the immortal Hegel see p.56 and future issues...)
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 13
Realities
The Private Lives Of Rocks
Jon David thinks about the view that everything has awareness.
D
o rocks have minds? A minority of modern philoso-
phers are prepared (but only, perhaps, after some
prodding) to admit they believe the answer is ‘yes’
– or at least, ‘sort of’. In the past decade, a number
of bona fide academics, such as Australia’s Freya Mathews, the
USA’s David Skrbina, and the UK’s Galen Strawson, have
emerged as champions of panpsychism: the view that not only
rocks, but everything in the universe is – in some sense, and to
some extent – conscious.
The Roots of Universal Consciousness
The idea that inanimate objects have some kind of conscious-
ness isn’t entirely new. Alfred North Whitehead promoted it
early in the Twentieth Century. Going even further back, early
societies apparently believed that the natural world is popu-
lated by intelligent spirits who could control the environment
– think of the naiads and driads of Greek myth, for example.
By the historical period, such animism was on the wane – but
it wasn’t dead. In the Sixth Century BCE, the earliest recorded
Greek philosopher, Thales, famously wrote “All things are full
of gods.” Aristotle reported that Thales said this because he
noticed that a certain kind of rock, lodestone, has a mysterious
power of attracting iron. So individual gods dwelt in the individ-
ual lodestones, and were able to reach out and drag iron nails
towards them. If such spirits lived in magnetic rocks, Thales
reasoned, why shouldn’t they also inhabit other objects?
It didn’t stop with Thales. Plato, writing in the Fourth Cen-
tury BCE, believed that the universe as a whole was a conscious,
living entity, with an anima mundi or ‘world soul’ (anima is Latin
for ‘soul’, and later writers used it to translate the Greek word
Plato used, psyche, which can mean either ‘soul’ or ‘mind’). Plato’s
mystically-inclined later followers, the Neoplatonists, went even
further. In the third century CE, one of them, Plotinus, claimed
14 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
to have experienced union with the anima mundi through ecsta-
tic meditation. Another Neoplatonist, Iamblichus, believed not
only that the universe was conscious, but that it was packed with
spirits along the lines of The Tempest’s Ariel, who could, through
appropriate rites, be called upon to do our bidding – including
by animating (literally ‘ensouling’) stone statues.
The Christian church tried to stamp out such flagrant
paganism, but it was never entirely successful, and by the Six-
teenth Century the Renaissance’s interest in ancient spirituality
was all over Europe. For instance, the alchemist Paracelsus,
along with originating the bacterial theory of disease, believed
that the elements of earth, air, fire and water each had animat-
ing spirits, ‘elementals’, who could be invoked for magic ritu-
als. In the case of earth – and for our purpose, rocks – the ele-
mentals are gnomes. Meanwhile, the Hermetic philosopher
Giordano Bruno claimed “there is nothing that does not pos-
sess a soul.” Even the comparatively level-headed English nat-
ural philosopher William Gilbert, in his treatise On the Magnet
(1600), argued that magnets had souls, and that compasses
pointed north because they were attracted by the earth’s soul.
Thales and Plato would have nodded approvingly.
The Matter with Modern Minds
But why would modern philosophers, raised on the type of
view bequeathed by Newton that the universe is essentially a
vast mechanism, ever flirt with the claim that inanimate objects
are conscious? The answer is in the question. The universe-as-
machine metaphor so beloved of early modern scientists
implies that the universe has analysable working parts and that
we can learn to predict its clock-like behaviour. But clocks do
not, most would say, have minds. Yet the universe includes
minds. We know it does, because we have some of them. But
how can our minds possibly be related to the matter that makes
up our machine-like bodies and the rest of this clockwork uni-
verse? How for example can my mind – not my brain, but my
consciousness – move my hand just by thinking?
This problem has haunted philosophers for centuries. The
Eighteenth Century Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley tried
to exorcise it by abolishing the mysterious mind-matter rela-
tion through his audacious claim that there’s no such thing as
matter. There are only minds, and ideas in minds. Allegedly
material objects, such as rocks – or even brains – are really just
ideas in the minds of perceivers looking at them, or in God’s
mind, if there’s no one else looking [see elsewhere this issue for
Berkeley, Ed]. But this mental-only solution to the problem of
mind’s interaction with matter, called idealism, never caught on.
Samuel Johnson certainly wasn’t impressed. “I refute it thus,”
he said, kicking a pebble. In his eyes, he thought he could
prove that the pebble was a chunk of matter by kicking it.
The Twentieth Century English philosopher Gilbert Ryle
went in the opposite direction. He insisted there’s no such
thing as mind, if by ‘mind’ we mean some separate ghostly
entity that inhabits the body until death severs the connection.

Mind, he claimed, is nothing more than the body’s disposition
to react in certain ways to certain stimuli. There is no “ghost
in the machine,” to use Ryle’s own phrase. But this solution,
physicalism, is also hard to swallow. How could we think there’s
no such thing as mind? What would we be thinking it with?
There’s also the question of where mind, or consciousness,
came from. If the rest of the universe is unthinking, unfeeling
matter, then what happened to give our ancestors their spark
of awareness? Some people might be content to say that the
fact mind and matter interact, and the fact there are minds at
all in an otherwise material universe, are miracles, and leave it
at that. But for atheists and agnostics, as well as believers who
don’t want to sweep mysteries under the carpet, this won’t do.
The Panpsychic World
This is where panpsychism comes in. For if mind is matter in
the form of brains, then equally, matter in the form of brains, is
mind. But panpsychism doesn’t just restrict this thinking to
brains. Why suppose there are two different kinds of matter in
the universe, the insensate kind that makes up most things, and
the special kind that somehow ends up in our heads? “I would
bet a lot against there being such radical heterogeneity [differ-
ence] at the bottom of things,” Galen Strawson says. For him,
it’s easier to believe that consciousness is part of the fundamen-
tal nature of matter – of all matter. So for panpsychists, the best
explanation for how evolution managed to turn primordial
sludge into conscious grey matter, is that the sludge was already
conscious, albeit in some lowly, sludge-like way. In other words,
panpsychists say that the best explanation for how mind and
matter work together, is that all matter already has some degree
of consciousness.The consciousness then becomes more com-
plex as the organisation of the matter becomes more complex.
What’s it like to be a rock, then? Without inside informa-
tion (perhaps from magically possessed statues) we have no
idea. But panpsychists say this lack of knowledge isn’t a prob-
lem. They point out we also have no idea what it’s like to be a
bat (what must it be like to see using sonar?), yet we’re happy
Realities
to believe bats have some kind of consciousness. Unlike bats,
rocks don’t have brains or sense organs. But panpsychism isn’t
the claim that inanimate matter has thoughts or perceptions in
the way that our brains enable us to have thoughts or percep-
tions – just that it’s conscious. This consciousness might be
unimaginably simple and feeble compared with the conscious-
ness of complex organisms, but it’s consciousness nonetheless.
In fact, Strawson is reluctant to say rocks are conscious ‘as
rocks’ – rather, it’s the fundamental particles of which they are
composed that enjoy a ‘feeling-hum of existence’. But for David
Skrbina, the alleged absurdity of rock-psychology just boils down
to anthropomorphic bias. Why shouldn’t rocks be conscious?
Panpsychists are generally keen to shut down talk of mysti-
cism or ‘woo woo’ (Strawson’s term) in connection with their
ideas. Although understandable from the point of view of want-
ing to maintain academic credibility, this is a shame. Panpsy-
chism is consistent with spiritual and philosophical traditions
that span cultures and centuries – from Plato’s world soul to the
claim that everything has a Buddha nature. The idea that all
things have at least rudimentary consciousness is also a staple of
Romanticism – see Wordsworth’s nature worship – and, through
the work of palaeontologist and philosopher Father Pierre Teil-
hard de Chardin, has even found a home in Christian theology.
Also, like Plotinus, people throughout history have had momen-
tary experiences of the cosmic consciousness – glimpses of reality as
an ordered, living whole – that complements panpsychist claims.
Such experiences aren’t proof, but they are, perhaps, evidence,
and surely have a role to play in the case for panpsychism.
The Point of Panpsychism
Speculation on the private lives of geological formations might
seem a sterile intellectual game, but it has profound implica-
tions. The mechanistic worldview inherited from the Enlight-
enment distorts our self-image. As minds in an otherwise mind-
less cosmos, we cannot make ourselves at home. It also means
we’re liable to see everything around us – minerals, plants, ani-
mals, even people – as just raw material to be exploited. There’s
a direct link between metaphysical materialism (the idea that
matter is all that exists), economic materialism (the assumption
that material possessions are all that matters), and full-blown
ecological crisis. But economic materialism isn’t inevitable.
Panpsychism can help open our eyes to the reality of pressing
environmental concerns. “When the world is understood in
panpsychist terms,” says Freya Mathews, “the whole spectrum
of Western thought undergoes a profound shift, a shift away
from the direction in which it has been drifting since the time
of the scientific revolution.”
So, panpsychism offers a way to understand how mind and
body interact. It puts us in touch with rich spiritual traditions.
It points the way to a healthier environmental ethic. All so
long as we’re prepared to rub shoulders with sentient stones.
For some, this price is too high. But for others it isn’t much
more extravagant than supposing that the offal in our skulls is
sentient. Conscious rocks might be better than the hard place
of a materialistic universe.
© JON DAVID 2016
Jon, a philosophy post-grad in Britain, sent us this article, then disap-
peared. If you know the author, please ask him to contact us!
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 15
Realities
Spinoza’s Metaphysics
& Its Relevance For Science Today
Zoran Vukadinovic thinks Spinoza could help us with our enquiries.
B
aruch Spinoza was a Seventeenth Century Dutch
philosopher of Portuguese Jewish descent, and a lens
grinder by trade. Though mild-mannered and agree-
able, he was excommunicated by his community for
his ‘abominable heresies’. His most important book Ethics
(1677) is concerned with presenting the implications of God’s
nature for human happiness. It might surprise you if I said that
this work is quite relevant for our time, and that it may even
help us understand some perplexing issues in contemporary sci-
ence, but this is precisely what I will argue in this article.
Specifically, I will try to show that Spinoza’s metaphysics, as
well as being a good system through which to understand the
behavior of elementary particles as described by quantum
mechanics, also allows us to demystify the mind-body problem
in cognitive science.
Baruch
Spinoza
(1632-1677)
Two Modern Metaphysical Positions
The branch of philosophy known as metaphysics is not easy to
define, but we can say that generally it is concerned with the
basic categories or ideas that underpin reality. It deals, for
instance, with substances, causality, identity and emergence, and
it relies on our ability to reason about things that cannot be
directly observed or measured. In modern science there is a great
emphasis on observation and measurement, which unfortunately
tends to obscure the importance of theory in science. The disci-
pline of metaphysics can help us make our worldview more com-
prehensible by integrating insights from science into our overall
understanding of reality, which cannot rely on observation alone.
Two influential contemporary metaphysical views are scientific
reductionism, which is essentially a materialist position, and math-
ematical idealism, which holds that the basis of space and time is
not subatomic particles, but rather, certain mathematical truths.
Both positions derive from long traditions in Western thought,
and both have merits. Scientific reductionism derives its force
16 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
from the successes of modern science, which is itself largely a
reductionist enterprise – meaning that it tends to explain the
complex world in terms of layers of increasingly basic con-
stituents. Mathematical idealism is inspired in particular by the
successes of computer science in generating mathematically-
based models of worlds; in fact, so successfully that the idea that
our universe is itself a computer simulation produced by an
advanced civilization has entered the mainstream in philosophy
(see ‘Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?’, Philosophical
Quarterly, 53(211), Nick Bostrom, 2003).
However, both positions are ultimately unsatisfactory. For
example, it’s not clear that the qualities of our experiences can
be entirely reduced to or expressed in terms of physical things.
And if the world is composed from mathematical truths, the
question then arises, how we can have any knowledge of these
truths, given that they are outside space and time? Further-
more, if we suppose that these mathematical objects are mental
in nature, we could end up with a circular argument: if, as the
reductionists suppose, the mind can be reduced to the activity
in the brain; and the activity of the brain can be reduced to
interactions between nerve cells; these cellular processes to
interactions between molecules; molecules to atoms; atoms to
subatomic particles; subatomic particles to space-time points;
space-time points to sets of numbers; and finally, sets of num-
bers to the mathematical laws relating them – which some
would argue are essentially mental entities – this then loops us
right back to where we started (see Reality: A Very Short Intro-
duction, by Jan Westerhoff, 2011).
Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Outline
Yet before we abandon the metaphysical enterprise to the skep-
tical view that what underlies the world we experience is essen-
tially unknowable (or worse, uninteresting), let us consider
Spinoza’s thought, which, as you will see, is surprisingly com-
patible with modern science.
Spinoza held that nature – which he equated with God – is
absolutely perfect, determined, infinite, and timeless. This infi-
nite ‘God or Nature’ (Deus sive Natura) is all-encompassing. We
are all part of it and there is nothing outside of it. We human
beings have access to two attributes of this infinite Being – exten-
sion and thought – both of which express its infinite essence, and
they correspond with each other, because they are expressions
of the same reality. Besides thought and extension there are
infinitely many other attributes of the infinite Being, to which
we do not have access but which are nonetheless expressions of
the same Being, which is, moreover, unconstrained by time.
To appreciate how novel this thinking was, it is worth
remembering that during Spinoza’s time the predominant view
of the universe in Europe was still the medieval notion inher-
ited from Aristotle and Ptolemy of a finite cosmos. As Joseph

PARALLEL WORLDS © VADIM DOZMOROV 2016 CONTACT HIM AT DOZMOROVADIM@GMAIL.COM
Ratner points out in The Philosophy of Spinoza (2014), Spinoza’s
vision of the universe not only surpasses this ‘pent in’ medieval
universe, but also the predominant contemporary view of the
universe as a purely physical system. So let me elaborate a little
on Spinoza’s metaphysics and present some examples that illus-
trate why it may be inspiring to anyone who is perplexed by
our relation to the universe.
Spinoza’s Monism
Spinoza’s Ethics is divided into five parts. The first two concern
metaphysics, and discuss God and the mind-body relationship
respectively. In Part One, Spinoza equates God with the one infi-
nite and unique substance that underlies all of reality. Please note
that what is meant here by the philosophical term ‘substance’ is
an integrated whole that cannot be directly experienced by us.
Some of Spinoza’s contemporaries and near contemporaries
held that there are several substances. Most famously, René
Descartes (1596-1650) argued that there are two substances,
mind and matter, which have the distinguishing qualities of
thought and extension respectively. He further claimed that each
individual person is a somehow-interacting union of these two
substances. In contrast, Spinoza held that there is only one sub-
stance, because it is infinite and all-encompassing, and that,
because it is not only infinite and all-encompassing but also cre-
ative, is to be equated with God. In the rest of Ethics, Spinoza
unfolds the implications of this view for understanding the rela-
tionship between the mind and body, and subsequently for our
understanding of emotions, knowledge, and ethics.
One of the aims that Spinoza outlines in the opening pages
of Ethics is to provide an explanation for the very existence of
things. For example, one might ask whether the cause for the
existence of existing things is within them or outside them.
Spinoza begins to answer this question by stating that the
definitions of entities usually do not include the specific num-
ber of individuals of that type that exist. For example, there is
nothing within human nature, or in the definition of ‘human’,
that specifies that there must currently be seven billion of us.
This suggests that the definition of ‘human’, and so our
essence, does not determine how many individual humans there
will be. Therefore, our existence as individual entities is deter-
Realities
mined by an entity greater than ourselves. Spinoza then gener-
alizes this observation to postulate that if there are multiple
individuals of a type of thing, then the cause of their existence
cannot be within them, and therefore that their essence does
not involve existence. In other words, it is generally not part of
the definition and essence of things that exist that they necessar-
ily exist. This then invites the question: What is the ultimate
cause of all the diversity and complexity that we encounter in
nature, if it is not those things themselves? Spinoza’s response is
that the ultimate source of all existing things – which contains
all the other existing things, and without which they would not
exist – must be something whose essence does involve existence.
And because the definition of this entity therefore involves nec-
essary existence (because it is of its essence to exist), not only does
it necessarily exist, it cannot involve any negation to being.
This means that this Being is unconstrained, all-encompassing,
infinite and eternal. These are the defining characteristics of
the cause of all that exists.
This leads to Spinoza’s definition of substance as “that
which is in itself and is conceived through itself” (Ethics Part 1,
Definition 3). Put another way, substance is that part or aspect
of nature that is self-creating (Spinoza and Spinozism, Stuart
Hampshire, 2005). To use Spinoza’s terminology, substance is
active nature, or Natura naturans (‘the nurturing nature’, or per-
haps, ‘nature naturing’) – which he thus equates with God.
Moreover, as its very definition involves necessary existence, we
cannot deny that this entity exists. And because it is infinite and
all-encompassing, there can only be one substance.
Proposing that there is a self-creating aspect to nature is not
foreign to the modern mind familiar with Big Bang theory, and
we might even say, with the theory of evolution. However,
accepting that there is only one such self-creating process (which
by reason of its uniqueness we can call God) is more difficult.
Moreover, because this entity is absolutely perfect and unique,
the term ‘process’ to describe it is not entirely appropriate, since
that term entails something that’s developing. ‘Substance’ is a
more appropriate term to describe an entity that is not lacking
in anything, and thus whose very nature is unchanging.
The human intellect grasps Spinoza’s substance through its
two attributes of extension and thought. That is, we can appreci-
ate substance either by contemplating the infinitely-extended
physical universe, or else by considering the infinity of ideas
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 17
Realities
possible within it. Reality is for Spinoza both a system of objects,
and a system of ideas or representations. Human beings, for
example, are bodies composed of physical parts, but are also rep-
resentations, which constitute human minds. As I mentioned,
for Spinoza substance also includes an infinite number of other,
unknowable, attributes in addition to the two we can know. In a
way, these attributes are what makes something real, distinct –
they are the means through which one finite entity may be dis-
tinguished from another. In Spinoza’s terminology, each individ-
ual in nature is a mode of the one substance.
For Spinoza, thought and extension are conceptually and
causally independent of each other, but at the same time corre-
spond to each other, or are ‘mapped onto’ one another. This
correspondence of causally and conceptually distinct attributes
is known as parallelism, and will be important when we con-
sider the mind-body relationship.
Please note that for Spinoza mind is not the cause of the
physical universe, nor is the physical universe the cause of
mind. Rather, Spinoza holds that the force behind the exis-
tence of corporeal nature and behind the workings of the mind
is the same unique and all-encompassing substance, which has
both attributes equally.
Substance & Science
So God is an entity that exists necessarily, or by definition. It is
the self-creating aspect of nature, and is the cause of everything
WWW.CHRISMADDEN.CO.UK
CARTOON © CHRIS MADDEN 2016
18 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
else that exists. The next question is, why is God/nature, as
defined by Spinoza, relevant to us today? The answer is that this
idea provides a view of the world that is surprisingly consistent
with contemporary science, which still lacks a metaphysics that
can accommodate its perplexing discoveries.
The first example of its perplexing discoveries is quantum
mechanics. It has become a cliché that no one understands the
strange behavior of the elementary particles that quantum
mechanics describes. For example, how can an unobserved elec-
tron be in an infinite number of places at the same time? Or
how can a particle of light – a photon – ‘sample’ all of space to
‘select’ the fastest path between two points in space, as Richard
Feynman’s interpretation of quantum mechanics would say?
One common theme in quantum mechanics is precisely this
‘unconstrained’ behavior of particles. This is consistent with the
notion that there is a boundless or infinite aspect in nature
underlying the reality we experience – which is precisely Spin-
oza’s view of substance.
Another theme in quantum mechanics is that the answer
supplied by an experiment often depends on the question the
experiment is asking. For example, elementary wave-particles
can be seen to behave as either waves or particles depending
on how an experiment is set up. Furthermore, it seems that
observation is required to give quantum entities a determinate
form. These two features of quantum mechanics suggest that
there is a very close relationship between intelligence and cor-
poreal nature in the universe, just as Spinoza supposed. To put
it in Spinoza’s terms, intelligence and the material quantum
events that intelligence observes are inseparable because they
are two aspects of the same unique and boundless substance.
The anthropic principle in cosmology refers to the striking
observation that the cosmos in which we live appears as if
specifically fine-tuned to allow life to exist. A number of very
basic facts about the Universe, such as the strengths of certain
forces (for example, the nuclear forces inside atomic nuclei),
and the masses and charges of certain subatomic particles, are
of the precise values required for the development of intelligent
observers such as us. As the physicist John A. Wheeler summa-
rized in 1986, it appears that “a life-giving factor lies at the center
of the whole machinery and design of the world” (see Wheeler’s
foreword in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by J.D. Barrow
and F.J. Tipler, 1986). That description could aptly apply to
Spinoza’s conception of Natura naturans, nurturing nature.
In summary, modern science provides support for Spinoza’s
monism by indicating that there is an unbounded and creative
aspect in nature, and also that intelligence and corporeality are
intimately bound and inseparable.
Mind-Body Correspondence
Next, let’s turn to one of the most important logical conse-
quences of Spinoza’s monism, namely, the doctrine of mind-
body correspondence.
In the first paragraph of Part 2 of Ethics, dealing with the
mind, Spinoza makes clear that his conclusions about the mind
emanate from his view of God: “I pass now to an explanation
of those things that necessarily had to follow from the essence
of God, or, an eternal and infinite entity.” As we have seen,
God or substance is the self-creating aspect of nature which,
 Realities
because it necessarily exists, cannot be limited by anything, and SPINOZA’S WORK
is, therefore, infinite.
For Spinoza, a human body has the attribute of extension, Half-light and the calm hands
and a human mind the attribute of thought, or representation. of a man polishing glass,
Moreover, the mind and the body are parallel expressions of though outside the day is harsh
the one underlying reality; or we could say that the mind and with persecution, words that damn
the body are the same thing (substance) considered under dif- for the smallest deviation.
ferent attributes. In language that Spinoza inherits from In the synagogue they recite the cherem,
Descartes, an idea is a representation of the thing of which it is denouncing a heretic
an idea. This leads Spinoza to his famous conclusion that the to be deported from the House of Israel.
human mind is equivalent to the idea of the human body. Spinoza’s
parallelism also means that every change in the human body Yet here in this alcove of instruments,
has to be accompanied by a change in the human mind: of curvatures plotted to decimal points,
“Whatever happens in the object of the idea constituting the there’s clarity of intellect.
human mind must be perceived by the human mind… That is, Nothing’s opaque. Through the clean eye
if the object of the idea constituting the human mind is a body, of a telescope, an objective world
nothing can happen in that body which is not perceived by the with objective grace.
mind” (Part 2, Proposition 12). There’s no rush for eminence –
This doctrine of mind-body correspondence is relevant to he rejects honours as one declines
contemporary cognitive science, where there is increasing bruised fruit
recognition of how intimately cognition and embodiment are or last night’s beer.
related. We might say that Spinoza’s argument, put in modern On his signet ring
neurological terms, implies that the total representation that (below the hermetic rose)
constitutes each individual human mind is equivalent to the there’s a Latin word:
total activity of that individual’s nervous system, and each caute – with caution, taking care.
operates or functions in parallel with the other. So Spinoza’s
metaphysics shows how mind and the nervous system relate. He hides his writing for fear
This approach to the mind-body problem is appealing also of being burnt alive.
because it suggests that the mind is not extrinsic to nature, but
is one part of an integrated whole. For Spinoza, the double As shadows stain the cobbled streets
aspect of things (that is, the parallelism) applies to everything he jots down:
in nature, and therefore, everything in nature has a mind of Focal length, refractive index,
sorts. Human beings do not occupy a metaphysically special magnifying power –
place, except in so far as the human body is the most complex bringing closer the grammar of blood,
thing in nature, and therefore, its representation, or the human the Euclidian matrix of the stars.
mind, is the most sophisticated mind in all of nature. Or as
Spinoza says: “to the extent that some body is more capable © PETER ABBS 2016
than others of doing several things at the same time, or of Peter Abbs is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the
being acted on (that is, suffer) at the same time, to that extent University of Sussex. Books include The Flowering of
its mind is more capable than others of perceiving several Flint: New and Selected Poems (Salt) and Against the
things at the same time” (Part 2, Proposition 13, Scolium). In Flow: Education, the Arts and Postmodern Culture
other words, the sophistication of the human mind corre- (Routledge). Please visit www.peterabbs.co.uk.
sponds to the complexity of the human body.
gence within it are ultimately expressions of the one substance.
Conclusion The attributes of thought and of extension cannot be reduced
According to the contemporary spin on Spinoza’s theories that to one or the other, but both point to the same infinite and
I have attempted to articulate here, the infinite self-creating eternal Being. The same boundless power expressed by the
aspect of nature underlies (1) the unconstrained behavior of complexity of the human body is also expressed by the powers
particles in quantum mechanics; (2) the very existence of a of the human mind. The same power that is behind the uncon-
world that supports intelligence; (3) the emergence of life strained behavior of particles in quantum mechanics, and
forms through evolution. Moreover, all these phenomena that expressed by the sheer vastness of the cosmos, also underlies
emerge from the one substance are interrelated: there is no the continual development of human knowledge. There can-
intelligence without embodiment; there is no increasing com- not be anything more life-affirming than this. This is what
plexity of embodiment without evolution; there is no evolution makes Spinoza most relevant to contemporary thought.
without a unique universe that allows life to emerge; and © DR ZORAN VUKADINOVIC 2016
finally, as both quantum mechanics and the anthropic principle Zoran is an addiction psychiatrist at the University of Colorado,
teach us, there is no observed material universe without intelli- where he works as a medical director of a substance abuse treatment
gence within it. The existence of the universe and of intelli- clinic. He and his wife Marina have two children, Andrey and Mila.

December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 19

 A Golden Manifesto, Part II
Mary Midgley continues her recollection of a golden age of female philosophy.
MARY MIDGLEY © MARTIN MIDGLEY 2011
Mary Midgley
I
n the first part of this essay (in Issue 116), I suggested
that philosophers have been wrong in thinking that they
were engaged in a hunt for a single and infallible answer
to moral questions. They can hope to get nearer to right
answers, to get further from some demonstrably wrong ones,
and to get a better grasp of the kind of wrongness that is caus-
ing most trouble here. But none of this will be final.
In his book of 1739, A Treatise of Human Nature, David
Hume famously claimed that it was impossible to logically
derive judgments about values, about what ought to be the
case, solely from facts about the world. Here Hume showed no
interest in the detailed meaning of the value-judgments them-
selves, simply treating them as solid, ultimate units. His point
was only that they were matters of feeling, not of reason.
When I and my Oxford friends Elizabeth Anscombe,
Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch began to look into ethics in the
early 1940s this was still the prevailing view. It had just been
reinforced in 1936 by the publication of A.J. Ayer’s best-selling
book Language, Truth and Logic, which outdid Hume in preach-
ing an extreme emotivism, a reduction of all moral matters to
various kinds of feeling. Philosophers in general tried to accept
this message of Ayer’s in spite of its alarming implications.
They were still convinced by Hume’s account of the matter.
But there was a good deal of uneasiness about its details.
When we were first on the scene, the newest variant was
20 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
R.M. Hare’s formula of Prescriptivism, which described moral
judgments not as isolated feelings but as comprehensive
orders, directions or prescriptions which one’s feelings might
lead one to impose systematically on the rest of the world.
People were, of course, somewhat puzzled about how these
various individual orders or directions were to be brought into
harmony, but Hare replied that, in general, these rulings would
not disagree much with one another because they would all
flow from a basic Utilitarianism. Apart from that, people
would just have to be sensible. Because these were matters of
individual feeling, no general rules could be imposed about
what these judgments would require. Moral freedom had to be
preserved.
So can just anything be a moral principle then? It some-
times looks as if it can. Hare at one point mentions someone
who believes that torturing is morally permissible, but Philippa
Foot pointed out in response that for this to be possible, we
need to know how it can be done. Is this man supposed to have
answered the objection that to inflict torture is to do harm? It
is not enough (she says) just to proclaim that in principle any-
thing can be called good. Calling it good has to be made intel-
ligible. And this requires an appropriate context – a back-
ground against which the claim makes sense.
For instance, can it be good – can it be a matter for pride –
to clasp one of your hands on top of the other three times in an
hour? If we want to make sense of such claims, we have to try
to find plausible ways of filling in the background: “Perhaps he
is ill, and it is an achievement even to do this; perhaps this ges-
ture has some religious or political significance and he is a
brave man who will defy the gods or the rulers.”
But these stories must still be made plausible, and without
that plausibility the claim is still unintelligible. In fact, it turns
out that emotivism cannot provide any escape from that
requirement. “In this way,” says Philippa, “even feelings are
vulnerable to facts.” As she points out, there are many aspects
involved here:
“How exactly the concepts of harm, advantage, benefit, importance are
related to the different moral concepts such as rightness, obligation,
goodness, duty and virtue is something that needs the most patient
investigation. But that they are so related seems undeniable, and it fol-
lows that a man cannot make his own personal decision about the con-
siderations which are to count as evidence in morals.”
(Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices, 1978, p.106)
So the background by which moral judgments are explained
cannot just take human feelings for granted. It cannot treat
them as separate, ultimate units. If we say, for instance, that
Iago resented Othello because he thought his dignity was not
being well enough appreciated, we are supplying a familiar
explanation from human nature and we will naturally go on to
give details. But, at the time that we are talking about, in the
mid twentieth century, there was not supposed to be any such
thing as human nature at all. Behaviourism tabooed this whole
concept because it insisted that behaviour was entirely reactive
– caused only by previous behaviour – and any reference to
motives was therefore merely an irrational excuse given for
ignoring that causality. Existentialism tabooed it too, though
for a quite different reason – because the Existentialists
insisted that we are entirely free to act on our own decisions,
so our claims to be blocked by natural emotions can (again)
only be bad excuses (‘bad faith’). Marxists, meanwhile, consid-
ered all real causes of action to be essentially economic, so they
too outlawed all talk of human nature.
Today, it may seem strange that so many quite bright people
should, for so long, have resolutely refused to use such an
obviously indispensable floorboard in the whole structure of
our motives. But I have lived through too many examples of
this kind of thing in my time to be much surprised at it now. I
do, however, remember that I knew I was in for trouble when I
set out to defend the notion of Human Nature – including its
close connection with the natures of other species – in my first
book, Beast and Man. I began the book boldly like this:
“We are not just rather like animals; we are animals. Our differences
from other species may be striking, but comparisons with them have
always been, and must be, crucial to our view of ourselves... People
have a lot of obvious and important things that other species do not –
speech, rationality, culture, and the rest. I have tried to discuss some of
the most important of them, not attempting at all to deny their unique-
ness, but merely to grasp how they can occur in what is, after all, a pri-
mate species, not a brand of machine or a type of disembodied spirit.
This attempt must invade the territory of a dozen subjects, but the pro-
ject still belongs to philosophy, because finding how the basic concepts
of any subject work is a philosophical problem... Philosophy, like
speaking prose, is something we have to do all our lives, well or badly,
whether we notice it or not. What usually forces us to notice it is con-
flict. And on the matter of our animal nature a pretty mess of conflicts
has arisen – between different elements in the common sense tradition,
between common-sense and various learned studies, between those
learned studies themselves, and between all these and the remarkable
facts turned up by those who, in the last few decades, have taken the
trouble to observe dispassionately the behaviour of other species.”
The mid to late Twentieth Century saw important shifts in
the way we humans perceive our relation to the rest of cre-
ation, including the protests of moralists like Peter Singer
against the blank insensibility of our whole civilization towards
other animals. Awareness of issues about climate-change has
been much slower than this to reach the public – indeed it still
seems to have difficulty in reaching the kind of people who
could do something about it. But about animals there has been
a real change.
Readers will notice that on these matters, as with the other
topics that we four discussed, I and my friends did not try to
claim credit for introducing any beautiful new simplicity. Far
from that, we rather emphasized that these matters are really
difficult and complicated – that we do indeed seriously need to
think harder about them, so as to evolve concepts that will fill
in the vast blank spaces that have been allowed to accumulate
around the narrow ranges of our own experience. In fact, we all
need to do some serious philosophizing here. And we ourselves
have tried to suggest ways in which this could be done.
On the matter of animals, I think this last half-century has
indeed seen some real progress, as people have learnt to think
differently about them. Better-informed prophets, from Jane
Goodall to David Attenborough, began to be heard above the
clamour of those straightforward admirers of the human race
who merely told us how extraordinarily intelligent we were.
On this topic, as on many others, what has brought about the
change has not been a persistent concentration on standard
puzzles about borrowed books or choices involving trolleys,
but a careful attention to the complexity of the actual facts – an
examination of them which shows the need for new concepts.
And here again, the choice of everyday examples – such as
ones involving potatoes – makes it clear that facts are indeed
relevant to the understanding of principles. Thus, David
Hume’s declaration that there could be no reasoning from facts
to values had been confidently accepted as a general truth. It
was expressed, in our time, by dismissing these arguments as
resting on a ‘naturalistic fallacy’. All right then, said Elizabeth
Anscombe, if I can’t use facts to prove that something is my
duty, what sort of evidence can you use to prove that I owe a
debt? “Suppose, for instance, that I ordered potatoes, you sup-
plied them, and you sent me a bill”, that surely constitutes a
debt. But the whole point about debts is, of course, that the
debtor has a duty to pay them; indeed, that is just what the
word ‘debt’ means. So it seems that truths about facts can
indeed be a proper basis for truths about values. (See ‘On Brute
Facts’ by G.E.M. Anscombe, Analysis 18, 1958)
This must, I think, be the end of my Bovrilesque attempt to
boil down the main points of our philosophical message, and to
explain why it has created a certain stir. I am conscious that, in
trying to explain this, I have laid more emphasis on its destruc-
tive side – on our protest against existing attitudes – than on
clarifying what ought now to be done to replace them. This is,
I think, partly because the whole issue is simply too large to
allow of summarising any new proposal here.
Positive ideas can, of course, be found elsewhere in our
writings, but I can’t reduce them all to Bovril form here. What
we need now is not just a matter of replacing crows with jack-
daws or apples with bananas. We need a real change of
approach. We need to stop splitting philosophical ideas up into
separate items and setting them to compete against each other.
The best tool for this may be the logic of question and answer
developed by philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood. This is
a way of treating awkward proposals not as isolated proposi-
tions, but as answers to questions, searching out the particular
question which has arisen to require just this answer, and
thereby finding the wider pattern of further questions behind
it. As Collingwood himself explained, this idea originally grew
out of his interest in the nature of historical enquiry:
“History did not mean knowing what events followed what. It meant
getting inside people’s heads, looking at their situation with their eyes,
and thinking for yourself whether the way in which they tackled it was
the right way... It was a doctrine of [the contemporary creed called]
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 21

BONOBOS © PSYCH ASD 2012
‘realism’ ... that in this sense of the word there is no history of philosophy.
The ‘realists’ thought that the problems with which philosophy is con-
cerned were unchanging... they thought that the same problems which
were discussed in modern ethical theory were discussed in Plato’s
Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics, and that it was a man’s duty to ask himself
whether Aristotle or Kant was right on the points over which they
differ.” (Collingwood, An Autobiography, 1939 pp.58-9)
In short, they believed that philosophy dealt in doctrines
which were fixed units like tiles or tablets of stone, each
inscribed with its own permanent message. Instead of this,
Collingwood was suggesting that we may need to find out in
our search a question which is quite unexpected, perhaps a
question that has never actually been formulated before – as,
for instance, clearly happened when people began to think
about quanta. And this new question will itself have come from
the answers to further questions, so that we need to look round
to find the whole structure which is the source of the trouble.
When somebody’s thought puzzles you (says Collingwood):
22 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
Not so different from ourselves?
“At first sight you cannot tell what he is trying to say. But if you will
think carefully about the passage you will see that he is answering a
question which he has taken the trouble to formulate in his mind with
great precision. What you are reading is his answer. Now tell me what
the question was? ...
For me, then, there were not two separate sets of questions to be asked,
one historical and one philosophical, about a given passage in a given
philosophical author. There was one set only; historical.” (pp.71-2)
Someone who has grasped this approach is not likely to
shift to, for instance, the combative style in which Colin
McGinn was taught to philosophize (see part 1). But the temp-
tation to tidy everything up into a fixed set of stone tablets is
evidently still a strong one. And the heirs of the realists still
continue to haunt us in the orthodoxies that reign today.
This suggestion of ours – this sweeping (or ‘comprehen-
sive’) call for an end to the artificial separation between values
and facts – may seem a bit drastic. It is not, of course, usual for
philosophers, or for scholars generally, to call for destructive
changes on this scale. Doing so always invites reprisals. And I
probably would not now be dipping my computer in this pot
of acid if I were not already old enough to more-or-less ignore
my own future career, or if I did not feel that my duty to my
friends and colleagues actually demands it.
There is, indeed, one fact about the present state of our cul-
ture which does, I think, anyway call for a protest of this kind.
This is the immense increase in specialization which has fol-
lowed on the sheer increase in student numbers. As universi-
ties proliferate and departments subdivide themselves into
‘institutes’ and ‘centres’, this naturally produces a tendency to
classify and standardize philosophical methods, so as to keep
everybody telling the same story. Thus I now find that people
to whom I have mentioned some quite ordinary topic murmur
apologetically, “Oh dear, I’m afraid that’s not my area...” as if I
had started to talk Chinese.
I think something will need to be done about this runaway
specialisation before we all become mutually incomprehensi-
ble. On the other hand, this enlargement and subdivision of
the field may, of course, make possible all sorts of fertile devel-
opments of different approaches. If each separate university
and institute managed to go its own way, thinking out its own
problems independently but sharing its results with its neigh-
bours, possibilities could light up indeed. The scene could also
surely be enlarged outside the current system of universities
and graduate schools by twittering and making use of other
social media and related networks.
I also suspect that this modern hope of standardizing the
whole subject of philosophy must be the source of a quite
alarming change that has gradually taken place in the nature of
philosophical journals. During the last century, these journals
have become steadily more influential and more technical.
They used to be regarded chiefly as steps on the way to Real
Books. Now, however, philosophers longing to achieve career
success do not expect to do it by writing an interesting book.
They know that their route to glory is to get an article pub-
lished in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. And they know
that the article will, of course need to deal with some topic
with which that journal has lately been concerned, because that
is what interests its current editors.
So in what style can our ambitious young prophet hope to
write this important article? How can philosophy best express
itself today? John Cottingham took up this painful question in
a disturbing article called ‘What Is Humane Philosophy and
Why Is It At Risk?’ By way of illustration he supplied an
extract from a recent book:
“Let us define what it is for a proposition to be (practically) realizable
by A at t, that is, realizable by means of A’s intentional behaviour at t. To
say that a proposition p is practically realizable by A at t is to say that
there is some way of behaving, W, such that there are possible worlds
in which all the actual truths that are causally independent of what A
might do or think at t hold, and A intentionally behaves in way W at t.
and in all those worlds p is true.”
(Ralph Wedgewood, The Nature of Normativity, 2007)
This passage is not intended as a contribution to some
highly technical branch of logic. It comes from a discussion of
that most widely-discussed of topics, Free Will. Yet it is hard
to see how anybody could follow this reasoning at all unless
they were already deeply dipped in the background of that par-
ticular controversy. And, though this particular example is
from a book rather than a journal, this is the sort of style that
journals increasingly adopt and editors increasingly expect
their contributors to use. It seems to me that the natural result
of this can only be that soon nobody will read these journals at
all except the people who hope to contribute to them, since
nobody else can understand them. And once the contributors
realise this, the journal itself will surely evaporate.
We may surely ask, then, why this style of writing has
become so prevalent? John Cottingham rightly explains that it
is used in order to imitate the approach of the natural sciences.
This, however, is not going to work:
“It would be sheer self-deception to suppose that such definitional and
conceptual work could offer the kind of explanatory enlightenment
that scientific research into a given phenomenon can provide.
The basic disparity between the scientific case and the conceptual case
is this. In the scientific case, the aim is to find some inner constitution,
mechanism, or micro-structure whose workings will account for the
phenomenon to be explained... [Then] we can see that a certain key
will open a certain lock... But if we wish to understand meaning-involv-
ing activities or states like consciousness, belief, knowledge, intention,
desire, goal, purpose... there is not even in principle the possibility of
this kind of explanation. We may break the concepts down into their
conceptual components, but, however deep we go, we shall never (as
we may hope to do in the scientific case) discover a simple explanatory
key that make us say, ‘ah, that’s how it operates’.” (p.5).
Thoughts, in fact, are not machines. Pseudo-science will get
us nowhere. In fact, everything mentioned in this manifesto
urges us to look at philosophical issues on a larger, more
appropriate scale than is used in current orthodoxies, perhaps
starting by asking why the ghost of that old, divisive mind-
versus-matter dualism, with its insoluble ‘hard problem’ of
consciousness, still haunts and distorts philosophical orthodoxy
today. And is my idea of shifting to a wider perspective itself
entangled with the other interesting question that still awaits
us, namely “How much does it matter that we four revolution-
aries all happened to be female?”
But these puzzles will, I fear, have to wait for another time.
© DR MARY MIDGLEY 2016
Mary Midgley lectured at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
until 1980. Her best known books include Beast and Man;
Wickedness; The Ethical Primate; Science and Poetry and a
memoir, The Owl of Minerva. She was given Philosophy Now’s
2011 Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity.
• Clare MacCumhaill, Rachael Wiseman and Luna Dolezal, from
Durham University, and Liza Thompson of Bloomsbury Publishing,
are working with Mary Midgley to recover the ‘Golden Age of female
philosophy’. They will be publishing a series of companions to these
women’s work, starting in 2017 with Human Nature. Find out more
at www.womeninparenthesis.wordpress.com or @parenthesis_in
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 23
 Epicurus For Today
Luke Slattery argues that the ancient philosophy of the Garden offers an
attractive answer to some of the challenges of the modern world.
A
n elaborate faux Roman villa, replete with coffered
ceilings and a lavish ‘Vesuvian’ color scheme, rises
above the Pacific coast at Malibu. Why location
scouts didn’t seize upon it for the Coen brothers’
comedy Hail, Caesar is anyone’s guess. But it’s best thought of as
another kind of prop. Built by John Paul Getty to house his art
collection, the Getty Villa connects the contemporary world
with an ancient philosophy that could change the world for the
better; or, at least, make a difference. Getty modelled his villa
on a partially buried seaside mansion at Roman Herculaneum,
a victim of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. It is known as
‘the Villa of the Papyri’ because it housed a vast collection of
papyrus manuscripts. Most of these are on Epicurean themes.
Epicureanism was the world’s first ‘green’ philosophy. When
people turn to the ancient therapeutic philosophies, or arts of
life, they tend to look to resolute Stoicism for succor. But Epi-
cureanism, which insists that we learn to be happy with less, is a
better fit with the anxieties du jour.
The reason Epicureanism is not often mentioned in this con-
text is that for more than two thousand years it has been misun-
derstood. Today Epicureanism is regarded as a form of gastro-
GETTY VILLA © BOBAK HA’ERI 2007
24 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
nomic connoisseurship. In antiquity it was the exact opposite.
Epicurus (341-270 BC) abandoned the city of Athens for a
house and garden outside its walls. The communards who fol-
lowed him adopted the pleasure principle as their guide: the
purpose of life is to maximise pleasure. But they understood
pleasure not as the fulfillment of desire so much as its rational
mastery. The richest pleasure of all, Epicurus believed, was
freedom from suffering. “By pleasure,” he insisted, “we mean
the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul.”
A troubled soul, Epicurus believed, had two main causes: fear
of death, and runaway desire. He tried to banish the first by
pushing back against superstition. There is nothing to fear in
death, he taught, because when you’re alive death is elsewhere,
and when you’re dead you won’t be there – or words to that
effect. Then, once irrational fears of the afterlife are swept
aside, the Epicurean can attend to this one finite life. And as for
desire, Epicurus counseled a disposition very close to Eastern
ascetic simplicity: we are to shun the pursuit of unnecessary
pleasures – of new sensations, more possessions – and instead
take deep pleasure in simple things. As some of the few surviv-
ing fragments of writings by Epicurus explain, he aimed to live
Getty Villa, Malibu
frugally at peace amid ‘nature’s wealth’. So there were no anti-
quarian cook-offs in the Epicurean garden, no tastings of the “A Dazzling Book!”
finest Retsina (if there ever was such a thing as fine resinated
– ALA Booklist
wine). Meals were shared, although property was not. Epicurus
declared himself content with water, bread, weak wine, and a
‘pot of cheese’. During a siege of Athens he kept his commu-
nity going with a store of beans, which must have been both a “A delightful
culinary and an olfactory challenge for all concerned. journey”
An inscription placed at the entrance to the Epicurean gar- -- Washington Post
den conveyed something of its presiding spirit:

“The host and keeper of this place, where you will find the pleasure
of the highest good, will offer you freely cakes of barley and fresh
spring water. This garden will not tease your appetite with the dain- "Lyrical and deft….
ties of art but satisfy it with the bounties of nature. Will you not be a [LIGHT] is an eye-catching display,
happy guest?”
reflecting and refracting like a gemstone.”
-- Nature 
The Epicurean Cosmos
Attempting to explain the movement of the world’s con-
stituents, Epicurus held that although its atoms tend to fall in a
straight line, they are liable now and then to deviate, or swerve.
This primitive version of the particle theory of matter has pro-
found psychological and ethical implications, since the swerve
in nature allows for human freedom. By imbuing the basic
stuff of matter with an erratic, unpredictable quality, a ‘free
movement’, Epicurus hoped to release mankind from the
chains of predestination. Without this swerve, none of us are
responsible for our actions, since they would have then been
determined, as a second-century AD Epicurean, Diogenes of
Oinoanda, explained. The end result of a deterministic world
is that “all admonition and censure are nullified and not even
the wicked” can be justly punished.
Our planet is one among many, Epicurus argues. But Epi-
curus’s philosophy resolutely denies the existence of a spiritual
or abstract, supernatural world – such as was offered by the
Platonic, then Christian traditions, and even Stoic cosmology,
which insists on a determined universe infused with the breath
of a cosmic god. Epicureanism, most importantly, rejects all
thought of a postponement of happiness to a paradise in the
heavens. At the point of death, Epicurus believed, we simply Light
dissolve into the basic constituents of the universe, the atoms. begins in myth and ends in mastery.
It was this courageous questioning of received ideas about
religion that encouraged his followers to picture Epicurus as a
Between lies a 3,000 year journey of
liberator, a breaker of shackles, a champion of humanity – a
saviour. “Therefore Superstition is now in her turn cast down philosophy, scripture, painting,
and trampled underfoot,” writes Lucretius in celebration of his photography, and more.
master’s atheism, “whilst we by the victory are exalted high as
heaven.” Lucretius views Epicurus as a philosophical freedom From the Ancient Greeks to the Romantic
fighter who has turned religion on its head so as to exalt man – Poets, from the sunrise at Stonehenge to
an image that was to exert a formative influence many cen- the latest LEDs, from the oldest creation
turies later on the young Karl Marx. There is much of Epicu- stories to the newest lasers,
rus – who was the subject of Marx’s doctoral dissertation – in
the young revolutionary’s early thinking. The Marxist notion
of the philosopher as change-agent takes its heroic colours
Light:
from Lucretius’ celebration of Epicurus the liberator. And A Radiant History... shines.
Marx’s vision of the Communist utopia, in which a man might
“hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticize after dinner” has a distinct Epicurean cast.
 Happy Simplicity
The Epicurean message, stripped to its essence, really is a call
to liberation – from a superstitious fear of death, and from
destructive desire. Its less-is-more ethos is remarkably, improb-
ably, providentially relevant, twenty-three centuries after it was
first articulated. As the late College de France scholar of
antique philosophy, Pierre Hadot, explained, it enjoins us to
“learn to be content with what satisfies fundamental needs,
while renouncing what is superfluous. A simple formula, but
one that cannot but imply a radical upheaval of our lives.”
If translated into contemporary terms, this thinking might
compel us to temper our mania for consumption; for more
cars, more gadgets – more stuff. What gives Epicureanism its
contemporary usefulness is that it talks not of an angst and
guilt-ridden need to make do with less – the dilemma, broadly
speaking, of eco-minded people – but of the rich pleasure to be
had from doing so. It’s essentially an egoistic or selfish philoso-
phy with altruistic consequences. So the philosophy of the gar-
den addresses an urgent ethical question: how do we manage
the threat of global warming caused by human over-industrial-
isation, and the crisis of environmental degradation that ulti-
mately follows? Epicurus answered this question long before it
was a question by invoking the idea of natural limits as a guide
to action: “He who understands the limits of life knows how
easy it is to procure enough to remove the pain of want and
make the whole of life complete and perfect,” he wrote.
“Hence he has no longer any need of things which are not to
be won save by labour and conflict.” Time and again Epicurus
and his followers return to the theme of limits: “One must
regard wealth beyond what is natural as of no more use than
water to a container that is full to overflowing.”
It might seem to make no sense to airlift a philosophy of
deep antiquity twenty-three centuries on from its origin and
expect it to precisely dovetail with contemporary needs, and
yet it is eerily prophetic. Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s 2013
treatise, How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life, is a cri-
tique of exponential economic growth that opens with a quote
from Epicurus: “Nothing is enough for the man for whom
enough is too little.” And a few lines from the Epicurean poet
Lucretius, penned at the height of paganism, also strike home
in the age of the smartphone:
“While we can’t get what we want, that seems
Of all things most desirable,
Once got,
We must have something else.”
It should be remembered, however, that the philosophy of
Epicurus is very old, and despite its contemporary resonance, is
now and then rather strange. For example, believing in the
absolute authority of the senses, Epicurus considered the sun
no bigger than an orange because it seemed that size to the
naked eye. Even in the domain of ethics, where Epicureanism is
at its most attractive, its various dictates mix the reasonable –
“There are three motives to injurious acts among men – hatred,
envy and contempt; and these the wise man will overcome with
reason” – with the ludicrous: “The wise man will not make fine
speeches…Nor will he dribble when drunk.” On the other
26 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
hand, it is remarkable just how directly the Epicurean ideal
speaks to many contemporary needs. In antiquity this ideal was
distilled to a quatrain of spare yet beautiful phrases:
“Nothing to fear in God;
Nothing to feel in Death;
Good can be attained;
Evil can be endured.”
This tetrapharmakos, or ‘fourfold remedy’, shows us how to
achieve the Epicurean ideal of being happy in this moment, to
stop postponing our joy – to, in the famous formulation of the
Roman Epicurean poet Horace, “Seize the day!”
Epicurean Economics
Just how practical for contemporary people is the ‘radical
upheaval’ (in Hadot’s phrase) implied by Epicureanism?
Chicago University philosopher Martha Nussbaum, a world
authority on Hellenistic philosophy, argues, “The whole world
cannot organize into little Epicurean communities; such com-
munities are always parasitic upon the economic and political
life of the larger world.” And yet I would counsel against a too-
ready association of the Epicurean spirit of retreat with a bare,
primitive, passive, parasitical existence. The nineteenth cen-
tury French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau – little known out-
side his native land, although he was the first to coin what
would become the Durkheimian notion of anomie – wrote a
beautiful work of Epicurean advocacy and analysis titled La
Morale d’Epicure. In it he points out that the lines with which
Lucretius ends Book Five of his magisterial poem De Rerum
Natura amount to a “doctrine du progress intellectual et moral de
l’homme” and are a passionate hymn to creativity and social
dynamism achieved by building upon simplicity:
“Seafaring and farming, city walls and laws
And arms, roads, clothing, and all such other things,
All the rewards and delights of life,
Songs, pictures, statues curiously wrought,
All these they learnt by practice gradually
And by experiments of eager minds
As step by step they made their forward way.
So each thing in its turn by slow degrees
Time doth bring forward to the lives of men,
And reason lifts it to the light of day.
For as one concept followed on another
Men saw it form and brighten in their minds
Till by their arts they scaled the highest peak.”
In ancient statuary, Socrates is invariably pug-nosed and
ugly. Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor, looks like a guy you
can trust. Epicurus, eyes set deeply behind a furrowed brow, is
permanently cranky. He’s no voluptuary, no gastronomic bore.
He’s a radical with a burning idea. It burns fiercely still.
© LUKE SLATTERY 2016
Luke Slattery is a Sydney-based writer, and an honorary associate in
the University of Sydney’s department of Classics and Ancient His-
tory. He is the author of four books, including Reclaiming Epicurus
(Penguin, 2012).
 anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world.
A comic by Corey Mohler about the inevitable

Each week, Corey Mohler draws a new Existential Comics strip and posts it at http://existentialcomics.com
The Epicureans, despite being avowed hedonists and the modern connota-
tions of the word, weren't really interested in the sort of sensual pleasure
that we think of as hedonism. They believed that the most pleasurable life
mostly consisted of avoiding pain and unpleasantness by leading a simple,
tranquil life free of worries and suffering. The best kinds of pleasures were
not excessive ones that could lead to displeasure down the line (such as
28 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
hangovers), but simple pleasures that fulfill basic desires (hungry, sleep,
etc). Likewise you should avoid excess or unnecessary desires such as
greed, lust, and domination over others. Their prescribed path might be
viewed as boring by many modern and ancient readers: doing gardening,
meditating, and avoid politics and conflict. Epicurus said that he could be
satisfied with merely water, bread, weak wine and a “pot of cheese.”
 Philosophy For The Brave
Dahlian Kirby on the benefits of existentialist counselling.

A
ccording to Epicurus, “The discourse of the philoso-
pher that wouldn’t cure any human affectation is
indeed an empty one.” So in a society where cut-
backs are destroying education, where money is con-
sidered the main blessing and intelligence an embarrassment,
what is the point of philosophy? I believe it is to keep us well.
Whilst working in a semi-open prison as a counsellor, I
came across several men who were nearing the end of very
long sentences. They had all committed violent crimes, and
some of them had spent their entire adult lives in prison, hav-
ing entered the system at sixteen or seventeen. They had spent
a long time being institutionalised; but had also been able to
spend a long time thinking. Where else do you get the oppor-
tunity to reflect so long on life, morality, and individual worth?
The problem for these men was that as the end of their
time inside drew near, they began to feel very distressed. It
wasn’t just the thought of sorting out housing and money. It
wasn’t always about lost relationships or the world having
moved on. It was a question of not knowing who they were:
about not having a purpose.
A lot of prisoners are physically and mentally unwell and rely
on medication to get through. Some of them go to counselling.
In counselling they are able to discuss the meaning of life. Anxi-
ety and depression cause a person to feel isolated. We tend to
start questioning our existence when we are in crisis or have suf-
fered great loss. Philosophy can help us feel connected. As a
counsellor with a doctorate in philosophy, I have found some of
my most memorable conversations have
occurred with a prisoner in a small room
Now according to Emmy Van Deurzen, “psychotherapists,
psychologists or psychiatrists often have considerable difficulties
in recognizing the validity of philosophical questioning. They
are reluctant to engage in theoretical discussions with clients and
patients who are seemingly disturbed, but who actually may be
in search of meaning” (‘Existentialism And Existential Psy-
chotherapy’, 1999). When people are distressed and questioning
we often shut them up, either with pills or platitudes. But why
shut them up, when what they really need is to think through
what has happened and who they are? I think the modern cliché
I most dislike, posing as a piece of philosophy (but which is really
a form of shutting people up) is “Everything happens for a rea-
son.” Okay, explain sudden cot death. Or suicide bombing. Or
my cat getting run over. Or domestic violence.
Philosophy doesn’t shut us up, it opens us up. We don’t need
a university education to question, to wonder, to find meaning –
we just need space to reflect, and perhaps, to debate. We need to
tell our story, and in telling it find out who we are. We can do
this alone, in our heads or on paper. However, to do it in the
company of another human is both challenging and reassuring.
We can piece together ideas between us. And why stop at two? A
host of questioning human beings can be a fine thing.
Choose Meaning
Psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl, imprisoned in the
Auschwitz concentration camp, asked himself why some prison-
ers survived and some did not. What made the difference? He

CARTOON © PHIL WITTE 2016

trying to make sense of human existence.
By philosophy, I mean the sharing of
ideas from the unique perception of the
individual who has come to a point in
their life when they need to know more
or go deeper. It involves an acknowledg-
ment that we are alone, but also together.
In discussion with another questioning
person, we can feel that we are not alone
in our search for answers. Enter the
philosopher, armed only with questions.
Is that enough? In some situations, an
encounter with a person willing to enter
into a philosophical dialogue about life’s
meanings, free will, and intention, may be
enough to let someone know that life is
both more complex and more beautiful
than they have previously imagined. This
can set the frail but curious individual on
to the road to wisdom, and finding a way
of coping with being a thinking, feeling “I have an existential dread of falling off your couch.”
being.

December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 29

 found that those who found the will to endure the horrific con-
ditions did so because they felt they had meaning in their lives.
Frankl’s conclusion invites us all to find meaning. Some-
times this is easy, but when we’re in crisis it is painful. Long
bouts of depression can leave us so isolated and exhausted that
any suggestion of finding meaning seems beyond possibility.
Frankl suggests that the final human freedom is “to choose
one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s
own way” (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946). I believe that
Frankl’s focus on choice of
attitude is the greatest wis-
WOMAN LISTENING © FRED W. BAKER III, 2009
dom he could give us. He
isn’t suggesting we can over-
come death or disaster, but
merely that we can decide our
attitude towards it. We don’t
have to rely on the govern-
ment/the priest/the weather,
etc etc. We ourselves can
begin to change how we feel.
We can take comfort from
the possibility that life isn’t
something that is done to us;
then we can decide to explore
the hows and whys, and of
course, the all-consuming
‘Why me?’
Asking the question ‘Is my
life worthwhile?’ suggests we
are looking for meaning. The
question might occur to us
because we are emotionally or
psychologically tired from a
life that seems to be only about paying bills and answering to
the whims of an unreasonable boss. Or it may come when we
have a serious illness, or are about to be released from prison
after serving ten years for murder. When we ask this question,
we are perhaps hoping that our life should be worthwhile. Or
we may be asking why it used to be but isn’t now. Alternatively,
we may feel it never was, and never can be.
Counselling Through Philosophy
People who have suffered serious abuse may need ‘formal’ dis-
cussion to make sense of their lives. This can come in the
shape of existential counselling, which is therapy through
philosophical discussion provided by a trained counsellor. If
drugs block out the thoughts and feelings caused by abuse or
other trauma, existential therapy does the opposite: it enables a
person to think through what has happened, how it happened,
and why it happened. Through existential counselling,
depressed people can become aware that they are now respon-
sible for themselves, and use this knowledge positively. The
relationship between the client and the counsellor reflects all
good relationships: we learn what it means to say that there is
another who can listen and debate with us, but also that we are
ultimately responsible for our own thoughts and feelings. Also,
like other relationships, it is finite, which makes it bittersweet.
In existential therapy in particular, the client will most likely
30 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
be encouraged to reflect on one or all of the following: freedom
and responsibility, isolation and meaninglessness, and the
inevitability of death. This may sound negative, but the
approach is positive. It depends on the theory that people can
find meaning and can come to terms with the past now, and are
therefore able to have a worthwhile future. With support from
the counsellor the individual can face up to their fears and take
responsibility. They can learn about their strengths and limita-
tions. Existential therapy celebrates authenticity, and also
acknowledges how damned
hard life can be. Van Deurzen-
Smith (same person, different
year – this time 1997) suggests
in her book Existential Coun-
selling in Practice that through
existentialist counselling, people
can become truly alive, and that
only when “they begin to be
ready for the recurrent chal-
lenges, crises and troubles, do
they start to be open to the
depth of experience and reality
that comes with a true commit-
ment to existence.”
The truly liberating thing about
existential counselling – possi-
bly about any philosophical dis-
cussion on human existence – is
that it doesn’t rely on diagnos-
tic labels or on the medicaliza-
tion of behaviour. A person
isn’t ‘bipolar’ or ‘depressive’ or
‘borderline’; they are a unique
human being reacting to a difficult world. The symptoms of,
for example, borderline personality disorder, can be viewed as
the results of rational responses in someone who has been sex-
ually abused since childhood. She may feel she also would like
the support of a medical doctor, and possibly medication; but for
someone with such a history to have a serious, intimate, honest
conversation, as equals, with another person about their choices,
their abilities, their possibilities, is to give them the chance to
take control of a life that may have seemed forever out of con-
trol. The journey won’t be easy, and the conversations will be
painful. I am not talking about a quick fix self-help afternoon.
We are looking at facing our fears head on, working out what
we must take responsibility for, and what we must accept that
we can’t change. It’s about giving up our victim status, and
becoming powerful. It’s exciting, it’s challenging. Its philosophy
for grow ups! It’s philosophy for the brave.
An Antidote To Junk Culture
We live in a culture where rather than ask our grandma for the
old family Christmas pudding recipe, people look online to see
what famous people put in theirs. To train our dogs, choose a
book, live a healthy life, we look to celebrities who are making
money by telling us what to do, think and eat. We seek the
answers to how to live life and how to be happy from the rich
and famous, although they themselves are often also struggling
to find their authentic selves. Through existential ther-
apy we can explore who we really are and find out what
we really want. Existential philosophy and existential
counselling can both be considered antidotes to this
celebrity culture. Through philosophical discussion –
with a friend, a philosopher, or with an existential
counsellor – we can begin to answer the questions
‘What would make life worthwhile?’ and ‘How do I get by Melissa Felder
to that place?’ We can look back to what used to satisfy
us and see if that still works, and if not, find new
sources of meaning. We can also look at responsibility
– a very important issue for people who have been
abused.
It may be thought that counselling in general, and
existential counselling in particular, is only suitable for
articulate, confident people. I strongly disagree. My
work with people in prison is the evidence. In fact, the
quirkier mind the better, and prison survivors often have
a particularly individualistic, thinking-on-your-feet kind
of way of looking at life. And as I said, they have had a
long time to contemplate life’s meanings. One of my
most successful therapeutic relationships was with a pris-
oner who was a traveller, or ‘pikey’, as she enjoyed
describing herself. We looked at abuse and the meaning
of life mostly through metaphor. Her aim was to make
her life worthwhile. She learned what she could change
and what she had to accept. Our starting point was both
staring at the brick wall just outside the window.
Sometimes those who can talk and think well hide
their fears behind their talking and thinking. I believe
very few of us are without anxiety. Instead of putting up
armour, we can bring down our barriers in discussion
(please enjoy the almost mixed metaphor!). We can start
to look at questions in a new way, rather than trotting
out the glib answers we have become familiar and com-
fortable with. We can take time away from looking at
the constructs of our society, and look instead at our
self-constructs. Instead of debating international poli-
tics, we can look instead at our internal politics. This is
not self-indulgence, rather it is self-knowledge. We can
look at the way we react to situations and people, and
decide that from now on, we will respond in a here-and-
now way. We can dump any aspect of our public per-
sona at any time. This can only be liberating.
If there is a meaning to life, shouldn’t we learn to
understand it? If we are not choosing suicide, we are
choosing existence. Existence is confusing and fright-
ening. We need to reflect, and to talk to each other; to
be humble and brave, and always question those plati-
tudes handed to us which are announced as truths.
Through philosophy, and in particular through existen-
tial discussion and existential counselling, we can learn
to be good at life. Philosopher, heal thyself.
© DR DAHLIAN KIRBY 2016
Dahlian Kirby obtained her PhD in Philosophy from Cardiff
University. She works as a counsellor, and teaches counselling SIMON + FINN CARTOON © MELISSA FELDER 2016 PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM
at Redcar and Cleveland College. She also runs therapeutic
writing courses.

December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 31

 Question of the Month
To Be Or Not To Be, What Is The Answer?
The following responses to Hamlet’s big question each win a random book.
“T here is only one philosophical problem which is really
serious: suicide. To decide whether life is or is not
worth living.” So opined Albert Camus, and he proffered an
answer too. Yes, life is worth it if lived with lucidity, conscious
of life’s absurdities, but rebelling against them. Scorn its arbi-
trariness and commit to being happy. Carry on Sisyphus!
The question is topical. The single biggest cause of death
among men under forty-five in the UK is suicide, and that’s
typical for the whole Western world. Is that a ‘philosophical’
issue? Being authentic – true to who you are, and exercising
your freedom to choose – is easier said than done in a modern
world that’s so coercive. Social media invites us to create a kind
of living autobiography that is not necessarily about the person
we are. And how do you exist authentically with the pressures
of modern life, which tend to bear us along on a tide of preoc-
cupations? Understanding our human condition goes some way
to inuring us against its absurdities.
Where does suicide fit in a cost/benefit calculation of life’s
trials and tribulations – which is what Hamlet’s soliloquy is
largely concerned with? It is only if you exist that you can have
pleasure, joy and satisfaction. As long as these outweigh the
pain and the suffering, then being is worth it. But there is
arguably an asymmetry in this argument. If you no longer exist
then there is a complete absence of pain, which is a good, but
also an absence of pleasure. Yet the latter is not in itself bad,
because there isn’t a person who is being deprived. For the liv-
ing, however, the calculus is different: pleasure involves a good,
yes – but you experience pain too, which is an outright bad. Bad
seems to outweigh the good when you compare the latter with
the former, so that if we had the choice whether to come into
being in the first place, we might well answer, no thanks.
Eastern philosophical traditions argue that we confuse
‘being’ with egotistic thought and emotion; break free from
these and you become aware, present, attentive to the present
moment and non-reactive. This emergent self enjoys a different
sense of being. It isn’t just what we feel and experience that
matters to us, it is also what we are and how we live in contact
with reality; and being in contact with reality requires us to be.
MIKE DE VAL, NANT-Y-DERRY, ABERGAVENNY
T o be is a good. Unless existence is a good, then nothing is
good. Yet we all desire good: the will is naturally drawn to
the good, and recoils from harm. What is not good is evil,
meaning that evil is the privation of good. So evil only exists rel-
ative to some good. We all participate in goodness, which can be
perfect only in God. Yet we’ve all also experienced evil at some
point, because we all exist. We’ve also had experience of good,
whether simple or complex; the pleasant feeling of sunshine on
one’s skin, or the pleasures of friendship or romance. These are
goods which we especially recognize when they’re missing, in
the bitter cold, or loneliness, or heartbreak. No one who loses a
limb reckons life better by the loss itself. Rather, the loss is only
32 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
???
made bearable by the gain of some other good; for example, by
becoming a more grateful person, or a more charitable human
being, through overcoming the adversity. I think few would
argue that the evil was required in order to gain these goods.
Rather, the evil was merely the occasion of these intangible
goods, which could be acquired by anyone at any time.
There still sometimes occurs the feeling that life is unbear-
able, that the sum total of good experiences surely cannot out-
weigh the bad ones. Or perhaps the crushing weight of adver-
sity and sorrow has made its presence felt too keenly upon a
soul. To know that another has suffered more than me and has
endured it admirably – Jesus is a good example – may be a
small comfort. But perhaps all that is needed to revive hope is
a change in perspective; to have a little more courage, a little
more strength, and the grace to bear that which is passing, for
this earthly life is indeed passing, lasting but a moment, while
eternity is forever. With a perspective such as this, and the
examples of countless others who endure suffering with forti-
tude, who wouldn’t be inspired to work not for what perishes,
but for eternal life?
EFREN PIZANO, CHATSWORTH, CALIFORNIA
T o be or not to be? That is the question that arises when
one faces up to the feelings of anguish, despair, and
insignificance that can overcome us during times of deep
reflection. Such feelings can lead us to wonder if it would be
easier to end it all now and be done with the fluctuating emo-
tions that never seem to settle or straighten themselves out
with time. They linger on our horizon alongside another cause
for concern: the certainty of death. When we reflect on the
likelihood that a century from now we will be erased from the
historical memory, a dark shadow of meaninglessness can be
cast over our every decision and action. We feel like a Kafka
character, who has been summoned to this world without a
reason but living in hope that one day, before death, it will all
become clear. I personally do not hold my breath.
Instead of looking for answers in the works of existentialist
philosophers or in the texts of the world’s religions, perhaps a
reason to be can be found by observing nature. While walking
my dog one afternoon, I noticed a cherry blossom tree in full
bloom. It was strikingly beautiful, and I made a point of walk-
ing the same route every time I took the dog out, so that I
could bear witness to the pink leaves that had left such an
impression on me. A week or so passed, and I headed out on
the same route: only this time, the tree stood bare. I was later
to find out that these blossoms are very short-lived. Ever since
I became aware of the cherry blossom tree’s evanescent nature,
I have felt a deep affection towards it. I believe that while the
colour of the petals is pleasing on the eye, it is their transience
that provides the special aesthetic quality.
Like the blossoming of a ‘Sakura’ tree, our lives are unendur-
ing. This does not render them pointless. Instead, it provides the
To Be or Not To Be?
beauty and significance that makes them worthwhile. If we can
learn to embrace our impermanent and absurd condition, we
may, like Albert Camus, find within us an eternal summer.
KEVIN HATTIE, KIRKINTILLOCH, GLASGOW
T he reference in the question is undoubtedly to Hamlet’s
soliloquy where, considering suicide, he realises he and
others are deterred by fear of what may happen after death.
But to me the question also suggests the Greek myth where,
when questioned by King Midas as to what is the best and most
desirable thing for human beings, the satyr Silenus replies:
“Not to have been born – but the next best is to die soon.”
Some may say that philosophies which claim that life is not
worth living, or that only a fear of death deters us from taking
our lives, cheapen and degrade life. But, in regards to Hamlet,
much of his soliloquy appears to ring true. He is surely right to
say that life is full of tribulations – “the thousand natural shocks”
– and that we are often unable to avoid them. We may, for exam-
ple, be oppressed minorities living under a dictatorship; or, like
Ophelia, we may be scorned in love. By ending our lives, it may,
strangely, seem that we are taking control over matters and
deciding how to live (to not). However, although many may hate
their lives sometimes, few actually take their lives. Hamlet seems
right when he says, “conscience makes cowards of us all.”
Silenus, however, seems to be saying that it’s never worth living
at all. Yet surely many things do make life worth living: the beau-
ties of nature, art, science, the capacity for reason and self-
awareness which allows us to appreciate these things. Although
we know some of our life-experiences will be painful, and are
aware that love affairs and friendships end, and the people we
love most may die in the course of our life, there is, arguably, still
much to appreciate. Furthermore, there is perhaps a certain dig-
nity gained by living through personal adversity. Consider
Camus’ telling of the myth of Sisyphus: Sisyphus adheres to his
pointless labour in Hades despite the endlessness and ignominy
of it, deriving some nobility from his absurd condition.
And irrespective of the rights and wrongs of suicide, should
we really fear death and what comes afterwards? Perhaps we
should instead view it with anticipation. In the words of Peter
Pan, death is “an awfully big adventure.”
JONATHAN TIPTON, PRESTON, LANCASHIRE
I s that the one real philosophical question – whether to live?
(Camus.) But yet it is not really a question; it is a choice (or are
we merely bewitching ourselves with language here? – Wittgen-
stein). But what is the purpose of this ‘real philosophical ques-
tion’? Purpose itself goes far beyond the idea of ‘to be’: the real
answer is to be sought in ‘how to be for someone’ (Levinas).
In fact, there is no ‘answer’ available to us, only a choice;
and this choice is contingent on whether the ‘to be’ can attain
(realise, etc) its purpose – whether understood as that revealed
in scripture, as the final cause in Aristotle’s sense, as some per-
sonal construction, or the ideal of a thinking subject, and so on.
Hamlet’s trouble in asking his question is also an admission
of having missed a particular life-purpose. That is, Hamlet is
without an answer to the primary pair of questions: ‘What is
man and why are we here?’ (Cassirer). I mean, it is difficult to
imagine the ‘What am I?’ before knowing the ‘Why am I?’
This alone can inform us about ‘Who am I?’; and only from
answering that can one have any idea about how to answer
‘What should I do?’
To Be or Not To Be?
So Hamlet seems not to understand what he is asking. He,
like everyone else, cannot proceed to properly answer ‘To be or
not to be?’ without having performed the necessary first step of
making a positive identification of, and commitment to, why he
is here. And then the so-called ‘question’, like the dense fogs of
Elsinore which so mystified him, should clear.
HANK VRANA, SOFIA, BULGARIA
T he human heart recognizes heroes by the choices they
make when they are faced with adversity or responsibility.
None of us ever knows for sure what we are made of until we
are tested. In The Tragedy of Hamlet, the protagonist falls short
of being a hero by virtue of his character, or lack thereof.
According to the gravedigger’s reckoning (Act 5: Scene 1),
Hamlet was thirty years old when he fell into his pit of despair.
To be fair, Hamlet’s future was pretty bleak. His father, the
old King of Denmark, had been dead only a month when his
mother’s scandalous marriage turned his world upside down.
Hamlet knew that his mother’s self-centered happiness had cost
him the throne, but he felt helpless to stand up for himself.
And what can a king stand for if he can’t stand up for himself?
Poor Hamlet! He was a prince: that much was true. He
knew full well who he was, but what he was, he hadn’t a clue.
In this modern age of blended families and accumulated cul-
tures, we struggle more than ever to know who we truly are.
Companies such as AncestryDNA and Ancestry.com lend their
shovels to help us dig up our roots; but the deeper we go, the
more we know that we are digging in the wrong place. Our true
identity does not reside in the dry dusty bones of our family
trees, but rather in the sum total of our own individual actions.
The beloved Russian author Leo Tolstoy believed that
untangling who we are from what we are is one of life’s greatest
pursuits. His philosophy was that our station in life merely
describes us, whereas our actions define us. In his book, The
Gospel in Brief, Tolstoy concludes that our true identity comes
down to one thing: our choices.
We have no control over who we have been made into. That
is a fact of circumstances beyond our control. Yet to become or
not to become what we are meant to be is for us to decide.
Therein, dear Hamlet, lies our true identity, and our strength
to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
CONNIE KOEHLER, TEXAS
C amus wrongly reasons that the fundamental question of
philosophy is whether or not life is worth living. No one
seriously raises that question except in uncommon, particular
cases. Why should I continue to live? The nearly universal
answer is, “Because I want to.” It’s the way nature made us.
Camus should have consulted Mother Nature. To be or not to
be? The empirical evidence is clear. It is to be.
There is a survival instinct. It is visibly operating in, for
instance, conditions of slavery, where a continued existence in a
degrading state of injustice, no liberty, scant pursuit of happi-
ness, brutal punishment, and back-breaking labor, is still pre-
ferred to death. It is manifest in the clinging to life of the old
and infirm whose time is short; and in the same clinging to life
of the young and infirm whose time to suffer is long. Many
with terminal illness who plan suicide find they cannot will
themselves to do it. The survival instinct is not something we
reason out. It is in us as a result of aeons of evolution. It clearly
contributes to the survival of one’s species. To be or not to be?
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 33
?? Nature answered that question for us.
Neither suicide nor deliberately sacrificing one’s life for
another is evidence against the survival instinct. Both are rare,
and their rarity is itself evidence that ‘to be’ is generally pre-
ferred to ‘not to be’. War might be the chief evidence to the
contrary. However, most have to be conscripted or pressured
to fight. And when people do march off to war, they do so not
to give their lives for their country, but, as General Patton said,
to make “the other poor dumb bastard die for his.”
I might question my continued existence in the face of ter-
minal illness. I would never question it just because someone
suggested that life seems absurd. Even if it were proved to be
so, we still are driven to live, and so we will. And if we need
meaning in our lives, somehow, almost all of us will find it.
JOHN TALLEY,
RUTHERFORDTON, NORTH CAROLINA
C onscious thoughts are due to complex electrochemical
reactions in the brain, which, when deconstructed, are
essentially interactions of matter and energy. Einstein’s equation
E = mc2 says that matter and energy are interconvertible. And
one of science’s most secure maxims is that energy can never
disappear, it merely changes form. This means that nothing is
absolved from this immortality, because everything has energy-
identity. Therefore, ‘to be’ is the only answer.
But will we still experience a sense of life after death – espe-
cially since our sense organs will no longer have the capacity to
work as we anthropocentrically perceive them to? Aye, there’s
the rub! Emerson says in The Poet, “Here we find ourselves,
suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and
should go very warily and reverently.”
To conceptualize post-death consciousness is to plunge into
a conjectural dreamscape. Yet, many pundits have taken this
dive and fashioned innumerable ‘answers’. In his Myth of Sisy-
phus, Camus calls this leap to belief in an afterlife a hope that
transcends human understanding, an escape from reality that is
akin to philosophical (that is, intellectual) suicide. He finds
integrity only in the state before the jump: in Shakespearean
terms, an ego-teetering between being a “paragon of animals”
and “quintessence of dust.” He counsels living with the absur-
dity of the life we perceive. Absurdity bursts forth from con-
flicting contemplations of self: body and/or consciousness,
meaningful and/or meaningless, particle and/or wave, etc. As
PLEASE VISIT CGILLCARTOONS.COM FOR MORE.
© CHRIS GILL 2016
CARTOON
34 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
T.S. Eliot said in The Hollow Men: “Between the potency and
the existence/Between the essence and the descent/Falls the
Shadow.” All who meditate upon these koan-like recursive
mysteries become ensnared in this speculative penumbra of
potential solutions, not unlike the superposition of the photon
before the wavefunction collapse.
In one sense, we will always be a part of this great flux of
matter-and-energy existence; but the conscious decision to give
place to being and/or non-being is one of preference not of
certitude, for we cannot experience death amidst living aware-
ness. The possible implications of quantum entanglement, uni-
versal sentience, parallel worlds, and a myriad other rabbits,
beg to be chased. My preference is to shimmer in the probabil-
ities, blink from one to another without settling, without col-
lapsing. I will continue this relentless run to touch the horizon
of human knowledge until I am enlightened by hidden vari-
ables, by inevitable natural death, or never, by nothing. Until
then, the only significance any of us can give to these primeval
yearnings for absolute identity are personal morality tales of
ideology and imagination.
CHRISTINE ROUSSEAU,
FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA
I n practice, suicide is rarely the result of a process or reason-
ing, but rather of a loss of reason. It is an outcome of depres-
sion, of schizophrenia, of alcohol or other drug abuse. It is esti-
mated that 80% to 90% of suicides occur in people with men-
tal disorders. Two-thirds of suicides visit a doctor in the month
before their final act. (A depressed young friend of mine tried
to admit himself to hospital the day before he killed himself,
and was turned away.) So suicide is usually the consequence of
an untreated illness; an illness that leads as surely to death as
untreated cancer.
Every year, across the world a million people kill them-
selves, and fifteen times as many try. In the developed world it
is a leading cause of death in the unreasonable young. The old,
and sometimes wiser, having still a little reason, eschew it, for
reason cannot drive us to suicide. Roquentin in Sartre’s novel
Nausea confronts a world in which all action is pointless, and
quickly deduces that suicide would be pointless by the same
token. Camus writes The Myth of Sisyphus towards much the
same conclusion, encouraging us to battle on in an absurd
world. Thomas Nagel agrees that if all life is pointless, then
suicide is as pointless as anything else. It will be neither justi-
fied nor condemned by reason.
However, David Hume long ago taught us about the limits
of reason for motivating action. Reason cannot prove that
night follows day, nor that the world exists, nor that I have a
self. And yet I daily preen myself, and in the day that follows
night, I go out into the world. I may also kill my unreasonable
and unjustified self.
We are not perfectly rational beings, like angels or gods. We
are apes, and if we kill ourselves it is not because reason has
shown us the way, but because we have become temporarily
wonky. The brain – that highly irrational organ – that struggles
to convert sensation into something bearable, has given up try-
ing for a moment. And in that moment – and it only takes a
moment, it does not take thought – we do the non-undoable.
As for Hamlet, he was all words, words, words, and he was dri-
ven to murder and suicide because he had seen a ghost.
ROBERT GRIFFITHS, GODALMING
To Be or Not To Be?
T hought over the act of self-killing has persisted for millen-
nia alongside entrenched religious anathema against it, as
well as certain religions which require it on occasion, for exam-
ple, in the immolation of widowed Hindus. Attitudes in West-
ern civilization started to shift from the Seventeenth Century:
John Donne’s defense of suicide and David Hume’s critique of
the Thomistic view of suicide were notable treatises. Hume
argued that circumstances that lead to a human being living in
constant pain and suffering mean that that person is leading an
existence worse than death.
Hume thought that the our natural fear of death ensured
that the person who chooses to commit suicide would only do
so after substantial deliberation. However, a person embroiled
in dreadful circumstances may not be in the optimal frame of
mind to make the choice. Giving the choice to someone else, a
close relative, for example, appears to be a better alternative.
However, the threat of extraneous factors affecting the decision
always remains. For example, the person chosen to choose
might abandon her duty to prevent an impulsive suicide in
order to advance her own interests. Regardless of the checks
which we might presume operate, a set of practices has yet to
be devised that prevents manipulation and abuses of the poten-
tial victim. Advances in medicine have enabled us, through psy-
chiatric testing, to determine a person’s rationality in moments
of extreme anguish, for instance, when a patient chooses
euthanasia. But are such tests able to reveal a difference
between a soldier laying her life down for her county and a sui-
cide bomber at the end of her life? Without testing capabilities
at such junctures, the answer to ‘To Be or Not To Be?’ would
appear to lie within the moral compass of the beholder. Yet as
Schopenhauer puts it, suicide “is a clumsy experiment to make;
for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which
puts the question and awaits the answer.”
ISH SAHAI, MUMBAI
W hether life is inherently positive, negative, or neutral is
an issue faced by many philosophers, but few confronted
it with such force as Arthur Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer,
all organisms are all driven by a Will to survive that often drives
them into conflict, meaning that life is essentially suffering.
Even in the brief respites when Will is not pushing us forward,
there is little more than boredom. Life is therefore overall neg-
ative in nature. This is the philosophical stance of Pessimism.
This Pessimistic stance leads Schopenhauer to another
rather shocking conclusion – that human reproduction is
morally reprehensible, and cannot be justified through reason.
If life is suffering and negative, then it follows that to create life
is a cruel act, as it condemns a new being to a life of suffering. It
is no wonder then that, in both fiction and reality, suffering sen-
tient beings often curse their creators, who have damned them
to an unfair existence – as exemplified in Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Even if we do not go so far as Schopenhauer’s Pessimism, nor
accept his conclusion that human reproduction cannot be justi-
fied, his argument should highlight to us the significance of
childbirth and parenthood. Creating another being is not some-
thing that should be undertaken lightly, and our reasons for
doing so should be carefully considered, perhaps more than for
any other act. For while we may not accept that life is inherently
or simply negative, it is evident that our world is one with a great
deal of suffering. With the awareness that one is bringing inno-
cent life into an at times hostile world, parenthood is then a
To Be or Not To Be?
great duty. Let Schopenhauer’s Pessimism then be taken as a
challenge and a reminder to us: a challenge to build a better
world for future generations to inhabit, and a reminder that
children do not choose their existences. And on a broader scale,
if society supports childbirth to sustain its own existence, then
education and other investments in the future should be priori-
tised as a debt owed to the life that has been created. If new life
is to be created, then we must take care that it is not a curse, by
??
accepting the challenge of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism.
KENNETH THOMSON-DUNCAN
ABERDEEN
T o be or not to be? Let me try to answer the question by
recounting a harrowing episode from three years ago.
Facebook is a strange place to try to talk someone out of
suicide. But through an instant message I checked in with a
young friend, who I knew outside of Facebook. She was not
doing well and threatened to end her life. I am a philosopher,
not a counsellor, so I was not trained for this. Nevertheless, I
had to keep typing.
I told Nancy (not her name) that she needed to stay in the
world, that her presence, no matter how miserable for her, was
nevertheless good and significant. I asked her to remember her
place in the hearts of her family and friends. I added that her
life might get better unexpectedly. I gave her links to articles
that might awaken her desire to live. (All the while, I was fran-
tically Facebooking to try to get through to her family.) I had a
significant problem, though: Nancy is an atheist, who thinks
that life has no objective meaning. But I did not counsel her to
commit suicide if that was her desire since everything is mean-
ingless anyway, neither I did not invoke Camus’ response to
suicide, since I find these worldviews unconvincing. But since
even nihilists cannot escape the truth that some things have
meaning to some people, I tried to remind her of value outside
of her own suffering. Ultimately, and however clichéd it
sounds, that value, that meaning, is love. Love could hold her
back and lead her on. I also implored her as a loving friend.
Nancy did not try to die that night. I had gotten through to
her mother, who lived locally and she rushed to Nancy’s apart-
ment. Perhaps I stalled her long enough to make that possible.
Sadly, Nancy did attempt to take her own life twice not long
after. She failed both times. I visited her in the psychiatric
ward, because she asked to see me. It was a kind-of pastoral
visit to an atheist. Our philosophical discussion about God and
meaning didn’t get too far during those visits. But why did she
call me, a Christian philosopher, to meet her in the aftermath
of her darkness? I think it was love. If love is real, suicide is
wrong. As I departed, I said, “Love is real, please stay.”
DR DOUGLAS GROOTHUIS,
LITTLETON, COLORADO
The next question is: What is the Future of Humanity?
Please give and justify your predictions in fewer than 400
words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book
mountain. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the
Month’, and must be received by 13th February 2017. If you
want a chance of getting a book, please include your physi-
cal address. Submission is permission to reproduce your
answer physically and electronically. Thanks.
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 35
 In her 1982 book Child Abuse and
Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives,
the anthropologist Jill Korbin wrote that in
classical China “children, according to the
ethic of ‘filial piety,’ were considered the sole
property of their parents. As such, they could
PHOTOS © AI BEI 2016
to time, and sometimes it became an
excuse for the father to behave in an
unfatherly way, but according to the
rules of behavior (we call it ‘regulatory
behavior’), the whole idea of property
itself is, again, quite distorted. However,

be dealt with in whatever manner their
parents chose, with little or no interference
from outsiders. Severe beatings, infanticide,
child slavery, the selling of young girls as
prostitutes, child betrothal, and foot-binding
were not uncommon.” Is it true that Confu-
cian ideas of filial piety say children are the
property of their parents? Doesn’t the Clas-
sic of Filial Piety teach that the basis of fil-
ial piety is love?
Korbin’s view is distorted, and I would
say erroneous, for a number of reasons.
In the Classic of Filial Piety, Confucius
makes filial piety the root of all virtue,
starting with the piety of the Emperor
there are limits. For example, if the son
kills the father, then normally the son
would not be excused! The most impor-
tant value in Confucianism is self-actu-
alization, so the son cultivating the
father is part of the game. The son
should not be rebellious, but the father,
like the son, has to improve. So in that
connection, the reciprocal relationship
is very much emphasized.
The Confucian philosopher Mencius once
explained that it’s not a good idea for a
junzi [Confucian gentleman displaying
moral nobility] to teach his son, because if the

Tu
towards his parents and the good conse-
quences of that for all his decisions. A
disciple asks the Master (Confucius)
whether simple obedience to a father
student doesn’t do his work, the teacher may
become angry, which a father shouldn’t do.
Do we know why this is the case?
This is a very famous, yet sometimes

Weiming
is a philosophy professor
at Harvard University
and Chair of the Institute
for Advanced Humanistic
Studies at Peking
University. He is an
ethicist and is one of the
leading lights of
New Confucianism.
David Volodzko asked
him about the relevance
of Confucius today.
can be called filial piety. Confucius
reacts strongly (“What words are
these?”) and replies that the Emperor
who had ministers willing to argue with
him would not lose his state and “the
father who had a son that would remon-
strate with him would not sink into the
gulf of unrighteous deeds. Therefore
when a case of unrighteous conduct is
concerned, a son must by no means
keep from remonstrating with his father,
nor a minister from remonstrating with
his ruler.” So the son’s responsibility is
to help the father to become more
fatherly. The father disciplines the son,
of course, but the son is obligated to see
to it that the father acts according to the
fatherly principle.
According to Confucius’ approach to
the Rectification of Names [ie Chinese
philosophy of language] if you occupy
the position of father, then that very
concept implies that you act in certain
ways. The father acts fatherly so that the
son will be able to act in filial reverence.
So the notion of obeying an abusive
father is totally distorted and, I would
say, against basic Confucian principles.
The principle of reciprocity, shu, is
important in governing this relation-
ship. The abuse of authoritarian power
[in Chinese politics] occurred from time
overlooked, aspect of the Confucian tra-
dition. The father-son relationship
should always be cordial. Well, that’s not
the right term. Loving and caring. So,
for example, I would teach my friend’s
children and my friend teaches my chil-
dren. This is because the discipline of
the teacher is incompatible with the car-
ing of the father. A teacher-student rela-
tionship should be able to endure a
great deal of pressure because of the dis-
cipline involved. But this is not desirable
in the father-son relationship. It’s all
right for the teacher to have indignation
if the student doesn’t obey the rules, but
between a father and son, anger is coun-
terproductive.
In the Analects, Mang Wubo asks Confucius
about filial piety, and Confucius talks about
parents who worry if their children are sick.
Can you talk about this?
There are 109 references to humanity,
or ren, in the Analects, so in this one
case, Confucius says that in filial piety
it’s difficult to have the right attitude.
Amy Chua, the ‘tiger mother’ [author of
the bestselling book Battle Hymn of the
Tiger Mother], who teaches at Yale, made
a few comments, after she became a
celebrity, that her older daughter is very
amenable to this kind of pressure, while

36 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017 Interview


her second daughter is diametrically
opposed to it, so sometimes she would
have to compromise. So even though on
the surface, the emphasis is on imposing
one’s will, I think there are underlying
issues that need to be explored. If you’re
very stringent, and the child is aware
that this is for their own good, and the
learning time is appreciated, it turns out
to be efficacious for the relationship. On
the other hand, I think many parents in
China misunderstand this, and overex-
ercise their parental power, and we
don’t need to discuss the psychology of
it, but quite often the children rebel.
The parents’ willingness to sacrifice
their own self-interest for the well-
being of their children, and not the out-
moded idea that they will rely upon the
children to take care of them, has now
become a civil religion in China. Espe-
cially the education of the children. As
soon as a child is born, the parents
begin to work extremely hard in order
to save some money so that the child
will have a proper education. Especially
when they themselves never had a
chance to go to school. Of course, there
are benefits for them: they feel proud;
they can be praised if their children
excel. That’s certainly part of the story.
But it’s extraordinary in many cases, I
noticed, that parents in China or even in
Taiwan decide to leave an adequate job
at home in order to eke out a living in,
for example the United States, by run-
ning a coffee shop, so that their children
can go to a better school. That happens
quite a lot. Even in my own personal
experience, I have encountered quite a
few stories like this, and I think it has do
with the culture and ethos of the people.
Filial piety is not just to one’s parents,
but to one’s clan. And also, in the Great
Learning, they say self-cultivation has to
be extended to the family, and to the
nation, and eventually, heaven. That is
each person’s role in the network of self-
cultivation.
What do you mean by one’s clan?
Not just one’s parents, but one’s rela-
tives. It’s patriarchal, but it’s also quite
broad. To support your parents, that’s
good, but that’s a minimum. Even ani-
mals can do that. But to make your par-
ents happy, respected in the community,
Interview
Interview
that’s considered a higher level of filial
piety. The highest level is, that because
of your own merit, your own achieve-
ment, your parents will be remembered.
For example, Mencius’ mother is
remembered as an ideal of motherhood.
Both Mencius and Confucius were
raised by their mothers, so the role of
the mother is extremely critical in Con-
fucianism. A soldier who shows bravery
on the battlefield can also be a demon-
stration of filial piety. So it has much
broader significance than simply a fam-
ily ethic. It has to be cultivated publicly.
One thing that I just learned is that in
Singapore, which is not necessarily a
Confucian society, there’s been a survey
run for the last 30 years or more of the
views of different generations, and dif-
ferent sectors, businesspeople, acade-
mics, and so forth. And the single value
mentioned most often is always filial
piety. This is probably not true in China
now. I don’t know whether it’s true in
Taiwan.
Why isn’t it true in China now?
In China, Confucianism was devastated
by the Cultural Revolution, which was
very much anti-Confucian, even though
now they try to restore some Confucian
values. I don’t think xiao [filial piety] is
included in socialist core values. But it is
coming back in civil society in terms of
parental relationships.
In your view then, it’s not a case of Orien-
talist thinking to attribute Chinese behavior
to Confucianism?
If we look at the world in terms of value
orientations, then not only China but
also the rest of that region has been
characterized as the Confucian world.
Although in Japan, the idea of loyalty is
much more pronounced than that of fil-
ial piety.
Precisely because China was obsessed
with the idea of being overwhelmed by
Japan aggressiveness, China wanted to
become wealthy and powerful, and
many believed that getting rid of Con-
fucian tradition was a precondition for
becoming powerful. The discourse was
that Confucianism is incompatible with
modern ideas of ethics or the dignity of
individuals. And the revolutionary Red
Guards attacked Confucianism time and
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 37
time again, though it
continued to be devel-
oped in Taiwan, Hong
Kong, Macau, Japan, Korea.
But this has all changed now, and we’re
entering a new era where many of the
positive Confucian values can be under-
scored. Right now, there’s this new view
that China is going through a kind of
Confucian revival. A revival is a double-
edged sword that can very easily be
politicized by the government as a
method of political control, but it also
has much broader implications as well.
Why do some people think Confucianism is
incompatible with progress?
That is a tradition that started in 1919,
with the New Cultural Movement, and
what I call all these Enlightenment val-
ues of the West, even though there’s a
lot of debate about the abusive use of
some of these values. We have Christ-
ian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Confucian
values, and the argument was that reli-
gious forms are not compatible. But I
think that phase is already over, and
people today have more sophisticated
ideas about human development, that
it’s not just a matter of having a higher
GDP. So right now in China, very few
insist that the Confucian tradition is
incompatible with progress. As properly
understood and properly practiced,
Confucian values become even more
congenial to human development.
Some narrow and nationalistic ideas
have also surfaced based on this. My
view is that Confucianism must adapt
itself to human values, and that the abu-
sive use of power by neoliberal
economies could be corrected by a
much broader vision of human flourish-
ing. Issues of proper governance, moral
order, and the financial regulatory sys-
tem are all a part of the story. The role
of government, for example, the role of
leadership, all these are relevant issues.
Thank you for your time.
• David Volodzko is the national editor of
the Korea JoongAng Daily, the sister
paper of The New York Times in South
Korea, and a contributing author for the
South China Morning Post and The
Diplomat, where he writes about Chinese
politics and society.

Voting For Self-Destruction
DEAR EDITOR: Your Editorial in Issue
116 concluded that in the long term, the
communal view of ordinary people
should be trusted. I wouldn’t disagree
with that. But this is not the ‘Five Year
Democracy’ model of politics we and
other so-called ‘democratic’ countries
have adopted. Take, for example, the
environment. The very future of our
world depends on our solving a host of
environmental issues. One of those is
overuse of the world’s resources. If
resource consumption continues at cur-
rent rates the Earth will finally become a
barren desert and a poisoned sea. Con-
certed international action to stop this is
needed now. And ‘Now means Now!’
But the good sense of the general
population will take a lot longer than
five years to show. What politician,
knowing they must go to the polls
within that time-scale, is going to tell
people that they must stop using their
cars, buying things they don’t need, and
switching the heating on, instead of
wearing more jumpers? Our economy is
based on a capitalist system which needs
ever-increasing use of the world’s
resources to generate growth, jobs and
profits. What politicians are going to tell
companies more powerful than their
governments that they must stop pro-
ducing junk and over-packaging it, chop-
ping down forests to produce burgers
and oil, and turning mineral-rich coun-
tries into big holes in the ground?
I’m usually quite an optimistic soul,
but not in this case. Our politicians can
make a few of the right noises and sit
through conferences at Kyoto and
Copenhagen. But any of them who seri-
ously suggested to the voters that they
must stop consuming resources at any-
thing like the level we do now would
not get a sniff of the benches at West-
minster or seats at the Senate in Wash-
ington.
MEURIG PARRI,
CAERDYDD
38 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up!
Write to me at: Philosophy Now
43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ • U.K.
or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
Contractual Obligations For Life
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 116, Stephen
Faison argues that adherents of a social
contract must provide the means to
food, clothing and shelter, since “the
contract recognizes that the individual
possesses a natural right to survive.” Yet
how can a contract, a literal or figurative
piece of paper, recognize anything? Fai-
son must mean that individuals recog-
nize that each individual possesses a nat-
ural right to survive. But from where
does this recognition arrive? In a state of
nature, individuals are concerned only
with their own self-interests and will do
whatever necessary to advance those
interests, including attacking others. If
individuals recognize the natural rights
of other individuals, they wouldn’t
attack one another and wouldn’t be in a
state of nature in the first place. Rather,
individuals in a hypothetical state of
nature would agree to a social contract
simply because that contract would
advance their interests by allowing them
to live without constant threat of attack.
Any claims about ‘natural rights’ are
unnecessary.
Faison goes on to explain that the
state must furnish food, clothing and
shelter for all its individuals as though
the state were some nebulous entity
external to the contractors. But the state
is merely the legal arrangement to
which individuals agree when they enter
into a social contract. It’s nothing more
than a collection of individuals, so Fai-
son’s claim amounts to saying that some
individuals must furnish food, clothing
and shelter for other individuals.
Consider a hypothetical state of
nature where A is in a position of advan-
tage relative to B and C by virtue of A’s
superior natural abilities or material
possessions. A could kill or steal from B
or C, but B and C are strong enough
together to kill or steal from A. A, B and
C all have reason to enter into a social
contract in which each of them agrees to
refrain from attacking any other party.
But suppose B and C make the addi-
tional demand that A furnish them with
food, clothing and shelter as part of the
contract. At best, this looks like a bad
deal for A, one he would never accept
without coercion. At worst, it seems like
B and C are extorting A by agreeing not
to attack him so long as he provides
them food, clothing and shelter.
There are arguments for equitable
distribution of basic goods, including
John Rawls’ social contract theory incor-
porating a ‘veil of ignorance’; but I’m not
convinced that Faison is on the right
track with his ‘license to steal’.
GREG HICKEY
CHICAGO
DEAR EDITOR: I’ve recently discovered
Philosophy Now and I love it. But I am
struggling with Faison’s article, ‘The
Social Contract: A License to Steal’: I am
constantly distracted by the use of the
terms ‘he’ and ‘man’ in contexts that are
clearly intended to be gender-neutral. It’s
particularly galling given that the article
addresses the state’s responsibility to pro-
tect citizens, yet it is so often women (and
their children) whom the state fails to
protect. Surely authors could be advised
that sexist language is unacceptable in
Philosophy Now; and that if a submitted
manuscript includes sexist language, its
author will be asked to correct it?
VIRGINIA SIMPSON-YOUNG
NEW SOUTH WALES
More Unfeasible Election Conditions
DEAR EDITOR: I’d like to address how
Lorenzo Capitani wants to count votes in
his article ‘Informed Voting’ in Issue 116.
Capitani argues that those with particular
experience within a specific topic should
have their vote on that topic count more
than a layperson. For example, a police-
man’s vote would count more than mine
concerning issue of criminal justice.
This sounds reasonable, but why
should we take working within a profes-
sion to be a guarantee of the quality of

that person’s vote? It is false to think that
policemen automatically have a better
understanding of racial discrimination
being committed by police officers. An
officer can ignore these issues, even after
being thoroughly educated about them.
They may say they don’t believe it’s hap-
pening and carry on their job in wanton
ignorance. This can be said of any profes-
sional who decides that a particular prob-
lem doesn’t exist within their profession,
e.g. mine safety, or medical malpractice.
In addition, the idea that votes should
be counted according to the theme does
not sound feasible. There is too much
known overlay among different issues,
not to mention the unknown overlay.
Voters, and those who will calculate
their votes, may not realize that a partic-
ular issue will have further-reaching
aspects, in which others who have vital
knowledge should have been part of the
calculation process. For example, if the
issue is overfishing, it would be obvious
to have the votes of fishermen count
more than others, but it may not be
obvious that local psychiatrists should
have their votes enhanced too, since less
work for the fisherman may lead to a
diminished sense of worth, affecting
their families.
Lastly, in most representative sys-
tems, we do not vote directly on issues,
but rather vote to elect those to make
those decisions. For this idea of Capi-
tani’s to work, each representative would
need to be a jack-of-all-trades to be able
to vote rightly and fairly.
K.C. WARBLE III
SOUTH CAROLINA
DEAR EDITOR: I read with great interest
Lorenzo Capitani’s idea of voting rights
based on merit. I have been thinking this
very idea for quite some time, and seeing
your article allowed me to look at the idea
from a different perspective. I was initially
in favour of a test for a vote, but now I’d
like to argue against the proposal.
Humans are naturally self-serving,
and politics is no different. If only those
with a direct, active interest in the topic
under debate may vote, votes will largely
be driven by self-interest, to the detri-
ment of those more indirectly affected
by the issue. Take the example of a vote
on whether factories should be forced to
reduce carbon emissions. Factories
would have to find better ways of reduc-
ing fuel consumption. They might invest
more in renewable energy and spend less
on oil. If enough factories follow this
plan, there would then be a surplus of
oil, driving the price down. The
economies of oil-exporting countries
may shrink due to this devaluation. It is
not impossible (it has already happened)
that such a declining economy would
seek to divert attention away from the
poor economy by focusing on showcas-
ing its foreign policy strength... As can
be seen, a snowball effect is created.
Also, what constitutes ‘knowledge of
the issue’? Does being a businessman,
investor, or economist suffice to have
enough knowledge of the above exam-
ple? How deep would the knowledge
have to be in order for it to be sufficient?
Is a one week course enough to vote on
X? Or perhaps a doctorate is needed to
truly grasp a complex situation. If the
vote was whether or not to make Shake-
speare mandatory for schoolchildren,
who would get a say in that?
In theory it seems logical that the
best-informed should govern society.
Yet a single-subject test might danger-
ously narrow political debate and muffle
the expression of genuine concerns. Mis-
guided though the uninformed vote may
be, it is still a better indicator of the gen-
eral will of the people. Take Brexit; the
‘leave’ side won, in spite of economists’
warning that it would have a negative
impact on the British economy. If only
people who had passed a politics and
economics test could vote then Brexit
would have been rejected. Yet it is likely
that leave voters had other concerns on
their minds that, for them, outweighed
the likely economic damage. The world
isn’t split into different and separate
compartments, where a certain thing can
be done and then one can move on to
the next; it is human nature to want to
give order to the world, but in reality
everything is interrelated, whether obvi-
ous or not. For this reason, and the rea-
son previously stated, I don’t think that
it is in the interest of society to impose a
test in order to be eligible to vote.
DAVID CONROY, BY EMAIL
DEAR EDITOR: I find Lorenzo Capitani’s
suggested methods for enhancing political
decision-making disturbing on two
counts. First, his proposals are elitist and
so anti-democratic. Second, there are
serious issues about the delivery of his
suggestion. I’ll concentrate on the second.
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 39
Letters
Capitani stresses the importance of
knowledge in political decision-making.
Knowledge is essential to that purpose,
but knowledge cannot be sufficient: the
facts require interpretation. Politics differs
from subjects such as physics or driving
theory, where answers can be assessed as
being correct or incorrect. Certainly facts
underpin political decisions; but the facts
themselves must be augmented by inter-
pretation. The ability to interpret facts in
a rational manner is essential when mak-
ing any decision, political or not. Skill in
this could be assessed. However, a further
step is required: the facts have to be
weighted. Some people will arrive at
weightings consistent with their synthesis
of the facts; but others will not. The latter
will be dominated by prejudice, possibly
arising from political allegiance. Capitani
does not explain how his system would
overcome the influence of propaganda,
nor does he inform us whether he would
seek to assess the weightings a potential
voter gives to the facts.
How, and importantly, by whom, are
examiners to be chosen? One concern
here is over the possibility of political
patronage. A second is, to what extent
would assessors allow those with political
views different to their own to reach the
required standard? Unless these two
issues are addressed, Capitani’s examina-
tion system will work in favour of the
establishment and exclude divergent
thinking.
Further, what level of ability does
Capitani require of those permitted to
vote? As someone interested in many
political fields, my knowledge is not to a
consistent level across all, but I would not
wish to be excluded from any decision
which affects my country, region, or
town. For some topics, my interest only
develops when that field enters political
debate. Would I have the time to acquire
the necessary level of knowledge in time
to pass the examination required to par-
ticipate in the decision-making?
MICHAEL SHAW
HUDDERSFIELD
Co-operative Disagreement
DEAR EDITOR: I wanted to thank you for
publishing Mary Midgley’s article ‘A
Golden Manifesto’ in Issue 116 [and
117, Ed]. I am a young woman who’s
recently returned to university to under-
take a Masters degree and the article
really resonated with me. I found it very
Letters
valuable to read Midgley’s account of
being in classes during the war where the
men were invalids or conscientious
objectors and less competitive than usual.
This reminded me of undergraduate phi-
losophy classes where the male students
would be highly involved in discussions,
whereas there were some female students
who wouldn’t say anything at all, with
little to no encouragement from tutors.
As a woman I feel I have had to adopt a
particularly aggressive discursive style to
make myself heard. The article helped
solidify some concerns I’ve been having
about this. I hope to let myself be influ-
enced by Midgley and her friends in
adopting a more co-operative approach.
ANA HINE
DUNDEE
The Trolley Trundles On
DEAR EDITOR: Let us call the person
who comes upon the situation in Omid
Panahi’s very good article, ‘Could There
Be A Solution To The Trolley Prob-
lem?’ ( Issue 116) the ‘Accidental Visi-
tor’. In the original version, Visitor can-
not stop the trolley, but she can control
the switching mechanism of the tracks,
thus enabling her to direct the trolley
away from a track that will kill five peo-
ple down a track that will kill one person.
Normally, the moral question posed is:
“Which alternative should Visitor take
and why?” Another possibility, however,
is for Visitor to do nothing. In that case,
Visitor does not interfere in the fate of
any of the six people involved. This
involves a rather radical view of responsi-
bility which we might call ‘Bystander
Immunity’. The idea is that one is never
responsible for a train of events that
would occur in one’s absence anyway.
Admittedly, this is a truncated view of
moral responsibility. Normally, it is
thought that we should save another
human being if possible, at least when
there is little or no cost to ourselves. One
should wade into the muddy water to
save the drowning child, even if it
involves ruining one’s clothes. To fail to
do so is morally monstrous. Neverthe-
less, it might give us pause that in many
countries, there would not be any crimi-
nal charge in the offing for one who
stood by and simply allowed the child to
drown – or simply let the trolley run
over the five people on the track.
Another alternative is for Visitor to
flip a coin: heads, the trolley goes on the
40 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
track with one person; tails, the trolley
continues on the track with five. The rea-
soning here is that each of the six people
has an equal right to life. By flipping a
coin to decide which track the trolley will
roll down, the coin flip gives each of
them a 50/50 chance of surviving, thus
giving equal respect to the right to life of
all six. For a discussion of this way of
thinking, see: John M. Taurek, ‘Should
the Numbers Count?, Philosophy & Public
Affairs, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1977).
DON E. SCHEID, J.D., PH.D.
WINONA STATE UNIVERSITY, MN
DEAR EDITOR: Ethical matters aside, a
consideration relating to the Trolley
Problem (Issue 116) is the question of
legal liability. The relatives of the one
worker you kill might well sue you for
loss of earnings, perhaps more. The five
workers on the other track would be
unlikely to testify in your defence since
they are apparently deaf and unaware
that they have been saved.
DERRICK GROVER
WEST SUSSEX
In Sight Of The Self
DEAR EDITOR: Thank you for Alisa
Anokhina’s article on relieving depression
through searching for authenticity (Issue
115). I’ve often felt that depression
(including my own) is connected to a loss
of authenticity resulting in a severe loss of
self. I’ve never before viewed this connec-
tion in existentialist terms, but I can now
see how this philosophy suggests a solu-
tion to, not just a relief from, depression.
The Australian psychologist Dorothy
Rowe described depression as a prison,
and it certainly does feel like that. She
describes this imprisonment as a life in
which one’s own values cannot be
expressed or provide autonomy for that
person. It takes a lot of courage to define
one’s own values and act in a way that is
consistent with them, so shaping our-
selves, because this often affects other
people. But depression does seem to be a
situation in which we have become shape-
less – without choices – and the best treat-
ment would be help with regaining and
strengthening the person we want to be.
However I’m not clear about Alisa’s
advocacy of medication. Depression can
be, and often is, devastating, because the
loss of self is devastating, and medication
cannot restore that loss of self. Regaining
the self requires action and love and a
sight of a possible future. This cannot be
gained medically, it can only be lived.
And I think that with psychological (exis-
tential) strengthening, a ‘depressed
brain’ can achieve great things.
PAMELA WHITE
NOTTINGHAM
Eternal Fact-Straightening
DEAR EDITOR: In his interview with
Stanley Fish (Issue 116), Scott Parker
was in error in inserting that in Kansas,
“creationism is taught in schools as an
alternative theory to evolution.” He was
presumably thinking of actions taken by
the state board of education in 1999 and
again in 2005 to compromise the treat-
ment of evolution in the state science
standards. Both actions were subse-
quently reversed; moreover, neither
involved requiring or even allowing
teachers in the state’s public schools to
present creationism as scientifically cred-
ible. Such a requirement or allowance
would be unconstitutional, as established
by the Supreme Court in its decision in
Edwards v. Aguillard (1987). To be sure,
creationists have not been idle in their
attempts to undermine the teaching of
evolution in the US, but their recent
efforts have been aimed at misrepresenting
evolution as scientifically controversial.
Dismayingly, the Supreme Court’s deci-
sion notwithstanding, creationism is rou-
tinely taught in US public schools.
GLENN BRANCH
NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENCE
EDUCATION, OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
DEAR EDITOR: In reply to Bill
Meacham’s letter in Issue 116 expressing
exasperation over the resolution of the
contradiction in baseball’s rules, look at
Rule 7.08(e) as quoted in the story of the
professor: “Any player is out when he
fails to reach the next base before a
fielder tags him or the base.” That was
the rule before the correction. Now read
Rule 7.08(e) in rule books subsequent to
the correction (mine is the 2013 edition):
“Any runner is out when he or the next
base is tagged before he touches the next
base.” The corrected version makes the
runner safe in the event of a tie; the old
version makes the runner out in the
event of a tie. The new version makes
the rule consistent with the rule for the
batter-runner at first base.
CHRIS CHRISTENSEN
PORTLAND, OREGON

Voltaire (1694-1778)
Jared Spears looks at the cometary career of a celebrity revolutionary.
I
mprisoned inside the walls of the Bastille in 1717 accused
of composing poems which mocked the family of France’s
ruling Regent, twenty-three-year-old writer François
Marie Arouet was hard at work on his first play. He later
boasted that his cell offered him quiet time to think. It seems
Arouet took this time to ruminate over the injustice of the
charges: the subject of the play bears the unmistakable irony of
satire. He chose to adapt Oedipus, the classic Greek incest
tragedy. The irony? The Regent, whose family Arouet had
allegedly defamed, was widely rumoured to have carried on rela-
tions with his own daughter. Drawing such an unabashed com-
parison, the play was destined to spark controversy, even before
opening. But while libel was a punishable crime, satiric insinua-
tion was not. As if to make sure of his inculpability, the author
for the first time graced his work with a nom de plume, a single
word: Voltaire.
This vignette of the rebellious young writer coining his
now notorious pen name is in many ways characteristic of
Voltaire’s entire life. Throughout a long career, Voltaire was
never a stranger to controversy. On the contrary, he courted it,
revelling in every chance to outmaneuver an opponent
through rhetorical mastery and biting wit. A natural provoca-
teur ever testing limits, this penchant for feather-ruffling won
him admirers as well as enemies. A humanist who championed
reason over superstition and tolerance over bigotry, Voltaire
helped France cast off a shadow that lingered over it after cen-
turies of religious conflict.
Early Years
Born in 1694 with what’s now diagnosed as Crohn’s disease,
Voltaire constantly defied prognoses that he was not long for
the world, although the degenerative condition often left him
confined to bed. As a boy he received a strict Catholic Jesuit
education. From this he acquired two things: impeccable
learning, including in Latin, theology, and rhetoric; and an
abiding skepticism and mistrust for authority.
Rebelling against his father’s wish to carry on the family
practice in law, the young libertine chose for himself the life of
a writer. Instead of performing the duties of a notary as his
father had arranged, the young Arouet spent his post-college
days scribbling poetry and charming the salons of Paris’s social
elite. When his deceit was eventually uncovered, his father
sent him abroad to serve the French ambassador in Holland,
but scandal followed close behind when the impetuous poet
fell in love with a French Protestant. The idea of an interfaith
marriage was too much for his father to swallow, so the errant
son was shuffled back to Paris.
His time abroad in Holland’s more liberal society is often
cited as a source of Voltaire’s humanist values, but the sting of
a foiled love affair at such a tender age cannot be overlooked.
In any case, shaped by the ironies of his early life, his character
would be defined by his eagerness to embrace the role of intel-
lectual outsider.
Brief Lives
Master of the Art of Shaping Perceptions
Seldom in one place more than a few years, Voltaire’s life was
largely that of a wanderer. Never far from controversy, he often
left a city in flight, as when faced with the prospect of another
term in the Bastille in 1723. The wily troublemaker this time
contrived an alternative, commuting his sentence to a period of
exile in London. Voltaire’s career had to this point leaned more
toward literature than philosophy, but in England’s more laissez-
faire market of ideas, Voltaire started to engage with convention-
challenging concepts about the universe and man’s place in it.
Warily returning to France in 1726, Voltaire was eager to
repair his tattered public image there. Keenly aware of the
machinations of noble favouritism, he began a deliberate cam-
paign of literary output and influence-courting in Paris. His
tip-toeing around potential controversy in this period paid off,
and by the end of 1732 he had taken up residence at court in
Versailles – a sign his reputation was restored. While there he
struck up a relationship with the Marquise Emilie du Châtelet,
whose vivacious personality and remarkable intellect proved an
instinctive draw. But his repaired standing and new-found
favour at court would be short-lived.
While at Versailles, Voltaire refined and expanded on his
Letters Concerning the English Nation, the result of a fruitful
infusion of new perspectives while across the Channel. These
essays mark his shift toward philosophy and the examination of
social mores, extolling such far-ranging topics as religious tol-
erance of the Quakers to the natural philosophy of English
thinkers such as Isaac Newton. Despite Voltaire’s dutifully
applying for approval from royal censors, Letters was illicitly
released by its publisher in 1733 without the author’s approval.
Causing yet another scandal, the book was banned, even
burned, when it appeared in France.
This controversy saw Voltaire’s careful campaign of appear-
ances undone, in part due to his assertions of Newtonian nat-
ural philosophy. The concept of a natural world governed by a
set of fundamental laws observable and understandable through
experimentation had already won over Protestant nations. The
French, however, clung stubbornly to their own science, rooted
in the work of Descartes, and French Academy elders rejected
Newton’s theories. Underlying the discrepancies was a deeper
tension between the methods of the two schools. The deductive
Cartesian system demanded explanations for why natural phe-
nomena occurred, while the inductive Newtonian method
favored empirical investigation, and was content to take nature
as it was observed. In Letters, Voltaire broke down Newton’s
math-heavy works, and espoused empiricism as a more objec-
tive standard of truth over the “useless” Descartes, but his asser-
tion that Descartes “was a dreamer, and [Newton] a sage” was
tantamount to heresy among the Academy establishment.
As the debate swirled in Paris, Voltaire and his partner in
crime, du Châtelet, fanned the flames by publishing scientific
experiments alongside a steady stream of pamphlets and essays
in support of Newtonian theories. By the time the authoritative
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 41
 tions on the nature of
man and the moral
implications that fol-
lowed. Was man inher-
ently good, or inher-
ently evil? Were the
course of mankind’s
actions divinely preor-
dained? In natural phi-
losophy Voltaire had
proved himself a tactful
and tireless champion of
the ideas of others. Here
he would leave his own
enduring stamp on
Western thought.
This debate was a war
of words fought on two
fronts. On one side were
those such as the young
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
who conceived of mod-
ern man as corrupted by
society, and who praised
instead the ignorant
simplicity of the noble
savage. To Rousseau’s
assertions, Voltaire
responded that “Read-
ing your works, a man
gets the notion to walk
on all fours. After more
than sixty years I’ve
regrettably lost that
habit.” He went on to
oppose Rousseau’s
extremity. “Great crimes
are always committed by
great fools,” he wrote of
him.
On the other side
stood Optimists such as
Alexander Pope. Heirs of
Voltaire
the German philosopher
by Gail Campbell, 2016
Gottfried Wilhelm Leib-
edition of Voltaire’s Elements of Newtonian Philosophy was pub- niz, they reasoned that through divine ordination the world
lished in 1745, the tide of French thought had turned away which man inhabits must be the best of all possible worlds. No
from Cartesianism. Voltaire, standard-bearer of the movement, matter how terrible things may seem at times, they asserted that
was credited with dragging national thought into modernity. God’s will must be good, and infallible.
This was the manifold genius of Voltaire – able not only to syn- For Voltaire, the Optimist’s stance epitomized the dangers of
thesize the complex works of Newton and others, but also able dogmatic faith holding sway over reason. In 1755, an unpre-
to wage a formidable campaign of public discourse. dictable catastrophe brought the dubiousness of the Optimist’s
thinking to the fore when an earthquake of an estimated mag-
Theodicy Meets The Odyssey nitude 8.5 rocked the Portuguese capitol, Lisbon. Coupled with
By 1754, after the untimely passing of his mistress and a tem- the resulting tsunami, the disaster leveled three quarters of one
pestuous stint as advisor to Prussia’s King Frederick the Great, of Europe’s great imperial cities in a matter of minutes. With
the wayward Voltaire found his next cause célèbre. Europe’s tens of thousands of lives lost, the horror at this seemingly ran-
many different theological strains had left unanswered ques- dom calamity left Europe bewildered. Although Voltaire must

42 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017


have been as shocked as anyone at the tragedy, he was outraged
by the responses of his adversaries. Rousseau proclaimed Lis-
bon proof that civilization was inherently a mistake – if the
many towers of Lisbon had not crowded so many thousands of
people together, how much harm could the earthquake have
done? Even more worrying in Voltaire’s eyes was Pope’s Opti-
mistic response, which affirmed the idea that God had surely
brought his wrath upon Lisbon to punish its sinful ways.
Voltaire’s initial response, Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon, used
high literary form as an entry into the debate. In its verses
Voltaire directly attacks the Optimists, writing, “Come, ye
philosophers, who cry, ‘All is well,’ And contemplate this ruin
of a world.” In humourless sobriety, Voltaire asks how such
unpredictable, senseless suffering isn’t a cruel fate. The poem
stirred the Paris salons and drew rebuke from Rousseau, but
Voltaire’s follow-up would prove the knock-out blow.
The satire Candide was Voltaire’s magnum opus, successfully
synthesizing forty years of social criticism and challenges to con-
ventional wisdom into a brilliant example of his literary com-
mand. Rich in the author’s trademark ironic wit, the brisk narra-
tive follows its once sheltered young Candide in an Odyssean
adventure through contemporary Europe, confronting all the
harsh cruelties of this world in a reality check not unlike the
fabled experience of the young Buddha. He is accompanied by
Dr Pangloss, who after each horror asserts, “Everything must
be for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.” The satire
struck a stinging blow against religious zealotry, government
hypocrisy, and, above all, the philosophy of Optimism.
Although thinly veiled in allegory, the book laid bare the
shortcomings of that philosophy by reducing it to absurdity.
Published in 1759, Candide was quickly translated into multi-
ple languages, rapidly becoming a best-seller despite being
banned in France. The book’s familiar format – it satirizes the
narrative clichés of the popular picaresque novel – made it
accessible to any literate person of the time, rendering Candide
capable of spreading Voltaire’s rebuke out from the salons and
into the wider public consciousness. One contemporary that
year speculated that it had been the fastest selling book ever.
The far-reaching results of this work cannot be overstated.
The minds behind the democratic revolutions in France and
America in the following decades were in no small part influ-
enced by the notion of individual free will set forth in Candide.
Final Acts
Voltaire finally settled down in 1759 in Ferney in France, near
the Swiss border. Installed here for the next two decades, he
received visitors from across Europe, corresponded with lead-
ing thinkers the world over, and published numerous new
works. ‘The Great Voltaire’, as he came to be known, never
ceased his work, and continued to engage in events which cap-
tured public attention, such as the 1763 affair of Jean Calas.
Voltaire elevated this case of religious persecution against a
wrongly-accused provincial Protestant to national scrutiny.
Calas had been tortured and executed for the murder of his
son, despite evidence of his son’s perjury and suicide. Once
more, outrage stirred Voltaire into a vigorous campaign of let-
ters, opinion columns, pamphlets, and petitions. This time, the
intervention of the ‘Patriarch of Ferney’ prompted an almost
Brief Lives
immediate response. King Louis XV received the Calas family
and annulled the sentence. A new trial found Calas innocent
and posthumously exonerated the wrongly accused citizen.
The incident is a testament to Voltaire’s now unrivaled influ-
ence and stature. It also exemplifies one of his most enduring
lessons: exercise restraint over impulsive judgement and action
when our emotions might otherwise get the better of us.
In February 1778, Voltaire made his first trip to Paris in
twenty years. He came for the opening of his latest play, Irene,
and was greeted at the theater with a hero’s welcome. The
members of the French Academy who had so bitterly pitted
themselves against Newtonian theory some four decades ear-
lier now exalted the man who had survived to witness the birth
of his own legend. But at the age of eighty-three, this last trip
proved too much for Voltaire’s constantly bedeviled health.
For one who referred to himself as “dying since birth” he had
managed to cheat death long beyond the wildest expectations,
but he died soon after returning to Paris.
A long-standing opponent of the Catholic church, Voltaire
was denied a churchyard burial. But his remains would not rest
long in the ground. Just fourteen years later, they were resurfaced
on the order of the French Revolution’s new National Assembly,
to be interred in the Panthéon, where the Assembly decreed the
most admirable sons of France were to be laid to rest.
An Enduring Legacy
Voltaire was so incessant in his attacks, so adapt in wielding
both wit and reason, we who look back from today cannot help
but admire him, and today he is exalted as a preeminent thinker
from the era history has called the Age of Enlightenment.
It is perhaps easy to think of the Enlightenment and its
achievements as just another inevitable step in the long march
toward Modernity. But freedoms which form the basis of
Western society today – the freedom to think, speak, and act as
we choose – were then only the fancy of a few scribbling ideal-
ists such as Voltaire. It took courage to provoke the powerful
and challenge commonly-accepted ideas to advance more
humane ones. Conceiving mankind as neither irrevocably pre-
destined for glory nor utterly doomed, Voltaire showed that
despite its perennial imperfections, humanity could neverthe-
less strive toward virtue. His life, advocating reason although
he was at times vain, and tolerance although he was at times
vehement, is itself proof of the wide-eyed realism he espoused.
So what can we make of the legacy of Voltaire? His ideals
have been used to mould our modern democratic societies, and
for that we can rejoice. But we must remain sober in acknowl-
edging the ways in which history is bound to repeat itself.
“What makes, and will always make, this world a vale of sor-
row,” Voltaire warned, “is the insatiable greediness and the
indomitable pride of men.” So it falls to each era to confront
these ever-shifting shadows as they appear to every generation
and place. We can be grateful then to inherit the privilege, and
responsibility, of Voltaire’s legacy – to stand that much bolder
on the shoulders of a great man, who employed wit and wis-
dom in an unfinished quest for greater justice and humanity.
© JARED SPEARS 2016
Jared Spears is a writer and researcher in New York. His work can
be found at LitHub, Mental Floss, and elsewhere on the web.
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 43

Books
Was Einstein Right?
by Clifford M. Will
IN NOVEMBER 1915,
Albert Einstein revealed
his theory of general rela- the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity,
tivity to the world.
Almost exactly a century
later, in June 2015, at the Perimeter Insti-
tute in Waterloo, Canada, a group of
physicists gathered to discuss a problem:
the theorists are taking over. As Perimeter
director Neil Turok told New Scientist, in
physics, “theory is becoming
ever more complex and con-
trived… and yet failing to Gravity Probe B
explain the most basic facts”
(Issue 3028, 4th July 2015).
The main culprit is string
theory, the mathematics of
which have become all but
impenetrable without yield-
ing a single testable predic-
tion. Physicists wanting to
grapple with these develop-
ments, and philosophers
studying their predicament,
could do worse than start by
reading Was Einstein Right?
by Clifford M. Will, Distin-
guished Professor of Physics
at the University of Florida.
Professor Will sets out
his stall early on: “Without
experiment, physics is ster-
ile, physical theory merely
idle speculation” (p.13).
This book is remarkable in
that Will manages to remain
faithful to his objective of
making experiment his
focus, while at the same time
delivering, almost in passing,
a superb explanation of gen-
eral relativity, without an
equation in sight. Further-
more, you’ll find here none of the hyper-
bolic theorising that is usually assumed to
sell popular physics books. There is no
fretting about what, if anything, came
before the Big Bang, no untestable hooey
about quantum multiverses. Instead, Will
exhorts us to “focus only on observable,
operationally defined quantities, and avoid included in this book.
44 Philosophy Now December 2016/January 2017
Tim Wilkinson answers the question Was Einstein Right?
about general relativity with a “Yes!”, whilst Phil Badger
surveys Steven Lukes’ perspective on moral relativism.
unanswerable questions” (p.50).
The author’s qualifications for giving
us the lowdown on experimental general
relativity are impressive. A distinguished
academic physicist and Editor-in-Chief of
he also chaired NASA’s Science Advisory
Committee for the Gravity Probe B
experiment for over ten years. Gravity
Probe B is arguably the most important,
and certainly the most delicate, test of
general relativity so far performed, and
became the longest-running project in
heads off
NASA’s history. First conceived in 1959
and proposed to NASA in 1961, the satel-
lite was not launched until 2004. The
results – in the affirmative – were finally
announced in 2011. Unfortunately,
although the experiment is described in
detail, the results arrived too late to be
Induction and Under-Determination
The evidence-based approach to knowledge
yields a treasure-trove of ideas for anyone
interested in the philosophy of science.
It is generally accepted by philosophers
of science that scientific theories can never
be finally confirmed. For starters, the past
may not be an absolutely reliable guide to
the future, so that what has been observed
might not be what will be observed in the
future, even in the same circumstances.
This is part of the problem of induction.
Moreover, for any given experimental
result, there might be several
theories capable of predicting
that result, so how do you know
which is the correct theory,
given that evidence? This is the
so-called under-determination
problem.
Will gives us a striking exam-
ple of under-determination in
action, as he charts the rise and
fall of an alternative theory of
gravitation – the Brans-Dicke
Theory, developed in the 1960s
and 70s. For a time, it looked as
though certain experiments
might go against general relativ-
ity and in favour of Brans and
Dicke. Although the tide even-
tually turned in favour of gen-
eral relativity, as Will recounts,
with appropriately chosen
parameters, Brans-Dicke
Theory can always be config-
ured to produce exactly the
same predictions as general rel-
ativity, to within any given level
of experimental accuracy. Why
then, ponders Will, did Brans-
Dicke Theory fall out of favour?
In what sense is it wrong, and
general relativity right?
The answer can be partly put
down to Occam’s razor – gen-
eral relativity is a simpler, more elegant
theory. Philosophers reading Will’s account
may also conclude that Brans-Dicke
Theory was a degenerative theory – it was
constantly in need of tweaking to accom-
modate troublesome observations, without
any concomitant increase in its explanatory
or predictive power.
Book Reviews

Falsification
In other chapters of Was Einstein Right? we
are served a banquet of food for thought
on the relationship between positive evi-
dence – observations that conform with
what a theory would predict – and confir-
mation that that theory is true. A single
repeatable negative example – that is, an
observation which goes against the predic-
tions of the theory – will always carry more
weight than any number of positive ones.
In fact, a repeatable negative observation
will, generally speaking, falsify the theory
under scrutiny. However, in some
approaches in the philosophy of science
(such as those incorporating Bayesian
probability), positive evidence should count
for something, especially when the obser-
vation concerned would be extremely sur-
prising without the theory in question pre-
dicting it. As Will shows, some of the pre-
dictions of general relativity are so surpris-
ing as to be almost unbelievable, but have
been verified by observations nonetheless.
For instance, when setting out the implica-
tions of general relativity on the bending of
light rays, the effect of gravity on clocks,
and the motion of Mercury around the
Sun, Will clearly, carefully, and convinc-
ingly explains why calculations done using
Euclidean geometry and Newton’s ideas of
gravity will produce different results to
general relativity. He then leads us through
decades of experiments designed to test
general relativity’s predictions. Because the
experimental difficulties and uncertainties
are placed front and centre, students of the
philosophy of science will find it entertain-
ing and illuminating to relate their ideas to
the episodes described. As a source of
material for such an exercise, Was Einstein
Right? fares better than many texts written
specifically for that purpose.
There is still one major prediction of
general relativity yet to be properly tested:
gravity waves. Will explains how these
arise from the theory. Importantly, from a
scientific point of view, gravity waves are a
specific, quantifiable, and in principle
measurable prediction. The theory is
therefore susceptible to falsification. Since
the mid-1970s, the existence of gravity
waves has been inferred indirectly from
the movement of binary pulsars. However,
in early 2016 direct detection of them was
announced in a paper published in Physical
Review Letters (PRL 116, Feb 2016). Sadly,
this was much too late to be included in
the book, but it will be interesting to
watch the story unfold in this still nascent
area of observational astronomy.
Book Reviews
Books
Brush Up Your General Relativity
In addition to its value as raw material for
philosophical reflection, Was Einstein
Right? should prove an extremely prof-
itable read for students of the philosophy
of science wanting to get to grips with this
important pillar of physics.
For example, Will takes his time in
explaining the crucial importance of the
principle of equivalence. Broadly, this is the
idea that people in equivalent types of
motion will experience the universe in the
same type of way. For instance, it says that
things appear (locally) the same to an
observer in free-fall as they do to an
observer who is not under the influence of
gravity. Will further explains why any theory
that respects the principle of equivalence
(such as Brans-Dicke Theory) will automati-
cally make many of the same predictions as
general relativity, such as the effect of grav-
ity on clocks, and the curvature of space.
Speaking of curved space, Will invites
us to consider an enormous triangle, half
the size of the Solar System, with the Einstein
middle of one side passing close to the Sun
and the opposite vertex somewhere out lenge, but Will still manages to give the
near the orbit of Pluto. From our perspec- reader a decent flavour of what’s going on.
tive, the sides of this triangle are perfectly
straight along every part of their length. A Rewarding Page-Turner
However, general relativity would predict The only criticism of Was Einstein Right? I
that due to the mass of the Sun, the inte- can muster is that it is desperately in need
rior angles of this triangle would add up to of a Third Edition. We now have the
179°, 59’, 59.125” – which is 0.875 arcsec- results of Gravity Probe B, and the latest
onds less than the 180° that would be the detectors are approaching the sensitivity
case if space were everywhere Euclidean. needed to routinely observe gravity waves
Conclusion: matter literally bends space. without the need for a conveniently nearby
Such a large triangle is unlikely to be supernova. But this is a minor gripe.
drawn any time soon; but long baseline Although more educational than popularis-
radio interferometry (using radio tele- ing, as an exposition of general relativity
scopes a great distance apart) provides a which avoids the underlying mathematics, I
very accurate way to measure the same have never come across the equal of Was
angular discrepancies. These measure- Einstein Right? The presentation of the
ments have confirmed the predictions of theory in the form of engaging real-life his-
general relativity with a precision of 0.1%. torical episodes makes it more of a page-
Space is indeed curved. turner than it has any right to be. Com-
Spacetime is curved too. Now, using pared to the full-fat mathematical version
geometry to represent time, let alone of general relativity I learned as an under-
curved spacetime, is a few levels of abstrac- graduate, I have no hesitation in saying that
tion up from using geometry to represent in many respects, the fascinating tales in
space. However, since Descartes introduced this book are far more rewarding. Will’s
us to coordinates in the Seventeenth Cen- clear writing and breezy enthusiasm make
tury, we have been able to use mathematics this an enormously agreeable way to pick
to represent anything that can be quantified, up the basics of general relativity, and an
including time. Geometry, which since the indispensable resource for reflection on its
Nineteenth Century includes non- philosophical ramifications.
Euclidean (curved space) geometries, can © DR TIM WILKINSON 2016
then be brought to bear on our physical Tim Wilkinson has a PhD in pure maths.
concepts, including spacetime. Describing
curved, non-Euclidean spacetime without • Was Einstein Right? by Clifford M. Will, Basic,
using mathematics is a considerable chal- revised 1993, £9.99 pb, 312pp, ISBN: 0465090869
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 45
 Books
Relative Battle,

IMAGE © PETER PULLEN 2016 PLEASE VISIT WWW.PETERPULLEN.COM

Moral Relativism
Peter Pullen 2016
by Steven Lukes

TO BEGIN WITH, LET ME

say that this is a slim book
on a huge and controver-
sial topic. However, to say
that a book is slim in girth is not to say that
it is slight in content, and this one is the
summation of well over thirty years work
on its topic by an eminent thinker in the
field. Professor Lukes’ conclusions might
not be to the tastes of some readers, but
few will be left with anything less than
admiration for his grasp of the issues, or
his crystal clarity in exploring them.
Lukes, a professor of politics and sociol-
ogy at New York University, first outlines
several species of relativism. For example,
cognitive relativism says that there is a
range of fundamentally incompatible per-
spectives about the sorts of things that can
be true. The inspiration here is Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804), and in particular, his
insight that what have become known as
our ‘conceptual schemes’ (not his term)
shape our understanding of the world.
However, Kant argued that even if we
could not be sure how far our understand- scepticism or relativism: we might, as experienced on learning of each others’
ing revealed ultimate reality, the rational Lukes points out, readily accept that others preferred modes for disposing of the
mind’s basic ‘categories’ (his term) gener- think differently from us and conclude that remains of the dead. It seems as that we are
ated a universally human vision of that they’re just wrong! It is only when we in the business of ‘inventing right and
reality. Cognitive relativism undermined adopt the ‘external’ perspective of the wrong’ (the phrase is the subtitle of a rela-
Kant’s ‘human universalism’ by making anthropologist that doubts about the status tivist tract by John Mackie).
claims, based on anthropological research, of our own moral beliefs get a hold. This is
for ‘exotic’ cultural variations in both a matter of profound anxiety to some Against Moral Relativism
beliefs about the world and basic logic. (Lukes cites Pope John Paul II as an exam- Faced with this situation, the beleaguered
ple) on the grounds that, captured by such moral realist – someone who says that there
The Diversity of Custom doubt, we’ll be unable to maintain any are real ethical truths independent of
As exciting as debates about cognitive rela- sense of value at all. parochial variations in customs – has few
tivism are – and there are plenty of us who’d Sadly for the moral absolutists amongst options. One, which Lukes explores, is to
take the ‘universalist’ side against such rela- us – and ultimately we have to count Lukes deny that variation at the level of ‘norms’
tivism – it is moral relativism that most in that camp – there is more difficulty in (that is, rules and practices), betokens any
interests Lukes. Again, it is the apparently overcoming moral relativism than its cogni- real moral variation at all. Thus Persians,
huge range of beliefs found across human tive sibling. Concerning cognitive relativism Indians, and Greeks all shared the ‘value’ – a
cultures that inspires the moral relativist we can, with moral philosopher Bernard more abstract, higher order of thing than a
move. Faced with the wide differences we Williams, say that reality has a habit of bit- norm – of respecting the dead, even though
find between individuals and between cul- ing us hard if our cognitions are too wide of the norms followed in doing so differed.
tures regarding morality, the relativist aban- the mark – people with really mad thinking The problem here is two-fold. Firstly,
dons questions about the justification of about the world will die a lot quicker than the extent of normative variation between
moral beliefs in favour of sociological ones people with reality-tracking thoughts. Thus, cultures makes us balk at the idea that this
explaining why they exist. Morality, on this agreement or ‘convergence’ on big ques- variation is superficial. Secondly, if the real-
picture, is the product of time and place, tions of fact is at least possible. ist wants to assert the truth of one set of
and there is nothing more to moral No such constraints define the limits of norms against another, her position is as
approval or outrage than the cultural condi- moral variation. Consequently, history and untenable as moral relativism itself. Moral
tioning of emotion. For Lukes, moral rela- anthropology give us repeated examples relativism holds practices to be too different
tivism represents a fusion of anthropology apparently vindicating the view of the to judge them by any one standard, whilst
and moral scepticism which sees genuine Greek poet Pinder that “Custom is lord of with moral realism, the apparent differences
debate on moral issues as impossible. all.” Lukes himself gives an excellent exam- in practice signify no real differences at all.
Of course, the existence of moral diver- ple from Herodotus about the mutual hor- How can we know which perspective is true?
sity is, of itself, no argument for moral ror that Greeks, Persians, and Indians Well, Lukes does not swallow any of

46 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017 Book Reviews


this. You can almost hear his distain for
anthropologists such as Richard Shweder,
who attempts to categorise female circum-
cision as ‘genital modification’, and
describes suttee (a Hindu widow’s ritual
self-immolation) as “conceivable [to the
victim] as an astonishing moment when
her body and its senses became fully
sacred.” For Shweder, and others like him,
cultures and their ways are radically differ-
ent, alien, and, chillingly, closed to any
form of evaluation from what they see as
our ‘ethnocentric’
Western perspective.
Lukes argues that what
is at work here is a kind of
romanticism about culture,
originating in the work of
Johann von Herder (1744-
1803) and later taken up by
Johann Fichte (1762-
1814), which sees each cul-
ture as a hermetically
sealed ‘monolithic’ unit
that “bears in itself the
standard of its perfection”
(Herder, Reflections on the
Philosophy of the History of
Mankind, 1791). In other
words, cultures cannot be
judged in terms of values
external to them. Lukes
pulls no punches in criticis-
ing this view, asserting that
cultures are nothing like as
rigid as it implies (he
approvingly cites Mary
Midgley’s image of cul-
tures as ‘ecosystems’ which
shade into one another,
either across space or
through time). He also says
this view ignores the possi-
bility of contention and
struggle for change within
a culture. As an example he
cites the case of a Sicilian
woman, Franca Viola, who
broke a thousand-year-tra-
dition by not only refusing
to marry the man who had
kidnapped and raped her, but by pressing
charges against him. Later, in similar vein,
Lukes notes the research of Christine
Walley, whose work with Kenyan initiates
of ‘genital modification’ counters
Shweder’s picture of general female
endorsement of the practice. Custom
might, in other words, be ‘lord of all’; but
some of its subjects are more willing to
revolt than we’ve been led to believe.
Book Reviews
Crossing Cultures
So powerful, argues Lukes, has the ‘mono-
lithic model’ of culture become, that it has
even infected the thought of some other-
wise liberal thinkers, leading them to dis-
miss those who criticise practices in other
cultures as ‘cultural tourists’.
Lukes acknowledges that such criticisms
sometimes have force, but identifies dan-
gers, both in certain kinds of relativist
multiculturalism, and in the ‘Clash of
Civilisations’ thesis put forward by the late
Divine Judgement?
Kali Trampling Shiva particular cultural norms. Lukes
by Raja Ravi Varma
Samuel Huntington. Both of these con-
cepts, Lukes argues, are premised on the
notion that dissent within a culture is
always experienced as both negative and
external in origin. Thus in Holland some
well-meaning liberals have denied the
need for cross community dialogue or cri-
tique, which they fear might be experi-
enced by immigrant communities as a
form of cultural imperialism, while
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 47
Books
Huntington saw only irrevocable differ-
ence between ‘civilizations’ – again negat-
ing the possibility of real dialogue between
them. The net result of both positions has
been a ‘ghettoising’ of culture in which a
conservative suspicion of those defined as
‘other’ can fester.
Instead, Lukes proposes that we
embark on a renewed effort to identify
shared values across cultures – what politi-
cal philosopher John Rawls called an
‘overlapping consensus’. This might, Luke
hopes, form the basis of a healthy
re-examination of the justice of
refuses to pin his hopes for this on
any specific philosophical
resource, but unsurprisingly,
‘Kantian universalism’ gets a men-
tion, as do Jürgen Habermas’s
attempts to rescue the idea of
shared values from what he sees as
Rawls’ excessive ‘abstraction’. For
Habermas, thought experiments
such as Rawls’ ‘original position’,
or Kant’s notions of ideal rational-
ity can’t replace actual debate
between real individuals. Lukes
even gives a nod to the kind of
Aristotelian view represented by
Martha Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities’
approach, which holds that there
are some universal prerequisites
necessary for people to live ful-
filled lives.
There’s much to be said on all
of this. For instance, Habermas
insistence on the right of ‘all con-
cerned’ to take part in such a
debate has a whiff of circularity
about it – it assumes the equality of
persons which he hopes will be our
conclusion. Nussbaum’s position,
on the other hand, might seem no
more than an eloquent plea for
universalising certain rights.
Nevertheless, for Lukes, the
chance of establishing a dialogue
between cultures is worth the
effort, and dialogue that moves us
towards basic consensus on values
is the best argument against a moral rela-
tivism which begins from the observation
of apparently irreconcilable differences.
© PHIL BADGER 2016
Phil Badger studied social sciences, including
economics, psychology, and social policy, with
philosophy, and teaches in Sheffield.
• Moral Relativism, by Steven Lukes, Profile 2008,
£8.99 pb, 256pp, ISBN: 1846680093
 THE ROAD
Michael Burke traces the lengths to which we must go
Films to truly love the other person.

S
peculating on ethics from the bleak Levinas, all these principles and rules for The Failure Of Theodicy
post-apocalyptic 2009 film The Road how I should act get in the way of and Before exploring more closely how The
(based on Cormac McCarthy’s bleak obtrude my relationship with the Other. Road illustrates Levinas’s ethic, it will be
post-apocalyptic novel of the same name) Facing the Other, I simply ask: ‘What do helpful to place his philosophy in context,
seems like a contradiction-in-terms. After you need from me?’ When I encounter as a response to the horrors of World War
all, The Road recounts the journey of a another, I ought to put aside my concerns Two, in the wake of which much of Europe
father and son over an inhospitable Earth and projects to provide succor to the was in a condition not a far cry from the
smothered in a cloud of dust, where civi- Other any way I can. There should be no devastated ruins of the world of The Road.
lization is dead and buried under the ashes. hesitation, no qualification in my response. As Levinas attested in Difficult Freedom
Humanity has become a fast-diminishing Levinas says that our responsibility to the (1990), his life and thought were “domi-
refugee species, forced to make brutal deci- Other has no limits. Nor are there any nated by the presentiment and the memo-
sions in the face of bitter cold, starvation, ry of the Nazi horror.” Yet the genocidal
and roaming cannibals, as the beleaguered Emmanuel devastation of the Holocaust, which took
survivors eke out what little food remains Levinas the lives of several members of Levinas’s
while avoiding becoming food for others. 1906-1995 family, did not undermine his hope in
Why then propose this film as an illustra- humanity. Rather, it showed him the
tion of the ethical thought of Emmanuel moral bankruptcy of ethical systems that
Levinas (1906-1995), a philosopher who magnify rational characteristics or social
stresses our unconditional responsibility values over directly addressing the person.
LEVINAS PHOTO © BRACHA L. ETTINGER

for the welfare of others? In a world where Levinas expounds on the deficit of stan-
any underlying decency has long ago been dard moral theories in light of the
squelched by rumbling stomachs, where Holocaust and other horrific atrocities in
churches have long since burnt down and an essay entitled ‘Useless Suffering’. Here
ethical treatises have either succumbed to he addresses the centuries-old question of
mildew or been consumed as fuel to keep how an all-loving, all-powerful and all-
warm, Levinas’s message seems over- knowing God could allow humans to suf-
whelmingly out of place. Yet it is precisely fer. For Levinas, the absurd, superfluous
when the clamor of all the sensible and character of suffering is magnified in the
rational theories of moral obligation have light of the senseless convulsions of the
been silenced that his message of an Twentieth Century. But despite the vari-
inescapable moral responsibility resonates ous efforts of Western philosophers and
the loudest. In other words, Levinas’s theologians over the centuries to justify or
ethics is the definitive ethics of emergency, explain suffering, often by appealing
for the destitute, the abandoned, the root- beyond experience to a supersensible
less. His ethics is a sure and steady guide Being, Levinas, not unlike many of his
along The Road, especially as Levinas and contemporaries, believed a tipping point
Cormac McCarthy converge in their limitations on whom qualifies as the was reached against these theodicies [theo-
attempts to salvage a shred of humanity Other. Seeing someone in terms of their logical explanations of evil, Ed] in the
from the gaping maw of an inhuman world. gender, race, creed, or any other distin- Twentieth Century, with its total wars and
guishing characteristic only risks blocking merciless genocides. It is not merely that
My Responsibility To The Other my access to the singular individual before the humanistic culture of the
What makes Levinas’s ethics so singular is me. So we bear an ethical responsibility Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rea-
his unrelenting insistence on the individu- that we have not chosen, to respond to a son, human rights, and the inviolable free-
al’s absolute responsibility to others. This call of obligation we can never fulfill. If dom of the person, was unable to prevent
is not an ethics where my obligations to this brief sketch of Levinas’s ethics shows the rise of murderous totalitarian ideolo-
the Other (person) are mediated through anything, it is the sheer difficulty of living gies, but that these Enlightenment values
some general, rational principle, or up to your responsibility to the Other. In a were fundamentally unable to justify such
through some algorithm of utility. I do not sense, it’s impossible –your obligations are senseless horror. The point is not simply
calculate how I should act toward the never exhausted: the more we meet our that no one can write moral treatises, let
Other by asking what that person would obligations, the more that is asked of us. alone poetry, after the Holocaust. Rather,
want done in my place, or what an impar- But it is this impossible obligation to the any attempt to even explain such an event
tial spectator would suggest I do. For Other that resonates so deeply in The Road. falls flat. So for Levinas, Auschwitz under-

48 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017

mines humanity’s ability to make sense of
the world, let alone form a plausible
theodicy regarding such events.
What separates Levinas’s response here
from other accounts, is that rather than
trying to prop up the enfeebled moral and
social values, Levinas asks what we ought
to do in light of this manifest failure of
institutional morality and traditional reli-
gion. If the devastating events of the
Twentieth Century undermine the theo-
retical framework of the political and
social order, perhaps a more appropriate
starting point is the interpersonal
encounter between the I and the Other,
and an unconditional responsibility to the
person. Further, if a rational set of moral
principles tailored to the reality of human
condition has failed to guide human inter-
action, perhaps an unrealistic moral
approach, demanding the impossible, can
succeed in its place. In the face of useless
suffering, perhaps the senseless kindness
advocated by Levinas – of placing the
Other’s needs, even their survival, before
your own – is the only ‘sensible’ response.
Post-Apocalyptical Ethics
The hopelessness and nihilism that post-
war Europeans encountered are paralleled,
or rather accentuated, in the post-apoca-
lyptic wasteland of The Road. Indeed, what
The Road so forcefully characterizes is the
sheer devastation that has befallen the
world. Further, there is no explanation of
the cataclysmic event: we aren’t told
whether it is due to some asteroid, nuclear
conflagration, or even the visitation of a
divine judgment upon a forsaken humani-
ty. Theodicies can offer neither explana-
tion nor succor in this monochromatic and
wasted world. Rarely has the alternative
between ethics and sheer survival been
drawn so starkly as here. But this contrast
also starkly exposes what Levinas cease-
lessly promulgates: the blunt opposition
between the way of the world and the ethi-
cal call. The obliteration of the environ-
ment through and even against which
humans have so long defined themselves,
opens up the possibility of encountering
human beings beyond any doctrine – sim-
ply face to face. Neither nature nor culture
any longer mediates one’s encounter with
the Other. The people encountered in the
story are for the most part stripped of the
identifying categories that Levinas casti-
gates as submerging the uniqueness of the
individual brought out by the ethical
encounter, such as ethnicity, political affil-
iation, or religious creed. What predomi-
nates instead is need, vulnerability, and
hostility.
The cries for help often go unanswered
by the father, the protagonist of the film
(Viggo Mortensen) who is bent on continu-
ing on The Road and keeping his son (Kodi
Smit-McPhee) alive. Bereft of other sanctu-
ary, father and son find refuge in one
another. This relationship between the
father and the son epitomizes the uncondi-
Films
Unsaying The Apocalypse
tional devotion of the ethical bond, both in What unites McCarthy and Levinas is
the father’s unstinting commitment toward their common effort to express the inex-
his son, and in the son’s equally unsurpass- pressible. Levinas is well aware of the ten-
able dedication toward his father. sion upon his call to our ethical obligation
Although the father’s unrelenting drive to the Other caused by depicting the
to do whatever it takes to save his son Other, since to comprehend the Other, let
marks him as a likely representative of a alone measure our ethical responsibility to
Levinasian self called to an infinite ethical them, limits and distorts the way our ethi-
obligation to the Other, I think that the cal responsibility reaches us. Levinas is
son provides a better example through hard pressed to avoid his suspicions that he
which to see
Levinas in Father & Son
The Road. help an old man
Although on the road
both the
father and the
THE ROAD IMAGES © WEINSTEIN CO./DIMENSION FILMS 2009
son repeat
the mantra
that they are
‘carrying the
fire’ – a
catchphrase
which guides
their conduct,
epitomized
most clearly
in their stric-
ture against
eating other
people – the
son embodies
this ideal more fully than the father. It is has already betrayed the inviolable nature
unclear as to whether the father actually of the self’s responsibility to the Other
believes this ‘code’, or whether, as intimat- even in merely discussing them.
ed increasingly throughout the journey, Unlike other post-apocalyptic stories,
it’s simply one of the father’s ‘old stories’, The Road deprives the viewer of reassur-
calculated to motivate the son to continue ances of something better to come. There
the journey. The son, however, constantly are no precious books to reignite the fires
advocates for those they come across, of civilization; no triumphant return of
whether for a dying man, a thief, or a ram- nature; no sense of freedom or vindication
bling old man. In response to the father’s with regard to the overturn of the old, cor-
question about responsibility, with its rupt status quo. The desolation and
Biblical resonances of being the keeper of despoilation of the world is near complete.
one’s brother, the son replies that he wor- Time has also contracted for the wan-
ries about everything and everyone – an derers, flattening into a monotony bereft
apt summary of Levinas’s injunction to of conventional chronological references
care for others unconditionally. Perhaps or temporal markers. The opening line of
the son, by his actions, or by his very pres- the book captures this erasure of distinc-
ence, prevents the father from degenerat- tion well: “Nights dark beyond darkness
ing to the desperate measures that others and the days more gray each one than what
around them have adopted. had gone before.” Coupled with this loss of
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 49
orientation is the contraction of the world
to the things necessary for day-to-day sur-
vival. Whatever does not draw the father’s
scrupulous attention regarding their sur-
vival is ignored. This tunnel vision also
underscores his truncated sense of time –
of a past impossibly distant and excruciat-
ingly painful when viewed from the pre-
sent, and a future doled out in the next
scrap to be found, the next meager shelter
to be sought. Memories of a deceased wife
and a departed world are irrevocably
cleaved from a present where they can find
no foothold. An interplay of abstract ideas
is also absent from the dialogue. Littered
with archaic, obscure words, The Road’s
focus on dead and dying words illustrates
how the apocalypse might also transform
thought and language.
Levinas grapples with a similar dynamic
of transforming language, for instance
through his distinction between ‘saying’ and
‘said’. He argues that the Other’s unique-
ness – the way they express or say themselves
to your self – cannot be captured through
the stale, general concepts and empty terms
of rational argumentation – what is said. And
even though Levinas employs traditional
spatial and temporal terms to depict the
Other, such as the height from which the
Other calls to us, or the distant past from
which it summons us, the concepts are
drained of their conventional meaning. This
height cannot be traversed; this past is so
remote as to have never transpired. These
puzzling formulations of space and time
accentuate that the Other stands apart from
context – the Other is not a character within
a shared spatial and temporal context. For
Levinas, the said (rational discourse) seeks
futilely to compensate for the absence of a
50 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
shared world. However, both Levinas’s and
McCarthy’s response to this decentering
from time and space is through a storytelling
that is a speaking to the Other rather than a
speaking about the Other.
At first glance this point seems counter-
intuitive for The Road. After all, the exhaus-
tion of narrative is in part the point. The
allusions to the silent monoliths of a for-
gotten civilization, to the mute agonies and
imponderable rhythms of nature, attest to
the end of the human story, the impotence
of human theory, and in particular, to
theodicy. In the face of such devastation,
words have been divested of their power.
The son has even tired of his father’s tales
of the past, of deeds of goodness and hero-
ism, complaining that these stories are not
true, yet offering no tales in their place. Yet
the reaching-out of story-creating and
story-telling remains. When the father
dies, the boy kneels besides him, saying his
name over and over again. Although this is
a name we never hear or even need to hear,
it assures us that through his love this man
fashioned an identity, the story of a self,
and that in the desolation of the world’s
ending, the father’s life meant something.
The boy also promises to talk to the father
every day – a promise of love that validates
the use of memory which the father had
once thought too harmful in this world,
since all it seemed to do was evoke the pain
of loss. So the conclusion of The Road inti-
mates that the boy will assume the father’s
mantle in continuing to tell stories, talking
to his absent father every day not in order
to chart the passing of time or understand
the world, as much as to sustain his rela-
tionship to the father, and by doing so, sus-
tain goodness and love in the world. This
practice strikes close to the concept of say-
ing Levinas uses, insofar as saying consists
not in explaining or pigeonholing the
Other but in being exposed to however the
Other comes across to you, and thereby
keeping an open relationship to them.
Terminus
The world of The Road cannot be put back
together or made right. This runs contrary
to the assumptions guiding most theodicies.
But this bleak comment on the future is an
affirmation that the world must be faced and
lived in as it is. It deploys themes all too
familiar to the reader of Levinas’s philoso-
phy: the frailty of goodness and redemption,
and the isolation of the individual in and
from the vast, senseless universe surround-
ing her. Such fragile goodness is exhibited
The Road in small acts of senseless kindness,
whether it be the father and boy sharing
their meager supplies with a bedraggled
stranger, or the family at the end adopting
the now orphaned boy. Yet one must not be
misled by this last fleeting glimpse of good-
ness. Such acts will not save the world.
Things cannot be made right.
Levinas also acknowledges that there are
no guarantees or unequivocal measures to
be taken to ward off evil. Nor is there any
certainty that history will not repeat itself
in new and more horrendous holocausts, be
they human, animal, or planetary. Perhaps
it’s enough to be content with acknowledg-
ing the fragility of our civilization, with its
Bibles, Mona Lisas, and Constitutions, and,
as McCarthy in a rare interview with Oprah
Winfrey pithily summed up, “Be grateful.”
© DR MICHAEL J. BURKE 2016
Michael Burke is Associate Professor of Philosophy
at St Joseph’s College, New York.
IMAGE BY CAROL BELANGER GRAFTON
What is Metaphysics Anyway?
Peter Adamson considers Aristotle’s original use of the term.
’ve occasionally had the disappointing
I
experience of walking into a bookshop,
seeing a shelf marked ‘Metaphysics’ and,
beginning to peruse it, only then finding that
it’s filled with volumes on mindfulness, crys-
tals, and learning about one’s past lives. I
wouldn’t be surprised if New Age enthusiasts
have occasionally had the reverse disap-
pointment upon learning that a ‘Metaphysics’
course they signed up for will involve arguing
about the nature of reality, personal identity,
and the problem of free will.
This confusion over what metaphysics is,
exactly, is an old one. A historically-minded
person asked to define this field of philoso-
phy might say that metaphysics simply stud-
ies the sort of issues tackled in Aristotle’s
Metaphysics, the first work to use the word
in its title. But this answer would need a sig-
nificant caveat: Aristotle did not use this title
himself, and indeed the book is almost cer-
tainly a collection of disparate materials cob-
bled together centuries after Aristotle’s death.
Because it is a composite work, maybe
we should not expect a unifying theme in the
Metaphysics. Perhaps it is called by this title
just because it is to be read after (meta) Aris-
totle’s discussion of natural philosophy in his
Physics. On the other hand, perhaps the
compiler had good reasons for putting these
materials together as a single text. Intelligent
readers, from the great ancient commenta-
tor Alexander of Aphrodisias, to the also
pretty great medieval commentators Aver-
roes and Thomas Aquinas, have indeed
detected a single project running throughout
the Metaphysics, although without agreeing
what it was.
This disagreement was only to be
expected. The Metaphysics takes on an
enormous range of problems, from the prin-
ciple of non-contradiction, to the nature of
God; from an analysis of material substance,
to a refutation of Plato’s ideas about mathe-
matics. One book even takes the form of an
extended philosophical lexicon. If however
you want to argue that the Metaphysics is
about just one central topic, then an obvious
candidate for that topic is being. Aristotle
Philosophy Then
has a lot to say about being, especially in the
notoriously difficult middle books, whose
inquiry into substance is clearly relevant to
the study of being (especially since the
Greek word for substance, ousia, is derived
from the verb einai, meaning ‘to be’).
According to this way of thinking about
metaphysics, as being concerned with being
itself, it has a good claim to be the most gen-
eral philosophical subject, and hence in a
way, the most fundamental science. Ethics
studies only human happiness and virtue;
zoology only animals; physics only physical
things. Metaphysics would study everything,
since everything that is has being. The meta-
physician should however bear in mind Aris-
totle’s dictum that “being is said in many
ways.” I myself, for instance, will have being
in a different and more primary way than my
baldness has being. In Aristotle’s terminol-
ogy, my baldness is only an ‘accident’ – a
property that belongs to me and depends on
me for its being; whereas I am a ‘substance’,
meaning that I have being independently of
other substances.
Now that we’re thinking along these lines,
we might wonder: is there some being, or
kind of being, that is most fundamental or
primary?
Many readers, especially in the medieval
period, thought that such a being makes its
appearance only in the twelfth of the four-
teen books of the Metaphysics. Here Aristo-
tle discusses the immaterial intellects that in
his view are responsible for moving the
heavens. One single intellect stands over all
the others, initiating or coordinating the
motion of the entire universe by thinking.
This is Aristotle’s God.
Perhaps then Aristotle’s plan all along
was to move through preparatory stages of
discussion before finally reaching the real
object of his investigation, namely the divine
First Mover. Thus, once we work through the
Metaphysics we will have grasped the
nature of the first cause of all things. Since,
according to Aristotle, we understand things
by tracing back their causes, metaphysics
therefore provides a foundation for the
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 51
study of all other things. If so, metaphysics
would still be the primary and fundamental
science, but for a different reason. Now, its
philosophical primacy will have to do with
the primacy of God.
These are two very different ways of
understanding the Metaphysics, and hence,
metaphysics: are the treatise, and the branch
of philosophy, about being, or about God? Or
perhaps there are two kinds of science
here: it became traditional to speak of meta-
physica specialis (about God) and meta-
physica generalis (about being). But allowing
this would undermine the cherished idea
that Aristotle did have a unified project.
That was presupposed in a dispute
between two leading thinkers of the Islamic
world, Avicenna and Averroes. Avicenna
believed that metaphysics is really the
study of being, and that talking of God, even
proving His existence, is just part of this
general enterprise. Averroes disagreed. He
pointed out that Aristotle proves God’s exis-
tence in the Physics, and thus the Meta-
physics only discusses the manner of God’s
causality. But this is as it should be. As the
first cause of being, God is the proper sub-
ject matter of metaphysics; and Aristotle
teaches that no science should try to prove
the existence of its own subject matter.
This debate has relevance for our under-
standing of metaphysics today. The linger-
ing association between the word ‘meta-
physics’ and theology or the supernatural
(what comes ‘after physics’ in another
sense), has real historical roots. Some are
therefore suspicious of the whole enter-
prise. But they need not reject the term, or
the discipline, since there is an equally
sound historical precedent for understand-
ing metaphysics to be something quite dif-
ferent – an inquiry into all that is. This would
arguably make metaphysics the most gen-
eral and fundamental part of philosophy.
© PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2016
Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1, 2
& 3, available from OUP. Both are based on
his popular History of Philosophy podcast.
 T allis
in
Wonderland
T
he greatest mysteries are often
those we are most likely to
overlook. Supreme among these
is the fact that the world is
intelligible to us, at least to some degree.
Of course, if we could not make moment-
to-moment sense of what was going on
around us, there could be no us. Inhabiting
an entirely unintelligible world in which
nothing could be understood, anticipated,
or acted upon with reliable consequences,
would be incompatible with life.
But there is no ‘of course’ even about
this. That human existence requires a more
or less intelligible world doesn’t solve the
mystery, it simply moves the mystery on.
After all, the vast majority of organisms act,
or at least react, and flourish, without mak-
ing sense of the world. That one thing is
explained by another thing is not the kind
of thing that bacteria (the most successful
organisms) entertain; and at a higher level,
the laws of nature as we understand them
are beyond the cognitive reach of all but H.
sapiens. What’s more, many humans thrived
before Newton announced his discoveries
or Einstein formulated the General Theory
of Relativity.
Let us unpack our sense-making a little.
We live in a world in which happenings
seem to be explained by other happenings:
‘this happened because of that’. We not
only observe causes, but actively seek them
out. We also note patterns, connect and
quantify those patterns, and so arrive at the
natural laws which have proved so empow-
ering, enabling us to predict events and
manipulate things. All of this takes place in
a shared, boundless public cognitive space,
draws on a vast collective past, and reaches
into an ever-lengthening and ever-widen-
ing future.
The extraordinary character of the
sense-making animal may be highlighted
by contrasting a wild animal looking for
the origin of a threatening signal with a
team of scientists listening into space to
test a hypothesis about the Big Bang, hav-
ing secured a large grant to do so.
This suggests another way of coming
52 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
On Logos
Raymond Tallis looks into the mystery of
the sense-making animal.
upon the miracle of our sense-making
capacity. Consider the relative volumes of
our heads (4 litres) and of the universe (4 x
1023 cubic light years). In our less-than-
pin-pricks bonces, the universe comes to
know itself as ‘the universe’ and some of its
most general properties are understood.
That this knowledge is incomplete does
not diminish the achievement. Indeed, the
intuition that our knowledge is bounded
by ignorance, that things (causes, laws,
mechanisms, distant places) may be con-
cealed from us, that there are hidden
truths, realities, modes of being, has been
the necessary motor of our shared cogni-
tive advance. Man, as the American
philosopher Willard Quine said, is the
creature who invented doubt – as well as
measurement, provisional generalisation,
and modes of active inquiry.
It takes two to tango. The fact that the
world is intelligible clearly cannot be just
down to us, otherwise our stories about
how things hang together would be some-
where between myths and an evolving con-
sensual hallucination. The balance between
the contributions of what is out there and
what is in us, between the extent to which
the mind conforms to the universe and the
universe has mind-compatible properties, is
an issue that has had a long history, shared
between theology and philosophy.
The Word and The World
One word that haunts discussion of our
astonishing capacity to make sense of the
world is Logos. In Western culture, its most
famous occurrence is in the extraordinary
opening verse of the gospel according to
St John: “In the beginning was the Logos.”
This has kept thousands of commentators
busy, because Logos, which is often trans-
lated ‘word’ or ‘reason’, does a lot of work
– encompassing the Word that was God’s
command that the universe should come
into being as well as the Word that was
made flesh in the body of Jesus Christ in
fulfilment of a promise of salvation. At a
more abstract level, the Logos is offered as
an explanation of the intelligibility of the
world: John is indicating that God ensured
that His creation and His chosen species
should be so designed that the latter
should make sense of the former. ‘Let
there be light!’ was ‘Let there be sense!’ as
well as ‘Let there be stuff!’ However, this
replaces one mystery with many others.
Moreover, it does not seem to accommo-
date the story of the gradual advance in
understanding, by no means complete,
that has been the great, hard-won achieve-
ment of humanity. It puts it all in the
human starter pack.
Logos has a history beyond even the
wide realm of a faith that has filled two
thousand years with hope, joy, bloodshed,
terror, and oppression. This history – bril-
liantly summarised in James Hastings’
monumental Encyclopaedia of Religion and
Ethics (1906-1928) – is all the more com-
plex because Logos has a multitude of
senses, mobilised in different contexts. It
has a field of meanings, with nodes here
and there. This is hardly surprising, given
that it registers such a profound encounter
of human consciousness with itself.
We cannot be sure when something
equivalent to Logos first made its appear-
ance in our conversation with ourselves.
Some scholars trace it back to the Pyramid
Texts of Heliopolis, nearly 2,500 years
before St John wrote his gospel. From the
primal waters the god Atum arose: he was
the light of the rising sun and the embodi-
ment of the conscious Word or Logos, the
essence of life.
The Egyptian Logos does not map
clearly on to what Logos subsequently
became. The term was in common use
when the Pre-Socratic philosophers –
those “tyrants of the spirit who wanted to
reach the core of all being with one leap”
as Nietzsche characterised them in Philoso-
phy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks –
employed it, partly to pat themselves on
the back for their own reason-based
approach to questions about the nature of
the cosmos. Although Logos referred to the
way human rationality was reflected or
expressed in discourse, it also captured the
 philosophers’ trust in their own arguments
and explanations, and the sense of their
awakening from the sleep of Mythos. The
boundaries between Mythos – stories told
as religious myths or in works of art – and
Logos – a reasoned account – will always be
contested, and their respective claims to
truth likewise. After all, myths, too, are
reasoned accounts of a kind: they make
sense of making sense, and they use words.
What’s more, reason itself operates on a
given experience of the world, established
long before reason does its work. Hence
the endless returns of Mythos.
Logos was central to Heraclitus’s philoso-
phy. According to F.M. Cornford in From
Religion to Philosophy (1912), Heraclitus
developed – “in flashes of mental lightning”
ATUM © JEFF DAHL 2007
Atum, Egyptian embodiment
of reason
– the notion of Logos as being both the
rational structure of the world and the
source of that structure. Reason was present
in all things. This was asserted against the
materialism of the Ionian philosophers, for
whom the world was just what was visible.
By contrast, Logos was an invisible, imma-
nent reason – the general plan ensuring that
the world was an ordered Cosmos rather than
a disordered Chaos. It was the hidden har-
mony behind the discords and antagonisms
of existence; behind the eternal war between
the elements that kept Being in motion,
leaving nothing immune from change. This
rational order of things did not itself make
the world conscious or thoughtful. Rather,
the world became conscious and thoughtful
in the human Logos, whose most developed
representative was the philosopher himself,
in whom the human Logos was united with
the Logos of the Cosmos. Making sense of the
world was the result of a marriage between
microcosmic human Logos and the macro-
cosmic Logos of the universe itself. Logos
provided the link between rational discourse
and the world’s rational structure.
The Subsequent Fate of Logos
We are more familiar with Plato and Aris-
totle. For Plato, Logos was the rational
activity of the world soul created by the
demiurge. It could be revealed through
Ideas accessed by an intelligence stimulated
by the dialectic of philosophical discourse.
For Plato, influenced by Parmenides, Logos
was revealed in the kind of thought that
accessed unchanging self-same Being, real
and true, not through sense experience,
which is unstable and untrue. According to
Aristotle, the Logos was the inherent for-
mula determining the nature, life and activ-
ity of the body, as well as, more narrowly,
‘significant utterance’.
These ideas inspired the Stoics, for
whom the Logos was a supreme directive
principle, the source of all the activity and
rationality of an ordered world that was
both intelligible and intelligent. It was the
‘seminal reason’ or underlying principle of
the world, manifest in all the phenomena
of nature. It acted as a kind of force, con-
ferring inner unity on bodies and on the
world as a whole, and at the same time
guaranteed the intelligibility of the world
to humans, since the human soul partici-
pated in the cosmic Logos. It is also because
the one Logos is present in many human
souls that we are able to communicate with
each other: we all partake of ‘common
sense’. The Stoics’ message was that
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 53
T allis
in
Wonderland
humans were truly happy only when they
were living in a state of harmony in which
the Logos of their own soul resonated with
the universal Logos, the harmony of nature.
For Philo of Alexandria, a first century
Jewish philosopher steeped in Greek
thought, the Logos was the model according
to which the universe was created. It
encompassed the creative principle, divine
wisdom, the image of God, and man, the
word of the eternal God. At the same time,
it was the archetype of human reason, that
through which the supreme God made
contact with His creation. Logos is the
intermediary between God and the world,
the creator and His creation.
Which brings us back to the Christian
notion of Jesus Christ as Logos. The Logos
was the means by which God let Himself
into a privileged part of His own creation –
humanity. Philo’s connecting the ‘divine
thought’ with ‘the image’ and ‘the first-
born son of God’, ‘the archpriest’ and ‘the
intercessor’, paved the way for the Chris-
tian conception of the incarnate ‘word
become flesh’, and so of the Trinity. The
Word by which He made the world, His
law, and indeed Himself, known to man,
was now identified with Christ. In the New
Testament, the Logos is the Word, the wis-
dom of God, the reason in all things, and
God Himself.
Secularists may smile at such responses
to the extraordinary fact that we make
sense of the world. But when we think of
the alternatives – such as Kant’s claim in
The Critique of Pure Reason that the experi-
enced world makes sense because we fash-
ion that world through our senses and
understanding, or an evolutionary episte-
mology that argues that the fit between
mind and world is a Darwinian necessity –
the smile may fade and wonder return. The
endeavour to understand the sense-making
animal has a long way to go.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2016
Raymond Tallis’s latest book The Mystery of
Being Human: God, Freedom and the
NHS was published in September. His website
is raymondtallis.com.
 Philosophy Now
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December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 55

 Hegel & Hume Talk It Over
Chris Christensen watches Hume and Hegel argue about how they can have
knowledge of reality.
Hegel Hume
I
doubt there are two philosophers further apart in their ideas
than George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and
David Hume (1711-1776). Hegel’s rationalist metaphysics,
based on the arguments of reason, ranges far afield and is diffi-
cult to understand. Hume’s empiricism, on the other hand, with
its conclusions derived through experience, is accessible to the
layman. A thoroughgoing skeptic, Hume thought that meta-
physics should be “committed to the flames.” Hegel was six years
old when Hume died, so there was no professional overlap. But
here they’re in the philosopher’s afterlife outside of time, able to
see the entire history of philosophy. I see them in comfortable
chairs before a cozy fire, each sipping brandy as they talk.
Hegel: [Gesturing at the fire.] So, Hume, you say that meta-
physics should be committed to the flames. Does this con-
tempt for thinking beyond what we can observe derive from a
philosophical stance? Or does it simply stem from insecurity
regarding your unease in tackling pure reason?
Hume: The flames are figurative of course. I’m not a book
burner, and I wouldn’t stand in the way of people who wish to
publish nonsense. But I readily admit to unease over any spec-
ulation that professes absolute certainty.
Hegel: Yet you yourself claim a sort of certainty regarding
experiences that arise from the senses; those which you call
‘impressions’.
Hume: You misinterpret me. I make no such claim. I concede
certainty only in mathematics, where, to quote myself, there
are “relationships among ideas true and certain.” Three times
five equals fifteen, Hegel, and always will. I do however say
that the liveliest thought is inferior to the dullest sensation.
Hegel: But Kant taught us that the mind does not simply pas-
sively receive information through the senses, but organizes
our experience. So our ‘impressions’ are partly a creation of
our intellect. In other words, we know the world by the work
of the mind, and the world just as we experience it does not
exist independent of us.
56 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
Hume: True enough, Kant said we could not comprehend the
world without the mind first putting its stamp on it; and he added
that this means that the true external world – what he called
the ‘thing-in-itself’ – is forever beyond all knowledge for us.
Hegel: That statement is contradictory! How can he say we
know nothing of it, yet also claim that he knows that it exists
and is a ‘thing’?
Hume: I leave that for you metaphysicians to play with – if
only you would admit that it’s merely play! But Kant’s idea
brings Barzun’s metaphor to my mind. Barzun likened Kant’s
idea of the mind putting its stamp on reality to a waffle iron
acting on batter. Fortunately, there’s another metaphor that
reverses Barzun’s. Locke says that at birth the mind is a blank
slate upon which the chalk of experience writes. That makes
much more sense. To put it briefly, Hegel, ideas arise from
experience. However, abstract rationalism such as yours
depends more on invention than experience!
Hegel: Yet there are cases in which the ideas arising from pure
reason are later empirically demonstrated. For instance,
through pure reason Leucippus and Democritus theorized the
existence of atoms over two thousand years before your
vaunted empiricism confirmed their philosophy.
Hume: I grant the Greek atomists their luck. But most such
cases don’t get beyond speculation. Plato’s nether world of
Forms has yet to be proved empirically, and I dare say it will
remain in his metaphysical cave. Incidentally, you just said so
yourself: atomic theory was confirmed by empiricism. Still, I
must concede that if Plato’s Ideal Brandy is better than the
superlative stuff we’re drinking, then I tip my hat to him.
Hegel: We agree on that, Hume. Here’s to Plato.
[They raise their glasses and drink.]
Let’s leave the ancients and move to more modern times. We
rationalists believe that so-called ‘empirical proof’ is unnecessary:
one can gain knowledge purely through step-by-step reasoning.
Descartes proved this when he concluded ‘I think therefore I
am’. He proved his existence by doubting it, then through pure
reason carefully built a logical proof that overturned his doubt.
Hume: Descartes wrote that he wanted absolute privacy for a
few days, and so squirreled himself away to think. But his soli-
tude demonstrates the two main weaknesses of pure rational-
ism – its need for error-free rigor and its extreme subjectivity.
Bertrand Russell illustrates the first well when he describes
rationalism as an inverted pyramid, with the first premise pin-
pointed on the ground. If it and all subsequent premises and
conclusions are sound, all is well. But if just one mistake is pre-
sent – one brick is weak – the whole subsequent argument col-
lapses. Empiricism, on the other hand, avoids both weak-
nesses. Its foundation is wide and broad, constructed from a
careful gathering of facts. Experiments prove the facts by test-
ing and study. Relationships among the facts are then deter-
mined. Moreover, many thinkers cooperate in the endeavor –
they seek objectivity. Once the foundation is perfected, the
next level is built, using the same method, and so on. If a mis-
take is made – if a brick in the edifice is weak – it can be
removed and corrected without the collapse of the whole
argument.
Hegel: But with empiricism, unlike with pure logic, no argu-
ment is ever proved absolutely. You yourself admit that by
using the scientific method, high probability is the best we can
attain. Let’s return to Kant’s statement that there is an in-itself
external world beyond our experience. That’s an idea that
Kant claims is demonstrated by reason. It follows that we can
employ reason to further that knowledge.
Hume: But ideas don’t come first, they derive from impres-
sions. So you cannot gain knowledge without employing the
senses. Proof that impressions come first can be seen in the
stark example that a man born blind has no idea of color.
Hegel: A man born blind has only an idea of color! Precisely
what he lacks are your impressions!
Hume: That’s absolutely wonderful, Hegel! You’d have made
a great Sophist! I can see you in my mind’s eye, traveling with
Libanius, teaching the untutored the wiles of argumentation,
the two of you completely unconcerned about truth…
Hegel: Careful, Hume. You don’t want to infect your precious
empiricism with the mind’s eye.
Hume: A predictable rejoinder from a rationalist! You seem to
think you have a monopoly on the mind – that empiricists
don’t employ it at all. Well, let me disabuse you of that notion.
The intellect’s greatest contribution to knowledge is being
acutely aware of impressions and emotions as they surface. In
short, mind is best used for awareness of its own processes. In
this way it can tame the passions – and prevent flights of
Hegelian fancy. Unfortunately, few are very aware.
By the way, there’s a revealing statement by your fellow ratio-
nalist Descartes, seemingly unconscious. He writes, and I
quote, “We must occupy ourselves only with those objects that
our intellectual powers appear competent to know certainly
and indubitably.” Isn’t that wonderful?
Hegel: It’s perfectly reasonable. What’s your point, Hume?
Hume: His recommendation certainly seems wise. But first
note the words ‘only’, ‘certainly’, and ‘indubitably’. These are
words of certitude. But in the statement is also a word that
conveys uncertainty. That word is ‘appear’. It’s an escape word
– a means of explaining how one could be wrong, despite all
the certitude that reason can attain! I find it charming.
Hegel: Whereas you put great stock in the senses and in
empirical proof, yet in the end you caution us that even sci-
ence can be wrong. That is, in truth, you admit that science is
in fact a process of finding temporary approximations to
knowledge that eventually gives way to better approximation.
It must make continual adjustments to accommodate new cir-
cumstances, new evidence. So your skepticism leads to a dead
end. We can know precisely nothing!
Hume: I wouldn’t put it quite like that. I concede that my
skepticism can often paint me into a corner. One wag even
said that I throw the baby of science out with the metaphysi-
cal bathwater! But science does not totally do away with
acquired knowledge. It can find error and correct it, or we
may refine our knowledge. Nonetheless, science comes close
to reality despite its tentative knowledge – or rather, because
it admits to tentative knowledge. With the exception of
mathematics, we’ll always be without certain knowledge. Yet
it’s true, the human mind thirsts for certainty. This is why
religious belief – and theories like yours – will forever be
with us.
Hegel: But my theory is not religious. It has nothing to do
with man’s religion. It’s based on rational thought, bereft of
superstition. I believe merely that humanity is on a journey.
We are here to develop the self-consciousness of the world,
which is the consciousness of freedom. Beginning in China,
then in Persia, and now in Europe, humanity has gradually
developed a higher consciousness of freedom, and an actual
freedom of living, which in turn feeds into a greater con-
sciousness of freedom, until –
Hume: – until – and correct me if I’m wrong – humanity
arrives at an ideal state of pure consciousness, which you call
Absolute Mind, or Absolute Spirit.
Hegel: Now you’re getting into the spirit of it yourself,
Hume! In fact, reality is actually constituted by mind. At first,
mind is unaware of this: it sees the world as something inde-
pendent of it, even hostile or alien to it. It’s estranged from
reality, tries to understand it, and fails. Only when mind
awakens and realizes that reality is a creation of mind can it
give up reaching beyond itself. It then knows there is nothing
beyond itself. On the contrary, objective reality is thought;
and thought is objective reality.
Hume: Indeed, Russell called your Absolute Mind a sort of
God: “truly a professor’s God” – Mind dwelling on its own
thoughts! The whole thing is quite fascinating, even if it is
nonsense. But let me see if I have it right. The engine that
propels this metaphysical journey is your dialectic. One stage
of this journey of human culture is negated as development
continues: as you phrase it, a thesis meets its antithesis; there
is a clash; then the two are melded into a synthesis, which
becomes the new thesis; and so on it goes.
Hegel: I never used those terms. They were added to my the-
ory by my followers. But there is a stage-by-stage advance,
December 2016/January 2017  Philosophy Now 57
yes. And each stage of human culture is an advancement of
human consciousness until we reach the stage of Absolute
Mind. That ideal state no longer requires, nor allows, an
‘antithesis’.
Hume: Tell me, what happens to our bodies when we reach
that exalted state? Do we shed them and ascend to an intellec-
tual heaven like a rapture? All I can say is that one would miss
one’s brandy.
Hegel: You make light of it, Hume. That’s a familiar reaction
to profound thought from someone who shies away from
metaphysical exploration. Unfortunately, I cannot describe the
particulars of the final destination of consciousness.
Hume: Sorry, Hegel, but you strike me as taking yourself too
seriously. Nonetheless, your metaphysical edifice is exceed-
ingly impressive. Your theory is magnificent – truly a monu-
ment of unprecedented intellectual achievement. It puts you
at the pinnacle of philosophical idealism. It’s unfortunate that
it smacks of bloody rubbish. But this is unsurprising, since you
follow in the rationalist footsteps of Pythagoras, Parmenides,
Plato, right on up to Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, even
surpassing them in speculation.
Hegel: I take that as a compliment, Hume. I see myself as
standing on the shoulders of my predecessors. After all, my
philosophy is all-inclusive. The dialectic of history is a
process; it does not do away with what came before.
Hume: But in the final analysis your majestic edifice is a reli-
gious one, despite your claim to the contrary. That’s the great
irony of pure rationalism. It claims the mathematical precision
of logic, but its conclusions ultimately require faith. I suspect
you rationalists secretly crave the approval of empiricism.
Hegel: Recall Democritus and his atoms. Perhaps some day
my metaphysical theory will be proved empirically – even if it
takes over two thousand years!
Hume: There’s an important distinction between your think-
ing and that of Democritus. While you both employ pure rea-
son, you propose a metaphysical theory, concerning a purpose
and end to human development. Democritus, on the other
hand, proposed the physical existence of atoms. You dwell on
metaphysics, he on physics. He was a materialist, let’s not for-
get. His theory was provable by empiricism. I doubt yours is.
Hegel: You doubt everything, Hume. That’s a certainty I find
quite ironic. And in the twentieth century your skepticism
lead to its own extreme result – analytic philosophy. It seems
that speculative philosophy is now dead. Philosophy’s role has
become merely to analyze the workings of language. Still, my
theory cannot be disproved.
Hume: It’s not incumbent on the doubter to disprove an asser-
tion: the onus is on the maker of an assertion to prove it. But
you can dream, Hegel; and your dream never ends. Even in the
58 Philosophy Now  December 2016/January 2017
twenty-first century you have an ally who’s picked up your torch,
a fellow whose name rhymes with yours – Nagel. He took a
shellacking from materialists for his ideas on consciousness.
Even I thought the reaction against him was a bit knee-jerk.
Hegel: Yes, I’m aware of Nagel – an American, no less. In fact,
he attempts to find a middle ground between my idealism and
materialism by saying there’s a gap between the explanations
available to science and explanations for consciousness. He says
the physical sciences can describe the behaviour and physical
constitutions of organisms like ourselves, but they cannot
describe our subjective experiences, such as how things appear
to our different points of view. This gap, he says, reflects a deep
metaphysical difference between consciousness and the brain –
between mind and matter. Dualism dies hard, eh? Still, I am
encouraged by his existence, and by your defense of his idea.
Hume: I didn’t exactly defend his idea.
Hegel: No, but you seem to caution his critics.
Hume: I don’t like knee-jerk reactions. But I do like Nagel’s
idea that science is limited regarding its knowledge of subjec-
tive viewpoints. However, he says it follows that biological
evolution must be more than just a physical process – that the
theory of evolution must incorporate a mental aspect.
Hegel: But the greater theory need not be theistic, Hume. It
can be seen as an expanded form of understanding that
includes the mental, but is still scientific.
Hume: Of course I find that appealing. But his leaping from
that to speculating that consciousness has a purpose in the cos-
mos strikes me as reaching too far.
Hegel: Hume, you ought to let your imagination soar a bit. So
let’s imagine that there’s a post firmly lodged in the ground –
the Post of Skepticism. A rope is attached to the post, with the
other end tied around your waist. My guess is that you, my
friend, would never stray far from the Post of Skepticism, and
would always keep a firm grip on the rope.
Hume: And you?
Hegel: I would venture out wherever my mind demands, in
the search for higher knowledge.
Hume: And, dear Hegel, when you felt the tug on the rope, you
would slip the knot and float away into the metaphysical mists.
But I must say – and this may be the brandy talking – despite our
differences, I would miss you. A toast, Hegel – to philosophy!
Hegel: To philosophy!
[They raise their glasses and drink.]
© CHRIS CHRISTENSEN 2016
Chris Christensen is a delivery driver in Portland, Oregon. In addi-
tion to studying philosophy, he and his wife Bobbie produce a blog
called Red Stitches: Mostly Baseball.
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