The Existential Problem of the Present for American Conservatives

The central problem for American conservatism is its fascination with its past at the expense of the present. I call this problem, the problem of the present. In moral situations, we face the exigencies of life afforded by sensitivity to the fact that people are vulnerable to a range of injuries and injustices of life presently and currently. As such, the liberal intelligentsia often observes remedies to immediately respond to the temporal proximity of an injurious reality or institutional injustice, often with the medium of government in some way.

To resist this liberal intrustion, the American conservative is aesthetically obsessed with providing moral justifications of why we cannot remedy, undue or modify an existing practice especially those practices that are institutionally ingrained in American life. The Conservative goes out of their way to enshrine the past with a detached contemplative reverence in what could only be called an aesthetic attitude. This attitude is much the same with that of the tourist walking the Roman ruins. As Simone De Beauvoir says, "The tourist considers the arena of the Coliseum, the Latifundia of Syracuse, the thermal baths, the palaces, the temples, the prisons and the churches with the same tranquil curiosity" (Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 75) These things merely existed, and in that, they satisfy. In political culture -- and this is the point we are aiming at -- the American conservative uplifts the practices of the past in a magical and deceptive manner. For them, as De Beavoir says of the estranged Italian too, "the present already seems like a future past" (Ibid, p. 75) For the Conservative wants a Jeffersonian purity or a Madisonian understanding of our institutions and our Jurisprudence to reflect the past as if it were truly present as a perceptual object. However, the sad case, and this is what we academics understand, this can never be so. We cannot will the present to be a future past anymore than we could believe in square-circles.

The reason we cannot accept a willed action to be a future-past in the present is that we cannot extoll the conditions of our nation's history to the point we are willing blindly. The very philosophical truth is harder to admit. We are limited by our own finitude. We cannot reach out beyond the circle of our age, and transcend time and place to enter the subjectivity of a past author anymore than we can recreate the conditions under which the past was realized within that author. In thinking this transcendence of history possible, American conservatives merely "understand the temporary events and through them to cultivate that beauty which perishes not"--they are victim to their own blind reverence, the aesthetic attitude of history. They take the point of view of history when the present challenges their understanding. In taking that point of view, which I and many others have already shown to be an impossibility, they, as De Beauvoir would say flee "the truth of the present" (Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 76) According to the existentialist, choice is deprived of meaning if it is effaced willingly by those that could act, that could respond to the present.

If ethics has any meaning, then it can be agreed solely that ethics is about the freedom to respond. This aesthetic attitude, as De Beauvoir rightly claims, causes "inertia," or our inability to respond to the exigency of injury and injustice. The freedom to respond to meaning, to someone's suffering, is at heart why liberals are so emphatic about uprooting the bonds of tradition that hold sway over our considerations. We want to upsurge the existence of others, and make those outside our sphere better in some way. Ethics is about responding and uprooting the false views that blindly steer us away from a full commitment to the moral life.

Of course, the Conservative can only come up with two responses. First, the unreflective conservatives will esteem the fact that in religion one can have access to the past as it was revealed in a text. But such a response dares to cut its own feet off when even in their own view, the religious text is the only revealed access to that transcendence they seek in human tradition. For the religious conservative, only the Bible is capable of that transcendence. If they admit of American exceptionalism, then they are harder pressed to be dissuaded by their own shortcomings. American exceptionalism is at the root of all conservative fanaticism and stupidity. If we admit that we -- as a nation -- share in the teleology of a divine plan, and that our greatness coincides with the plan of God, then those exceptionalists succumb to the same version as before. They forget that transcendence is only capable of God, and put themselves on a pedestal of the sacred being they all admit more infinite in nature than they can possibly understand. To put these versions down, I need not even get started in my own philosophical views.

The second response is more sensitive to the content of what I have said here. He will say that you cannot forget history, we ourselves and our nation being the product of historical forces. In that, we both agree. I take to heart the historicity of our being. We are being, thrown by the world and its forces as directed by the fact that we are temporal beings. We live in time's ebb and likewise when we view the past with a backward glance, we cannot help but see the past solidify into a narrative. The point is, we don't forget the history. We do not make the history to be something so metaphysical that we are determined within the limit of history. Instead, we view that the freedom to respond to the present is more important, and that in our response will have a human signification, a meaning that attaches on to the forever moving present that we will make into history. In this way, liberals perceive the present as something not detached from history, but as a continuum without losing sight of the exigency of the present. In this way, we are progressive without being determined by the optimism about the future, but keeping the future open to all possibilities because we realize that we are bound ethically to all.

Does this work?

It has come to my attention that moral realists have been hard-pressed in many instances to provide an ontological story as to why others should assent to the moral realist's claim of independent existing moral facts. By moral facts, I mean the set of moral beliefs that inform our everyday day-to-day deliberation in the same way someone would speak of a set of worldly facts like how many grains of sand there are on Earth, or how many snakes are poisonous. The only difference in form from the analogy is that moral facts express evaluative notions about what ought to be the case rather than describing the world. I claim that the existence of moral facts can be treated as a body of truths that is implied by the acceptance of their relevance in lived-experience. Thus, I accept the following argument as a way of entering into the truth of moral realism.

P1: If moral facts exist independently of our endorsement of them, then moral facts constitute the fabric of the world.
P2: If moral facts constitute the fabric of the world, then moral facts arise in our experience of knowing the fabric of the world.
IC: If moral facts exist independently of our endorsement of them, then moral facts arise in our experience of knowing the fabric of the world. (HS, 1 and 2)
P3: If moral facts arise in our experience of knowing the fabric of the world, then moral facts, according to phenomenology, are rooted in our subjective constitution of moral intentionality that bestows meaning-formation of our lived-experience. (HS, IC and 3)
C: If moral facts exist independently of our endorsement of them, then, moral moral facts, according to phenomenology, are rooted in our subjective constitution of a moral intentionality that bestows meaning-formation of our lived experience.

Moved-In

Everyone has been super with our move. My wife and I love how we envision our life growing here in Southern Illinois. The university has been spectacular, and the department is encouraging. What a wonderful place!

Ross, Motive and the Sense of Duty

In a revisitation of Ross' The Right and the Good, I have been strangely trying to figure out a decent representation of the following textual argument. Here is that little snippet that catches my fancy:

Those who hold that our duty is to act from a certain motive (Kant is the great exemplar) usually hold that the motive from which we ought to act is the sense of duty. Now if the sense of duty is to be my motive for doing a certain act, it must be the sense that it is my duty to do that act. If, therefore, we say 'it is my duty to do act A from the sense that it is my duty to do act A.' And here the whole expression is in contradiction with a part of itself. The whole sentence says ' it is my duty to-do-act-A-from-the-sense-that-it-is-my-duty-to-do-act-A.' But the latter part of the sentence implies that what I think is that it is my duty to-do-act-A simply. And if, as the theory in questions requires, we try to amend the latter part of the expression to bring it into accord with the whole expression, we get the result 'it is my duty to do act A from the sense that it is my duty to do act A from the sense that it is my duty to do act A,' where again the last part of the expression is in conflict with the sentence as a whole. It is clear that a further similar amendment, and a further, and in the end an infinite series of amendments would be necessary in the attempt to bring the last part of the expression into accordance with the theory, and that even then we should not have succeeded in doing so. (R&G, p. 5, CH 1).

This seems, at first glance, to be a devastating argument. Motive and duty cannot be contained in the other. However, I am unsure as to how the contradiction is reached given that the contradiction is internal to the statement. And how exactly does Ross understand the given expression? Untangling this mess will require some effort, and has been the subject of some scholarship since this is a famous argument made against Kantians (Arthur T. Shillinglaw 1933 in Mind for starters). Before we get to analysis of this argument, I want to further add what he says about acting from the sense of duty.

On this argument, Ross clearly says that only acting from sense of duty will it lead to a infinite regress (p. 6). However, acting from other motives will be free from the infinite regress. Still, he reminds "it would be paradoxical to hold that we ought to act from some other motive, but never ought to act from a sense of duty, which is the highest motive." For Ross, there is a positive significance acting from a sense of duty has; it is just that we cannot regard any theory which holds "that motive of any kind is included in the content of duty" (p. 6)

Now, reductios attempt to get A and Non-A statements together in a proof. In application, this means showing that a theory or thesis commits one to its negation as well as positive formation. Above, let's identify what thesis is up for attack. I'll call that the Kantian Containment Thesis, or KCT for short.

KCT: The motive from which a moral agent ought to act is the moral agent's sense of duty.

So, Ross would show us how we reach ~KCT:

~KCT: The motive from which a moral agent ought to act is not the moral agent's sense of duty.

Yet, I am not too sure that this is done. Any thoughts? I could be missing something, but I'm going to think more on this.

Where Have All the Essences Gone?

When someone finds themselves influenced by a historical thinker, one takes up positions counter to others along shared beliefs with the philosopher in question. However, sometimes, what strikes me most about Husserl is what little is said about a key issue, and the problem left in its wake has an effect. Consider for a moment what we can glean from Husserl's phenomenology about ideal objects, or what I take essences to be.

Essences are eternal, apodictic and eternal. They are non-temporal, and are only described by phenomenology since phenomenology is the descriptive science of phenomenological essences. The descriptive focus is the most attractive thing for being a phenomenologist; it allows me to get to the concrete matters of our lived experience whereas other more naturalistic philosophies often conceal over the elements of our lived experience in which decisive data for philosophical problems can be gleaned (this is the source of dialectic tension between the broad landscape of naturalists in Anglophone philosophy with my non-natural leanings). However, this descriptive emphasis avoids the metaphysical problems associated with ideal objects. These essences have no ground other than they occur within our experience of consciousness in the world and are describable.

At first, I always never thought of these essences as anything more than realized intuitions that appear to us at the end of phenomenological reduction. I thought of them as byproducts, and easily regard them as a coherentist would a series of representations and non-inferential intuitions that mesh together in a series of propositions. For me, the intuition of these essences consists nowhere but their apprehension. I was left with just ideal objects looming in Husserl's system (esp. in Ideas I where Husserl talks about the world could vanish and as long as there appears before consciousness phenomena, phenomenology would be a viable enterprise), and him denying possible grounds, or hypostases as we might call them Julian Marias confirmed this shared suspicion with his chapter on Husserl. I like how he divcides them up:

1. Psychological hypostasis would locate ideal objects in the mind; their existence would be mental and they would exist in my thought.

2. Metaphysical hypostasis would state ideal objects are entities located in an immaterial place, e.g. Platonism

3. Theological hypostasis would locate ideal objects in the mind of God who is constantly thinking them. (Marias, p. 406, The History of Philosophy)

Now, given that Husserl rejects all of these but still maintains the existence of ideal non-temporal objects/essences, then where exactly can we put essences in our ontology? While I think Husserl would avoid the metaphysics of the issue, there is a decisive advantage to 1. For whichever theory of pscyhology pans out as the truest in the discourse of psychology, we could wait for theoretical consensus and be consistent with the result of the science to say we've only been describing the world the whole time. However, that might have the dogmatism of the natural attitude all over it.

If we indulge in 2, committing to a immaterial plane, then the immateriality of God in 3 is but one step away given our interpretation will eventually require God, I think. Yet, the decisive advantage is that we gain that truth is guaranteed by relating to an ultimate Absolute, very much in the spirit of the American philosopher Josiah Royce. For he claimed that truth only occurs by being in reference not to a contingent world of nature, but to an Absolute ground. Our experience of the world would be limited unless it refers to a reality that outstrips it. Husserl would, I think, reject 3 clearly in thinking that emphasizing that ideal objects are the absolute reality we lose a connection to the lived-experience of the concrete world in the very same way that the natural attitude operates. Ideal objects become presentations of God's mind, and we no longer can follow the Husserlian motto: To get back to things themselves if the things themselves (ideal objects) become something other than they are. For Husserl, we are strictly limited to our consciousness of the world, and how it constitutes phenomena. That's it. Plain and simple.

Therefore, it would seem we are left with 2 as long as we don't read into the immateriality of ideas. We would be left with the same place we started from, only sure that what is required is a loosely-based Platonism without any commitment to the content of the ideal object's ontological nature. All we can know of them is that they are epistemologically required via phenomenology qua philosophy. For the other options 1 and 3 lead us away from the very insight as to why we practice phenomenology in the first place.

Fissures

For a long time, I have been concerned with reconciling the broken traditions of philosophy plagued by difference in style and attention to matters ruptured along EITHER thinking that philosophy should follow clearly the sciences to the effect that most, if not all, philosophical problems are in some way scientific problems OR that philosophy should interrogate the structures of our lived experience without which we could never make sense of the facticity, let alone our science. In this, I am decided that the latter should have my attention. For all its worth, I cannot help but think that philosophizing about the concrete matters of our practical life and lived-experience evoke a fuller conception of philosophy than the sterility of the Anglophonic tradition.

As of now, I think I will take the more Continental direction in the road. I will still, from time to time, meditate on those problems that inspire me, the existence of practical reason as such, what is agency, the objectivity of morality and the best normative theory for describing the content of morality. However, these deviations will occur along a fissure that cuts down all the way in every philosophical bone in my body. For now, I am more dedicated to the pursuit of Continental philosophy and Husserl than ever before.

Graham Harman Interview

Graham Harman agrees to an interview over at anotherheideggerblog.blogspot.com.

Love at First Sight

So, I'm visiting Carbondale, IL and I have met several of the graduate students. I can already feel a sense of community that previous graduate school experience did not afford. They're friendly, helpful and above all motivated. In one day, I have had social outings and experienced a level of personal contact far surpassing a month of the old school. Now, I am not one for "knocking" what came before. For those that may come here from there, this is, perhaps, a shortcoming.

My blog will be slowing down, and many of whom frequent my blog may be upset. I will be posting primarily on Derrida and Husserl in the next few upcoming months, as that is the seminar I will be invested in. I'm still unsure of my second seminar. In that time, I want to get some good solid Continental essay on Husserl out there for the 2010 meeting of the Husserl Circle, and SPEP for 2010.

Continental/Analytic Divide

Paul Patton's lovely talk about Continental philosophy is stirring and inspirational. It's absolutely lovely and correct--understanding CP as an Anglophonic projection! His thoughts connect themes of Continental philosophy to application of immediate insight to one's concrete world (especially thematic reflections on Australia). Among these I liked: The Question of the Other in Derrida, Levinas and maybe Arendt as real themes in Australia's colonial past. Foucault's analysis of our present with the modes of past thought---philosophy as a mode of reflection on the present and its consequence for Australian law.

Value-Predicates & Being and Time

In BT, Heidegger writes,

value predicates cannot tell us anything at all new about the Being of goods, but would merely presuppose again that goods have pure presence-at-hand as their kind of Being. Values would then be determinate characteristics which a Thing possesses, and they would be present-at-hand. They would have their sole ultimate ontolgoical source in our previously laying down the actuality of Things as the fundamental stratum. But even pre-phenomenological experience shows that in an entity which is supposedly a Thing, there is something tht will not become fully intelligible through Thinghood alone. Thus, the Being of Things has to be rounded out. What then does the Being of values or their 'validity' really amount to ontologically? And what does it signify ontologically for Things to be 'invested' with values in this way? (BT, H. 99)

A Few Things:

First, I cannot tell if 'goods' here refer to moral goods, or are goods meant in terms of instrumental goods like when one looks at a shop sign reading "goods and services."

This sounds like Heidegger has reached the often observed gap between fact and value. The above passage reads as if it is skeptical about equating values with material objects that are judged valuable.

Moreover, the problems of metaethics and the objectivity of values has always talked about values as enduring reasons of action for one agent and others like the agent. Agent-neutral values, as it were, inherent the talk of what Heidegger would call present-at-hand.

Any thoughts?

Thoughts on Contextual Pacifism

Let contextual pacifism be a rejection of any form of violence or war where the means to control the effect of war or violence from the agent(s) disperses beyond control of the agent(s) in question. This dispersion requirement conceptually grounds what type of contexts justify pacifism. As such, any form of violence that can be restricted to a smaller locus between agents and the victim has a greater chance of not dispersing, actually controlled, and therefore might justify smaller uses of violence in different contexts.

In war, the effects of agents will always, I think, cause unnecessary suffering. The missile misses, the magazine emptied into a building where the enemy and a family were, and the nerve gas hit a windstorm blowing into the civilian areas. The larger an area of effect, and the larger the amount of people, the more organization will break down between the agents and targets to the point where innocent people will get hurt. It's as if entropy enters into these organized activities exemplifying what Clausewitz called "the fog of war." The entropic breakdown of war and its effect of killing civilians is the wrong-making property of initiating war.

Smaller contexts seem intuitively more plausible. If I am at a bar and someone finds me revolting (probably my sense of humor) to punch me, then I certainly have the right to block the punch, arm bar the attacker and say enough is enough. If I am a police officer and in the heat of longstanding struggle, I have to shoot an armed perpetrator in the leg (all things being equal: I'm a good shot, I won't miss etc.), then it seems reasonable. Moreover, if someone during a hostage situation is becoming more and more of a danger to himself and the hostages, a sniper can kill. What makes these contexts different to me is that we can be reasonably confident about how we control the means of our agency in conflict.

It might seem like I've taken a back-step for any general pacifist will be appalled by my thoughts, and I could be accused of being logically untenable in that I accept violence in smaller forms than largely organized ones. Do these contextual differences really explain the moral rightness and wrongness of war generally speaking? My answer is yes. When military leaders want to justify just causes as an offset to a gain to initiate a war, they are more confident in the means to direct their own troops than they should be. The gain is illusory in that their confidence blinds them to the fact that the value of human life is worth risking for the better world. Yet, that is not so. In addition, massively organized troops differ in context than a Seargant of 22 years in New York who has to order his SWAT team take out a lunatic with a gun. The sniper can be accurate. He doesn't have the fog of war looming over him.

In conclusion, my contextual consideration preserves intuitions about self-defense and the defense of others we legitimate in our normal civilian life. We often take these intuitions and put them on the legitimacy of war. That is a mistake. As I think it conceivable and reasonable, we should see the fog of war as a wrongmaking property that eventually will transgress against others, contributing unnecessary suffering in the world. For that reason, smaller contexts of violence seem more plausible to justify than those plagued by the chaos of war itself.

Larry May and Just Cause

Here is a paper I'm writing right now. For some flavor for ya'll, I've put the beginning outline and proposal out there. I'm still working out both A) the label for the type of pacifism defended (as well as some content consideration), and B) how one who holds that human lives can be offset against other moral considerations for supporting jus ad bellum .

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Larry May’s work in philosophy of war is very well-known and respected. For me, his interpretation of just cause principle(s) are the most reasonable with the caveat that war is a permissible moral activity. One might say, for this reason, that May’s version is the most reasonable view of just cause. In fact, many of my own prima facie moral intuitions about war are worked into his reconceptualized view of the just cause principle. Yet, I am not willing to grant him the caveat of war’s permissibility. However critical May’s reconceptualized just cause principle, the critical stance and acknowledged attendant horrors of war cannot serve as a reason to constrain that only a small number of wars, those justified by a just cause, can be fought. Instead, the horrors of war serve as a wrong-making property to undermine that just causes justify war at all. This does not mean that there’s no such thing as a just cause, but only the remedy of addressing the just cause cannot be war.

As remedies go, I propose a contextual pacifism that rejects all forms of war that pose a danger to massive amounts of non-combatants, a large portion of whom are innocent. My particular intuitions reject warfare in cases where a large amount of people will unnecessarily suffer. Thus, my contextual pacifism concerns how states and internationally mobile sub-state actors ultimately relate. This pacifism does not cut down all the way into personal relationships, however.

Metaphysics of Presence?

Derrida regarded Husserl's phenomenology to be the culmination of everything that is wrong with the metaphysics from the Greeks onward. Simply put, for Husserl, all phenomena are constituted by consciousness. Meaning is enduring beyond describing how consciousness constitutes a phenomena, and the meaning of the phenomena persist through time. Anyone else engaged in phenomenological description of the same phenomena would achieve the same result. The tendency for both the subject, or ego, to persist through time as well as objects of consciousness undergird all of metaphysics. Both Heidegger and Derrida see this tendency played out in historical examples of metaphysics. As such, the question of presence ultimately becomes one resulting in skepticism that the subject exists.

Now, I don't want to get into the reasons for why Heidegger and Derrida are skeptical about the subject's existence (As I go into my Husserl and Derrida Seminar this Fall, I will no doubt have much more to say on this issue), but I do want to be skeptical of their initial skepticism. I want to rethink why such a bias of presence should be avoided. I may be a herald of tradition and nothing more at this point, but I think a metaphysics of presence should be encouraged, not avoided. Like Gadamer, biases are not something to be avoided as in the concept of bias in the Enlightenment. Instead, our biases are productive; they form the basis of my encounter with the world in a tradition.

I think a metaphysics of presence is right in some regard. Consider two cases of wonder where philosophy is said to have started. First, the wonder of philosophy begins by curiosity of a world whose mystery endures through time. If it is the world, it's mystery escapes me, outstripping my ability to know wholly the status of its reality. Next, the fact that I have a sense of continuity of my habits, dispositions and very self while not proof in itself, certainly adds some intuitions to the fact that I am in a world. I have a sense of my own being that likes, hates, shutters, fears and shivers. Thus, in both the mystery of the self and the nature of the world, I find wonder persists. It is a phenomenological fact that when I am mystified by the world or my own subjectivity, it persists through time.

Finally, maybe Derrida is right in a limited sense. Some system builders in metaphysics maintain a concept of the self that is devoid of sociality, history and intersubjectivity. Even contemporary moral philosophers that want to find how it is that agent's exhibit practical reason as such, ahistoricize the agent, and speak about agency in terms of some impersonal conceptual scheme. Perhaps, this is the quagmire. We cannot conceive of our selves as either wholly phenomenological or natural. Our conception of our selves may be mediated between a conception that preserves presence, eschewing Heidegger and Derrida, while preserving a more healthier understanding of humban beings as connected with a time, place and understanding.

The Problem of the Lifeworld's Legitimacy as a Philosophical Problem

I am interested in the origins of phenomenology as a way into explicating irreducible structures of our social and historical experience, what we might call the field of the lifeworld. The tendency of the Neo-Kantians to link science with Kant was, as far as I can tell, a similar situation with contemporary philosophy today. Analytically-trained naturalists are skeptical of a philosophy that seeks to explain all fields of experience. What counts as worth talking about is only those categories supported by the natural sciences, or in a way, at least plausible within a narrow scientifically informed window of plausible speculation. In their view, science should not seek to integrate in explanation of our experience sources of artistic, cultural or historical domains. These features are more for the phenomenologist that accepts these features of human existence as irreducible in the sense that the analytically-trained naturalist could not provide a suitable space for them in the first place. We just tend to ignore this refusal to talk. Thus, there is a disagreement between whether or not to treat irreducible features of human existence as real. Instead, our philosophy should only be engaged with what the sciences directly or indirectly support as real.

More specific to the German situation was the relationship of science to culture. To explain this relationship, it is important to first mention something of the term for science since it is peculiar to the German language. The word for 'science' is Wissenschaft. Wissenshaft includes both the natural sciences and humanities under its rubric. Thus, to strive for unity in science in general is to explain how physics or history may relate to each other. This striving-for unity engages in a dialogue with how science relates to culture at large. As far as I can tell, a philosopher that wants to integrate cultural life into science would be forced to equate forms of culture, like art, with the value of science. However, since much of ontology for the analytically-trained naturalist drives the machine of what we should even begin to philosophize about, I wonder if the Divide between Analtyic/Continental should be recast as a problem of legitimacy of the lifeworld.

I find this problematic attractive since I entertain the thought that objects of culture like historical works, literature and art contribute and express insights about humanity. To consider them sources of knowledge would mean that analytic philosophers would have to abandon the professional insight that we can only talk about things that science can support and that are clearly expressed in logical argumentation. We would have to embrace other forms of communicating insights about the human condition in ways other than logical argumentation. For me, this makes legitimate more literary or poetic styles of communicating even philosophical ideas.

The Meaning of Acceptance Is their Pride

Meditation on Steven's Thirteen Blackbirds

Of the several explored so far, I love this poem. But my tastes are peculiar some might say. Let me start by explaining my starting methodology.

In phenomenology, we look at how experiences avail themselves without presupposing anything about the phenomena under reflection. In this way, aspects of the world come into view, but never the world as whole. Instead, experience is likened to a field (as in Merleau-Ponty), with each field availing itself in our reflective attention to the implicit structures that we commonly taken for granted. In acts of perception, objects of perception are never revealed with all sides showing. There is always some profile of the object kept from us. When approaching a table, I only see the top when looking directly down on it. If I walk around it, only two legs are showing while the other two are concealed from my vantage point.

In the same way, poetry can be an exercise to let phenomena avail themselves, and this is what, I feel, Stevens achieves. He is a phenomenologist about blackbirds, letting various experiences of the blackbird reveal themselves in our experience. Each stanza is fragmented, only unified by the fact that the poet is paying attention to the various experiences of blackbirds either perceptually or symbolically.

In I, we open to a still vista of snowy mountains. If you've skied, say Vermont, you will know that winter is silent, and cold. The stillness of snow lies in its blanket whiteness across the horizon of my vision at the top of the mountain. Stark contrasting colors stand out, brought into relief by the blanket whitenss of snow. If a blackbird gazed at me in this still whiteness, I would feel it, too, was “the only moving thing.”

In IV, I perplexed, and for good reason. How is that men and women are united by poets? Usually, love is the answer. In this case, a man and women are first united. Then, the blackbird is united with them. In this case, perhaps, men and women are one in aspects of love, but are further unified in the existential realization that human lives are finite, experiencing their own mortality in the symbolism of the unity with the blackbird.

In VI, moods are disclosed in moments where moods have cognitive content, at least in Heidegger. They have a primordial relationship to experience as they tend to fill out and “color” my experience in general. Jagged wild icicles carve up my field of vision in the window, and eery shadows move crossing my visual field “to and fro.”

In XII, we see a river moving, and the blackbird is said to be flying. Objects are given only in relation to a nexus of other objects, or so say the phenomenologists. My leaning on the bed with the computer is for blogging which presupposes the keyboard to share my thoughts. In this experience, I my blogging, the computer screen and the keyboard all give rise to sharing my thoughts. In the same way, when the river moves, it appears to move in relation to those that can see it, as a blackbird flying above it. Yet, viewing the river moving must be actively viewed from the top of it. As such, when the river moves, so too does the flier perceiving it.

Just some thoughts.

A Wonderful Critical Thinking Video

I might use this someday in a critical thinking class.

Simon Critchley Introduces The Public to Being and Time

Yup, that's right. Simon Critchley is introducing the public to Being and Time. Check it out here.

Father's Day

As secular holidays go, one of my favorites is Father's Day. Although I am almost 30 (in six days), I do not have any children yet. My Father and I took a ride up into Tionesta, PA, and sat reading. There were sharp divisions between us. I pulled out a book on Husserlian phenomenology, and my father had a book by Conservative media pundit, Mark Levin. As we hiked down to the lake, he said as I politely put his book into my messenger bag, "Won't that contaminate your books?" I laughed, and said "You'd better carry this chair. Your book is weighing down my intelligence." We jibed at our respective differences not forgetting the bond we've always had.

When I think about it, I get a lot from my father. He's incredibly political, as I am. He always taught me the value of voting, and being part of one's community. I chose to study political science in addition to philosophy because of the instilled love of the political. When I found my own voice, as people often do in philosophy, I soon realized I disagreed sharply with him on many issues. For one, I do not ground religion and morality together as Baptists do, nor do I revere tradition in the same way. However, I like older stuff. I like Aristotle, and jibe back that I am even more conservative than him!

In the end, Father's Day is a lovely gesture. Without my father, I could never be where I am going. My father has always been an inspiration. When he said goodbye to me after we had moved in all my dorm stuff my freshman year, he hugged me, and said, "Make good choices." That's all he said. I have always loved how fathers and sons keep it simple.

Answering Khadimir

“First, all four irreducible factors of disclosure are always present; something is not disclosed in just one of them. Speaking of them separately is done for articulation via phenomenological reduction, and because each has its own structures and modalities as disclosed in disclosure.”

In your view of Heidegger, all factors are irreducible and are necessary for disclosure. Phenomena are not disclosed if they do not share in the four characteristics of disclosure: language, mood, fallenness and understanding. I want to take apart disclosure, and see if these are always necessary. Certainly, anything that occurs to the understanding will need to have content, and content is always linguistically framed for Heidegger, yet I doubt that is true that all content can be put into language (I’m reminded of Gadamer’s often cited, ‘That being which is understood is language’).

First, let’s draw a distinction between existential propositions which are propositions about the conditions of human existence as revealed in phenomenological descriptions, and secondly, the normal sense of propositions as declarative statements made about the state of affairs. To think about existential propositions resultant from existential phenomenological analysis requires additional doctrines that Heidegger does not spell out. Let’s see this in the case of moods.

When Heidegger asks about the nothing, he had the serious purpose of examining nothing as it related to the anxiety. Anxiety is a mood that targets existence as a whole. In that anxiety, the world falls away, and one is left with meaninglessness. Moreover, this anxiety is whole, and precludes the possibility of separating any part out of this meaninglessness. We cannot look to a part and see what this meaninglessness is about since it is about the whole so to speak (Richard Polt, 1999, p. 124). Moods are revelatory for Heidegger, that is, they can be put into language and be described phenomenologically. These moods form the backdrop, forming a condition of what it is to have judgments about the world or even think about it at all.

These moods are nonpropositional. They are more conditions of existence for Heidegger than to put it mildly, the locus of attention which grounds our meditations on intentionality in previous blogposts (that seems to be how we are using the term). My only point, now, is that nonpropositional content could never be revelatory, as Heidegger assumes it to be, since its content would take a different form than would be translateable if understanding was not intentionality. In such a case, intentionality must be present, even more so than you acknowledge. The very fact that we can describe moods as revelatory commits us to a cognitivism about the subjective judgments we make phenomenologically. Such a view can only be made consistent by the cognitivism resultant from intentionality. As such, the only candidate I find in the four categories that can account for the fact that moods are revelatory of the conditions of existence stem from the importance of understanding them. Disclosure qua mood occurs only from the fact that I am capable of understanding what at first is nonpropositional, but then I put it into a propositional, that is, linguistic form.

To put it formally, cognitivism is necessary to maintain 1) Moods are nonpropositional and 2) Moods can be described in language (as they can be made into existential propositions). Denying 2) would mean that one could not be a phenomenologist, and 1) is warranted by the fact that it is a condition of the whole of existence, not any part we can talk about. However, cognitivism is not sufficient on its own for both 1), 2) and cognitivism to be true. Instead, only intentionality is both necessary and sufficient to maintain the truth of cognitivism and 1) and 2). In Husserl’s analysis, we identify the implicit constitutive intentionality that we are not aware of (here would be the example of moods). At the implicit level, we would encounter phenomena as nonpropositional, and that’s all Heidegger has done, it seems. He has mistaken a phenomena as manifesting only partially. The fact that we can describe in content the fact that there is an implicit intentional structure explains how we can describe nonpropositional content into cognitivist phenomenological descriptions. Now, let’s move on to the next point I want to make. I your passage from BT as:

“
‘Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence—in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. Dasein has either chosen these possibilities itself, or got itself into them, or grown up in them already. Only the particular Dasein decides its existence, whether it does so by taking hold or by neglecting. The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself. The understanding of oneself which leads along this way we call ‘existentiell’’. (33; 12-13)”

There is still room to equate understanding with intentionality when we keep in mind that Husserl largely meant the term ‘intentionality’ as anything that appears to consciousness, even our implicit awareness or non-awareness of our body must appear to us in some way. Gaining access to that modality of appearing before consciousness is, as far as I know, the only way we can make sense of existential propositions. By necessity, we must be conscious-of the world in some small degree, and this appearance-enabling condition is what is meant by intentionality. Let’s move on to the next point I wanted to make.

Finally, I like your re-use of my tendency to symbolize. You say,

”So, if I must use As and Bs, A) disclosure is dependent upon the existential context, yet what is understood depends on the history of one's prior understandings B). Yet the history B) depends on the available existential contexts A). In neither case need intentionality be invoked, for it is not relevant to he discussion until we specify a specific context, understanding, history, etc. So, neither A nor B is primary.”

Here, I wonder how we are using primary. I believe I was the first to use that term, and by primary I meant that X is a precondition that enables disclosure.

3) Disclosure is dependent upon the existential context (such that by existential context we mean the history of one’s prior understanding.

4) History of one’s prior understanding depends on the available existential contexts.

I think you are saying that Dasein moves between 3 and 4 quite easily without any mention of intentionality. We can simply describe what is disclosed, and the historical involvement as mitigated by existential contexts. Yet, given that the enabling-appearance condition of intentionality must be met to have access to the world, then disclosure cannot happen if we do not have access to its appearance before consciousness, and while context might constrain some aspects of what comes before consciousness, it does nothing to the truth that intentionality enables access to the historical involvement in the world.

In summary, I have equated understanding to be but one mode of intentionality. The thought is that the Seinsfrage of Heidegger privileges just one overall aspect of our complex intentional life, and the question that I began asking about privileging this intentional modality as the only way of answering the question of Being still strikes me as odd. Other avenues in answering the question of Being might be available, I just don’t know. I speculate a more fully grounded description from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of the various intentional structures might be a better avenue into the question of Being.

Distinctions of Value

I like Adrienne Martin's overall distinctions about what is meant by value. Here's the blog post over at PEA Soup.

Privileging the Heideggerian Mode of Intentionality?

One limiting feature of existential phenomenology is its insistence that the fore-structure of our encounter with the world is only understanding. Now, it may be my naivete, but that claims sounds pretty much like Husserlian intentionality. It is, for me, one modality of intentionality we can take up. The sphere of our conscious life is more variegated than just that type of modality. All Heidegger does is privilege one modality of how we are aware of the world, and with Husserl one can get to the content of our experiences rather than just seeing the shape of consciousness rather than content.

For me, this exploration of the givenness of content cuts all the way down, and elucidates more of our experience than Heideggerians can hope to achieve. Of course, I think they have larger concerns than I know here about the transcendental motif. I would like to hear what others have to say on this point. Wink, wink, hint, hint:


In my reading of Heidegger, I interpreted being-in-the-world as the basic comportment of understanding, thinking this is a transcendental analysis--thus drawing more links to the indebtedness to Husserl than many Heideggerians acknowledge. Of course, this is a contentious area of exegesis and criticism. Heidegger's exploration of being-in-the-world is, as I know, not very content-oriented from the standpoint of the transcendental ego meditating on its own intentional awareness but Dasein looking back on its action-orientation in the world. However, I question this motif. Why deny the transcendental motif of the egological activity we're aware of for one type of intentional modality? What is so special about this type of intentionality that gives us a way to access the question of Being?

Critchley on Happiness

Simon Critchley defends an Aristotelian old picture of the Good Life as the contemplative life in a NY Times article.

Dual-Experience Physicians from US and Canada

Here's an interesting study comparing physicians' perspective about health care with dual-experience in Canada and the United States.

The Limit of the Public Good

It seems unethical to let people suffer, and easing people's economic hardship is one avenue to positively fulfill one's duty of not letting people suffer. However, it is easier said than done, and how do we determine the limits of our charitable efforts?

I have a set of worries though. Most of these worries revolve around how we keep funding the status-quo previously failing institutions and inheriting a massive public debt that tests the resilence of our economy to the point that even China is getting nervous.

Now, I'll say it up front and center, I have immediate family that benefit from a surviving GM. That said, I still wonder how the government will oversee a company in circumstances that may collide. Will GM collide with the government environmental incentive to better gas mileage and profitablity if the R&D costs more than selling cars that meet better gas mileage? What happens then?

Will the management culture change, and if so, what direction will they take MY company. Let's face it...it's now my company!

If the government maintains an active interest in the success of its investment, will that cause Chrysler and GM to unfairly pull its resources that undermine free-market competition? Ford might not be OK, but will it thrive if its competitors are given strings of support.

So, the philosophical question boils down to finding the moral limit of economic intervention of the state to its domestic economic actors...That's a question in the case of GM I'm to close to have a solid answer. Yet, it should be thrown on the table for discussion if anyone has any solid proposals of how to determine that limit.

Originalism and Constitutional Interpretation

Justice Scalia defines originalism as the only way of proceeding in terms of constitutional interpretation. In originalism, the text as law is interpreted under looking to the historical authorship of the law up to including the legislative intention in which the law is authored. By looking to this historical authorship, one assumes that one can have access to the authorial intention of the law. Anything short of originalism is a picking and selecting arbitrarily at what one wants the text to mean-such people are guilty of a form of judicial activism.

If we stipulate ahead of time that judicial activism is essentially Judges reading into the law what their personal views, then any time a Judge reads his personal views into the act of interpretation it can be said that such an act is wrong when interpreting the law. If one accepts originalism as a way of proceeding, then they, too, believe prior to the act of interpretation a personal view that they read into the law as well. Their prior commitment to finding the historical situation in which the law was written violates the central principle of their criticism of judicial activism.

What is ludicrous above is the fact that it is an unrealistic assumption that interpreters can separate themselves from the body of preexisting beliefs. time and place of their current situatedness. Since the law is about interpreting the law, one stands at the horizonal moment of a text -- between past and future expectation. Interpretation is never concerned with the past in a way that the originalist assumes the past available. Instead, the interpretive act is always futural. We look to history and what has happened in the past for our practical need to engage the law in the present, that is, toward the demands of our current situation. I think an example is in order to organize our intuitions on this very matter. The following example is inspired by its analogue in Ronald Dworkin's Law's Empire.

Let us suppose that Suzy is a tenant in a building. Under state law, a "Landlord must provide suitable time for tenant eviction." Suzy is getting her car repaired, and cannot leave immediately despite her landlord's desire for her to vacate the apartment so as to rent to more reliable tenants. Suzy leaves her apartment for a second to do some grocery shopping after staying 3 days over the day the landlord wanted her to vacate the apartment. As such, the landlord uses his key and starts to move all her possessions onto the lawn in front of the building. When she returns, she finds her pieces of furniture have been rained on, and the landlord ushering his nephews to hurry with her belongings. Suzy and her landlord end up in court.

The source of the disagreements rests between the two parties on how to define a "suitable time for tenant eviction." Laws are written with general appilcability in mind, often without precision in the law's authoring. Legal interpretation is assumed to flesh out the generality of what the laws shall mean in terms of their applicability. Suzy's civil claim would be compensation for property damage, and the landlord would counter claim the right to evict a tenant after suitable time has passed, arguing 3 days is "suitable." Any look to the legislative intention might be something like general guidelines so as to curtail private quarrels between interested parties. What is one to do for the legal interpretation of the state statute?

The above is a palatable example. It drives the fact that the law is a socially argumentative practice built on the praxis of concepts, not the stasis of universal meanings solidified in the past. Legal interpretation is more like Aristotle's notion of phronesis in which one gets better at practical reasoning in moral situations the more one gets better at being/cultivating the virtues over time. For this reason, this is why Gadamer revives Aristotle on exactly this point. The act of interpretation is connected to the past in a lively and workable way through the needs of interpreter. Privileging originalism is just hiding one's conservatism in a way that stagnates judicial review.

It is one thing to beat the drum of the untenable premises that undergird originalism, namely, that interpretation is about having epistemic access to the past in the way originalism thinks it does, but it is quite another to leave empty what a good theory of constitutional interpretation would have to answer. As such, I now turn to outline several unrelated points to the above post on what I think a good Constitutional theory of interpretation ought to have.

1) Constitutional interpretations employ normative concepts. Central to these concepts is justice, and as such a good theory must give us an answer to what justice is, and its relation to interpretation.

2) Constitutional interpretation relies on the assumption that the Constitution has legitimacy, that is, the Constitution has authority over us. This means that a good theory of interpretation must give us a story as to why we find the Constitution authoritative.

3) Conceptual analysis of interpretation needs to cut through the normative posturing; a deep philosophical story of what exactly interpretation is, and how far interpretation can go epistemically are necessary to give us a fuller story. I have alluded to what I think would be a good analysis on this end, a Gadamerian story of legal hermeneutics as found in Truth and Method.

In concluding this really long blog post, I will summarize my thoughts on originalism. First, the originalist rhetorically move to say that judicial activism is nothing more than reading what you want to read into the law is absurd in that originalism is guilty of the same way it defines judicial activism for other competing acts of interpretation. Moreover, I show that what the criticism lacks is a realistic picture of how interpreters are using the past to secure applicable knowledge for their present situation. This means that interpretation is always normative, never impartial--always bound to the reconstituted historical moment of the interpreter. All interpretations points to the present, and this is the more realistic temporal relation revealing the past as never static and accessible to be known in the way originalism thinks the past available. Instead, interpretation is an act, a lively and workable engagement with the text, past and situation one finds oneself in; the analogues for this type of activity is Aristotelian phronesis by which we live morally better and better by acquiring the practice that only living morally in experience can provide. In essence, I oppose originalism by defending Gadamer's conception of phenomenological hermeneutics as a way of proceeding on these matters. In addition, I end by outlining several concerns as to what a good theory of constitutional interpretation would look like, largely inspired by Leiter's post "Justifying Originalism"

Democratizing Effects of Social Networking

Check out this article for how a low-budget (and I mean really low-budget) movie utilized social networking for movie-making.

Babette Babich Interviews Patrick Heelan

I met Babette Babich at the Pacific APA, and she's great. Can't say enough wonderful things about her, and Patrick Heelan first came under my radar with his expertise of Continental philosophy of science. He's got a lot of interesting work I still have yet to get through.

Anyway, here's the link.

Anthony Steinbock on Bodily Attitudes in Reception of the Divine

I like this a lot. It was a presentation for one of Richard Kearney's seminars.

Morally Wrong to Support the Troops

I warn you. This post is not the run of the mill average intelligibility concerning our troops. I reach farther than that. Just now, a USO commercial advertised a positive message for “getting involved” and that they were “all about the little things” sending messages of praise to our US troops abroad. I think this is suspect, and find myself lapsing into thinking the institutional values espoused by our military policymakers are unacceptable morally (a point assumed for the purposes of this post). Ultimately, what the institution values, its character, become the default values of anyone following orders, regardless of whether or not such values are endorsed personally. Thus, this conclusion rests on drawing a distinction between agent-endorsed values and agent-functional endorsement.

People will object that a poor West Virginian high school senior just joined the US Marines to gain the benefits of a college education otherwise out of reach for his/her potential. In fact, the said agent might not even endorse the justness of the war. Moreover, it is possible to push this objection to the ultimate extreme that the agent might have chosen to be a conscientious objector, instead possibly becoming a combat medic than training to be a soldier. By driving a wedge between the institution, its norms and actions, the agent – still part of the institution – redeems themselves in light of the unethical endorsements of the institution as a whole. The values endorsed in the examples above are agent-endorsed values, and in this example they differ than the institution as a whole.

However, agent-endorsed values of the agent do not function when the agent acts as part of the whole. The wedge is foolishly thought to avoid the criticism that what the US military values are not internalized by its members. Some candidate values of the unethical variety I have in mind are: expansion of US economic interests at the expense of the rights of others, the suffering of innocents in war (especially children) and absolute lack of justification for the Iraq War as a candidate of being a “Just War.” Yet, there is no internalization requirement needed. The Combat Medic heals soldiers that re-enter the theatre of war. She is part of the chain and functions in a way that comes at odds with the agent-endorsed values. One cannot value healing if one heals someone that will cause bodily suffering. If the agent functions contrary to their own personal endorsements, then there is no integrity between the beliefs and actions of the agent. Thus, it is possible to say that even those that made an innocent choice to be part of the military are morally wrong. Following this intuition, I do not have to thank them, or even be supportive of their existence. To do so means that I am morally contemptible for indirectly supporting the suffering caused by war itself.



So, the USO commercial is wrong. We should be against the troops even in the cases where troop disagrees with the aims and goals of its employer. With that said, it is also wrong to further support Obama and his politics if they endorse any measure of war that fails to succeed morally as justified. It remains undecided in my own beliefs whether or not any principle can provide justification for sustained wars in which children and women suffer.

Blog Slowing Down

Hello readers,

I know that a great many of you come here expecting something philosophical these days. However, I just can't keep up with all the hits I'm getting. I apologize for that.

I'm asking you for a little leniency in your expectations since I am moving from Canada back to the United States. I have about 10 days to go.

In the mean time, I've been thinking about the limits of perception phenomenologically. If one follows the metaphor of morality as given as objects of perception are given, then the same limitations of perception might be consistent with values. In sum, the fact that things are given incompletely and that situations are given incompletely might explain moral disagreement, or some aspect of it. Anyway, that's the only recent thought I had and it's not very developed either. It came to me after reading the second paragraph in Section III of Ideas I.

I'll be back to blogging in no time when I am well-situated back in the United States.

Three beautiful years in Vancouver, BC!

You should try it.

Best,

Ed

Philip Gourevitch in May 2009's New Yorker

This is a wonderful piece I read in the New Yorker this month. Here's the link to the podcast (it's on the right to the article teaser) of the New Yorker Out Loud.

Phenomenology of Ownership

I want to know what it is for the agent to own their action. In some sense, this is a phenomenological appeal made in many stripes. From Kantians to utilitarians, there is the implicit assumption that the agent is connected through ownership to the action they bring about. The Kantians ground their moral thought in intentions, and utilitarians focus on the consequences brought about by action. Yet, both think ownership primitively basic.

What is it though for ownership to be? Where does the sense of ownership come about? Is it connected to our embodiment? In what ways does our pre-reflective life give rise to the fact that we own our action?

Ownership is such a basic notion that ethics of any stripe could not succeed in terms of its question if people did not own their actions.

Examples of Moral Phenomenology

In this post, I want to speculate about some connections I've long hinted at, but never fully developed. While I don't suspect that I will develop them in any substantial way on a blog, I do want to say what types of questions and concerns I've been thinking about as of late.

It has come to my attention that to make sense of morality, we have a few options on the table. They go from varying degrees of acceptance of morality to complete skepticism about morality.

1) Moral realism is the thesis that there are moral facts independent of our knowledge of them. The existence of moral facts is our best explanation to make sense of moral practice.

2) Moral anti-realism is the thesis that there are no moral facts, but instead, moral facts are not needed to make sense of moral practice. Our moral judgments are actually statements that issue from our own subjectivity of approval and disapproval.

3) Moral nihilism is the thesis that there are no moral facts at all. With no moral facts at all, one cannot make sense of moral practice.

Now, I do not want to argue for why 2) or 3) are not true. Such a defense is the subject of a book, and not to be taken up lightly here. Instead, I want to develop some intuitions I have as to what 2) and 3) have a hard time explaining. In so doing, I am only putting a challenge to the anti-realist or nihilist. Such a challenge, I think, is not sufficiently developed at the basic level. I don't know if they have well-developed answers for the intuitions I will be sharing in this post.

The problem: In order to make sense of moral practice, I appeal to a set of moral beliefs. These moral beliefs are expressed and revised due to critical reflection and experience following Ross' notion of a prima facie status of moral duties. If I mistakenly hold a belief, then I disregard it because it is not true. My claim is that the presupposition about the truth or falsity of moral judgments enables a wider range of responsiveness than either 2) or 3). Suppose I have come to believe that I should perfect myself at all costs, even to the point that my selfish aims of self-perfection are not mediated in any way to take into account my wife. My wife points out that a planned commitment of marriage is at odds with the aim of uncompromising self-perfection. Moreover, she tells me that not only have I hurt her, but others are hurt by my neglect of them in pursuit of my uncompromising self-perfection. So, in order to make sense of moral experience, the actual phenomenology constitutive of this experience, I am committed to several propositions.

A: Moral judgments are truth-assessable.

B: In being truth-assessable, the judgments are true through the existence of moral facts.

C: Given A and B, human responsiveness is enhanced.

I think A, B, and C might be called the propositions for presumptive realism. However, I want to up the ante. I want to say that presumptive realism is due in a large part to how we experience the world. The experience of morality is revealed in such a way that our phenomenology reveals it as such. We make sense of our beliefs under the supposition of their truth or falsity. Moral nihilists are few and far between. I do not think they have sufficient evidence to say that moral practice has no meaning. The anti-realist can vehemently deny that moral practice can still be made sense in part to how people use language, yet when they talk about the various states of approval and disapproval, they will have to assume cognitivism in order to communicate. In some way, they must assume the intersubjective possibility of communicating their own subjective reports of approval and disapproval. While not a knockdown argument, I do not know how to explain that moral facts or in other words, nihilism and anti-realism can disregard how a) we treat our moral beliefs as truth-assessable and b) the fact that moral facts are present in our phenomenological experience as such.

However, here's the end and finish of the early 20th century moral philosophy. When people make this claim, they do not have any power to gain traction in an appeal to phenomenology. Enter some version of Husserlian thought.

Phenomenological realism is the thesis that moral facts about rightness, wrongness, and agency broadly construed are grounded within our phenomenological experience. The invocation of phenomenology is a return to the popular anti-naturalism found in Prichard, Moore and Ross, and motivated, in principle, by the very fact that morality seems higher-ordered feature of human experience. Being higher-ordered involves reasons for rejecting the metaphysical alternative that would make moral facts into emoting subjective preference states or thinking it a complete sham. Instead, there are aspects of Husserlian thought that can explain this appeal. Let me start by listing some of the areas phenomenological description could start.

Moral facts are context-sensitive, but can be identified by a subject with the appropriate moral intentionality. Moral intentionality could reveal the subject's faculties for moral experience, such as providing a fleshed out conception of practical reasoning derived from our pre-theoretic life that could settle the externalism/internalism debate. Within my intentional experience, phenomenological descriptions could reveal agents and how they achieve a narrative unity about their life. Moreover, certain habitualities form over time, and phenomenological description can help spell out the existence of certain habitualities that could be cultivated as a form of excellence to conform to. If moral properties are detected, then the intuitionism of Husserl might give us a model to think about how I come to know moral beliefs.

In summary, there are ways of bolstering 1) above without thinking 2) or 3) are stronger. One example could be to develop the commitment to what is revealed in our moral experience as a leading clue to what must be true about morality. Now, I know this is broad, and I was a little "all over the place" in this blog post. Some of the ideas in here need more refinement. Secondly, I maintained that human responsiveness is enhanced by thinking that moral claims are truth-assessable. It is to this that I want to briefly turn before ending.

Recall my case of the uncompromising self-perfecting spouse. Is it really the case that anti-realism can make sense of the meaning found in the the opposite spouse's appeal to the fact that if I truly ignore my caring relationships, then I am inconsistent with endorsing the goals of marriage? Moreover, my fictional neglect of any kids or family is also TRUE. These are not simply the effects of my belief, but that in my failure to reason thoroughly, I am wrong. My belief in uncompromising self-perfection is damaging, and has moral significance for that very reason. It is true.

One shortcoming of my account I foresee is one over the conditions under which some moral belief can be said to be true. The claim that human responsiveness is enhanced, as in the previous paragraph, resonates with a certain feel of pragmatism. If that follows, then the power of Husserlian phenomenology and the conceptual schema it offers to make sense of the whole body of claims I want to apply it suffer. I would have to reject elements of Husserl's privileged transcendental position and what work it does in phenomenological description for pragmatic truth. In short, human responsiveness cannot be a reason why I think moral phenomenology better suited to support realism, but simply a benefit of holding the position.

Okay, that's it for now. Philosophers help with applying the dialectical pressure here.

Summer Agenda

I felt I should list those things I want to get done this summer. I'm aware I'm not working in the classical sense, but having a set of goals also makes me feel like I am where I want to be.

1) Continue to work on a paper in development in which I argue that Husserl's Fifth Meditation in the Cartesian Mediations can be interpreted as offering a picture of what moral intentionality looks like in addition to solving for solipsism of some variety.

2) Get better at German.

3) Outline Division 1 of Being and Time, and try to crack the relevant sections on circumspection. I'm thinking that circumspection breaks down a lot more than Heidegger assumes it does. This breakdown, as I call it, originates when morally relevant considerations supervene on things we find instrumentally bound in the referential totality. Thus, there should be a separate form of being-in-the-world when we find things meaningful in terms of their moral relevance. Why Heideggerians avoid ethics in any traditional form is a little boggling to me.

4) Finish Anthony Steinbock's book, Home and Beyond.

5) Find an apartment in Carbondale, IL over the summer and send out the TA contract for next year.

6) See at least one Pittsburgh Pirates game, preferably with my father. Since I have avidly maintained to my fellow Canadians that baseball is the most complete sport, I should at least follow through with consistency on this belief.

7) Have New Jersey pizza everyday while away for my cousin's wedding this summer in Manasquan, New Jersey.

8) Surprise wife with something awesome for three year wedding anniversary.

The Faithful Are More Likely to Torture

Following my rant on guns on campus, I found this little ditty thanks to Philosopundit.

Big conclusion: The more faithful you are, the more you think you are justified. I chalk this up to someone thinking that they have God on their side. If that's true, then they somehow participate in the unfolding teleology of the righteous. Bullshit.

Smaller Conclusion: If these people had their way, they would be teaching creationism, not evolution, and we could bring back Aristotelian substances and get rid of particle physics!

Big Guns on Campus

I've been thinking a lot lately about returning to the United States. Since I will be on a campus again for the next four years, I've been thinking about those issues that I'll confront. What stands out the most is how many people regard the presence of a gun on campus as a way to prevent violence on campus.

I'm confused as to how more guns will make me safer. In truth, we've grown accustomed to thinking of American individualism as a romantic motif to draw on when thinking of how to prevent violence. However, the romantic conception of obtaining a concealed weapon permit and drawing a gun to "save the day" is as atrocious as the violence at Virginia Polytechnic. Here's why.

If campuses serve any purpose, it is that campuses are entrusted to provide a safe and nourishing environment. Weapons on a campus threaten this purpose. It's that simple. Simply the presence of a weapon is enough to threaten and undermine the university's educational mission. Recall this one:

Now, the image here is meant as recalling what violence does to a campus.

Moreover, our laws do not really recognize the romanticized conception of the special "hero" that will save the day. People are not empowered to take the law in their own hands. We have police for that. As a society, we've given over some powers of law enforcement to those entrusted to serve the public trust. Only these individuals may really detain someone, or end someone's life only when absolutely necessary. In fact, they have special training in order to do so. Normal citizens do not have that kind of power. We should stop pretending we do.

In the end, campus violence is always felt as a disruption of its purpose. The fact that we want to prevent massive injustices is a good thing. However, in the heat of ultimately desiring prevention, we seek those measures that would make us secure but forget the cost of approving such measures. This is also true when we approve the state may torture the accused at the expense of celebrating the greatness of the American state as a place so enlightened it even protects the rights of the accused.

Roxanna Again

Today, I called with grave concern about Roxanna Saberi. She's supposedly on a hunger strike for the last 5 days. Her lawyers are continually barred from Evin Prison, and Tehran is asking the West "respect Iran's independent judiciary and not hype this situation up."

I suggest a digital sit-in. I found out that the number to the receptionist of the DC Embassy is 202.965.4989. Bombard them with concern. Make their DC Office know that we will not forget this young lady!

Political Language, Abortion and the Middle Road

Every once in a while, it is good to remind people (there are many that come here) how powerful interest groups employ language to reflect their interests. This is an unfortunate reality, and while I have no empirical data, I do have some qualitative notions that help to pump this intuition. In the American political climate, we can just see how normal people discuss "abortion." Consider that there is no nuanced position that reflects the following two propositions: 1) Some abortions are morally justified and 2) Some reasons don't justify abortion at all. One must be either pro-life OR pro-choice. In that forced disjunction, 1) or 2) make little sense. I contend that 1) and 2) make more sense when we consider how complex the different moral situations are across cases of abortion.

At the outset, I'm not going to claim that I can solve the abortion debate. Many philosophers have engaged this problem in a variety of ways. From Mary Anne Warren, Judith Jarvis Thomson to Don Marquis have said a great deal. Moreover, I am not going to engage in popular debates (like the argument from bodily autonomy), nor propose some radical new idea in this post. That's not the point. The point of abortion is a test case for seeing how 1) or 2) are excluded.

We can take a better look at the interest of pro-life groups by understanding the term "pro-life" and "pro-choice." First, the term suggest that the opposition would be "anti-life." The term sets up that one would never want to be against life. But, that's just an oversimplification of a very complicated moral issue. Consider the opposite of pro-choice, "anti-choice." Would anyone really want to be against the ability to make choices? That also doesn't sound to fruitful. In both cases, the actual complexity of the moral issue is reduced to bumper-sticker mentality, and I've always been more attracted to a view of morality that attempts to see a moral issue in terms of the case by case basis that one might adjudicate, say, in a court room. Not all cases are identical, and for that reason, a little intellectual humility is involved in seeing in what types of cases succeed in allowing abortion, and others that fail to generate a reason for abortion.

Consider the following bumper sticker. Keeping your laws off one's body follows the idea that the positive argument for abortions stem completely from bodily autonomy. However, this idea that one can do with one's body what one may doesn't follow or make much sense. Getting an abortion isn't morally neutral like cutting one's hair and painting one's fingernails.

Consider the bumper sticker that abortion stops a beating heart. Such a sticker construes again the oversimplified notion that the impermissibility of abortion rests on the presupposition that a fetus is like you or I---a fully blown member of the moral community with a status of personhood.

In both cases, the language used conceals the philosophical complexity of two concepts central to the abortion debate: autonomy and personhood. Critical reflection moves past these, and I think I could show cases for 1) and 2) or refer back to Thomson, Warren and Marquis for how these terms get better attention in moral philosophy.

Now, one should take this case by case basis for morality without conflating morality and legality. Morality is more fundamental than the law. We don't legislate all forms of immorality. We don't make it illegal to cheat or your spouse, or lie to your neighbor. So, when I say that morality is complicated by the types of situations that engender different moral responses, we should take moral justification for what it is, and not confuse the analogy of cases with legal justification. That's not where I am going.

Let's take 1) Some abortions are morally justified. There might be several cases in which abortion is justifed prima facie. First, if a woman is raped, she has no responsibility for being the victim of a sexual offense. Typically, we do not hold victims of crime's accountable for the effects of the crime, and this is the central premise that will do the work needed to explain the sexual offense case. An insurance company would never make the claimant pay for things damaged in a fire as long as the fire was not initiated by the claimant. Secondly, if the mother's life is in danger due to pregnancy, the life of the mother trumps the life trying to enter the world. Our moral intuitions favor the health of those that are here before us, present in our lives. A husband might have to decide in favor of aborting the fetus while the wife is incapacitated during labor.

Let's take 2) Some reasons don't justify abortion at all. Let's go back to the bumper sticker about bodily autonomy. If I wanted to do with my body as I wanted, and part of this was vanity, then it is conceivable that someone might be vain about their personal appearance. If I heard someone say they didn't want to get fat, or would not look good in a skiing outfit due to pregnancy, these reasons do not support or mesh with the seriousness of abortion. In fact, we would think there is something seriously wrong with this person. Consider a second case. If a teenager said that simply out of fear, she wanted an abortion. We couldn't take fear alone as a reason to justify abortion anymore than vanity.

Moreover, the later development of a fetus provokes reactions in us that early first trimester abortions don't. We seem more permissive with first-term abortions than the complexity revealed in selective late term procedures. Clearly, the fetus has developed and the closer it gets to emerging in the world as a moral person.

To summarize up to this point, I have not proposed anything substantial about the abortion debate. Instead, I have only advanced the opinion that morality by a case to case consideration actually reflects a proper understanding of the issue. This is meant as a contrast to the over-simplified politics of abortion. My point is to show that this understanding of morality should be reflected in how it is portrayed in public debates, yet this is not the language employed. Instead, one is either for abortion in all cases, or strictly against it. However, like all either/or's in political language, it is a false dilemma. There is more going on in abortion than reflected, more options between the one's presented in the either for it or against it categories.

In some ways, I feel that politics and our culture dumb things down for our immediate consumption. News coverage, political debate and the populism of information have all contributed to a culture so bent on attaining what is needed now that the civic virtues of understanding, organizing and communicating have flown out the window. Being a philosopher leaves one with a bad taste in one's mouth as I look at the case of politics. I take my cue from Socrates that most profess knowledge they truly don't know, and every once in a while, you have to remind people that the world is more complicated philosophically than the comfort of faith, science or common-sense alone provide.

Maverick Again on Nietzsche

Okay, that's it. I'm calling you out, Maverick.

I don't like doing this. In fact, as a philosopher, I'm supposed to be charitable. I'm supposed to build up the damn reasons as to why I interpret a text T as supporting X. That's one of the very few things I do, and as an aspiring Continental philosopher (such a skill at exegesis surpasses any pejorative division in my discipline), I am practicing all the time. It pains me to see that this is not done in a recent http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/04/nietzsche-and-national-socialism.html#more my Maverick philosopher. The blog post takes the following rough form (note this is heuristic only)

1) Nietzsche says X in T.
2) I interpret X in T as supporting National socialism.
3) Cite passage of Gay Science, 325.
4) Proviso: X in T as supporting National socialism cannot be maintained on one passage alone, and mention that there are many passages that fit this bill.
5) Even with the proviso, Nietzsche's saying X in T could support National socialism.

The immediate problem with his post is the purpose of the post equivocates in the sense meant by 2) and 5). We see this in how he refers to Kaufmann's footnote as derisive as well as those that would "scream in protest." He doesn't honestly accept the dialectical challenges of his opponents, or he would present a better case for support of 2). If pressed into a corner, I think he would suggest that 5 is what he is really doing although he wants to conclude definitively 2.

Given 5, he admits that he is not offering a sustained treatment or objecting to reading Nietzsche and his worth as a philosopher. He is only suggesting that Nietzsche can be read this way. Yet, before this humility sets in, he pedals some provocative statements meant to provoke the interpretation he favors without substantial argument mind you--really wanting to pass of 2 from above. First, he is observing the inadequacy of Walter Kaufmann's translation footnote, specifically taken issue with the fact that 325 can be explained by reference to another aphorism "how boldness in expressing one's ideas can cause emotional hurt to those near and dear." Without really offering a reason why we shouldn't accept this footnote, Maverick only points to the possibility that the passage can still be read this why being situating his favored interpretation as an explanation for why this is not the case. This amounts to the stupid undergraduate mistake of reasserting your conclusion as a way to answer an intelligible objection to one's view. Reassertion is not a way out of a dialectic.

Secondly, he implies that Kaufmann's translation of the Übermensch as "Overman" is motivated to stem the interpretation to sliding this way. Über can mean ultimate, above all, and best. In this sense, choosing Over, at least in my eyes, has always been meant to usher in a conception of a certain ethical archetype set over and beyond the current moral conception, essentially someone healthy, self-creative and passionately dedicated to a life-affirming project. The English "Super" seems to suggest not the over and beyond sense that Nietzsche means since super exaggerates something in the here and now. As such, I think the rendering by Kaufmann responsible.

When considering a counter-argument to his interpretation, we are told that LIBERALS do not want to be reminded of certain things, which Maverick fails to prove as objectionable. It could very well be the case that God is dead among the other doctrines:

when one interprets these passages in the light of such key Nietzschean doctrines as the death of God, the Will to Power, the perspectival nature of truth, (which amounts to a denial of truth), the denial of a moral world order, it becomes clear that there are definite links between Nietzsche's philosophy and Nazi ideology. But I can understand why leftists don't want to be reminded of this.

Here's a brief synopsis of my remedy. One way of interpreting Nietzsche is that he is trying to offer an ethic to combat the impending nihilism in the wake of the Death of God since so much meaning is invested in this notion; its collapse would wreak havoc. If this interpretation is true (as I think it very well is), the honest passages of life-affirming values and the myths to reinvigorate this conception prove to establish a remedy to this nihilism, not the support of national socialism. I could even supply those passages I feel warrant this interpretation over the one favored/but-not favored by Maverick (confusing as it is to read his post) Moreover, the biographical observation of his sister's proto-Nazi leanings and meeting of the Fuhrer go unnoticed by Maverick. It's simply that I am a liberal and don't want to think about these things. That's really lame if you want to meditate on the value of Nietzsche's thought.

Well, Maverick, I do think about these things. I also think about exegetically responsible views. Your passing reference to some Nietzsche lovers "in protest" is an attempt to lessen those that read him responsibly. I find this distasteful, and like last time, I invite you to comment--hoping that you find my criticism accurate of how irresponsible your characterization of Nietzsche's view really is.

Maverick Philosopher on Nietzsche

I really like the attempt at understanding Nietzsche.

I'm wondering however if Maverick is aware that Nietzsche's critique of truth gives up on the idea that it is a thesis about the epistemological sense of knowing a proposition, or a fully-blown nature of truth thesis like correspondence theory. In this way, the truth doctrine of Nietzsche is more about the determinative social forces that determine the strength of an idea as a historical product, as he describes towards the end.

Skeptical of a Heideggerian Ethics, Reading Hatab's Ethics and Finitude

As I read more Continental philosophy, the project of moral philosophy becomes suspect. Most have inherited a Nietzschean skepticism of ethics as rule normalizing that threatens heroic creativity, individual eccentricity and the openness of life. In some ways, maybe the climate in Continental circles is right. Analytic moral philosophy proceeds to ground systematic principles that explain normative praxis. What is missed in any conceptual analysis is the pre-reflective dimension of our practical involvement, social relations, concerns, emotions and very historic situatedness. Passing over, concealing over these dimensions, ethics has construed itself as moving beyond the limits of what Lawrence J. Hatab would call our finitude. "The finitude of being-in-the-world also refers to the limits of human selfhood caught up in the encumberances and contingencies of life" (p. 3, Being and Finitude)

Moving past these concerns, Hatab contrasts the presuppositions of Anglophone moral philosophy. It is preoccupied in theory, and measures its philosophical validity by logical consistency, universality, impartiality and indefeasability. In fact, I find some of these features very compelling, and am not inclined to shy away from all these criteria whereas Hatab sees them as detrimental to a deeper understanding of ethics as an engaged, interpretive, contextual, addressive discourse for the sake of disclosing ethical bearings in life. (Ibid., p. 4). Attempts at deeply universal or theoretical approaches that justify ethical principles extended over time are abandoned, and an anti-foundationalism is enacted to reflect how we are already situated in the threshold of our own finite limitations.

I take it that Heideggerian phenomenology empowers this type of analysis. However, I am unsure that ethical pronouncements can strictly be embedded in socially pragmatic and finite contexts. As I grow older, the same old patterns of human life repeat throughout history and forward in time. As such, if this is even a remotely accurate intuition, then the repeated patterns and forms of life enacted by human beings may generally be subsumed under moral principles, or in my case prima facie intuitions that have acheived a theoretical recognition of human life have validity despite the want for contextual-sensitivity that a Heideggerian would want to foster. This repetition throughout history is not a collapse into a human nature essentialism. On the contrary, it is just an observation that human beings seem quite comfortable in choosing what has worked in the past until there is a major rift in the necessity of life engendering a new pattern of life. I still maintain human beings are free amongst the contingent freedom they possess to choose between what pattern of human life would best suit them.

It would seem the one lesson to learn from Hatab stems from the contextual-sensitivity of ethical principles. Following his insight, we could say that the responsiveness of some people stem from observing the theoretical need for contextual-sensitivity and the pre-reflective dimension of human experience. This point has been made reluctantly by Simon Critichley who thinks that religion and politics will never go away despite the philosophical want for a secularly enlightened society (See Continental Philosophy Review, Dec. 2008). While leaving the question of religion aside, it does point to the fact that ethical pronouncements engage us traditionally and historically. The point remains whether or not such insights are more true, that is intuitively self-evident, beyond the manifestation in a particular traditional, religious or historical milieu.

At the outset, I am suspicious of Hatab's efforts here. The phenomenology of moral experience is concealed from the "view from nowhere" efforts at moral theorizing, yet the contexts of Heideggerian finitude cannot ignore the vast similarities throughout time that human beings have exhibited. To remedy this, as I have may said here in the past, the search for a phenomenology of moral experience should rest on the transcendental variety found in Husserl.

Iranian American from North Dakota Imprisoned (Updated)

Here goes. I'm using every tool I have, my facebook, my blog, my telephone, and my email. I get about 15-20 people from around the world. I can't list all the phone numbers, but it's easy. All you have to do is google the Iranian Embassy in your home country, and make the call. I ask that you copy this blog post to your friends, family and strangers. Anyone that can help.

Here's a list of Iranian Embassies Abroad

This is about someone you don't know, but is an American suffering in an Iranian prison for no reason other than being a journalist in a country that doesn't like transparency or a free press. She's a 31 year old and reportedly frail according to her father.

I'm asking you copy this note to more than just people I know. I am asking you to call, write, email and FAX the Iranian Embassy. In addition, call your own Senator and US State Department.

Roxanna Saberi is a North Dakotan of Iranian heritage that went to file stories for a host of networks in Iran.

She was tried without her lawyer present. She was sentenced for 8 years for espionage. The trial lacked any transparency, and the ruling comes at a shock to a host of media outlets. The charges are baseless.

Here is the full CNN story.

Call the Iranian Embassies and Declare her trial baseless as Senator Conrad did from North Dakota.

I ask that you tag everyone you know, and get her home. But make the call.

DC:

2209 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Washington DC 20007
Telephone: (202) 965-4990
Fax: (202) 965-1073

Ottawa, Canada:

consulate@salamiran.org (613) 2334726

Some minor development: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090419/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_us_journalist