Thursday, 29 September 2011
In Defence of Higher Education
Excellent alternative white paper challenging the UK government's attempts to destroy the country's university system.
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Saturday, 10 September 2011
Principia Ethica & Professional Philosophy
G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, which was first published in 1903, has had an extraordinary influence on twentieth-century moral philosophy. One of its ideas - the naturalistic fallacy - provoked Stephenson, Ayer, and the other expressivists, who provoked the growth of metaethics into a vast and elaborate field of professional philosophical concern.
This review isn't about that field: I want instead to make some ideological or sociological remarks on Moore's project and legacy.
As I read it, Principia Ethica is an attempt to found an autonomous form of moral philosophy, immune to being absorbed by the sciences, especially biology (which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was bullish post-Darwin) and psychology (post-William James). This explains several odd features of the text and its reception: the extraordinary vitriol it directs against Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill - neither of whom could have cared less whether what they were doing counted as philosophy in Moore's idiosyncratic sense. Its firm assertion of distinctive, non-empirical methods for philosophy: intuition, self-evidence, and the method of absolute isolation. In person, as John Maynard Keynes records in his fascinating memoir 'My Early Beliefs', Moore's methods were expressed as pantomimes of extreme disbelief that anyone could possibly disagree with him. Finally, the cultish character of Moore's school at Cambridge, also described by Keynes.
Moore won: in the twentieth century, philosophy became professionalised in university philosophy departments, jealous of their distinctive subject-matter. Philosophers' research was funded on models borrowed from the sciences, along with that word, 'research': I work in philosophy by reading, thinking about, talking about, and writing it, but I'm not sure I do research. Philosophy's superstars were the magicians of the abstract and technical - like metaethics - and their work appeared in obscure, overpriced professional journals; popularisers and amateurs were looked on with suspicion, however many books they sold. (There's a fair amount of exaggeration in this picture, I admit.)
Was this a good thing? Obviously I owe my living to it, so I'm not disinterested (I'm no superstar, but I've published in several of those overpriced journals). But with that caveat, I'm in two minds: on one hand, I think philosophy should be public and accessible. It's a shame that some of the smartest people in the field never talk outside it, not least because there's obvious public interest in the questions philosophers work on, and if the smart people don't publish for that public, they'll look elsewhere (to weak sauce like Alain de Botton, for example). On the other hand, the realistic alternative to professional philosophy right now is probably not a utopia of high-level public discourse; it's the replacement of philosophy with self-help (The Secret, for example), leavened with the occasional philosopher kept on staff by a wealthy patron: think of Thomas Hobbes's faintly embarrassing dedication of Leviathan to Francis Godolphin.
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Mountains of the Mind
Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind is a history of how we understand, see, and live with mountains. It's both high-quality public communication of scholarship, of a kind I'd like to emulate, and an engaging personal memoir of the attractions and pains of mountaineering.
My interest here is what it suggests about the perception of value. Mountains of the Mind shows, by well-chosen anecdote and readings of travel-writing, that several values we might now take to be central to human flourishing - discovery, originality, the experience of wild beauty - have short, local histories. Quite recently, mountains were experienced as ugly wastes, not as provocations to Romantic emotion or heroic effort. How should we react to this revelation of contingency in our ways of valuing mountains, and in our forms of valuing generally? Here are four possibilities:
1) Profanation The discovery that others valued differently in the past, and that our own values have a history, throws all value into doubt. My perceptions of value are just what my history has made me perceive, not access to anything real.
Response: of course our value-judgements don't meet the impossible standard of being without history, but that doesn't show that they aren't true. One of the shifts in understanding Macfarlane maps is the discovery of deep time: the world is ancient, and mountains, far from being permanent, are brief by comparison to it. They're thrown up and worn down by vast geological processes operating over millions of years. But that mountains are temporary doesn't show that they aren't real.
2) Fluidity Human flourishing, and our experiences of value, are infinitely, culturally variable.
Response: we don't have evidence for infinite variability, only for difference within a range, and a pretty narrow range at that. Our shared nature as talkative, tool-using, child-rearing East African plains apes with a very recent common ancestor suggests that our possibilities have limits. The interesting problem is to map the range of difference and the loci of similarity.
3) Multiple expressions There are many ways to enact core human activities and passions, and different cultures have accessed and expressed that core differently. Mountaineering is our way of approaching what others approached through bullfighting or spiritual exercises: triumph, the numinous, addictive terror.
Response: this could be true, but it needn't be. There are some new things under the sun: contour maps aren't just an alternative way of describing mountains, they're a better way. Some forms of expression may be deeper and clearer than others.
4) Discovery Rousseau, Coleridge, and other central figures in the history of understanding mountains uncovered something latent in human nature. What we now recognise in wild beauty wakes something in us which, before them, was much harder to bring to fruition. These pioneers may also have discovered new forms of corruption: Macfarlane is very clear on the addict's selfishness of the mountaineer.
Response: but how are we to tell that some new experience of value is a discovery, rather than just another one of the nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right? I don't know. Much of my thinking at the moment - including this post - is about that question.
My interest here is what it suggests about the perception of value. Mountains of the Mind shows, by well-chosen anecdote and readings of travel-writing, that several values we might now take to be central to human flourishing - discovery, originality, the experience of wild beauty - have short, local histories. Quite recently, mountains were experienced as ugly wastes, not as provocations to Romantic emotion or heroic effort. How should we react to this revelation of contingency in our ways of valuing mountains, and in our forms of valuing generally? Here are four possibilities:
1) Profanation The discovery that others valued differently in the past, and that our own values have a history, throws all value into doubt. My perceptions of value are just what my history has made me perceive, not access to anything real.
Response: of course our value-judgements don't meet the impossible standard of being without history, but that doesn't show that they aren't true. One of the shifts in understanding Macfarlane maps is the discovery of deep time: the world is ancient, and mountains, far from being permanent, are brief by comparison to it. They're thrown up and worn down by vast geological processes operating over millions of years. But that mountains are temporary doesn't show that they aren't real.
2) Fluidity Human flourishing, and our experiences of value, are infinitely, culturally variable.
Response: we don't have evidence for infinite variability, only for difference within a range, and a pretty narrow range at that. Our shared nature as talkative, tool-using, child-rearing East African plains apes with a very recent common ancestor suggests that our possibilities have limits. The interesting problem is to map the range of difference and the loci of similarity.
3) Multiple expressions There are many ways to enact core human activities and passions, and different cultures have accessed and expressed that core differently. Mountaineering is our way of approaching what others approached through bullfighting or spiritual exercises: triumph, the numinous, addictive terror.
Response: this could be true, but it needn't be. There are some new things under the sun: contour maps aren't just an alternative way of describing mountains, they're a better way. Some forms of expression may be deeper and clearer than others.
4) Discovery Rousseau, Coleridge, and other central figures in the history of understanding mountains uncovered something latent in human nature. What we now recognise in wild beauty wakes something in us which, before them, was much harder to bring to fruition. These pioneers may also have discovered new forms of corruption: Macfarlane is very clear on the addict's selfishness of the mountaineer.
Response: but how are we to tell that some new experience of value is a discovery, rather than just another one of the nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right? I don't know. Much of my thinking at the moment - including this post - is about that question.
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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