the net self.

how to worry about privacy.

2011-09-14T13:38:00.000-07:00

this is a post that i started last year and never finished. i'm posting it as-is just to lay the groundwork for a new post i have in mind on privacy and technology-- laying out the problems and approaches that interest me and inform my interest in these questions going forward. it's twice as long as it should be and stops abruptly. apologies. i'll edit it someday.

before the technological advances of the last quarter century, there was a natural limit to the information about us by which we would likely be judged by our friends, family, potential employers, our government, creditors, and the community at large. these were the limits of human memory, the limited life of paper. our indiscretions may have been on record, but they were preserved by means that naturally degrade over the course of a lifetime, and in which information, even where preserved, can nonetheless be buried. or this, at least, is the premise of this week's new york times magazine feature-- jeffrey rosen's "the end of forgetting"-- a meditation on the theme of viktor mayer-schonberger's new book delete: the virtue of forgetting in a digital age.

the notion is that there is something essential in forgetting. the most interesting suggestion, i think, is that there is a necessary relationship between forgetting and forgiving-- that our ability to forgive is imperiled by these advances. but the more general concern is that our newfound (and soon-to-be-found) abilities to collect, record, aggregate, and search through vast amounts of information will result in potential dates, employers, and everyone else, making crucial judgments about our character and potential based on information that we haven't chosen to share-- information taken dramatically out of context, or about past behaviors that no subsequent penitence can erase. rosen presents a picture of a world in which

"people will be able to snap a cellphone picture of a stranger [or a job candidate], plug the image into google and pull up all tagged and untagged photos of that person that exist on the web...[and] internet searches for images are likely to be combined with social-network aggregator search engines...which combine data from online searches-- including political contributions, blog posts, youtube videos, web comments, real estate listings, and photo albums...in the web 3.0, [founder of ReputationDefendender michael] fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness, but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks."

to correct these disturbing trends, it is suggested that we put time limits or expiration dates on the photos, blog comments, and other bits of our digital trail that would mimic the limitations of human memory. another suggestion (of jonathan zittrain's) is that we be allowed to file for some sort of reputation bankruptcy, which would wipe the digital slate clean ever so many years.

this feature was fun to read, but i confess that i got a lot more out of "speak, memory", evgeny morozov's review of delete in last month's boston review. in it he does a pretty good job ob of defending the view that, though mayer-schonberger's argument is "interesting", it

"suffers from three large and arguably fatal flaws: a very loose account of what memory is, an insufficient appreciation of the value of remembering, and—most important for public policy—an unconvincing effort to distinguish the animating concerns about memory from more conventional (and serious) concerns about privacy."

it's a relatively dry and wonkish set of objections to mayer-schonberger's "romanticist rebellion against technology", but even as someone more prone to and qualitified to offer romanticist cultural criticism than technical assessment of the likely implications of specific new technologies (more of a mayer-schonbeger, that is, than a evgeny morozov), i like that morozov does mayer-schonberger the honor of taking his view seriously enough to offer such useful and academic assessment of what might prevent serious tech thinkers and policy makers from taking mayer-schonberger's critiques and suggestions seriously.

but what i loved most about morozov's review is that it pointed me toward hellen nissbaum's really wonderful book privacy in context, which has dominated my reading list all summer. her argument, in short, is that our privacy interests aren't just a matter of how much of our information is shared (as some brute percentage of what there is to know overall), or whether a particular kind of personal information (income, say, or medical records) is shared at all with anyone ever-- they are, rather, a matter of whether or not our personal information is being shared in accordance with what she calls "context-relative informational norms" or in violation of those norms. we live, she argues, within

"a finely calibrated system of [these] social norms, or rules, [that] govern the flow of personal information in distinct social contexts (e.g. education, health care, and politics). these...context relative informational norms define and sustain essential activities and key relationships and interests, protect people and groups against harm, and balance the distribution of power. responsive to historical, cultural, and even geographic contingencies, informational norms evolve over time in distinct patterns from society to society"

in our society, for example, there are norms according to which it is generally proper to share facts about your income with the IRS, and improper to share facts about your income at dinner parties with your coworkers. and there are norms according to which it is generally proper that to share facts about your sexual history with your family doctor, and generally improper to share facts about your sexual history with, say, your kids' teacher. these norms arise for all kinds of reasons, often having to do with the nature of particular kinds of relationships. (you have only to describe what kind of a thing a doctor is to start to see why sharing your sexual history with your doctor is appropriate, though you may refrain from sharing this information from even people you are very close to.)

on nissbaum's view, we ought to assess the alleged intrusiveness of particular instances of information gather or dissemination according to whether or not they violate the existing social norms of a particular society. and we ought to structure our laws around information gathering and dissemination in such a way as to protect and buttress those norms, even as new technologies make it ever easier to violate those norms on ever grander scales.

there's a crapload that's problematic about nissbaum's view-- most centrally its inherent conservatism. her program is essentially one of conserving whatever the existing norms are, however contingent, and without any particular attention being paid to what sorts of contingencies we're talking about. the contingent fact that a particular society exists in an extraordinarily warm climate looks to be different from the contingent fact that a particular society has lived for sixty years under cruel dictatorship, but it's hard to see how the existing norms established under this latter contingency are any less norm-y than the existing norms in the former. as with all societal norms, informational norms will sometimes seem, upon inspection, sound and other times silly, or oppressive, or otherwise objectionable. it's at the very least not obvious that laws that both varieties of norm ought equally be protected by law.

but there's something i fundamentally love about this view: it begins with an understanding of the dynamics underwriting all privacy concerns: the near-illiminable diversity of relations in which a human being can stand to other human beings, each essentially constituted by what the various parties know about one another and how they know it. to be someone's friend, or husband, or doctor is to stand in a particular kind of relation to that person-- a relationship subject to both generalizable norms and a a thousand little peculiarities. we might think, for example, that friendship is a particular sort of a relation, and that liking or trusting someone is partially constitutive of it, such that you could not truly say of someone that you neither like nor trust 'she is my friend.' and then beyond the general features constitutive of any particular type of relationship, there will be more localized norms (what i share with my best friend, my childhood friends, my friends at work), and ultimately the entirely unique pattern of sharing and expectation that we have with each individual friend, sensitive to specific contours of who someone is, or who they are to you. (the problem with facebook-- its ground-up misunderstanding of how relationships works-- the need to distinguish beyond "friend," to share in a much more targeted and discerning way.)

one of the philosophies around privacy issues is that it's ultimately the protection of a precious resource: intimacy. that in controlling what people know about us, we control who they are to us and who we are to them. we decide who gets in and to what degree, according to (best case scenario) our judgments about who they are.

the particular problem of aggregation.

what you can't know.

2010-10-28T08:16:00.000-07:00

we all have beliefs that are unresponsive to facts and arguments. we all have beliefs that make life as we know it possible (or so we think on some level so deep that it's probably not quite right to call it thinking) and the job of a belief like that is to be unmoving. and notoriously there will be other beliefs whose job it is to buttress those pillars, those supporting beams in the architecture of our belief systems-- to innoculate against doubt. they'll often be things like 'the kinds of people or facts that would challenge this belief are not to be trusted' or 'the more others criticize this view the more steadfast you'll proved yourself by continuing to believe in the face of others' doubt'. and while it's true that what i've said so far about these kinds of beliefs is famously argued by those public intellectuals attempting to explain the religious mind, i've sat in the offices of those public intellectuals who have famously attempted to explain the religious mind and i've talked with them on other subjects, and i promise you: they have their own support beam beliefs, stubborn in the face of facts and arguments, which make life as they know it possible, and which are insulated from doubt in a very similar kind of way. i'm not talking about some of us, i'm talking about us all.

reading about ginni thomas and her damn fool behavior this week, i've been full of feelings. first, obviously and passionately, is the feeling that a lot of people seriously owe anita hill an apology. this was true even before last week, but there's something about the spectre of an apology being demanded from the very person who is actually so deeply owed an apology and has never asked for one that really raises that middle-school feeling of intolerable injustice in the human heart.

but my feelings for anita hill aren't exactly feelings against ginni thomas. her behavior is, i think, deeply human and has been instructive to me. the impulse to philosophical inquiry is deeply human, and so, too, is this stubborn antithetical fear of knowing-- the refusal to know what we fear can't be born. in some meaningful sense i think it's true that ginni thomas can't (or at least couldn't) know the truth about her husband. she's cited in an interview as saying that they got through "that dark time" during the confirmation hearings by pulling the kitchen curtains closed and listening to religious music.

i'm reminded again for the millionth time that the fear i have of knowing myself or others or the facts or where the argument leads-- any fear i have at all-- will undermine my philosophical aims in ways that it would be hubristic of me to think that i'll recognize at the time. the struggle to know more is often enough the struggle to fear less. i hope i never get through anything by pulling the the curtains closed. it's understandable, but i don't imagine it's worth it.

update: a couple of relevant links!
discover magazine - facts don't persuade climate skeptics, so what does?
wired science - stubbornness increases the more people tell you you're wrong

on knowing what i am doing. (part I)

2010-10-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

i'm taking a seminar this semester on the philosophy of action. it's an area of philosophy in which we worry over what differentiates our intentional actions from the broader category of human behavior. what is the distinction between the things we mean to do and those things we do unintentionally? if i know that i'm doing something, does that necessarily make it intentional? (what about cases of collateral damage, where i know that i will hurt someone, but hurting them is not my aim? is that a harm i inflict intentionally?) if i do not (consciously) know that i'm doing something, does that necessarily make it unintentional? (what about cases in which i am directed by motives that are only clear to me in retrospect, if at all? can't i have meant to do something without realizing it until later?) and if we can come up with some way of distinguishing intentional actions from mere behavior, what should its moral significance be? are we more or only responsible for intentional behavior? does intentional behavior have unique moral significance? is an agent who does intentional harm somehow morally worse than an agent whose behavior persistently results in unintentional harm? why is it? anyway, it's a subject near the center of my academic interests in will, responsibility, self- and personhood.

one of the central features attended to in this literature is that everything you do, the smallest movement of your hand-- a keystroke-- can be described in infinitely many ways. you're moving the air. you're pressing a button. you're making a certain sound. you're arresting someone's attention, or failing to. you're typing a letter (the letter 'a'). you're typing a letter (to your sister). you're reconfiguring the innards of your laptop in ways that you may or may not understand or think about. all of these things (and so many others) are things you do when you strike the key. your action answers to many descriptions, some almost certainly of things you intend to do, and others that you just as certainly didn't. some things you do that you didn't directly intend, you could probably have anticipated if you'd thought about it. other things you never in a million years could have imagined. some will be written in familiar language, while others will be written in terms of the most abstruse physics.

pei says the things you regret are the things you didn't do, and i believe him. it's a sentiment with plenty of currency, corroborated by sages and the common sense. it captures something true in the experience of a particular kind of person who i particularly admire. but i've never been able to understand how it works in a moment where it might make a difference. it's rare that i feel like i'm choosing between doing something and not doing it. i'm choosing between doing something and doing something else. and even that's misleading. because for everything i do, there are infinite things i don't do. with every actual step i take, i annihilate infinite possible futures. the vast majority of them will never cross my mind. the vast majority of those that cross my mind i won't be troubled by the loss of. to make sense of this sentiment, then, one would need some kind of anchor. one would need to know what makes some possible paths The Things You Didn't Do and others nothing at all to you. what property does the former have that distinguishes it from the latter? it has to be something more than just facts about individual temperament-- individual propensities to regret in general or not to regret in general. i suppose that The Things You Didn't Do must be something like the times you might have defied the inertia of fear and habit and followed your heart-- the times you might have taken a personal risk where the benefits might have been great-- the times you missed yr chance to have done something different than you'd done before-- something deeper.

ok, so here's where i bring it all together. (thank you for your patience.) the infinitely describable nature of action (and of possibility) makes it so desperately impossible to sort The Things You Didn't Do from the things you did. i began by saying something about all the different things you do by the smallest movement of your hand. and each action we might have undertaken, like each action we do undertake, is likewise infinitely describable. and whether or not it constutes a Thing You Didn't Do (as i understand it) depends on which description you adopt: whether or not a course of action constitutes a break from the past or more of the same, following your heart or acting out of fear, is in large part a matter not only of how you describe the potential options-- the different courses you might take-- but how you describe what's come before. we don't just change more or less, overall-- we only ever change in some particular respect. it's relative, i mean. but there's no one thing that answers to the name "what came before"-- as i've said, there are infinite possible descriptions of a life that draw out different shades and patterns. what constitutes a break from the past depend on what aspects of the past one takes to be important. and given how much and complexly we love and fear it will often enough times be the case that almost any course of action open to a person could be accurately described in terms of either-- as constutiting either a change or more of the same. and i'm still only talking about the descriptions that are warranted-- forget all of the ways we describe things to ourselves which amount to misleading rationalizations or self-protecting spin. even if we could be so lucky and so good as to only consider the truest truths about who we are and what we've done, we're still, as we stand there considering our options, weighing and comparing, in a shifting matrix. try to focus your eyes anywhere and it goes fractal, folds into some infinity.

and then there's that funny fact of life-- how we always end up back where we started, anyway-- how we end up with exactly what we took ourselves to be running from.

two paths diverged in a yellow wood-- ok. but i don't believe it was so obvious which was which as it seems in memory to have been. or that, in fact, there were only two. it's such quaint idea, two paths. anyway,

agree times a million that we regret the things we didn't do rather than the things we did, but i wonder how often it ever seems clear in the crucial moment, in the pinch, which future matches which description.

2010-06-08T11:55:00.000-07:00

"i've carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. i'm not carrying it because i like it. the contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. i've carried it with me because there was nothing else i was supposed to carry. still, i guess i have grown attached to it. as you might expect."

haruki murakami

what i talk about when i talk about running

i put up a post awhile back that began with a discussion of the fact that we are attached to our particular lives-- generally unwilling, even in theory, to trade them in for better ones-- even when we don't like them much. murakami puts this phenomenon really nicely. and he draws out the deep implicit connection between this attachment we have to our characteristic features, the good and the bad, and the view that our most characteristic behaviors, the good and the bad, are better described as just that-- as expression of our character, rather than than as acts of our will. the above passage is immediately prefaced by a discussion of murakami's "own individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered nature that still doubts itself":

i didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. just like i didn't becomes a novelist because someone asked me to. one day, out of the blue, i wanted to write a novel. and one day, out of the blue, i started to run-- simply because i wanted to. i've always done whatever i felt like doing in life. people may try to stop me, and convince me i'm wrong, but i won't change.

he neither seems to approve nor disapprove of this fact.

in the comments section of that other post drew claimed that perhaps we ought to bite the bullet and concede that we should be willing to trade in our lives for better ones, regardless of our inclinations-- that it's irrational not to. given my own views on personal identity, to say that we ought to be willing to trade in lives for better ones is to say that we ought to be willing to give up our lives for the greater good-- for the sake of things being better, overall. because there is no us beneath all of those projects and characteristics to survive the loss of the old ones and bear the new. and maybe morality is that kind of thing-- it can demand of us that we give up our lives for the greater good. but to be attached to and to grieve for the loss of the perfect little storm of beliefs and aims and memories that we are, independent of how they stack up against some other, doesn't strike me as being irrational at all, even if the attachment and the loss don't ultimately undermine morality's claim.

i think that the right kinds of views about personal identity can themselves suggest that the best descriptions of our choices and acts will be in terms of expression of character rather than acts of will. i'm not at the point of being able to say it yet the way i'd like to, but i think reductionist views about personal identity and deflationist views about the will and revisionist views about blame and responsibility, while they all get a bad wrap for seeming not to capture the depth of our sense of ourselves and each other, are in fact the only terms in which we'll ultimately be able to do that sense any real justice.

part III: 'the data-driven life' (pragmatism, lantern consciousness, and flow)

2010-06-03T10:35:00.000-07:00

[this will probably be a little confusing if you haven't at least read part I of the series (one of my favorite things i've ever written), and maybe part II]

perhaps it's true that the data-driven approaches to self-knowledge are inextricably entwined with dubious self-improvement projects ('We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?') , the nature of which somehow skews the inquiries' results. but there are plenty of people who would argue that it makes no sense to try to conceive of any truth except in the context of practical inquiry-- as the answer to some question that we raise as a means of accomplishing some goal. on this view, there is no purer truth for truth's sake. there is no purer method that generates self-knowledge for its own sake. truth is a function of practical inquiry and it's utterly misguided to seek a truth external to it. so perhaps, in this, data-driven approaches to knowledge are no different from any other-- the answer will be largely a matter of how you ask the question. but even if we're thoroughgoing pragamatists, we can hold that there are better and worse kinds of practical inquiry. it still might be the case that the particular practical context of this data-driven stuff (which, historically at least, has been to maximize efficiency and thereby profit for capitalists) is the problem, but then there is a burden to show what other kind of practical inquiry would be superior and how it would be.

another way of explaining the pragmatist point is to say that we are planners, and that our beliefs are always on some deep level inextricable from our plans. what it is to be an agent, the idea goes, is to understand everything we see, at a very basic level, as a set of opportunities. we think only in the context of doing. but then, we may not have always been (or always be) planners in this way. it's debatable. i'm currently reading alison's gopnik's new book on baby thinking, in which she argues that to be a baby is to be a little buddha, experiencing 'lantern consciousness' ('that vivid panoramic illumination of the every day'), which she contrasts with 'flow' ('the experience we have when our attention is completely focused on a single object or activity'). neither of these is our daily experience. rather, each is a different way in which we lose ourselves. the latter is accessible only to adults-- the experience of being absorbed in work. the former, though, seems to be a state in which we genuinely perceive in a way that is utterly divorced from planning-- no inner directedness at all-- and it's a state we achieve through certain kinds of meditation practice, and that we experience as babies. young children, according to gopnik, don't have a sense of self, or the 'inner executive', that projects forward and backward, and what this means isn't that they have no inner consciousness (indeed, gopnik argues that they are in some sense more conscious), but that their inner consciousness is undirect-- ' a journey of exploration rather than conquest'. so it seems as though a pure state of awareness (should we call it knowing?) is possible, independant of any particularly inquiry or plan.

this is where i should move into the discussion of buddhism and the quantified self that i'd like to end with, but my discussion partner and fact checker in these matters is in nepal for a month. so i'll end it with this for now: the suggestion is that maybe there is a way of knowing that stands outside of our projects and desire for conquest (most notably the desire to conquer ourselves, which so many self-quantifiers seem driven by), and whether or not that's true means something for what the burden of proof should be for the quantifiers. the data nerds' holy grail (perfect productivity/functioning) may require that they appeal to this notion of 'lantern consciousness'-- productivity being best acheived when we are able to move as directly as we can from lantern consciousness to flow and back again-- to move from the utter openness of undirected play to the consummate work of flow, and back. i suspect that that's what gets the most brilliant ideas off the ground, as this excerpt from an interview with gopnik suggests:

there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use...children are like the R&D department of the human species. they’re the ones who are always learning about the world. but if you’re always learning, imagining, and finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you don’t have if you’re actually making things happen in the world.in short: i wonder if the project (conceived in the widest wildest terms of perfect self-knowledge and well-functioning acheived by data-collection and analysis) isn't self-defeating.

but to argue that such a thing is even possible puts the data collectors in the position of having to defend against the charge that their approach, born as it was of this desire for a kind of self-conquest, is itself antithetical to achieving the the desired state. something in the daily acts involved in quantifying our ourselves seems to preclude both the imaginative openness of lantern consciousness and the consummate focus of flow, but particularly the former. the question, then, is whether something in the nature of the quantifiedself-ers methods, given their ultimate goals, makes their whole project sort of self-defeating.

part II: on "the data-driven life" (a modest defense)

2010-06-01T13:54:00.000-07:00

the funny thing about 'priorities', and 'job descriptions', and all these kind of capital letter nouns is that they always make a lot of sense in abstraction, but it can be really complicated to square them up against reality. i'll give you an example. if i just grabbed you on the street and i said, 'what's the most important thing in your life?' you would say something probably like, you know, your family, or your church group, or, you know, maybe your career, or, you know, your kid, or your pet, or whatever. and the thing is, in some part of your heart, that's absolutely true. but do you have a sense of the extent to which your time and attention tracks to actually doing good stuff for that thing that you claimed is really important? because if a lot of people actually looked at where their time and attention went, the parts that they do have control over, it would like the most important thing in their life was facebook.

merlin mann

in part I of this little series i went over the basics of gary wolf's feature, 'the data-driven life' and what i take to be some of the best reasons to be skeptical of the notion that wolf's methods provide some viable alternative to the talk therapy (or meditation, or the kinds of conceptual analysis adopted in western philosophy ) as a way of coming to know oneself. but my allegiances in this discussion between the "quantified self"-ers and their critics isn't so clear, even to me.

over the past several years, largely by way of my excellent friend steve, i've become a regular peruser of the world of certain what you might call 'productivity gurus'-- in particular the various blog posts and podcasts of merlin mann. there seems to be a sort of clan of them writing and thinking about how and when and why we get our work done-- for the purpose, of course, of being able to offer people advice and the proper tools for getting their work done. that's what they're paid to do, it seems-- help tech people and other 'knowledge workers' bogged down by meetings and a million emails a day manage it all and increase productivity by way, ostensibly, of a kind of self-awareness about certain measurable features of their circumstances, allowing for greater focus and self-mastery. (in the same lecture that i quote from above, mann recommends that his listeners use a particular program that tells you exactly how much time you've spent doing what on your computer all day.) i'm casting a pretty wide net here, but these would seem to be some version of our quantifiers-- advocating particular (digital) tools and systems aimed at increasing (in some measurable way) productivity, while gesturing toward grander things-- values, life projects-- invoking buddhism, even.

it's troubling, of course, if the grand gesturing toward self-understanding through self-measurement begins to obscure the original ends of these measurement projects ('efficiency', 'productivity', etc.) and they are presented as just a new approach to self-understanding as an end in itself. but wolf's grandiosity aside, there's something obviously compelling in mann's very particular observation, and something obviously useful in the 'quantified self'-ish tools he suggests for helping us to see the problem more clearly. the point seems to be that, even putting to one side the question of whether or not we are living the lives we should be living, it is often the case that we aren't even living the lives we think we are living. the minutes slip by, and no natural faculty of ours (for most of us anyway) seems up to the task of keeping us in the honest know about how we're spending them.

these data nerds aren't even close to the first people to point this out-- that we are awfully limited in our capacity to see ourselves clearly-- or to suggest a method for correcting the problem, and though there are reasons to approach and inspect their methods with care before adopting them, my initial feeling is this: inasmuch as we are (1) already oriented by certain values, and (2) able to really look at the data we gather about ourselves without turning away, that data can, in certain limited ways, help us to see how and when we are failing and succeeding at living according to them. in favor of this proposed method of self-knowledge i will say that where it fails i think it's important to remember that other much older and grander methods have also failed (neither psychologists nor philosophers nor buddhist monks have yet ushered in an age of perfect self-knowledge, and god knows most psychologists and philosophers, at least, aren't even particularly adept at coming to know themselves). as a word of profound caution i'll add that where it succeeds it only does so by appeal to and reliance upon the partial successes of those same methods: if we aren't agile conceptualizers with an independent commitment to self-knowledge, the data is less than nothing. though numbers can certainly tell us a stark and surprising truth, if we can't approach them with openness and equanimity then we can ignore or misinterpret the truths they have to tell us just as we can ignore and misinterpret truths we can't bear to hear when delivered in any other form.

when the "quantified self" rhetoric isn't ratcheted up to the almost religious (and certainly the best of it isn't) i don't have so much of a problem with it. the questions of how and when and why we do what we think we ought to are at least as much a part of ethics as questions of what it is we ought to do, and some of these guys seemed to be doing some interesting thinking on that topic. so i've been eavesdropping a little, and i'm frankly pretty fascinated. the trick, i think, is to keep firmly in mind (1) that we manipulate and interpret the data according to rules that must have some other source (more on this later) and (2) that when it comes to these data-collecting methods in particular, as a contingent fact of human psychology, we're extremely vulnerable to being distracted from our goals by the very methods we're using in our attempts to reach them.

but then no one seems more aware of this pitfall then mann, a dude working within that very tradition. one of the things I've found so compelling is how deeply aware some of these thinkers seem to be of the risk that these methods and systems designed to help us get our work done (work in the broadest sense) will themselves becomes the focus of our thinking-- the real danger that adopters of these methods will come to use them as yet another way of avoiding what they fear-- to avoid finding or embracing the purpose to which those methods are meant to be put. the best are at least as aware of certain of the risks associated with their methods as the critics of those methods are, and they ought to be given credit for it.

anyway, dudes like wolf want to throw their hat in the ring and put forward these methods as a means of potentially coming to know ourselves, i think they should have their day in court, and that it would be worth our time, as critics, to look beyond wolf and try to respond to the best and subtlest pictures that can be sketched of what the approach would be. but i do hope that the advocates of this kind of method understand what they're in for in being taken seriously. when the data guru begins to make claims about the nature of the self, or the power of her method to reveal it, she will find herself in territory in which she may be distinctly uncomfortable: beyond the realm of the clearly testable or quantifiable-- her bets, in adopting this method, are not just empirical but in some profound sense normative.

while the power of massive data sets is that they allow us to carefully test and potentially falsify certain beliefs we hold about ourselves or the ways in which things affect us, the larger (often implicit) claim motivating these projects-- the meta-claim of the data-guru that legitimate self-knowledge can be had by this method-- is not itself a purely empirical or testable claim, and so can't be legitimized by the data-guru's preferred method.

here's what I mean: the buddha says that truth is the nirvana we discover when we follow the breath and sink below the surface chatter of our conscious minds, and plato tells us the truth is a heaven of ideal forms that we gain access to by a process of correctly abstracting from the apparent world of sullied particulars. suppose the alleged truths we discover by either of these methods conflict or fail to jibe, in principle or practice, with the alleged truths of the data-guru. suppose one tradition says "this is what you are, as revealed by our method", and another tradition (say, the tradition of the data-guru) says "no, this is what you are, as our method reveals." these aren't, though they may seem to be, typical empirically testable claims. what set of data can the data guru gather that could falsify or vindicate their picture over the others? if we're comparing different and possibly antithetical methods of getting at the truth about ourselves, and likely differing claim about what those truths are, we can't usefully appeal to one of those self-same methods in deciding on one over another, and there's no independently existing blue print against which to compare the picture of selfhood each tradition generates.

on silverman.

2010-05-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

i love sarah silverman. i do. i think she's funny, independent of any view that i might have of myself on any particular occasion for thinking that. so i was listening today to her interview with tom ashbrook on on point, and of course the topic is roughly: "is anything sacred?" "is everything fodder for your jokes?" and more subtly the topic turned to the question of (1) whether it makes a difference (a moral difference, is the implication) whether or not the listeners are in on the joke, and (2) if it's better to say what we're all already thinking. if sarah silverman makes a joke about kids with mental retardation, and the "real" joke is that she (or, rather, her on-stage persona) is morally obtuse, well, what does it mean that some people are laughing at the joke of her obtuseness and some people are laughing at retarded kids? and are we all really laughing at the kids, while a few sophisticates are simply able to tell themselves that they're laughing at the former rather than the latter? and is it better, as she claimed, to give a voice to the -isms that would otherwise be there, tamped carefully down upon. is there something potentially redeeming about being forces to confront that in ourselves?

i think that there's some merit to these defenses, but listening to silverman kind of vaguely and uncomfortably offer them (she is humbly uncomfortable in the role of theoretical explicator or moral philosopher), i thought, as i often do, of this passage from arendt's on totalitarianism, in which she addresses the actual impact of the work of another group of artists (silverman is clear in expressing her belief that comedy is art, and that this means the comic, like other artists, has no business telling the audience what they ought to make of their work) looking to expose some middle-class hypocricy:

Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest. What a temptation to flaunt extreme attitudes in the hypocritical twilight of double moral standards, to wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was patently inconsiderate and pretended to be gentle...

At the time, nobody anticipated that the true victims of their irony would be the elite rather than the bourgeoisie. The avant-garde did not know they were running their heads not against the walls but against open doors, that a unanimous success would belie their claim to being a revolutionary minority, and would prove that they were about to express a new mass spirit or the spirit of the time. Particularly significant in this respect was the reception given Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper in pre-Hitler Germany. The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when the respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann dommt die Moral,’ [LG translation: first comes a full stomach, then comes ethics] was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elites applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun. The effect of the work was exactly the opposite of what Brecht has sought by it. The bourgeoisie could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy, whose popularity proved they had been right all along, so the only political result of Brecht’s “revolution’ was to encourage everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.

obviously, this isn't pre-war germany. despite some insane shit going on at the moment, i don't think that we're on the verge of a collapse into totalitarian dictatorship from the right or left. and i don't think, where our -isms are concerned, we're anything like eager to drop the pretense to embrace our worse selves. i don't think that we're weary in the right ways to start thinking that our worst selves are our true selves. but the point is, there are worse things than hypocrisy. there are worse things than tamping down on our base impulses. there can be a sophomoric holden caulfieldish naivete in the urge to point out and rile them.

of course no one decried hypocrisy more directly than hannah arendt, who famously referred to it as 'the vice of vices' ('integrity,' she said, 'can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.'). so the lesson isn't 'tolerate hypocrisy for fear of something worse', but i does suggest that there are real moral and political risks in even an act so seemingly righteous. our moral responsibility doesn't stop with being honest or demanding honesty. taking a hard look at the worst of ourselves is not, itself, morally worthy-- though it can lead to acts of great moral (and artistic) worth.

part I: on "the data driven life"

2010-05-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

I believe there is only one story in the world, and only one…. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity, too—in a net of good and evil…There is no other story.’ John Steinbeck, East of Eden

The New York Times Magazine recently featured a piece on the growing number of people attempting to amass serious data sets cataloging the state and changes of their own bodies, thoughts, behaviors, etc., as a method for gaining self-knowledge, generally with an eye toward some kind of self-improvement or -mastery. The projects cited range from a relatively modest record of drinks consumed or the effects of a particular drug on the body, to moment-by-moment accounts of time spent over the course of a work day or speed over the course of a run, to serious longitudinal records, stretched over the course of many years, of mood changes or new ideas.

What I’d like to do is to try to take this claim seriously: That full self-understanding is aided by, if not dependent upon, our facility at quantifying ourselves. I’m naturally sympathetic to those who conceive of the drive to understand ourselves in terms of numbers and data sets as dangerous and misguided, particularly as intertwined as these projects have historically been with corporate efficiency goals and some of the more obviously facile “self-improvement” goals. But I can’t ignore the sense in which this movement shares a motive with a discipline as old as thought, and one with which I’m also naturally sympathetic: Western and Eastern philosophy alike are also founded on the claim that we can get free—of the cave, of our futile struggles—if we’re willing to surrender to a method, putting by the daily cud-chewing of ordinary thought with all of its erratic and sad circularities to follow the breath or the mantra or the syllogism—eyes closed, one hand in front of the other—toward truth, which is also freedom.

In this, part I of a series I hope to write over the course of the summer, I'd like to focus on offering what I take to be the best case against the "data-driven life" approach to self-knowledge: that engaging in the methods it prescribes for making progress in fact systematically distracts us from what matters-- from real self-knowledge-- from meaningful life projects-- derailing any hope of actual progress. I agree with the critics that the “data-driven” approach to self-knowledge is often a way for its practitioners to avoid rather than confront certain deep human fears-- fear of the body, of mortality, of intimacy-- the confrontation of which are ultimately essential to self-understanding. To gather and gather and look to these numbers for the source of our problems is sometimes merely to be blindly subject (subjected blindingly) to the very forces that self-understanding demands we detect. But it doesn’t seem entirely implausible to me that for those with a certain kind of independent commitment to self-knowledge, this approach might furnish certain tools useful in that pursuit.

Anyway, a little more about the “quantified self” phenomenon”: These quantification projects generally differ in scope from run of the mill calorie counting and checkbook balancing, though not necessarily in kind. What sets them apart is, first, the use of new developments in portable technologies. Most, though not all, involve the use of tracking devices that can account for steps, breaths, drops in blood sugar, and websites clicked through, with a mechanical precision and regularity formerly unattainable for your average human being. And some, though comparatively few, are distinct in a more fundamental way:

For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.

Unlike balancing a checkbook or counting calories, the folks engaged in these projects don’t always know in advance what it is they’re looking to find out—not only in the sense that we don’t know before we analyze these data sets what the answers to our questions might be, but in that we may not even know in advance what the question are.

The central idea driving these projects is, I think, one that we can all (advocates and critics alike) agree on: we often get ourselves badly wrong when we rely on intuition and eye-balling it—“Our memories are poor," says Wolf-- "we are subject to a range of biases; we can focus our attention on only one or two things at a time.” These cognitive limitations, bias foremost among them, limit our capacity to understand ourselves, leading us to systematically under- and overestimate stuff like the amount of money or time we spend on what, and leaving us only crudely aware of the crucial but sophisticated workings of our own hearts, lungs, digestive and endocrine systems. The idea specific to the data-trackers is that better mechanical tracking devices are an essential tool for self-understanding, and not just understanding of the body, but of behavior-- of the self in some more fundamental sense. When we look at the numbers, we see ourselves more truly—we achieve a better self-awareness. We look at the numbers, and we come to understand ourselves as we are—and, the idea goes, gain a traction that may allow us to become better—to see how and where we can.

In 2005 Mark Greif wrote an essay (“Against Exercise”) in which he presciently excoriates the very phenomenon that Wolf descibes in the NYT piece: “Almost imperceptibly,” Wolf writes “numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed.” Wolf's statement of the phenomenon he takes to be the solution to our problems could be taken, almost word for word, from Greif's perspective, as an indictment of that same phenomenon. (Side note: One of the most fascinating things about this discussion is that the advocates of this approach often understand their movement in exactly the same terms as its most disdainful critics. More on this later) Greif, in his earlier essay, addresses the case of exercise specifically, but delivers what I think is still the best formulation of the general distaste that a certain class of cultural critics (to whom I am hugely sympathetic) has for this approach to self-knowledge (I’m going to quote from this essay extensively, because it doesn’t seem to be otherwise available online, but feel free to skip over it—or, better yet, go read the whole thing here or here):

The only truly essential pieces of equipment in modern exercise are numbers. Whether at the gym or on the running path, rudimentary calculation is the fundamental technology…a simple negative test of whether an activity is modern exercise is to ask whether it could be done meaningfully without counting or measuring it…

in exercise one gets a sense of one’s body as a collection of numbers representing capabilities. The other location where an individual’s numbers attain such talismanic status is the doctor’s office. There is a certain seamlessness between all the places where exercise is done and the sites where people are tested for illnesses, undergo repairs, and die. In the doctor’s office, the blood lab, and the hospital, you are at the mercy of counting experts….The clipboard with your numbers is passed. At last the doctor takes his seat, a mechanic who wears the white robe of an angel and is as arrogant as a boss. In specialist language, exacerbating your dread and expectation, you may learn your numbers for cholesterol (two types), your white cells, your iron, immunities, urinalysis, and so forth. He hardly needs to remind you that these numbers correlate with your chances of survival.

How do we acquire the courage to exist as a set of numbers? Turning to the gym or track, you gain the anxious freedom to count yourself. What a relief it can be. Here are numbers you can change. You make the exercises into trials you perform upon matter within reach, the exterior armor of your fat and muscle. You are assured these numbers, too, and not only the black marks in the doctor’s files, will correspond to how long you have to live. With willpower and sufficient discipline, that is, the straitening of yourself to a rule, you will be changed…

The curious compilation of numbers that you are becomes an aspect of your freedom, sometimes the most important, even more preoccupying than your thoughts or dreams. You discover what high numbers you can become, and how immortal. For you, high roller, will live forever. You are eternally maintained.

It seems like the idea is something like this: The data-collection method of achieving self-knowledge seems patently absurd if the method itself serves as a daily means of distracting us from our own fear of mortality and intimacy—particularly if it does so in part by giving us a false sense that we are in fact gaining some traction on these very “problems”. Perhaps my drive to keep careful records of my heart rate on each daily run and how I’ve spent the minutes of my day is itself the function of a fear of death and the inevitable passage of time—a fear that record-keeping can momentarily hold at bay but can neither detect nor ultimately assuage. The thought seems to be that the promise of self-knowledge that mere data collection and analysis promises is not only false, but ultimately serves to mask and distract us from that very thing.

Also prominent in Greif's essay is the notion that we’re distracted from the project of living a meaningful life by the pointless but self-sustaining project of preserving and maintaining an otherwise meaningless life of endless preservation and maintenance. This is a criticism that the modern exerciser may be particularly vulnerable to, but anyone devoting the kind of time required to implement and maintain data-gathering systems on any aspect of their lives seem equally vulnerable. We may, in this way, “dispose of the better portion of our lives in life preservation.”[1] But the complaint isn’t just that act of recording oneself as data becomes (like some self-referential nightmare) the daily content it was meant to record[2] (this content might otherwise have just been some other relatively meaningless daily bullshit anyway), but that, but their very nature, these number games distracts us from the particular projects that are likely to make a life meaningful. Even if our systems of data-collection, once implemented, take up little of our actual time, their impact may be huge and unpredictable: We are by nature self-regarding animals. Change the way we look at ourselves, and you change the selves we're looking at.

I hope that even proponents of this movement won't consider any of this merely the vicious slander of a bunch of liberal arts majors. The data-collectors, at least as they’re represented in the Times piece, do seem to understand their own movement in some of the same (sometimes troubling) terms as their critics:

(1) as an outgrowth of the (emotionally and spiritually hollow-sounding) movement toward ever-greater efficiency (i.e. greater productivity in the context of capitalist economies in which the end is, I guess, money):

I suspected that the self-tracking explosion was simply the logical outcome of this obsession with efficiency. We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?

i'm not inclined, as some are, to hear this kind of talk-- of "optimizing" ourselves like cars on an assembly line-- in ungenerous or even dystopic terms, but i think it rightly gives many of us pause. let's consider with some care how we are or aren't like assembly line projects.

(2) as an (perhaps superior) alternative to therapeutic means of self-knowledge—to verbal analysis of our “thoughts and dreams". The following is from Wolf:

Ubiquitous self-tracking is a dream of engineers. For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. A hundred years ago, a bold researcher fascinated by the riddle of human personality might have grabbed onto new psychoanalytic concepts like repression and the unconscious. These ideas were invented by people who loved language. Even as therapeutic concepts of the self spread widely in simplified, easily accessible form, they retained something of the prolix, literary humanism of their inventors. From the languor of the analyst’s couch to the chatty inquisitiveness of a self-help questionnaire, the dominant forms of self-exploration assume that the road to knowledge lies through words. Trackers are exploring an alternate route. Instead of interrogating their inner worlds through talking and writing, they are using numbers. They are constructing a quantified self.

I've already said a little bit about why therapeutic methods might be better suited than data collection methods when it comes to self-knowledge, so I’m not going to keep hammering on this, but I hope it’s obvious why thoughtful people might suspect that this data-collecting stuff is, at best, a pointless distraction from what really matter and, at worst, the importation of utterly creepy, soulless and ultimately destructive capitalist business models into to the very heart of our personal lives. Whether one ultimately agrees with all of this or not, it strikes me as irresponsible not to at least take these sorts of concerns very seriously. The stakes are not small. In Greif’s words

The consequences are not only the flooding of consciousness with a numbered and regulated body or the distraction from living that comes with endless life-maintenance, but the liquidation of the last untouched spheres of privacy, such that biological life itself becomes a spectacle.

…The thinness we strive for becomes spiritual. This is not the future we wanted.

A final word against all of these numbers: I began this post by drawing a parallel (which I will draw out further in subsequent posts) between this method of overcoming cognitive limitation to see ourselves my clearly on the one hand, and Eastern and Western philosophy on the other-- and particularly the claims made by the founders of these two tradition. Both Socrates and Buddha offered us methods for getting at freedom by way of seeing ourselves truly. And, you know, it's hard for me to see, off the top of my head, how self-tracking could have helped the Buddha or Socrates to understand themselves better than their own methods allowed them to. Which is to say that data gathering is not obviously necessary (though it may be useful) for self-knowledge. And I don't think that even the most avid data-gather would claim that data gathering is sufficient. It can't tell us what questions to ask or make us capable of properly analyzing the data-- or even being able to bear to look at the results. Despite the dreams of the engineer, the data can’t tell us what questions to ask, and the data can’t open our eyes to see what we can’t or won’t see. It seems to me that having conceded that these methods are neither strictly necessary nor ever sufficient for self-knowledge, maybe there could be some space for discussing, in a way that is palatable to the critic, what valid use these methods could be put to.

[1] Greif here is referring to preserving our bodies through exercise, but I don’t think I’m making too much of a jump by understanding the phrase in this broader sense—by understanding the keeping of detailed numerical records of the states and changes of our minds and bodies as itself a form of “self-preservation”.

[2] Collecting numerical data would, after all, be no more subject to this criticism than, say, writing incessantly in a journal.

talking about the future.

2010-05-02T15:53:00.000-07:00

suppose someone proposed to you the following arrangement: you trade in your life for a new one. this new life will be measurably better. your life will be arranged in such a way as to score markedly higher by all quality of life indexes. you will, they can guarantee, accurately report higher levels of satisfaction-- less anxiety, more opportunity to engage directly in the projects you find most meaningful, better fit with those you are closest to, etc. you just live a new life, in a new place, with a new social network, and new projects. suppose you knew that your central values, preferences, and strengths could remain the same-- these places and projects and social networks would be better by your own lights-- you wouldn't be a happy executioner or anything like that. suppose also that you wouldn't even have to worry about missing your old life because you wouldn't have to remember it. you could wake up one day living this new life as though you'd been living it forever. you wouldn't miss a beat, or friend.

would you be inclined to take this person up on their offer?

people's answer to questions like this is almost invariably (and surprisingly/unsurprisingly) no. this holds true even when people are quite dissatisfied with their actual lives. we seem to be attached to the lives we live for reasons that aren't reducible to happiness or satisfaction, or even values and projects.

there are a mess of thought experiments in the literature on personal identity that have a remarkably similar ring to them. (personal identity is a branch of metaphysics devoted to questions of what a person is such that it persists through time as a single entity, though it may change drastically in its composition-- part of a larger literature on identity in general, concerned with the question of how anything persists in this way.) only the question here is a theoretical question: not 'would you choose to live this new life?' but 'would this new person still be you in any meaningful sense? in any sense at all? in what sense?' is it memory that unifies us? character? commitment to particular projects and values? the continuity of the body? of the brain? at what point do changes in any of these constitute the end of a person? are you the same person if your memory is wiped clean? if you find jesus? if your brain were transplanted into a new body? half of your brain? are you the same person if you step into a teletransporter and are perfectly reconstituted on a distant planet out of different atoms? what if there's a glitch at point A, and you are reconstituted at point B without ever having been unconstituted? what if there's a lag and you see, in the monitor, yourself at point B and you see, through the window, the teleportation operators working frantically to fix their mistake? you know they will succeed in just a moment and these atoms will be blown apart. do you feel you are about to die, or that you'll lived on? are you bored as though merely stuck in traffic? who is that person in the monitor to you? the questions are so strange, but our answers, if we look at them, can help us to understand who it is we think we are.

people keep asking me about the future. i don't know what to say. am i so excited? no, i can't say that i'm excited. what i mostly feel is a determined resignation-- sadly certain and a little scared. but not because i believe i'll be unhappy or that i've made the wrong choice-- quite the contrary. i think i'll be happy in california. more than happy. if there's something i know about myself it's that i'm good at beginnings, and i'm going to begin work i know i'm good at. but this 'i' i'm looking at in the monitor, with all of my values and strengths, most of my memories, who shares some of my projects and commitments and feelings and is alienated from or uninterested in others, she is primarily this to me: who i'll die for. and that's cool and that's right, because her life will fit to her the way this life here has been fit to me but would cease to be if i couldn't bring myself to do what i have to do, which is die so i can live. it sounds dramatic, i know. but my feelings aren't dramatic. they're barely even feelings. whatever they are, though, i'm determined to do them justice. i don't mind dying-- letting my own accomplished, failed, and deferred projects give way to someone else's-- but i'm not inclined to pretend that i feel something i don't, or that i'm someone i'm not yet. and i don't need anyone to explain to me that things will be awesome, as though my hesitation is a sign that i don't know-- as though i'm not the one willing to die for it. knowing one as fully as i can know it does nothing to undermine the other.

i'm so lucky in my life and place and projects and network, and it's not a question of waking up one day having lost all that, it's true. but there's a real sense in which a chapter has come to a close, and i can't say i didn't cling more than a little before i let go, or that i won't have to fight the urge to cling a little yet. because it's been so fucking good and so fucking bad and all mine. the future, for better and worse, is someone else's. and that's cool, and wonderful, and inevitable, and also sad.

a work in progress progresses.

2010-04-17T11:59:00.000-07:00

yesterday's blogtime was devoted to helping my sister put together packets of things for the voters of maricopa county, AZ. today, in light of this, and the difficulty of the subject matter i'm giving myself an hour.

several months ago i left hanging a post about causation, that claimed to be part one of a two part series. the gist of the thing (part one) was this: even if you know the whole story of how something came to pass, you don't yet have a way of establishing what caused it. run the tape backwards-- watch the bridge resurrect, uncollapse, in excruciating detail-- watch the cars and boats slide backward underneath and over it, and days become nights become days, the rain stopping, and the rain starting again-- watch the thing unravel back to the first moment a sleepy engineer arrived to survey the undeveloped land. catalogue it all and all you've got's a story in which every feature, no matter how seemingly insignificant, will like play an ineliminable role in the story of the fall. and, anyway, you could just keep rolling that film back forever. where does the story even start?

how, then, do we pick out the salient facts? the one's rightly named 'cause'? there are lots of philosophers who talk about causation in lots of different ways (probabilistic causation, backward causation, causal processes, the metaphysics of causation-- and that's not even touching on aristotle, who divides the universe of causes into four distinct sorts: material, formal, efficient, and ultimate), but what i'll be discussing here are counterfactual theories of causation, which ground what is known in legal and philosophical contexts alike as 'but-for' causation. In it's broadest form this is just to say that 'A caused B' is to be understood as the claim 'if A had not occurred, then B would not have occurred.'

but this doesn't get us too much further along than our perfect catalogue of events. a significant subset of the list of features will likely amount to causes by this definition. what we need to find are those subset of causes (in the broadest sense of that that term) which are not just necessary, but sufficient ('determinants', lewis calls them). so long as this feature (or set of features) is present, this enough to ensure that the bridge will fall. the relevant formula is now more demanding-- for A to be a cause in this stricter sense it must be true that so long as A has occurred, then B will occur.

oh, crum. leah is here early. and i haven't even gotten to overdetermination yet! i haven't even turned my little philosophy lesson into anything meaningful! i guess it's the nature of these exercises. i will continue to work on this, but i'm going to post it now anyway, in the spirit of the task i set myself.

the space of logical possibility.

2010-04-15T15:12:00.000-07:00

day 2:

i'm changing course, deviating from my list of things to write about, to think about a question drew posed in a comment on my last post-- both because it interests me and because i only have twenty minutes today, and i just spent ten of them looking for images i couldn't find. this is a question i've asked about many times myself: what are we suppose to be imagining when we imagine the space of logical possibility?

upon reflection it seems to me that i always imagine the space of logical possibility as a hybrid between:

(a) the fine grained color wheel that appears when i'm feeling picky and choose the 'more colors' option in microsoft word, so that i can pick the perfect shade in which to offer feedback on student papers. ('what color,' i ask myself, ' will communicate firmness and authority without being harsh or anxiety inducing?' and then i choose regular old blue again.)

and

(b) that old map (which i can't find anywhere) that they used in science textbooks circa 1995, representing our best guess at the time of what the universe might look like: a sort of ghostly dimpled undulating sphere-- the deep center of which looked utterly impenetrable, even in that sad little textbook sketch.

-- a hybrid interactive in the style of the technology used by the department of precrime in steven spielberg's minority report-- with all of the data swirling and reorganizing itself with an incredible responsiveness the smallest changes in the nature of the particular inquiry, utterly sensitive to the smallest expert flick of the inquirer's wrist (the mind's wrist!).

what do you say, drew k?

also, question: isn't there something square/circle-y about trying to imagine the space of logical possibility? how does the fact that we may or may not be able to imagine the space of logical possibility, or generate models of it (could we?), reflect on its ontological status?

all of the possible people who, for all i know, i am.

2010-04-14T13:19:00.000-07:00

to break up a week of studying in the desert for my metaphysics comp, i'm going to try to do a quick entry each of the next four days going roughly through some little idea or other that i've been meaning to get down and never managed to. these will be timed, and therefore badly edited, and likely confusing at times-- but i hope not utterly incomprehensible.

day 1:

this is a little idea i've been meaning to write down forever-- as good a place as any to begin. you've all heard me talk (too much, too much) about possible worlds, and i hope you can forgive me if i start there again, as a kind of warm up. it will start out seeming very dry and technical, but i hope that by the end you'll see that it's really about the something so hard and true and human and familiar.

kripke famously objects to david lewis' analysis of the modal claims we make about ourselves and others-- claims about what we could have done-- on the grounds that this analysis, in some profound way, fails to capture what we mean when we say that we could have done something. lewis's analysis goes something like this: when terry malloy says, with the deepest conviction and longing, 'i could have been a contender', we should analyze this as being a claim about what terry malloy counterparts actually did in nearby possible worlds. to say that malloy could have been a contender is to say that in very many of possible worlds very like our own world, people in those worlds very closely resembling malloy (except, perhaps for very slight variations in his composition or circumstance) were contenders.

according to kripke, though, this analysis is fundamentally in error, no matter what other advantages it may have: when malloy says 'i could have been a contender', he means himself. it is irrelevant to him what some other person in some other possible world did, but very important to him indeed that he himself could have done. there's a good technical response to this objection, which i'm not going to talk about here, because even though i think it does technically answer kripke's objection, i think there's another response that gets more to the beating heart of the problem kripke raises, which i think is not quite shaken off by the technical fix. (and because i'm strictly timing this little writing exercise, and i'm already running short.)

to understand the response i want to give, you have to understand something about how david lewis conceives of learning. imagine that, as david lewis thinks, the world we live in is "located" in a vast logical space, containing every possible world-- every single way things might have been-- with worlds most like our own being the closest and those farthest away being the most different. (of course worlds must be like or unlike one another in some particular respect, so where our world is located in logical space is not static, but determined by some particularly modal inquiry.) learning, then, is a matter of locating ourselves in logical space. if you know nothing about the world you inhabit (if that's even possible), then, for all you know, any possible world you can conceive of might very well be the world you're in. but every single thing you learn about the world you're in narrows down the list of worlds which, for all you know, are your own. so long as we're ignorant of anything, there will be many possible worlds which, for all we know might be our own. we're forever adding and eliminating possible worlds from the list-- that's what learning is. the region of logical space containing all of the possible worlds which, for all you know, might be the world you live in, is the space of epistemic possibility.

so here's the thing: there's so much we don't know about ourselves. there are infinite possible people, who, for all i know, might be me. we imagine possible futures, and we hope for and fear them terribly sometimes. there are many possible people who, for all you know, might be you, and some you come to hope or fear you are-- and some you even come, out of hope or fear, to believe that you are, though the evidence is, in fact, still inconclusive. it stands to reason, then, that because we are (a) epistemically limited in ways that keep us from knowing just exactly who we are or what's coming next, and (b) prone, as a contingent fact of human psychology, to care about who we are and what happens to us, and to prefer certain outcomes to others, that we will come to have feelings for possible people that it turns out we aren't, which are as profound as any feelings we might have for the person who it turns out we are. it's a funny thing about us that we sometimes care more for those possible people it turns out we're not. we sometimes spend our whole lives mentally tracking a person that it turns out we aren't along a path we believed we might follow. there is a possible person, a contender, who terry malloy believed so fiercely was himself, and that, i think, is more than enough to explain all of the conviction and longing implicit in his famous proclamation.

it's this sort of obvious aspect of human psychology, and not that he overlooked a certain technical detail of lewis' analysis, that makes kripke's "me myself" objection seem so obtuse to me.

time's up.

investing in possible futures.

2010-03-25T19:42:00.000-07:00

it's spring, and all of the ladies and gentlemen of the greater boston area are blooming baby bjorns, and so many of my friends who don't already have one or two are in various states of negotiations on the subject, and everyone's in the mood to talk about it, and damned if i'm not also reading a book on the subject (also, jason kottke reposted the trailer for the film, 'babies', which reignited my passion for watching it). if you're reading this blog, chances are i've discussed this subject with you yourself-- but, listen, i have a self-imposed blogging quota to meet. i'll try to add something a little fresh in order to hold yr attention.

i'm pretty much in love with the babies my friends have grown, and are growing, and are planning to grow, but i've always thought that any kids i raise will be kids i adopt, and something about this stance has recently become more clear to me: if i do adopt kids, it won't be because i'd rather adopt kids than grow them myself, but because i'd rather raise kids i've adopted than do anything else at all. there are approximately infinite answers to the question of how one should spend one's time and money, how one should love, and i don't see why the choice between raising a kid you adopt versus raising one you grow is more ethically salient than the choice between adopting one and doing something entirely different-- spending your life writing blog posts, for example-- or between growing a baby yourself and devoting your life to the sea. there's just a lot of ways to spend what you have, and they all have their advantages and drawbacks, and we each have our values and moral imperatives, and things we take special pleasure in.

richard russo says the following: 'you won't be a fully vested citizen until you have someone you love more than life to hand this imperfect world over to', and i think he's probably roughly right. there are awful parents and saintly childless crusaders, it's true. it's also true that the protective impulses that parenthood brings will probably tend, just like self-protecting impulses, to skew our judgment in ways that are sometimes destructive-- particularly toward others, toward the larger world. nonetheless, it's easy to see what RR's saying. and i don't suppose that there's a better way to learn more about science and magic and justice and injustice and pleasure and pain and goodness and badness than by attentive child-rearing. i suspect that raising kids would be for me, as it is for many people, exceptionally challenging and gratifying, and these are good reasons to do it.

but russo also writes: 'don't worry too much about the world they'll be born into, which will suck, because that's what the world mostly does', and i believe that, too, but maybe a little differently. it might sound odd or extreme, but i do think that the potential horrors that life throws at people, in addition to the horrors that people (who were all once the children of parents-- probably even some good and loving and optimistic parents) grow up to inflict on one another, makes the prospect of bringing children into the world an ethically risky proposition. i don't mean to suggest that these risks are necessarily prohibitive, but they are, i think, profoundly concerning...and possibly prohibitive. they concern the shit out of me, anyway. i do believe that taking a kid in the world and investing yourself fully in her, despite the risks inherent investing in anything as uncertain as someone else, strikes me as being one of the most unqualifiedly sound and satisfying choices that life allows for (assuming that building families and helping kids grow is one of the things you like to do best of all). but bringing new kids in the world in order to invest in them in this way is, i think, a distinct and distinctly dicier proposition, ethically speaking. you bring a kid into the world, and you can't make any promises to either about how the other is going to turn out. the risk you take, i can't help but notice, is so much more than yours.

it takes a special bravery to see love through.

2010-03-20T08:09:00.000-07:00

i've been trying to write this paper for over a year. i had a strong intuition about what the problem to be addressed was, but i was floundering around with no real notion of how to address it. and then i understood, and the answer seemed obvious. so i finally wrote it. i never really understand, of course, whatever it might feel like in the moment. i just take a swing at it. what follows are some tweaked selections from my swing. i've tried to strain out the most boring technical parts, but a good bit of it's here, and though it's a paper about a platonic dialogue it is not, as you'll see, addressed to a boring or technical question. plato, you should know, is endlessly sexy and relevant, and i'm not just saying that.

Love as Reverence & Revelation: Mad love in Plato’s Phaedrus

"[The lover's] effort is to know the other's character through and through. This leads, further, to increased self-understanding."

Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness

It’s an endless source of consternation, reassurance and wonderment how little the most basic questions about how to live ever change, even over the course of millennia. Ought one choose a partner she loves terribly—one, perhaps, who harbors a love like that for her—or ought one partner on more prudential grounds? Is passionate love imprudent by its nature? These are the questions that Socrates and Phaedrus discuss at length, along the banks of the Ilisus, in a dialogue composed roughly twenty-four hundred years ago. Passionate romantic love is a form of madness, both sides agree—the point of contention is whether this madness consists in a desire that overpowers reason-- obscuring our sense of the good, the right, the true-- or whether it is a kind of “divine” madness, in fact a special insight into those very things.

In the following paper I will present the arguments for and against choosing the companionship of a suitor in love (as those arguments are presented in the text), and then I will raise what I take to be a significant problem with the argument as it is explicitly put: namely, that, first of all, it’s hard to know how we could adjudicate between these views in principle, and that, second of all, even if we were to find some grounds on which to agree with Socrates about the wisdom of partnering for love, it would be difficult make good pragmatic use of his advice. What is "divine madness", and what, in principle, could count as a good secular reason to affirming or denying its exists? And what, in practice, could count as a reason for thinking that some particular instance of madness is of the divine as opposed to profane variety? The solution I will suggest is that we understand Socrates’ claim that love is a "god-given" madness, and his conclusion that we ought therefore to choose the companionship of a lover, as part of the larger and utterly central Socratic injunction to ‘know thyself’, making the relevant question not whether love obscures or enhances the lover’s understanding of the world, but whether love is a force that obscures the lover’s own character, or if love in fact reveals her. I hope I can demonstrate that this reading of the Phaedrus is both warranted and instructive.

Phaedrus presents the view of the speechwriter Lysias, who argues that being in love is a kind of madness, and that choosing the companionship of someone who is in love with you is therefore to exercise extremely poor judgment. On this view love is a kind of desire—a desire for what is beautiful. “Each of us,” on Lysias’ view,

is ruled by two principles which we follow wherever they lead: one is our inborn desire for pleasures, the other is our acquired judgment that pursues what is best…The unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right and is driven to take pleasure in beauty…, this desire, all-conquering in its forceful drive, takes its name from the word for force and is called love. (237d 6-8, 238b7- 238c1-3).

On this view, a person in love is, by definition, in a state of impaired judgment, moved by slave-like necessity. The “miserable condition” of the lover is to be driven by a helpless kind of agony to make imprudent choices regarding his own affairs—choices he will likely come to regret and retract, and for which he may even come to resent the love object—and to demand that the object of his affection make similarly imprudent choices, to neglect his other business and relationships, and, worst of all, to neglect the cultivation of his own soul. The lover loses his sense of proportion and perspective—“when a lover suffers a reverse that would cause no pain to anyone else, love makes him think he’s accursed! And when he has a stroke of luck that’s not worth a moment’s pleasure, love compels him to sing its praises” (233b 1-4). The lover cannot help, in his impaired condition, but exploit, limit, and otherwise harm the one he desires with such myopic urgency, and when the madness has passed, a lover, whose promises were compelled by this madness, has little reason to honor the commitments he made while not “in his right mind” (241a8).

On this basis, Lysias advises Phaedrus to choose the stable, enriching, and mutually beneficial companionship of a friend he can trust and admire over the companionship of a lover—one who, according to Lysias, will have been rendered unreliable, pitiable even, by that very love. In the cool light of reason or the warm glow of tame affection, free of mad desire, the suitor not afflicted by passionate love will choose a more appropriate object. In a better position to assess a potential companion’s proper worth, he is free to choose on the basis of certain facts of character and habit which better determine a longer-term suitability, facts which desire would obscure (233b1-4, 232e2-5). This is a companion who can dedicate a stable and improving attention to his partner. To be measured, masterful, and far-thinking, then, is the special province of the “non-lover”. And Lysias cites additional advantages: If a person is not limited to those who are in love with her, she can choose the most deserving from among a significantly larger candidate pool, and the relationship, in its decorum, is more likely to meet the approval of the community (231d6-10, 232a6-233b4).

Socrates dismisses Lysias’ speech as a sort of heretical hack job—not an earnest attempt to define and examine love, but a “wily” attempt to win the favors of a boy (Phaedrus) that he is actually “no less [in love with] than the others” (237b3). But despite Socrates’ (and some of my classmates’) protests to the contrary, it’s easy to see why Phaedrus is so enamored of Lysias’ speech. He describes with a formidable and stirring accuracy certain kinds of pain and poor judgment often associated with being in love, riling some deep and not unreasonable anxieties we have about loving and being loved—how it can limit and reduce us. Examples abound of love’s reputed tendency to blind, torment, and turn us sour. We have good prudential reasons for fearing the impact of powerful irrational forces on our ability to make sound judgments and manage to live by them. We have strong experiential evidence in favor of the proposition that love is, as Lysias claims, just such a powerful and irrational force. It is not at all obvious, at least to me, why a person—particularly a person aspiring to lead a philosophical life—shouldn’t agree with Lysias’ advice. Eros is unreasonable.

Socrates’ agrees that love is a kind of madness, and he, too, has a compelling and resonant description to offer of the human experience of love—a description not so terribly different from the first:

“in its madness the lover’s soul cannot sleep at night or stay put by day; it rushes, yearning, wherever it expects to see the person who has that beauty…no one is more important to it than the beautiful boy. It forgets mother and brothers and friend entirely and doesn’t care at all if it loses its wealth through neglect. And as for proper and decorous behavior, in which it used to take pride, the soul despises the whole business. Why, it is even willing to sleep like a slave, anywhere, as near to the object of its longing as it is allowed to get! That is because in addition to its reverence for one who has such beauty, the soul has discovered that the boy is the only doctor for all that terrible pain. This is the experience we humans call love.” (251e-252a)

But on the view presented by Socrates love itself consists not in the desire for the beauty we see in another person, but just in the striking recognition of that beauty. On this view, all human beings are to some degree, depending on their sensitivity to beauty, prone to being so struck. Love is a mad insight—a way of coming to know an aspect of the true nature of things by visceral impression as opposed to inductive or deductive methods. The experience of this insight is by its nature powerful and will tend to be accompanied by powerful desires, but the specific character of the experience, and the particular response one has to it, will be determined by the character of the experiencer: One will respond by “gazing…reverently” at the object of beauty, while another “surrenders to pleasure,” seeking immediate gratification (250e). Both may appear to be, or be in fact, mad—but a person of the right character, the right sensitivity to beauty, the right kind of soul, is divinely mad—he is “moved abruptly from here to a vision of Beauty itself when he sees what we call beauty here” (250e). Love in fact consists in this experience of insight, and not just the powerful desires for sexual and emotional gratification that notoriously accompany it, and although some may lack the strength of character to maintain the right kind of composure in the face of this terrible beauty, the explanation for their bad behavior is their own character, and not the character of love, which lies in seeing, and to which the proper response is reverence.

In the course of the dialogue Socrates offers a larger story about the human soul and the nature of reality as a context for this view of love. The soul is described as analogous to a charioteer, whose chariot is guided by two winged horses. One is “beautiful and good,” “a lover of honor with modesty and self-control,,,he needs no whip” (246b2, 253d5-6). The other is bad—“companion to wild boasts and indecency…deaf as a post—and just barely responds to the horsewhip and goad combined” (253e2-4). Before a human soul is incarnate it must have driven its winged horses around that Platonic heaven of ideas—a place “without shape and without solidity, a being that really is what it is, the subject of all true knowledge, visible only to intelligence” where “it has a view of Justice as it is; it has a view of Self-Control; it has a view of Knowledge” (). Each fights for a view of this Reality. It’s our nature, Socrates tell us, to be nourished by it. But not all souls have the same view. Different souls follow different gods, who, in turn, each have a different a place in the procession—and they differ, too, in the competence of their charioteers. Even the luckiest of souls, “distracted by the horses…does have a view of Reality, but just barely” (248a3-4). While we won’t explicitly remember the soul’s journey, we will be more or less sensitive to earthly instances of these perfect Ideas according to our exposure.

Both the practical question of who one ought to choose as one’s most intimate companion and the question, underlying the first, of what the nature of love might be, are as compelling now as they were twenty-four hundred years ago, and the descriptions and analysis offered by Lysias and Socrates are both still awfully compelling. But it seems less clear what secular grounds there could be for deciding the practical question. Though we may recognize that Socrates analysis is better organized, that it makes some important clarifying distinctions—that it is, in short, an actual analysis, in contrast to Lysias’ mere and partial description—it is still grounded in something almost mystical. We may be extremely sympathetic to the view that certain ethical insights can only be reached by human beings by way of irrational forces—love in particular. But it seems that the practicality of trusting such a force to generate insight as opposed to distorting it depends upon there being some truth to the claim that madness can be a force of insight and some way of determining when it is.

My intention is not to distort or simplify the view for the purposes of making it palatable or provable by contemporary standards. Certainly an important part of what Socrates claims is that mad love is good because it constitutes a kind of vision into the nature of external Reality (the world of the Forms), and that it does this by picking out what it is good and beautiful in the changeable world we daily inhabit—“the soul,” Socrates says, “is a sort of seer” (242c5-6). There is, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, something “cognitive” about the emotions and desires that constitute the experience of this madness—“they give the [lover] information as to where the goodness and beauty are, searching out and selecting, themselves, the beautiful objects” (215). Though it may be difficult to understand how we could go about proving this to be so, without either going around in a circle, or appealing to something sort of mystical, these claims stand, and they resonate, and they’re an essential part of the view Socrates presents.

But there is another aspect of the argument which doesn’t immediately raise the same kinds of difficult metaphysical and epistemological questions, and which, I am proposing, might present us with easier grounds on which to decide the practical question: to choose the lover or the non-lover? The grounds, I’ve proposed, are whether love reveals or obscures the lover’s character. Socrates, I argue, claims the former, while Lysias claims the latter.

One of the strengths of [the reading I've proposed] is that it gets to what I take to be the very heart of the Socratic project, particularly as it is framed in the Phaedrus. Early in the dialogue, before any arguments have been offered, Socrates tells Phaedrus that he himself has no interest in debating the truth or falsity of certain mythological explanations of things on the grounds that he has “no time” for it:

and the reason, my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and really it seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that. This is why I do not concern myself with them. I accept what is generally believed, and, as I was just saying, I look not into them but into my own self: am I a beast more complicated and savage than Typhon, or am I a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature?

It seems that understanding our own nature is the beginning and the end of Socratic discourse. Whatever divine entities are posited, they’re role is to make sense of things that seem true on other grounds—some combination of felt experience and careful analysis of that experience.

A good example of this use of divine explanation of observable phenomena is Socrates’ claim that each man’s soul is attendant to a particular god, whose character he strives to emulate. The mythology stands as the explanation for a mundane and observable reality: different people have different characters. Apart from being just more or less ‘good’ or ‘bad’, different persons are more or less querulous, more or less domestic, more or less prone to admire the warrior, the philosopher, or the able politician. “Everyone spends his life,” Socrates says, “honoring the god in whose chorus he danced” (252c8-252d1). We needn’t be deists to feel the force of this insight.

When Socrates recounts the view of Lysias, he emphasizes that Lysias’ view implicitly relies on the notion that love obscures the lover’s nature—than the honorable man will be rendered dishonorable, the gentle man violently jealous, the otherwise trustworthy man untrustworthy. The lover is not “the same man” as he was before he loved—he is “a different man” when passion has passed. The lover in love is ruled by “a mindless regime” which will be subsequently replaced by another, sounder one, and the man in question will not be able, in good conscience, to honor the promises he made—promises of another man, imprudent and otherwise inclined. On this picture, there is reason, and there is desire. Love is desire. Desire distorts reason. Love is unreasonable.

Socrates rejects this view. Love, he argues, is not mere desire, identically distorting. It is a common experience of beauty, to which different individuals will be differently sensitive; it is an experience that commonly incites strong desires, to which different individuals will respond differently. When and how we experience love, and how it shapes our behavior, is largely a matter of individual character. In his strongest explicit formulation of this claim, Socrates says that however the man in love behaves, “that is how he behaves with everyone at every turn, not just those he loves” (252d3-4). It seems correct, at least, to conclude that those who tend to be careful in love, or abusive, or effusive, will tend to be careful, or abusive, or effusive more generally. Socrates, in fact, begins his rebuttal by appealing to the obvious fact that the listener must know some “noble and gentle man…who [is or has been] in love with a boy of similar character”—someone whose behavior and experience Lysias’ description of love fails to capture. The right account of love will explain the obvious diversity of experience and behavior among people in love. On Socrates’ account, this diversity is best explained, commonsensically enough, by the diversity of human character.

It seems to me that Socrates’ definition of love, and his description of the peculiarities of the human experience of it, warrant a claim which is in some sense stronger than the one Socrates explicitly makes, and in another sense weaker: namely, that our experience of and behavior in love doesn’t merely express our character, but specially reveals it. This claim further underscores the role of love in bringing out what is uniquely true of the individual experiencer, but it is weaker in the sense that it may require us to back off somewhat from the explicit claim that the lover treats the beloved just as he treats everyone. Socrates’ own description of love provides us with adequate grounds to conclude that, in fact, love amplifies our typical responses, uniquely arousing and laying bare certain deep and relevant aspects of the lover’s character which, for better and worse, are not otherwise on prominent display—which are generally invisible even, to others and, perhaps, to the man himself.

We’ve said that mad love is to get a look at the beauty in another human being, a beauty that arrests the attention and inspires reverence. This reverence, I think, amounts to a kind of profoundly active stillness—the effort to hold one’s ground, to maintain the proper posture of awe, to keep one’s eyes fixed, against the powerful desires to grasp at or to flee the object of one’s awe. Socrates says that “when the charioteer looks love in the eye, the entire soul is suffused with a sense of warmth and starts to fill with…the goadings of desire”—the white horse is prevented only by his sense of shame from “jumping on the boy” who is his object, while the dark horse “leaps violently forward”, “no longer responsive to the whip and the goad” (253e5-245a5). An epic struggle ensues between the charioteer and the dark horse, in which the charioteer occasionally tires, giving in and moving toward the boy, only be blown back again each time he “sees that face”: “At the sight he is frightened, falls over backwards, awestruck…pull[s] the reigns back so fiercely” (254b4-254c1). And as the stunned dark horse regains its strength, the whole thing begins again, over and over, until the dark horse is finally humbled by the repeated violent reigning and the whole soul is then able to “follow its boy in reverence and awe” (254e8). Love, inasmuch as it is a thing apart from a desire for sexual or emotional gratification, is a process of “reject[ing] certain ways of acting when they…do not accord with felt reverence” (Nussbaum 217). The reverence one feels—the love—is not only a thing apart from these desires, it is the only help for them, the measure against which neither grasping nor fleeing can really meet with our own approval, though the desire to do either may be powerful—though we may even succumb to them.

The beauty that inspires love also riles powerfully destructive aspects of the lover’s own nature, bringing them mercilessly to his attention. Fears and desires—the stuff that underwrite the jealously, pettiness, and abandonment Lysias’ speaks of—are revealed and at the same time thrown into a specially instructive kind of relief by the revered love object. He comes to feel the power of these fears and desires in light of love—a light in which they are seen to be profane. In light of love, the lover is revealed to himself. He can’t afford a smug or self-congratulatory naïveté about his own nature, but must engage fully with the hardest parts of that nature in order to hold his ground and his gaze—in order to do justice, that is, to the object of his awe. Guided by his awe to control those powerful and potentially destructive aspects of his nature, he learns, through struggle, a kind of self-control that Socrates argues is near to being divine. “The companionship of a non-lover,” Socrates says, “is diluted by human self-control”, and “all it pays are cheap human dividends” (256e4-6). A self-control hard-won by the light of reverence, not “human self-control”, is, on Socrates view, the only truly stable basis for lifelong companionship and self-knowledge.

We don’t have to be deists or mystics, or even Platonic idealists, to feel the power of this claim: that love reveals us—that its dual power is to rile and aggravate and generally expose what we’d most prefer to avoid and deny, while simultaneously providing us with a special motive and energy for understanding and learning to control the same. If we accept this view of love, we have good reason to agree with Socrates that a boy ought to choose the companionship of a lover: The self-control of the non-lover is not hard-won—neither inspired by a sense of the boy’s true worth, which is not merely prudential, nor accompanied by the same hard-won insights into his own nature which are both essential to partnership itself to the overarching process of living well.

a writing break, from writing.

2010-03-14T08:26:00.000-07:00

Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In

by Raymond Carver

You simply go out and shut the door
without thinking. And when you look back
at what you've done
it's too late. If this sounds
like the story of a life, okay.

It was raining. The neighbors who had
a key were away. I tried and tried
the lower windows. Stared
inside at the sofa, plants, the table
and chairs, the stereo setup.

My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me
on the glass-topped table, and my heart
went out to them. I said, Hello, friends,
or something like that. After all,
this wasn't so bad.

Worse things had happened. This
was even a little funny. I found the ladder.
Took that and leaned it against the house.
Then climbed in the rain to the deck,
swung myself over the railing
and tried the door. Which was locked,
of course. But I looked in just the same
at my desk, some papers, and my chair.

This was the window on the other side
of the desk where I'd raise my eyes
and stare out when I sat at that desk.
This is not like downstairs, I thought.
This is something else.
And it was something to look in like that, unseen,
from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there.

I don't even think I can talk about it.
I brought my face close to the glass
and imagined myself inside,
sitting at the desk. Looking up
from my work now and again.
Thinking about some other place
and some other time.
The people I had loved then.

I stood there for a minute in the rain.
Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.
Even though a wave of grief passed through me.
Even though I felt violently ashamed
of the injury I'd done back then.
I bashed that beautiful window.
And stepped back in.

this is probably just about my favorite poem ever. i thought of it just now, sitting writing at my desk, which is also by a window, which also looks out over a porch-- the kind i would try to climb up on to get in if i locked myself out (which is just the sort of thing i'd do)-- which is also being steadily rained on at the moment.

i was going to say some things about this poem, but i've spent all of the time i allotted myself for this writing break from writing just reading it and reading it again. it's as perfect as i remember it. probably better not to bother saying much about it. i'm sure you'll understand.

post/mail

2010-03-07T03:59:00.000-08:00

this week the postmaster general told congress that any reasonable plan to keep the united states postal service solvent in the coming years would likely involve raising the price of postage at a rate greater than that of inflation and dropping saturday delivery.

drop saturday delivery! i don't generally consider myself particularly attached to custom and habit, though i'm learning to appreciate its comforts, but there's something about the almosteverydayness of the united states postal service that's somehow tangled up in my own wiring. changes in the way the mail is delivered feel like some kind of threat to my own homeostasis. i won't wax on here (i've almost hit my self-imposed blog writing time limit) on the topic of my feelings about and associations with the mail and it's delivery, but i will say i was very nearly moved to read a congressman object to the changes, citing, in part, the loss of "the social component of going down to the post office."

the thing is, though, we send less mail now than we did. and we will send less later than we do now. and there's no point in lamenting it, i guess-- its a way of doing things that's been replaced by other ways of doing things, which also have their value. in a changing world, we all have to change to stay solvent. even 'homeostasis' is just a fancy word for the process of changing to remain the same. but! i'm going to do my own small part to reverse the trend: one letter a week.

***

UPDATE!

letter, week one.

update!

letter: week 2

(w)resting my attention.

2010-02-25T14:01:00.000-08:00

last week, on a days notice, i decided to catch a ride out to central mass and spend five silent days at a buddhist meditation center, instructed in meditation practice by some really nice and knowledgeable dudes, and, of course, practicing it. practicing it from 5am to 9pm each day-- forty-five minutes of sitting meditation, alternated with forty-five minutes of walking meditation, with breaks for meals (breakfast, lunch, tea) and an hour of chores. i needed a little adventure, a little quiet, a little bit of that feeling of new skill acquisition, and a little break from my devices.

there were yogi's at the camp who were on year-long silent retreat, others three month, and many of those there, like me, for only a couple of weeks or several days had been practicing silent meditation at this center for ten, twenty, nigh on thirty years some of them.

i myself have never meditated before. i went to try this thing-- to see about this way of knowing supposedly more clear-eyed reliable, more searingly direct than all of my philosophical figuring. i didn't expect to get more than the rudiments in these few days, and that was right. i expected it to be a grueling exercise in not thinking-- like they'd equip me with some kind of punishing shock collar that zapped at the first suggestion of theorizing-- and there i turned out to be interestingly wrong. their task, they explained to me in (not) so many words, was to gently strip me of the punishing shock collar of my own making. the key was to notice, without judgment (!), when my thoughts had wondered and to bring my attention gently gently back to rest gently on my breathing. the impediment would be my own exasperation with myself.

to see clear is to see without aversion. that seemed to be a central notion. and looking inward we find many things to which we are averse. and the first and forever aversion to be overcome is the aversion our own distractability-- how easily we are subject to recursive and looping and endlessly repeating fantasies and replays of played out pasts. and that's before you ever even have to address your aversion to those fantasies and replays themselves! so first, and forever, i just had to train my attention on my breathing. rest my attention. just rest my attention on my breathing for a breath or two or three (that was really all i could manage at first) until i was carried away by one thing or another and then, eventually, to notice that i'd been carried away and to gently bring that same attention back again and again and again to the breath. gently.

raising them right. i mean happy!

2010-02-18T03:53:00.000-08:00

We are born utterly dependent; from the moment we pop out, a social relationship becomes essential to living, namely the relationship with our mother (as well as other family members). Through that dependency—for physical survival and mental, social, physical, and sensory stimulation—we form connections with other people who become significant in shaping our view of ourselves and of the world around us. That socialization process also structures the brain in important and enduring ways. Through the complex processes of socialization, families can create in their members, and especially in their children, either susceptibility or resistance to depression that can last a lifetime.

Long-term epidemiologic studies show that depression intensifies from one generation to the next. Today's parents represent the largest group of depression sufferers raising the fastest-growing group of depression sufferers. We are on average four times more depressed than our parents and ten times more than our grandparents.

michael yapko & hara estroff marano, secondhand blues, psychology today

so, there's actually a lot i don't like about this article. (to begin with, "pop out"? seriously? where is the editorial support?) but i've been thinking about in terms of another question that's been on my mind-- when do you know that you're ready to have kids? i know that this question usually refers to things like, when do you have enough money? when do you have enough time? when have you accomplished enough of your own goals? and the answer that people generally give-- and rightly, i think-- is that you're never really ready in any of these senses, so you just have to do it, and you figure it out, and you learn as you go.

but how do you know when you've worked through your own bullshit sufficiently to actually avoid the egregious repetition of the past? how do you know when you've found the calm center from which you can...i don't know, not just parent responsibly, but bring up happy kids? i know that it's easy to group these kinds of questions with the others, but i'm not inclined to. the best of lives can be lived on not enough money and short of time-- you could imagine, even, wishing these kinds of material limitations for your children, that they might learn to thrive in more interesting and satisfying ways. but it's hard to see how we might analogously wish for them the constraints congenital loneliness or persistent anxiety. and yet, with the best and clearest intentions, and with the sincerest love, we seem to be handing these things on at a rate that's approaching the exponential. we have one life, and we give one life to our kids, their entire experience of which will be filtered through the lens that they construct from observing our own daily approaches to life.

it seems to me that the question deserves a different kind of reflection than the others. a friendly pat-on-the-back-and-you'll-figure-it-out approach makes sense if you're urging someone to put aside pragmatic questions for the sake of jumping into the wonderful business of family, and it makes sense as a way of saying 'look, these are the problems that have been faced time immemorial'. but here i think the question isn't pragmatic-- it's a matter of ultimate concern. and this seems to be a uniquely modern epidemic-- which is not to say that this, too, is not an age old question of parenting, but the risks seem uniquely high: "The World Health Organization recently declared depression the fourth leading cause of human disability and suffering and predicted that by the year 2020 it will be the second leading cause." high risks, ultimate ends. the stakes are high.

this has probably begun to sound awfully pessimistic, but i am, in fact (foolishly, i'm sure), brimming with optimism. but it seems so crucial to know: how will you know that you have in yourself the critical mass of peace, that warm solid center, that frees you up to do it right? or is the fresh start we seem to need more fruitfully thought of in terms of external conditions? what will a good place to start look like?

arguments.

2010-02-17T13:25:00.000-08:00

when it's over, i want to say: all my life

i was a bride married to amazement.

i was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

when it's over, i don't want to wonder

if i have made of my life something particular, and real.

i don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

mary oliver

more on the subject: i just found this paper by a philosopher and a social scientist, called "why do humans reason? arguments for an argumentative theory".

abstract: "Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. ...Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow the persistence of erroneous beliefs. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all of these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and favor conclusions in support of which arguments can be found. "

http://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/MercierSperberWhydohumansreason.pdf

there are these rare thinkers, though-- really, having read a significant amount of philosophy, i find them to be so utterly rare-- who seem to go where the argument leads them-- who don't begin with a commitment to an outcome, but discover, with wonder, along with the rest of us, where the train of thought leads. they're willing to be proved wrong. can't we argue from a place of wonder? isn't that what wondering is? or is wondering also problematic? does it only lead to arguments, or can it also lead to understanding?

so understanding stands apart. it's clearly a way of knowing, but not a way arrived at by arguments, whose function is to convince, and to assess for convincingness. so what is it, if anything, that moves when we come to understand? what is it we do, cognitively? is it a movement? (we must be moved.) is it utterly still?

you (i), my little lettuce.

2010-02-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

[i'm trying to change my writing process from the very bottom up. i've got to learn to spit it out. in the name of this, i'm going to do these little writing exercises-- timed and unrevised, twice a week, i hope.

'when you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. you look into the reasons it is not doing well. it may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. you never blame the lettuce. yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. but if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like lettuce. blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. that is my experience. no blame, no reasoning, nor arguments, just understanding. if you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.'

thich nhat hanh

peace is every step

i read this book about a thousand years ago, and then the other day a friend of mine gave me the most wonderful gift-- she handed me this book, my own book, from my own shelf. it can look and read like something a little embarrassing-- an easy self-help manual, or treacly pop buddhism. i can't answer this except to say, somewhat vaguely, that this is that rarest thing-- a simple book that rewards multiple readings. while a first reading may provide a facile sense of revelation, i suppose that the only real transformative power comes with simple repetition (which is only to be expected, given the central role of simple repetition in buddhist pratice, as i understand it).

but i want to talk about the lettuce a little. i am here to write about the lettuce. i often use metaphors like these to try to bring home to people my practical and theoretical objections to our blaming practices. practically speaking, i think it's more useful and loving (and hard!) to think of each other in these sorts of terms (this is a highly contention claim-- the final word on the subject so far was spoken by the wonderful pf strawson who says that a mature and mutual and satisfying love depends on our not treating each other as we would the lettuce (see more on this subject here and here)). and i'm skeptical of there being any coherent justification for blame, as we generally conceive of it, whether or not it's of any practical use. blah blah yeah yeah you've heard it all before.

but look here! thich nhat hanh has used his lovely little lettuce metaphor not only to suggest the uselessness of blame, but to suggest the uselessness of arguments and reasoning. i'm brought up short. all at once i'm being schooled! challenged at the very core. because i think that people are like lettuce, and i think the value of my life is all and only my skill as a lettuce tender, but i also think that people are a very special kind of lettuce, responsive not only to sunshine and rain, but also to reason. i think that, officially. but the real challenge isn't to what i think, officially, but to who i am and what i do, independant of what i think. i'm an arguer and a reasoner, with a relentless habit of describing and redescribing things as a way of understanding them (and maybe something else). especially hard things. and most especially lettuce. it's the best and the worst of me. i think of this process of arguing and redescribing as the very process by which i come to understand. but thich nhat hanh tells me that you (i), my little lettuce, will respond no better to arguments and reason than you (i) will respond to blame. he suggests that understanding, on the one hand, and reason and arguments on the other, are of a distinctly different character. it feels hard as a paradox, trying to understand this very claim except as an argument or for reasons. alternately and also, i can understand it with the perfect ease that lettuce understands the sunshine.

this is what i've been thinking about.

a work in progress.

2009-11-10T06:24:00.000-08:00

i've been thinking back a lot about a lecture i listened to a professor of mine deliver-- the first session of a course on causation. he's a philosophy professor now, but he was an engineer for a long time, and one of the things that he used to do professionally was provide expert testimony, in the aftermath of disaster, about what went wrong. why the plane crashed. why the bridge fell.

why did the bridge fall? it's a harder questions than it seems to be, and it already seems like a really hard question. let's say we put to one side the ponderous constraints on what even an engineer can know about the precise empirical facts of something even just as complicated as a bridge. say we know with perfect certainty the properties of all the materials the bridge is made of, and of all the pressures those materials will come under, and all of the effects that each part of the bridge will have on the other parts, and precisely what effects the environment will have on the whole structure. say we know the story of every raindrop that ever winds its way into any fissure in the concrete, or along any rivulet formed in the bend of the steel. say that there is no detail in the story of the epoxy and its corroding effects on the particular material of which the screws are made when the temperature falls below zero that escapes our notice. say the whole story of the bridge and the bridge's coming to fall is, in all of its immense complexity, fixed and knowable and known.

why did the bridge fall? you might think that under these conditions we have an answer to the question, but it turns out that we only have a story-- a long story of materials and dynamics in which each and every material and dynamic plays an ineliminable role. to pick out a part of the story, a particular material or dynamic, and say 'here is the cause' requires something else-- something more even than the most perfect knowledge. even more, that is, than what we can ever hope to have.

coming soon: proximate cause, making the difference, and everything that's left unclear, even then.

i've got a new attitude!

2009-10-27T05:49:00.000-07:00

oh my gosh, i have to do this so fast, i should not be blogging right now, but i want to write this down. it requires you to (1) read my last post, which was a short little transcript of an interview with the novelist hilary mantel, and (2) understand the basics of the philosopher peter strawson's essay 'freedom and resentment'. you go do (1), and i'll work on making (2) happen:

(skip this if you've read the strawson) in 'freedom and resentment' (probably one of the most riveting little philosophical essays i've ever read), strawson asserts that there are two general places from which we can consider one another. the first he calls 'the reactive attitutes' [RAs], and we 'inhabit' these (i think that this is the word strawson uses) pretty much all the time with other adults. from the RAs we implicitly consider one another agents, who are, with some exceptions, the cause of their own actions, and we can feel passionately about them as agents, hating them, or loving them as equals; we can feel mildly amused or annoyed at them as strangers. i did a bad job of explaining that, but it'll make more sense after i tell you about the second place-- the objective attitutes [OAs]. we tend to take up the OAs when we think about children, or people living with severe mental illnesses, or when we're acting as doctors, or social workers or whatever. when we think in this way, we are thinking about people in terms of (a) the forces that caused them and (b) how to use that information to sort of manage them in the future. blame, according to strawson, is an RA, and we can only avoid blaming others by taking up the OAs. but strawson doesn't think that we are capable of considering the other adults in our lives from the OAs for very long-- we can do it for a little, but we could never manage to maintain the OAs consistantly in our daily interactions. And, he thinks, we oughtn't do that even if we could, because while you can feel compassion, or affection, perhaps, or the love of a parent for a child, passionate adult engagement is impossible, almost definitionally. there is something clinical about the OAs, and that troubles strawson. (this paragraph sucks, but i'll fix it up later-- you get the general idea for now, and hopefully most of you have read the strawson and are skipping this part anyway.)

the point: i think that the attitude that HM takes up in thinking about these characters (thomas cromwell and robespierre) constitutes a third kind of approach or attitude. it is diognostic in a sense- she wants to know the causes, the full explanation of what happened- 'the facts'- but it is not clinical- first, because she's not trying to manage that person (their fate is set in history- the facts are in), just understand them, and second, because she is utterly concerned with the vividness of the character's inner life. she's not trying to do anything to them, she's just trying to understand them-- and not just functionally, but phenomenlogically. she wants most of all to do them justice.

i don't think that this is a version of either the RAs or the OAs. i don't think that this is a highbred. i think that this is a distinct approach, and it's a better approach. because i don't think that our respecting one another as agents or loving/hating one another passionately depends on our failing to know who a person is, including the forces that caused them (aka the forces that drive them), and if meditating on the causes of a person tend to mellow our most recriminative impulses, i don't think that they'll necessarily dull our ardour. indeed, i don't see why it couldn't give our ardour more depth and focus. oh man, i really have to go grade papers, but i want your opinion: what should these kinds of attitudes be called?

writing philosophy isn't like writing novels, but philosophers might be the better for thinking more like novelists, if novelists think like this.

2009-10-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

this morning i listened to an interview between liane hansen and booker prize winning author hilary mantel, whose novels i have never read. it was pretty wonderful, and my transcription doesn't do justice to her delivery. i was riveted:

LH: was it difficult to provide a certain amount of suspense when many people, anecdotally, know the outcome?’

HM: what we’re doing here is unlike what a historian does. we’re behind thomas cromwell’s eyes, and we’re moving forward with him through history. he can’t have hindsight. he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. he’s just blundering on, in the half dark, as we all are—the way we all move through life, with imperfect information—and he’s only able to guess at what will happen next. of course we all know what happened, and we can’t entirely forget that. but there are two questions: how did it happen? and also, most vitally for a novelist, how did it feel to the person concerned? how did history feel from the inside?

LH: are you attracted to historical characters that need some kind of rehabilitation? i mean, in 1992 in your book A Place of Greater Safety, you made robespierre sympathetic.

HM: i'm not so much attracted to rehabilitation as i'm attracted to justice. there is something in common with robespierre and thomas cromwell, in that they’ve both been given an extremely bad press. and it's very difficult to get back beyond reputation, back to the real man, back to the sources. because a lot of the history we're taught, it's just packets of prejudice handed on from one generation to the next, and the packet is never opened and examined. we just carry it unquestioningly and hand it on ourselves. and i suppose i’m the kind of perverse person that, if you tell me someone’s a saint, i'll go looking for his feet of clay. but if you tell me that someone is a scoundrel, and a villain, and there's nothing to be said for him, i start asking, “now why would you want me to think that?' so it's not that i feel i have to redeem these people in any way, it's that i think the facts will redeem them if the facts are ever examined.

i'm fully confident that i will someday cite this interview in my own writing-- this is just how i feel: 'i'm not so much attracted to rehabilitation as i'm attracted to justice...it's not that i feel i have to redeem these people in any way, its' that i think the facts will redeem them if the facts are ever examined.' we're resistant, i think, to examining the facts too carefully and consistently. it's unclear what would be left at the end of such a process.

death panels.

2009-09-19T07:50:00.001-07:00

the night my gram decided to die we were alone together. we were alone in the middle of the night in a smalltown midwestern hospital. there were a couple of nurses on shift who settled her into a room (she had been brought over from the nursing home where she was staying for several weeks while going through physical therapy to recover from a broken hip. there was water in her lungs-- a nascent case of pneumonia). everything was quiet and white and well lit. there was a sleepy young doctor at the nurses station looking over charts.

my arrival was hurried, and confused in that way that things are confusing when what woke you up was an emergency phone call. as i walked in the room my grampa walked out, grimacing, frantic. 'you talk to her. you talk to her,' he said, furious and defeated. i still had very little idea of what was happening.

let me skip ahead and tell you what i didn't know, and wouldn't really understand until well into that night's aftermath: gram had given up. and this strange moment, she saw, was her chance. what she needed to live was simple-- she needed fluids-- but it required hooking her up to a machine. once she was on the machine, it would be something quite complex to get herself taken off. but here, in the middle of the night, with only me, the young doctor, and her irascible but helpless husband, she could refuse. if she consented tonight to begin even the most basic treatment the inertia of hospital rules and a cadre of wellrested family members filled with goodmorning optimism would mean almost impossible odds. and she was done fighting odds she deemed impossible.

i don't know how to get back to that night, before i understood this, to fully remember and explain to you what happened or what it felt like then, before i'd fit fragmented experience into a story that made sense of it. but what i mostly remember, and what i want to talk about, is the stabbing helpless desperation of feeling that everything was at stake, and nothing was clear-- that it would be clear to someone, but that it wasn't clear to me, and i was the only one there. i was alone in the room with my small sad grama, who was pleading with me to understand and agree. she said she couldn't go back to the nursing home. she said 'i'm not strong. i never was.' she cried, 'i'm done. i'm just done.'

there was the vague sense that if i'd objected strongly enough that i could overrule her. but it wasn't clear. there was the vague sense that the prognosis wasn't so bad-- no one was telling us to give up-- which made her capitulation bewildering. but how did i get that impression exactly? when? was it about the pneumonia or the hip? was she just depressed? the nursing home was depressing. i felt depressed. should she be allowed to decide to die in that state of mind? how could i know her state of mind? were there really only two options? what was my role? did i get to decide? (she seemed to be pleading with me.) decide what? based on what? i was playing some role, the nature of which was unclear to me, in a situation i didn't understand, wrestling with feelings i never thought i'd have, suspicious of everything, particularly my own motives and knowledge. i felt like i was operate the heaviest machinery at gunpoint without a licence, and i just kept thinking, how can they let this happen? shouldn't someone in this giant white laboratory be explaining something to us?

how do i tell you, how do i really bring home to you that there, in the hospital in the middle of night it wasn't just the answers that were terribly unclear-- i couldn't even figure out what the questions were. and the young doctor and the unobtrusive nurses (those enormously competent nurses) weren't criminally neglectful, they were just giving us some quiet time to come to terms with some hard things. they didn't see i was drowning. i didn't know what to ask for help with exactly or how to. it was the middle of the night.

i don't think that my experience was unique. for all of the specific features of my circumstance detailed here, i think that what i was feeling was just what it feels like to confront the possible death of someone you love in the midst of the sort-of-science of modern western medicine happening in the tangled little bureaucracies we call hospitals.

***

one of greatest of a great many perversities of this healthcare reform debate has been the branding of end of life counseling for patients and their family members as "death panels". it's not even as if those shucking death panel fear are trying to make something bad seem worse than it really is. rather, they have attempted to paint one of the most sensible, insightful and deeply kind bits of legislation i've ever seen written up in official language as something monstrous.

i needed help-- not so much answering the questions as figuring out what they were and what all of the possible bases for making them might be. i've largely dedicated my life to being ready to understand and face mortal questions as they come up, but that night i needed help more than i've ever needed it since. if you think you wouldn't-- if you think, with senator grassley that we have "every right to fear [of end of life counseling]. you shouldn’t have counseling at the end of life. you ought to have counseling 20 years before you’re going to die. you ought to plan these things out" -- if you've never been through something like this before, and you think you could do better-- then i feel sorry for you, and scared for our country. there are a few things we all do have in common, and the experience of death is one. your time will come, and what i wish for you, and i couldn't wish more, is sound and thorough counsel.

gay marriage.

2009-05-27T21:08:00.000-07:00

apologies to facebook friends who've already read this, but today i reposted a link-- a link to a blog post that responds critically to the outpouring of anger in the wake of the california supreme court decided 6-1 in favor of upholding proposition 8. i posted this link with some trepidation, as my own update feed was almost entirely filled with good friends who are, in fact, very angry about the decision. here's the link, and here's what i wrote:

to be clear: i'm interested in civil unions. not for gay people, but for everyone. the rights, privileges, and obligations that come with state-sanctioned unions should be available to any consenting adults who would choose to enter into them-- a legal framework flexible enough to structure all kinds of different families. if i spend my old age caring and being cared for by my dearest friends, then we'd be a household, a family, worthy of those privileges, rights and obligations. if my sister and i raise children together, then we'd be a household, a family, worthy of those privileges, rights and obligations. leave it to religion to specially consecrate sexual relationships (heterosexual or otherwise), and abolish civil marriage in favor of civil unions between any consenting adults who will pledge in good faith to be profoundly responsible for one another.

this is a policy change i would donate money and sign-petitions and canvas and write letters to the editor in support of.

i was extremely anxious about posting anything that would convey my ambivalence about the decision. partly out of respect for the very real pain and disappointment suffered by citizens of california; partly out of respect for the fact that, even though i'm not exactly "for gay marriage", those fighting against it are obviously motivated by their own intolerable homophobia and not to be supported in their aims; and mostly by the fear that it would further alienate me from certain friends (see: my last post).

but this is a serious issue, and i've got to say what i think. for every story about a same-sex romantic partner being barred from a hospital room, or being ignored while estranged parents are allowed to make bad end of life decisions or take away children or property (even if special papers have been signed), there's a story about the same sorts of things happening to people without romantic partners. their actual life-partners-- friends and housemates who care for and understand them and their wishes-- are ignored. these are wrenching stories-- each one a terrible miscarriage of justice. all people, in the vulnerable moments around death and birth and sickness, need recourse to the special protection that state-recognized unions afford.

and there's something maybe larger and certainly more radical that ought to be on the table: it's hard to see how we, as queers, can effectively imagine and adopt nontraditional family structures without said recourse. and it's hard to see how the larger public could begin to re-imagine traditional (often oppressive) family structures in the shadow of civil marriage. i won't go on about this at length, but it's worth mentioning. i'm no HRC gay with a yen to assimilate. i'm a radical, god damn it, at least about this, with a mind to reimagine.

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.

2009-05-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

if you're very lucky then it will happen to you once or twice or several times over the course of your life that you'll spend a smitten season with someone, and with this someone romance, when it concludes, concludes simply and in an easy affection. smittenhood itself lives on. smittenhood deepens, even.

i'm very lucky. so lucky! but my friend hannah (with whom i spent a smitten season) is moving away. i'm feeling surprisingly stricken! she's moving bravely, i think, to an unfamiliar city where she'll learn to do the work she loves, and work in a new way on the love she's in (grad school, in other words, and the pleasure of domestic partnership). so we're all being scheduled, all of us lucky ones, for a little quality hannah time before she goes, and mine was yesterday. i should have been writing a paper, as i should be writing a paper now, but it was such a worthwhile conversation, as our conversations are (i can't say how much i'll miss them).

hannah and i have both been thinking some, for various personal and pragmatic reasons, about domesticity. i feel surrounded by it all of a sudden. i'm sure it wasn't actually sudden. i'm sure it sauntered up to me slowly, in plain sight, waving. but here it is-- a collective turning inward toward shared homes, and marriages, and pets, and babies. everybody wants a damn baby! i can't even love babies without being accused of wanting them, too. can't i like babies for themselves, for being awesome, without self-serving motives like wanting to own one and dress it up and do things i think are cute?

not coincidentally, i think, i've made a series of apparently offensive comments over the last few weeks regarding the children, pets, and relationship dynamics of my friends. frankly, i haven't said anything that i'd never thought to myself (or even said out loud) before, but i've begun to say these things too loudly and at just the wrong moment. i've been courting confrontation.

the summer i met hannah was a conspicuously undomestic moment in both our lives, and this was reflected in the politics and circumstances of our friends and wider community. 'i was living on whisky and air' she said, and i was explicitly practicing a kind of friendly pluralism in which anything like the formal or informal expectations and hierarchies that come along with romantic relationships were strictly prohibited. and this was, it's true, a moment, but our views and commitments weren't, i think, fad-ish. i was two years in to a four year stint of this way of doing things, and most all of our friends were trying for something a little weird, where they were trying for anything at all.

i still think that there's something ethically dubious about the expectations and hierarchies that tend to structure romantic relationships. on the one hand, arranging one's priorities and expectations around a single other person can undermine other relationships-- to friends, to oneself. but i also wonder if the relationship in question-- the very one being prioritized-- doesn't tend to wither under the weight of prioritization and expectation. right or wrong, i've spent a long time trying to live by the conviction that one way of making relationships sustainable is to resist the impulse to expect, and, spun out to it's conclusion, this conviction has at times led me pretty far off the beaten path, romance wise.

my concerns aside, this primary relationship business seems to be what people are up to these days, even me, sort of. and i'm mostly proud and impressed and happy. this winter i visited with another old friend, unexpectedly living with someone and liking it, and she said to me that loving someone alone is not reason enough to think that you can make domesticity last. partnership-- sharing your life with another person-- is the deepest kind of compromise. it's an agreement to negotiate on the most important and distinctive features of what your life will be like. you have to think, she said, that this kind of compromise is valuable in itself-- not just something yr willing to put up with because you love someone. loving someone is one thing, wanting to be close to them no matter the cost-- honestly, that shit's a dime a dozen. any asshole can fall in love, and they generally do. it's another thing to think of someone that your own life would go better if it were decided by what you come up with together, even through conflict, then it would guided by your judgment alone-- to think that even the conflict itself generates something of vital importance-- that you're better for it. conflict will always be a reason to leave if you see things any other way.

i'm not sold on it yet, myself. it might be a good way to do things, and it might not be. it might be a good way to do things for some people, but not for everyone. "it" might be several different kinds of things misleadingly disguised as one, or one thing misleading disguised as several. i don't know. but i'm lucky, as i've mentioned. i'm surrounded by people i trust and admire who i can observe and talk with as they run their own on-going experiments on how a life might best be lived. h.lewis is just one bravewondefullovemess of an example. the greater the diversity of the experiments, earnestly undertaken, the more i learn and the better i can imagine. and the less fucking cranky i get. i want to romance my friends, and be a friend to my girlfriend, and i want my friends to be my teachers, and i want to treat babies like they're my friends, too.

hannah helped me think about it. she's put a damper on my bitchery with brave thoughtful goodwill, and thereby saved the rest of you from my aggressive heckling. sucks for you, she's leaving. no wait, sucks for me. no wait, i'm so happy! another city with a comfortable couch i can sleep on. xo, HL-- xo.

the retributivist instinct, revisited.

2009-04-23T05:22:00.000-07:00

last year i wrote a little about jared diamond's article in the new yorker, "vengeance is ours". the new yorker is now being sued by the papua new guinean tribe for making false accusations, and the media ethics project at the art science research lab (stinkyjournalism.com) is about to release a 40,000 study entitled "jared diamond's factual collapse: the new yorker's papua new guinea revenge tale untrue". it was diamond's analysis of the facts that i found objectionable, which no factual expose can disprove, and i'm sure that it's very complicated and diamond could probably explain things in a way that made sense of his choices. but in as much as he even finessed the facts it begins to look like he used them to illustrate a conclusion that he had reached independant of particulars. its the worst kind of anthrolopogy and the worst kind of philosophy that begins with an assumed conclusion and chooses the evidence to suit it.

2009-04-14T10:56:00.001-07:00

the truth is very different from what we are inclined to believe. even if we are not aware of this, most of us are non-reductionists. we [are] strongly inclined to believe that our existence is a deep further fact, distinct from physical and psychological continuity, and a fact that must be all-or-nothing. this is not true.

is the truth depressing? some may find it so. but i find it liberating, and consoling. when i believed that my existence was such a further fact, i seemed imprisoned in myself. my life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which i was moving faster ever year, and at the end of which there was darkness. when i changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. i now live in the open air. there is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. but the difference is less. other people are closer. i am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

when i believed the non-reductionist view, i also cared more about my inevitable death. after my death, there will be no one living who will be me. i can now redescribe this fact. though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connection as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention. some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways. there will later be some memories about my life. and there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. my death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. this is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. now that i have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.

after hume thought hard about his arguments, we was thrown into 'the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness'. the cure was to dine and play backgammon with his friends. hume's arguments supported total scepticism. this is why they brought darkness and utter loneliness. the arguments for reductionism have on me the opposite effect. thinking hard about these arguments removes the glass wall between me and others. and, as i have said, i care less about my death. this is merely the fact that, after a certain time, none of the experiences that will occur will be related, in certain ways, to my present experiences. can this matter all that much?

derek parfit
reasons & persons

enforcers., or, vigilante outting!

2009-04-10T08:44:00.000-07:00

several weeks ago, i was privileged enough to be eating dinner with some really wonderful philosophers- my fellow philosophy students, my professors lionel mcpherson and erin kelly, and two guests, tommie shelby and derrick darby. it was maybe the least socially awkward philosophical dinner party that i've ever been lucky enough to be a part of. the conversation, which i've recounted a number of times since (if i've recounted it to you, bear with me-- or, conversely, don't bother), turned, to my delight, to the moral status of vigilante outing! the gist is this:

(1) within the gay community there is an general belief that a closeted person could rightfully object to being outed by another person in the community.

(2) then there is the more radical view that a closeted person has no right to object to being outed, though it may cause them some harm. it might, in other words, be ethically permissible (or even obligatory) to out them on a number of grounds. first (this is the seemingly easier case), the person in question may be doing some direct harm to the community from their closet-- a closeted conservative politician, or evangelical religious leader, say. but the more interesting argument applies to people that we all know, closeted at work, or at home, in most cases to avoid harms and efforts ranging from the tedious to the down-right dangerous. the idea is that by being closeted, they harm the community by failing to bear their part of the burden in the larger struggle to secure benefits that they themselves enjoy, or could enjoy. it's the old free rider problem.

i have lots of thoughts about this! but i'm not going to talk about them here, directly. my view, in short, is that no one is ever, even in the extreme case, morally obligated to out someone, and that outing anyone under any circumstances is probably the wrong thing to do. but my reasons for holding this view are not, i think, conservative. i fully recognize the very real problem that the radical proponent of (2) is openly confronting:

in any community, and particularly within some solidarity group engaged in a struggle for survival, it is essential that the group find some way to protect themselves, both from external threats, and from the internal threat of free riders. the survival of the community itself depends on defending certain borders (literal, ideological, or otherwise), and on each member within those borders doing his or her part to abide by community standards. and yet, each individual within the group must grapple constantly with the temptation to minimize or avoid altogether the burdens of citizenship. if a group is large and its members have a reasonable measure of privacy, there will always be opportunities for this kind of exploitation. so keep it all together-- to maintain the good thing you've got going-- you've got to find a way to police against free riders, and ensure solidarity.

but even if all communities require policing, it might still be the case that the individual acts that policing consists in are not the sorts of things that, in and of themselves, anyone ought to do. going back, for example, to the case of the vigilante outer: it might be the case that if we had this sort of community policing, we'd all be more honest, or that we'd all be forced to join the fight and stay in it or something like that-- if no one had the option of being closeted, it seems reasonable to assume that we'd have more people fighting harder for gay rights-- fighting for their lives, bearing some of the cost of some collective struggle. but it still strikes me as obviously true that the sorts of people inclined to do this sort of outing are going to be morally insensitive dicks. and if they're not-- if they're just good people who decide that it's a job that must be done, despite it's distastefulness, by someone, for the sake of the group-- then they're going pay a high price, selling their souls, so to speak, in the supposed interest of the rest of us. this is not something that i would either do myself, or council anyone else to.

the problem, i think, is this: it's one thing to ask someone to do what's right, despite the cost to oneself-- it's another to ask someone to do something that's wrong as the means to some better end. i don't want to be a free rider-- it doesn't even sound fun or satisfying to me. which is why i try (with occasional success) to do what's right despite the cost to myself, and why i would encourage anyone who asked me to do the same (for their own sake, as well as everyone else's). but i don't think that i can endorse (or even fully make sense of) the notion that it's right to do something that's wrong in the interest of survival. and in this case, it's the survival of a group whose own principles may very well conflict with the actions that must be taken in order for the group to survive.

people sometimes assume or imply that an act that preserves a person or community that is itself good, is a good or at least acceptable act. i don't see why this should be true. it strikes me as obvious that being a good person is going to come into conflict with self- (or group-) preservation. but it's not at all obvious what, when that conflict arises, one ought to do about it.

¹ an exception: i don't think that anyone is ever obligated to closet themselves for someone else-- it's unreasonable for someone closeted to expect another person to keep their actual behavior a secret. while it's lame, i think, to out someone for the sake of outing them, it's better when we can live our lives openly, and it's unreasonable for someone who fails to live openly to ask someone they've slept with to fail along with them. though outing someone for the sake of outing them and outing someone just in the course of living one's own life honestly might have the same impact on the person who is closeted, it seems to me that each act has a different moral status.

how it's not fair.

2009-03-06T17:07:00.001-08:00

i'm a little drunk¹, but there's some things i need to write down right now before i forget them. this past week filing² we found a diary entry from a woman³, a radical, a member of the symbionese liberation army who was shot by police probably a year later, and she was sad and cynical over the death of a revolutionary also gunned down, turned against by someone he was fighting with, and she said (sad and cynically and better than i will) that the revolutionary spirit is so rare and beautiful, so rare and beautiful that she just didn't know anymore if a single drop of it was worth losing to save spiritless others.

i bet that the man she was talking about was so luminous. i bet he bristled with imagination and love for the people and a sensitivity to injustice like an exposed nerve. i bet he was so beautiful and so rare. but but but but but! what does a revolutionary fight for if not people? and what are people but just themselves? and if you fight for them, you'd better be fighting for them and not your idea of them that's wrong. that's what i thought when i read it. i thought, first, 'there's something wrong here-- something amiss at the very center of this moving idea'. revolutionaries fight to free people. maybe people need revolutionaries to free them. but revolutionaries need people just for there to be such a thing as a revolutionary. what can it mean, then, to say that people aren't worth revolutionary blood? what beauty can the revolutionary spirit have independent of these others who fight to free? even if they fucking crucify you. even if it's a thing about people that they will always crucify you. that's people. that's what you're fighting for, and i think part of what that woman meant by the beauty of the revolutionary spirit is that when you have it, you have it consummately. you are the fight. and the fight is (ostensibly) for the people. but could you keep fighting if you didn't harbor the illusion that they'd all rise up like an army behind you? could you keep fighting if you didn't believe falsely that they'd love you for it? if you can't, then the revolutionary's very identity, their sense of self and purpose, depends on maintaining this illusion.

have you ever been loved as someone that you aren't? someone that you aren't as good as? and then disappointed someone as bigly as an ocean? have you ever thought that you might prefer to be loved as the big risk that you actually are?

the people never said they'd rise up. the people never gave anyone any reason to think that they'd ever love anything and not turn on it. people will say what they say, but over and above what what they say stands who they are, and it's right there for you to see. and if you love people you've got to see it and love them anyway. love them just because every once in awhile, though you have no right to expect it, they'll make art or keep a promise or smile at you like an arrow through the heart.

sorry for all the rhetorical questions. i've had a few.

1 i've since made some sober editorial decisions. i haven't edited for grammar or anything like that, just minorly, for clarity. i've also removed a quoted song lyric, because quoting song lyrics is embarrassing, but i do urge you all to get neko case's new album and listen to it repeatedly. i particularly like 'vengeance is sleeping', 'i'm an animal', and 'middle cyclone' (the title track).

2 some of you probably know that i work as a research assistant to a radical feminist theorist, attempting to organize an archive of her personal papers (lectures, correspondence, etc.). we're still working on a first sift of the (seventy-odd boxes of) papers, so it involves a lot of one-page-at-a-time sifting and filing.

3 nancy ling perry, known also as fahizah.

it's been a somewhat difficult and totally wonderful february. march!

2009-03-03T16:09:00.000-08:00

i've just completed, after two weeks of toil, a prospectus for what will be my writing sample. i will no doubt tinker with it in the coming days:

Despite the foundational role that capacities play in so many analyses of moral responsibility, capacities are not, as far as I can tell, entities¹ of which there is some common or uncontroversial understanding. Nearly any theory in which moral responsibility or membership in a moral community is predicated on some notion of freedom or agency will in turn explain freedom or agency in terms of capacities, either rational or sympathetic. The risk philosophers run when they don’t state plainly some preferred analysis of the term—and even, it turns out, when they do—is packing that which is at issue into an unanalyzed or amorphous conception of a capacity, rather than directly claiming or arguing for it.² It is essential, I think, that those philosophers who invoke capacities and claim for them some power, explanatory or otherwise, should state their analysis plainly and in a way that gives us some reason to think that capacities are rightly thought to have the powers claimed for them.

In Ethics and the A Priori Michael Smith does provide an explicit analysis of capacities, which he offers in service of his own account of moral agency and responsibility. Here Smith, in his explicitness about capacities and their role in his larger project, models what I think is a useful and forthright approach to moral theory. And, further, I find his analysis of capacities itself to be both plausible and illuminating. Where I disagree with Smith is in thinking that capacities, as he ably explains them, are adequate to the task of supporting his larger views on agency and responsibility. Far from shoring up his larger view, his analysis of capacities gives us an excruciatingly clear view of why rational capacities will fail to provide an adequate justification of our attributions of moral responsibility. [In this paper I will present Smith’s view, offer a criticism of it, and then evaluate two potential rebuttals.]

A capacity, as Smith analyzes it, is an essentially metaphysical entity. While a rational capacity is underwritten by some actual psychological state constituted, perhaps, by some state of the brain, of the individual in possession of said capacity, the capacity itself is, over and above the actual state, a host of true counterfactual claims about that agent in relevantly similar circumstances. So when confronted with the question “could X have done otherwise?” we are to understand this as a question of whether or not X had the capacity to do otherwise, and this, in turn, depends on whether, in a certain number of relevantly similar possible worlds, it is true of X that she does otherwise. Smith has aggregated the would haves into a could have, which is yours (you could have), and which is therefore you. In the case of someone who has one drink too many, for example, we might ask, “would she have chosen to have that drink if a different friend had been there with her?”; “would she have chosen to have that drink if she had considered for a moment longer her commitments the next morning?” If the answer to enough of these sorts counterfactual questions is yes, then it can be truly said of the agent in question that she had the capacity to do otherwise—that her failure to do the right thing is, in these sorts of cases, best explained as a failure of her capacity to act rationally (which, for Smith, is synonymous with acting rightly). She had the capacity to act well, and she is therefore rightly thought answerable for her poor choice.

Claims about capacities are claims about possibility-- about what we could have done, what we can do. Anyone committed to a moral system in which responsibility depends on capacities, either directly or by way of agency, will therefore have to predicate their system on certain metaphysical commitments, some way of making sense of modal claims. Smith offers a possible worlds analysis of capacities, and possible worlds analyses provide, if I understand correctly, our clearest and best analyses of modal claims. It’s hard to see what we could mean by claims about capacities other than something along the lines of what Smith suggests. What this analysis reveals, I will argue, is that our assumptions about what capacities justify are, according to our best metaphysical theories, misinformed. More specifically, I will argue that Smith’s analysis of capacities makes clear that he, along with others who claim that the possession of rational capacities justifies attributions of moral responsibility, begs the question against his opponents. Far from demonstrating that capacities provide an adequate basis for attributions of moral responsibility, Smith's analysis lays bare their inadequacy to the task.

To see why this is so, we need only look to Smith’s analysis of dispositions. Though the disposition he analyzes is the property of a non-human animal (a chameleon), his analysis of a disposition is otherwise identical to his analysis of a capacity—both are analyzed in terms of hosts of true and relevant counterfactual claims. In his example case, we have a shy but powerfully intuitive chameleon who, though disposed to be green under normal viewing conditions, blushes red when he knows he is being watched—and always knows when he is being watched. He has, in other words, the disposition to be green when viewed though, when actually viewed, he is red without fail. His disposition to be green under normal viewing conditions is constituted in part by properties of his skin, and in part counterfactually—in all of the many nearby possible worlds in which the chameleon is a little less shy or a little less intuitive, he will be green when viewed. As in the case of capacities, dispositions are a kind of aggregate—the collection of relevant would haves—underwritten by the actual constitution of the one to whom it is attributed.

A disposition, when present, does not engender responsibility in the way that Smith takes a capacity to. If I have the capacity to resist the temptation to have another drink (if, in many relevantly similar circumstances I do resist it), then, Smith says, my failure to resist is best explained as a failure of my capacity to resist, and it is therefore right to hold me responsible. I have failed to do what I could have done. But imagine substituting the term “disposition” for “capacity”. Would anyone ever be inclined to attribute my having an ill-advised third drink to a failure of my general disposition to refrain? I think not. This seems, in fact, to get things exactly backwards: my general disposition to refrain is, for once, not the explanation for my behavior. We must look elsewhere.³ Smith himself, when speaking of dispositions (never in terms of human beings, but in terms of animals), describes these sorts of situations as cases of masked dispositions (i.e. cases in which the disposition is masked by some other disposition, which, I assume, is the better candidate if you’re looking to attribute my behavior to something).

What all of this amounts to is that dispositions and capacities, understood in this way, are both similarly constituted and metaphysically indistinguishable, and yet there is no indication that the attribution of a disposition engenders responsibility, while it is taken for granted that a capacity does. No argument is offered for why capacities engender responsibility while dispositions don’t, or even, for that matter, why some notion over and above dispositions is necessary for adequately explaining human behavior.⁴ The application of the term “capacity” to certain modal properties of human beings and “disposition” to the modal properties of other things seems merely to name the fact that we just do hold human beings (and not inanimate objects, weather patterns, plants or non-human animals) morally responsible. Smith thus assumes what is at issue.

Smith might reply that the difference between dispositions and capacities is that capacities are constituted in the actual world by brain states giving rise to psychological states, while dispositions are constituted by other sorts of bodily properties—of the skin, for example, or of muscles. Perhaps it is even some particular subset of psychological states that merit the modal status “capacity”. I haven’t fully thought this objection through yet, but I don’t see what (non-question begging) difference this distinction could make.

Smith might also reply that his explanation of capacities need not be justificatory. Indeed, he actually suggests this, on the grounds that not only our moral theory and practices, but all thought and discourse presuppose capacities. It is therefore deemed inappropriate to demand a justificatory explanation on the grounds that that which thought and discourse must presuppose is beyond the reach of valid skepticism. On this view, the job of the moral theorist is just to delineate the role that capacities necessarily play our moral systems and theories, and give the best possible descriptive account of them (which Smith certainly does). And yet Smith’s analysis is rife with justificatory aspirations, and, I will argue, rightly so. Neither thought nor discourse presuppose capacities (though many moral theories, I gladly concede, most certainly do). Our thought and discourse do certainly presuppose some modal truths and entities, but nothing that can’t be adequately explained in terms of dispositions. Again, Smith has provided no reason why we should think in terms of responsibility engendering capacities rather than the similarly constituted and metaphysically identical dispositions which, though they may license certain expectations, do not engender responsibility. We appeal to capacities (over and above dispositions) not because we need to, but because we want to.

Smith, finally, doesn’t succeed in providing an adequate “basis of an account of freedom and responsibility”. He doesn’t make sense of freedom and responsibility by making sense of capacities. The descriptive project—the project of sketching out an analysis of capacities—never gets adequate prescriptive traction. And while his descriptive project accomplishes quite a lot (as I hope to have time to spell out a little)⁵, capacities, so described, will not serve as an adequate basis for an account of moral responsibility. Which is not to say that nothing could, but only that capacities (or dispositions if you prefer) are not the right sorts of things.

[footnotes]
¹If capacities can even be said to be “entities”.

²I think that this happens in all sorts of philosophical exchanges, and the “it” therefore varies some from case to case, but I’m thinking most particularly about arguments over free will, practical rationality, and internalism versus externalism.

³In many cases, it will, admittedly, be hard to know just where we ought to look. This, I think, is part of what motivates our reliance on the notion of capacities—it sort of absorbs the impact of all the things we don’t and can’t know about what explains human behavior.

⁴I don’t think that there is any sound argument for why capacities, given their nature, engender responsibility while dispositions don’t. I don’t think that capacities can offer licit explanatory power over and above dispositions. I think, in fact, that we assign

⁵Smith’s analysis of capacities/dispositions helps us to see their importance in a number of ways, particularly around issues of personal identity. Who you are, on Smith’s view, is partly constituted by who you might be, who you could have been. There’s something right about this, and that Smith’s view captures it seems to me to be one of its great virtues. Further, a capacity, like a disposition, licenses the making of all sorts of interesting and important distinctions between objects (in this case people). Think again of the shy and intuitive green chameleon: employing Smith’s analysis, we carefully capture a real difference between it and the really red chameleon. Similarly, it seems plausible to think that there is a real distinction to be made among all of those people who have never gone skydiving between those who would go, given the chance, and those who wouldn’t. Smith’s careful analysis structures these distinctions—which are, I think, morally relevant, and generally crucial— setting truth conditions for them, etc. Overall, Smith’s analysis of capacities succeed in making sense of them in a way that allows for a vastly enriched (theoretical) view of the world—and agents in particular.

waking up.

2009-02-21T05:33:00.000-08:00

i dreamed that i blogged, and now i feel the need to really do it so that my feeling that i did can attach itself to something in the world-- can have an actual object. here is a prompt from my schoolmate anthony diclaudio and my given response:

anthony: ...the only logically consistent ending to Lost is ______.

laura: i have a theory (by which i mean a cruel hope) that it's an extended mindfuck experiment in how long people will spend trying to make sense of a bunch of random and ever increasing information. it'd be like a cross between the experiment where you show toddlers three pictures of shapes in different places on the page, and they (the toddlers) attribute intentions to them (the shapes) and tell a story about what the shapes "doing" to each other, and that other experiment where you see how many pennies you can drop in a cup full of water before the surface tension breaks and the cup runs over.

on my current subject of choice:

2009-02-17T06:35:00.000-08:00

'we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, i think, than most people realize even now.' p.krugman, in yesterday's new york times.

the following is from holland cotter's excellent ' the boom is over. long live the art!', featured in last week's new york times. it begins with a totally worthwhile analysis of american art in the american economy of the past fifty years.

"....Students who entered art school a few years ago will probably have to emerge with drastically altered expectations. They will have to consider themselves lucky to get career breaks now taken for granted: the out-of-the-gate solo show, the early sales, the possibility of being able to live on the their art.

"It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

"At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again...

"Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace?

"I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense.

"Right. Exactly. Crazy"

sometimes i wish that philosophers were more like artists-- sometimes and partially supporting themselves and educating others through work in the academy, but with the larger and more vibrant world of philosophy happening out in the cities and in the minds of anonymous farm kids on their way to cities, as compelled as any young painters to keep "imagining the unknown and unknowable".

[and also, this.]

there are more than a million. there are more even than an infinity.

2009-02-11T17:47:00.001-08:00

it sounds simple, i know. but it’s not. listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. everyone you know has a completely different one - the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. they convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations and continuations. some make their worlds without knowing it. their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed soufflés and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. but you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. a theater for your life, if I could put it like that. don’t live an accident. don’t call a knife a knife. live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. make accidents on purpose. call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. now i’m not a very smart man, but i’m not a dumb one, either. so listen: if you can manage what i’ve told you, as i was never able to, you will give your life meaning.

jonathan safran foer
a convergence of birds

(i'm reading about possible worlds again, and i'm always reading about agency of course, so i like to read this. but then it made me uncomfortable, too: i'm more and more skeptical all the time of what people call personal truths. i suspect that anything not common and available to us all might be something really good, but it isn't the truth.)

butterfly magic!

2009-01-22T20:34:00.000-08:00

my little tucson visit has been so nice. it began raining at almost the exact moment that my plane touched down, and the sun hasn't showed its face since, which is just fine with me. i know it's some kind of travesty, but i like winter and was feeling unprepared to abandon my winter layers, which has turned out to be unnecessary. i'd like to write little portraits of my friends here, but i need to do a little metaphysics reading before my host is up. maybe tomorrow. in the meantime, i'll say this: j.s. knows just the kinds of adventure that i like, and also the kinds of adventures of which i will be skeptical/petrified of but then love so much. here are some little videos from the butterfly magic exhibit at the tucson botanical gardens:

;

[NOTE: i am not under the influence of any drugs in these videos, but dumb with wonderment! jerk.]

self-interest.

2009-01-06T13:29:00.001-08:00

"OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest."

the end of the financial world as we know it
michael lewis & david einhorn

why does it have to be forced? this is just exactly what's been so hard for me to understand about nearly every aspect of this economic wreck, and every corrupt corporate meltdown that led up to it, and all the ones that just keep coming: where is enlightened self-interest? how the fuck (b.madoff is just one clear example) did all of these people think things would end? were they hoping that they'd just die before anyone noticed that there was no substance to their claims?

it's not that i trusted corporations and financial advisers to be virtuous-- to the contrary, i "trusted" them (wryly, implicitly) to look out for their own interests with a machiavellian precision. i thought they were self-interest experts, and they've turned out to be a bunch of fucking amatuers-- their "self-interest" so stupidly managed that they couldn't so much as sustain themselves-- their decisions based, apparently, on a conception of self-interest so simultaneously hollow and overblown that to call it sophomoric is to give it too much credit. (bah-dum, ching.)

all i can conclude about this bewildering mess, finally, is what i generally conclude on nearly every topic: pretense is so tempting, but it will fuck you in the end.

something, continued.

2009-01-03T19:59:00.000-08:00

it's sometimes something more sinister (sinister?) than superstition or even solipsism that leads us to attribute ill-will and bad intentions to other people or the universe at large: we posit external enemies as a way of avoiding the seemingly unface-able truth that the problem is in us-- that the enemy is inside. and it must take elaborate psychological mechanisms to prop up this belief in external enemies, because isn't it obvious that we ourselves are the only common factor in all of our experiences and changing circumstances?

i don't mean to sound like some kind of republican or motivational speaker or anything like that. who we are is itself a part of the world, and a product of it, and our demons are so often an unfair fact of bodies and circumstances into which were brought without consent. and it's a nightmare-- a reoccurring human nightmare, told and retold in all our scariest stories: the alien is on our own ship; the parasite is in your own guts; they're not the ghosts-- we are. it's a powerful fear we carry. it's a powerful shame. and maybe it takes a kind of power to confront it that's greater than what we can reasonably expect of another person. that might be so.

and sometimes it really does work the other way around-- in the case of oppression, say-- and then, of course, the members of the oppressed group are made to feel (to deeply feel) that the problem is in them, written into their genetic code, when in fact they really are systematically confronting other people's bullshit. and they wonder 'am i crazy?'

note to self.

2008-12-30T11:31:00.000-08:00

for further thought and attention post-metaphysics comp: religion! (as a moral motive)
i've added the two linked journal articles to my moral motivation-themed summer reading list.

and another thing.

2008-12-17T11:20:00.000-08:00

the same actions which are responsible for and instrumental in the origin and development of the virtues are also the means of their destruction.

aristotle
the nichomachean ethics
book ii, part 3

aristotle famously posits the golden mean as the way to understand virtue-- courage, for instance, as the virtue standing midway between cowardice (a vice of deficit) and recklessness (a vice of excess). virtue is the target, standing at the balanced dead center of all manner of vice and moral compromise.

i wrote a little about virtue ethics over the summer-- not so much about the golden mean, but what the actual exercise of a virtue consist in. what i mean is, i was addressing not so much the question of how, in theory, we understand what courage is, but what it is to be courageous (or to be patient-- the example i used at the time). to actually be virtuous is to be someone whose behavior conforms to virtue time and time again. it has to do with a consistency that is the result of each action springing from the same firm character. and just as consistency depends on firmness of character, firmness of character depends on authenticity. if it's not really you, you can't sustain it. beyond that, the virtuous person explicitly takes herself to be striving for virtue, undertakes virtuous acts for their own sake (that is, for the sake of the ultimate end-- the good life) and not in pursuit of some extrinsic end (like money or something like that), and, in turn, gets a certain pleasure from acting in the way according with virtue.

so, i'm trying to finish a paper on all this. in the paper i try to come to some understanding of how we can make sense of extremists-- radicals, visionaries, ascetics-- in these terms. a lot of our moral heroes (religious saints in particular, but also secular figures like ghandi or john brown) fall into this category, and there are lots of other people (particularly artists) who make valuable contributions to society, although their value isn't explicitly moral, which seems to be generated by certain extreme or ultimately self-defeating character traits. on the surface, at least, it looks like these sorts of extreme characters are not conforming to any sort of "happy medium", and yet we revere them, either for their moral integrity, or some quasi-moral aesthetic integrity.

are creative highs and principled stands the elevated end of a seesaw-- dependent upon, caused by, or one part of a whole that necessarily includes a lowered end? does the golden mean leave us perfectly balanced at the fulcrum, the low end raised, and the raised end lowered? what do we lose, if anything, and is it worth it?

i seriously have to finish this paper.

something i've been thinking about.

2008-12-13T02:04:00.000-08:00

attributing good faith to all other human beings-- particularly those who have done some harm to us-- is often considered naive. but it seems to me, given all of the complexities of circumstance, cognitive biases toward attending to our own interests rather than those of others, and the myriad ways in which people makes sense of (rationalize, perhaps) their own behavior, that the real naivete lies in attributions of bad faith or, more precisely, ill will. it strikes me as almost superstitious-- naive in the way that it's naive to attribute weather that scares or injures us to angry gods. we're harmed in some way by some movement in the world, and, in our pain and ignorance and self-absorption, we make sense of it by attributing some ill intention. this is not a new idea. but i don't mean to say that it's naive to attribute intentions to people in general-- i mean bad intentions in particular. i'm suggesting that bad intentions, despite all the wrenching harm that people manage to do, are relatively rare, and that making adequate sense of all that harm, even in terms of human agency, will require a more sophisticated analysis.

this sounds a little funny. on the one hand i'm trying to correct a certain misanthropic world view. on the other hand, my criticism is built on an understanding of human beings as vulnerable and ignorant and self-absorbed. but i don't mean these terms pejoratively. we're relatively small things with a lot of nerve endings (literal and metaphorical) and limited resources and just two eyes to see out of. to have contempt for a thing because it's that sort of thing strikes me as being ungenerous to the point of its being a kind of misapprehension. what's naive (though forgivably so) is to have ever believed that things were otherwise-- to have been operating on the assumption that we are more, or that our being good or worthy depends on such a thing.

more cut and pasted email.

2008-12-11T11:31:00.000-08:00

(this one's from elissa j. do your part, creeps.)

Subject: the suburban needs your help

Hello all,

The Peter Coffin Studio and The Suburban Gallery, Chicago are working on a project called; "How to Sneak into Art Museums Without Paying". We'd like you to share any techniques you have acquired through your life/work experience to submit to this project. These instructions (of "How to...") from you should be hand drawn and scanned to reproduced in a booklet/zine that will be distributed for an exhibition at the Suburban and to participants.

These illustrated techniques should actually work and must be relatively current. The instructions you provide should not require doctored documents such as fake passes etc or fake uniforms/badges and should be relatively easy to understand so that someone on the street can enter without paying using the instructions you submit.

If you would like to submit a plan, please hand draw it on 8 1/2 x 11 white paper in black pen/or pencli and scan in on gray scale @ 200 DPI and send to; assistant.petercoffinstudio@gmail.com

Include your name/pseudonym separate from the drawing in the email, to be included in the credits of the booklet. All accepted participants will of course receive a copy of the booklet/zine. And remember to include in the drawing the museum's name and city.

These are plans that should actually work so stick to keeping them as clear as possible....including street entrances, descriptive markers or "what to say to a guard"... anything to make the drawing effective. I have included a sample of a plan to sneak into the KW museum in Berlin to show generally what we are looking for. Feel free to forward this to any sneaky pals you know anywhere, especially outside the US as this is for any major museum/institution across the globe.

Best,

-Jory

BEST EMAIL EVER.

2008-12-09T09:41:00.000-08:00

from: matthew allen
to: me

i searched for "agency philosophy" in google images - hoping to find some obfuscatory diagram to wave at architects to my rhetorical advantage - and i came across an image of you! brightened my day! but no diagram...

M

(it's true! i'm on page 3!)
(also, soon i'll post real blogs again-- as opposed to cutting and pasting self-promotional materials.)

huh.

2008-11-11T08:46:00.001-08:00

i want to read this ten times and say a hundred things about it, but i can't right now.

2008-10-15T07:05:00.001-07:00

i'm all twisted up this semester-- contorted with work! one result of this is that i've been sadly neglecting this blog, and probably you. in the meantime i've taken to "micro-blogging"-- text-length blog posts-- which is probably just about as creepy as it sounds. nonetheless, i share brief updates on my whereabouts and the direction of my thoughts via a service called twitter, which i can (and do) update via the web and (more often) my cellular telephone. if the whole thing doesn't freak you out too much, if you aren't too fretful of your status as dasein, you might consider joining. heidegger is dead, and won't feel a thing.

(note: spellcheck just tried to make 'heidegger' 'headgear'. and by 'dasein', it suggests, perhaps i meant 'casein'. god help us all. no, wait, he's dead too.)

2008-10-06T21:06:00.001-07:00

despite all the ways there are to be human, the variegated range of culture, there's a lot we all have in common-- every culture on earth. we're all tool-makers, gossips-- we all read each others faces, read for intention, and are consequently adept at making, masking and mimicking them. we all have a word that means 'one' and a word that means 'two' (although not always a word for zero, or numbers more than several); we all tell stories, and we all pause in our storytelling for effect. we all live, and we all die, and we all have rituals to honor and mourn the dead.

my aunt died this morning, unexpectedly. she died in her sleep-- complications from diabetes-- in the sort of voluntary mental health facility she'd lived in for as long as i can remember, the kind she'd been in and out of for most of her life. in and out. not just in and out of institutions, but of everything. she'd be gone for days or weeks or months and come back with a man or a long coat or empty eyes. my early memories are punctuated by her comings and goings. she did a lot drugs, she made plenty of mistakes, and her life for the last twenty years seemed to me to consist primarily in smoking cigarettes on patios and some occasional crafting. but you could fill a hundred books with all of the things that aren't what they seem to me. she may have thought thoughts as deep as space, but i never knew them. i have this sense, though, a common sense, that a special kind of thoughtful regard is due. so while leah's at home signing all the papers, i wrote a brief obituary as an alternative to the antiseptic form announcements that the paper runs otherwise. it's not revelatory or illuminating, but i hope it's not sentimental either, and i think it's true.

jill gillespie, 55, was born in january of 1953 to nancy and calvin gillespie, the third of three. she was curious, artless, gentle on the whole, and utterly without malice. she was interested to know what was out there. jill passed away in her sleep early monday morning. she is survived by her brother, sister-in-law, and two neices.

the most self-defeating post ever.

2008-09-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

this is my second ever blog (that i can recall) about contemporary politics. it won't take very long: WILL EVERYONE PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT SARAH PALIN!

seriously, when i heard that john mccain had chosen her as his running mate, the only thing i felt was embarrassed for him. a guy whose only hope seems to hang on some vague perception of him as a maverick-- a man of integrity, who does what he thinks is right while everyone else is doing what's merely expediant-- has chosen a running mate whose only creditial seems to be that some political strategist of unsubtle mind thinks that choosing her would be tactical. there didn't seem to me to be any real risk that hordes of women would mccain over obama on the grounds that sarah palin was his running mate. no need for political analysts to explain anything-- the move could not have been more pathetically obvious, ineffective, and self-defeating. i still hold this to be true.

what i failed to anticipate was that reasonable left-leaning people-- particular women-- would flip the fuck out, start groups, fill my inbox with forwards and my mini-feed with their sarah-palin-related feelings! and in this, perhaps the mccain campaign was actually a step ahead of me. because the outrage amongst people who would never support mccain anyway has made this into an issue that actually MIGHT rally hordes of women to the mccain campaign. in a race between mccain-palin and obama-biden, mccain-palin doesn't have a shot in hell. but make this a race between palin and "women against palin", and those soccer moms that everyone's so fucking concerned about might pick palin. and i might not blame them! because in amidst the the valid criticism of her qualifications and policy positions, people in groups like "women against palin" will likely also say things that reflect a certain conscious or unconsious disdain, a certain tone of contempt which those soccer moms, whoever they are, might reasonably take to heart.

it's true that mccain's choice of a running mate is an insult to women who work hard, women who are qualified for the jobs they hold-- women who are overqualified-- and it's an (embarrassingly obvious) insult to our intelligence, and to everyone's, to think that anyone will vote for her on her initial merits. this, i'll admit, didn't immediately occur to me as noteworthy, because every one of mccain's stances on every issue is an insult to women (and to everyone else). but, frankly, i find it almost equally insulting that other progressive people think that i need mccain's move explained to me, or that anyone else does. and in the meantime we're just creating the thing that we feared.

[another thing: in a couple of months i'm going to have to make this blog private for awhile-- meaning you can only read it if your email address is on a list of email addresses that i submit. it's a bummer, but i'm going to be paying a lot of money to send applications out to various graduate schools, and i don't really want any investigative application reviewers to be able to read my extremely informal musings, philosophical or otherwise. if you're on my blogroll, i'll add you automatically-- if you're not, and you ever check this and might want to continue to, please please let me know and i'll add you.]

patience.

2008-09-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

i haven't heard back yet about my comp-- i'm assuming that i didn't pass it. so while i wait, i will post this apt little piece of the answer that i prepared for the question on virtue ethics.

If an agent is patient, for example, she will be disposed to resist acting in haste, a disposition that consists partially in a particular set of feelings and desires that would make her inclined, under many circumstances, to wait rather than act—a sense of calm, say, a certain resistance to undue urgency. It consists partially in a certain kind of judgment. To possess a virtue is to accept certain features of the world as reasons, and to be sensitive to the presence of those reasons, which will sometimes be features of the external world, and sometimes features of one’s own psychological economy. The agent who demonstrates patience will therefore be an agent who recognizes certain features of the various circumstances that confront her, and of her own mental state in those circumstances, as strong reasons to bide her time, to wait on further information, more auspicious circumstances, or a clearer frame of mind. The possession of patience as a virtue also involves the practiced and competent managing of subtleties and exceptions. A perfectly virtuous agent recognizes patience as a strong, but not necessarily an overriding consideration. Just as the virtue of honesty also involves tactfulness and discretion, so patience also involves promptness, decisiveness and courage, lest it be mere paralysis (cowardly, irresolute, or procrastinatory).

[i passed.]

marvelous!

2008-08-23T08:55:00.000-07:00

most enjoyable new york times reading experience i've had in quite some time.

doing good. doing all right.

2008-08-18T19:51:00.000-07:00

i'm taking a comp on friday, and i spent today reading about virtue ethics-- the ancient (most famously greek) notion that doing what's right is a matter of acting from good character. it stands in some contrast to the deontological notion (most famously kant's) that doing what's right is a matter of acting on particular principles or maxims. the theories have plenty in common, but here's where they contrast starkly:

according to most virtue theorists, perfect virtue consists in a flawless harmony between virtuous acts and the feeling and desires of the virtuous actor. acting virtuously despite bad or conflicting feelings is (mere?) contingent virtue. but according to kant, an act can only have moral worth when it conflicts with one's immediate desires. it's not that our actions are necessarily bad if they happen to accord with our desires (if, say, we act generously because it feels good), but they aren't specifically moral-- if we act kindly because we feel like it, then the maxim that we're acting on isn't "act kindly" but "do what you feel like", which, kant says, is not a moral principle-- we certainly wouldn't want to make it a universal (moral) law that everyone in all circumstances should do what they feel like.

so is the more virtuous moral agent the one who has to wrestle with her own desires to do what she thinks is right, or the one who feels inclined to kindness and courage-- who is naturally or cultivated impervious to fear, envy, etc.? here is a place where a disagreement in the philosophical literature seems to reflect conflicting notions in our everyday thinking about ethics and morality. we count among our saints and heroes both sorts of agents.

i wonder what you think. i'm inclined to agree with the virtue ethicists, but i'm conflicted. haha. fuck.

[dictionary.com word of the day: AESTIVAL (es-tuh-val) of or belonging to the summer.]

nomadry, in earnest.

2008-07-30T22:59:00.000-07:00

i'm homeless for one month.

i wonder what it will be like.

quickly.

2008-07-18T03:59:00.000-07:00

kay ryan has been named america's poet laureate. it's a wonderful thing. she's been my favorite living poet since i was twenty-two and, lonesome and living sparely, read this:

Action creates
a taste
for itself.
Meaning once
you've swept
the shelves
of spoons
and plates
you kept
for guests,
it gets harder
not to also
simplify the larder,
not to dismiss
rooms, not to
divest yourself
of all the chairs
but one, not
to test what
singleness can bear,
once you've begun.

kay ryan
that will to divest

i didn't die.

2008-07-12T06:34:00.000-07:00

but my computer battery did.
it's back now. more so soon.

xo.LG

update!

2008-05-01T06:49:00.000-07:00

hi friends. i finally cleared out my voicemail this morning, but then my phone fell out of my pocket on prospect and got run over by a car-- totally* kaput. god knows when i'll replace it. send me emails if you need anything-- i'll be sitting in front of my computer until monday, and after that i'll be as far away from it as possible for as long as i can manage. i guess then you'll have to send me a letter. or come find me! i miss all of your various faces.

as ever,
LG

*actually, it seems like maybe if it rang, i could answer it. but maybe not. i'm just going to turn it off for now, but someone should help me figure this out later.