part I: on "the data driven life"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.