Solitude

Last week, I lost my paternal grandmother. She had suffered from dementia for a long time and, in all honestly, I hadn't seen her in quite a while. So, while I was sad I was not overwhelmed, nor do I have any right to be.
More than a sense of grief, what the death reminded me of is a sense of aloneness, of solitude. And, not only because I found out because my mom saw the obituary online.
I was never close to my father's family growing up. They are a very close-knit family, but one whose closeness was centered on the church--and their church was the Lutheran one (Missouri Synod) and I was raised Catholic.
My parents divorced when I was two, my father moved away, and my only regular contact with his family was going to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter dinners alone. I was one little kid at celebrations with people I barely knew and no touchstone, no person there that I knew well and could latch on to. In fairness, my grandma tried, but there was too much absence to make up for.
And, that's what my deep problem is. I have no ability to interact with groups. I can teach a class, but that is a different sort of thing; that is performance and I have a very specific role. Pedagogy isn't sociality.
I can't do one-to-many socialization. I couldn't do it then, and I can't do it now. And, so I can't feel a member of a group or comfortable with one, however that group is defined and however natural my membership in it might be. The closest I ever get is feeling connected to someone who is a member of a group, but that's not quite the same thing. And, other possible connections recognize the unease; it's not an attractive characteristic. (This unease has been attractive to a few people in my life and gained me a friend or two and one amazing partner.)
And, so I feel alone. And, usually, alone in a crowd.

Why I'm not an (a)theist

There is an assumption in some circles that all rational people should be atheists. That all who profess philosophy should be is even more widely held. But I can't bring myself to that anti-credo.

To deny the existence of a thing (or a being), I have to be able to understand what that thing is, to have some fairly clear idea of what it would be for it to exist. I have a fairly good idea of what it would be for unicorns to exist. I understand what they are supposed to be like, what their biology looks like, their strange predilection for virgins, and all the rest. Similarly, I have a good idea what it would be for Zeus to exist. I know what his story is supposed to be, I know how he is supposed to have originated, I know his strengths and weaknesses, I know of his marital strife, his lusts.

So, I know what I am saying in denying the existence of unicorns or Zeus. And, I know what I would be saying in denying that Jesus existed--I think he did--or in denying that Muhammad received revelations from Gabriel or that Joseph Smith translated any golden plates.

But, I don't know what I would be denying the existence of God, full stop. I don't think atheism is, after all, just denying one more god in addition to all the others I freely deny.

I'm not just being precious here. I don't know what it means to say there is a Being who is the ground of all being. I don't know what it means to say that there is a Being that is outside of and utterly different to the universe, yet is the cause of the universe. I don't know what it is to say that God is both good and tolerant of all the suffering in the world--after all, His ways are mysterious.

There is a long tradition in the monotheistic religions of saying that what we say of God is said by analogy or metaphorically or, at least, predicated of God in a different sense to the secondary sense in which we predicate goodness or knowledge or anything else of beings in the world--here is the realm of the via negativa, the mystics, even Aquinas. This is just to say that we cannot understand God.

But saying that is tantamount to saying the claims of theism, taken literally, are a kind of nonsense--Unsinn. I don't mean that in a necessarily pejorative sense. Nonsense can be good, nonsense can be useful, nonsense can be evocative. We may need nonsense. Perhaps art is, in some ways, nonsense. But nonsense can't be true.

And, it can't be false, either. A negation sign doesn't make nonsense into sense.

Can you have the bells without the believers?

Richard Dawkins and I have something in common (almost). He considers himself a cultural Anglican and I consider myself a cultural Catholic. For both of us, a world in which there were no churches would be a world in which there were something important missing. At the very least, there would be an aesthetic loss, but there would also be a loss of a sense—he seems to be saying, and I would agree—of what the Western identity has been. 

I imagine I am a little more invested in my cultural Catholicism than Dawkins is in his Anglicanism. More than considering going into a church, I regularly go to the chapel near my office after classes and I engage in other practices rooted in my tradition. But that's not the point I want to make.

Rather, it is that being a cultural Catholic or Anglican or member of another tradition requires that there be committed members of the same tradition. Of course, Dawkins is in a slightly different situation, since his aesthetic comfort is state-supported. But, even in that case, and even if he is right that many Anglicans don't actually believe anymore, when there are no more believers, the churches will be just museums and the sepulchers—as Nietzsche's madman had it—of the dead God. That is not quite the same thing as a functioning church to which you have a cultural affinity, any more than an altarpiece in a museum is the same thing as an altarpiece in a church. Having been divorced from its purpose, it loses some of its meaning. There's no contradiction in being a non-believing, though culturally-entwined, member of a tradition. There might be something elitist about it, maybe it causes a tension, maybe it might even be bittersweet.

But my point is that being a cultural Anglican or Catholic does place a kind of restriction on one. Since what you love relies on committed others, they deserve respect. You can't run around with and cross-promote the work of people who claim that religion poisons everything, a la Hitchens; or, that those who pray are no more stable than those who believe God can be contacted by talking into a hair dryer, a la Harris; or, that all religion is a delusion, a la Dennett (and Freud); and, you can't claim that people ought to lose their jobs because they take their religion seriously, as Dawkins himself has—though that was with a person who believes a religion for which Dawkins has no affinity. 

That is, contrary to the program of many New Atheists, if you value what religion has given your society and even want to see it stick around, you can't deride the people who actually believe it—and create what you like.

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10303223/Richard-Dawkins-admits-he-is-a-cultural-Anglican.html)

A small question about the grammar of "pain"

I am in pain. I have the same persistent dull ache I have had in my elbow since the beginning of the summer when I began a new workout routine with a new workout partner. The pain is strong enough—so maybe not a dull ache—that it makes sleeping difficult. 

But, in the process of watching an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I forget the pain. The mixture of laughter at juvenile humor and wondering whether this isn't just a picture of human nature at its unvarnished core comes to the fore in my mind.

At the end of the episode, as I begin to get ready for bed, I again begin to think about my elbow and I notice the pain again.

A question presents itself: Would we say that I was in pain during the show? (This is a question about what we would say about the mental state, not a question about what science tells us about the operation of my nervous system and brain.) 

Beauty and supervenience

On Monday, I will be lecturing on Plato, as I do near the beginning of each semester. There's something a little like the liturgical year about teaching: the same material comes up again and again, in the same order. And, that can be immensely boring or it can bear me along in a reassuring rhythm, especially when I see something new—with my own eyes or, usually, through the eyes of my undergraduates.

My standard way to introduce students to the theory of Forms is to have them think about beautiful things and what such things have in common that could make them beautiful. This raises a few issues, since most of my students claim to believe that beauty is subjective—they have to be pushed to see that they don't actually judge it this way—and I always have a student or two who wishes to reduce beauty to symmetry or an evolutionary compulsion. 

But, I was also thinking about beauty with regard to one of my other courses this semester. In some ways, no matter how all analogies may limp, beauty seems a near perfect example of a supervenient property, thus an apt case for explaining that notion, as well as multiple realizability, to my philosophy of mind students. 

There's little question (to me) that the beauty of a piece of music or a face or a painting is determined by its physical properties. I know that this is not accepted by all in aesthetics, but it's near enough to true for me. And, any change in the beauty qua beauty of an object would have to mean a change in that object's physical properties. But, a full catalog of the physical properties of Mozart's Requiem or Michelangelo's David would not capture its beauty. There's just no reducing beauty to the physical, for all the determination by the physical. And, it should be obvious that there are many different ways to achieve beauty. So, this looks to me like an easier entree into the concepts of supervenience and multiple realizability than just hitting them with the mental supervening on the physical.

I'm sure introducing these notions through this example will lead to undreamt of nightmares of explication, but in this I have hope.

Am Anfang

Another school year begins. As I start another ethics class, I've been thinking about the strange—and off-putting—way that so much ethics is taught in colleges and universities. 

Courses too often have three components: 1) An episodic and ungrounded trip through the history of theoretical ethics; 2) A series of outlandish ethical dilemmas, ostensibly to evaluate and criticize intuitions and the positions of those ethical theories; and, 3) A short series of practical applications to issues like abortion and torture.

Most textbooks and readers follow something like this plan, as do most introductory courses. It seems to me—even when I am doing the same damned thing—that this misses on almost all cylinders.

It's very important not to lead students into the genealogical fallacy, but teaching Aristotle without talking about what sort of society 4th-century BC Athens was leaves the students utterly flustered. From there, of course, you have to talk about the way a virtue ethics might be divorced from its context, or better yet married to a new one, but you can't treat theories as ex nihilo. Too often, though, we do. When students can't see what made the categorical imperative live for Kant, there is little hope they can see what might make it live for them.

Then, we ask them questions about fat men trapped in caves, or runaway trolleys, or—Heavens forfend!—unconscious violinists and people seeds. We ask them what their intuitions are in such cases, ignoring the fact that no one has untutored intuitions in these cases. We treat intuitions as if they were themselves ex nihilo, while we really know that we gain them in experience. And, I have just had no experience with people seeds, so whatever my intuitions are they are intuitions about people or seeds.  We act as if there were deep underlying principles for each of a person's moral judgments, when we also think that what we are trying to do is provide such principles. When we do this, we ask them to think that ethics and philosophy is pure and utter bullshit. Then we are surprised when they think it is.

Finally, we try to ground this whole project in talking about controversial issues. But, we talk about the same ones all the time. Who really wants to talk more about abortion in a classroom? How many more times can we rehash the same substandard articles on same sex marriage? Or, animal rights? And, we act as if the issues that we are talking about the most central ones in a human life. But, I am not getting abortions most of the time. That is not where my attitude to human life is made most clear. So, we teach them that ethics, if it can be made about anything, only applies at the edges of life, not in their everyday lived lives.

I don't always think that the teaching of philosophy should try to be useful. Mostly, I think it shouldn't. But ethics is one place where it must be about the real world and the common life. And, I think we fail at that. Or, at least I do most of the time.

When will Snowden comment on civil liberties in the Russian Federation?

I am not one of those people who think that Edward Snowden had a moral obligation to stay in the United States and face criminal charges for his leaking. Yes, to stay and face the music when one opposes a government one sees as immoral might be heroic, but no one has an obligation to be a hero. And, criticism from a position of exile is not worthless for that reason. And, I do think that there are deep problems with our rapid approach to Panopticon, not to mention our military and pseudo-military adventures around the world, and the continuation of Guantanamo.

However, Snowden seems to have taken himself as some sort of warrior against the all-encompassing surveillance state and against the erosion of civil liberties. If that is the position he wants to take and he wants to be taken seriously as something more than just someone who has localized problems with the United States, that limits his options.

You can't accept asylum in the Russian Federation if what you oppose is the surveillance state, if what you are fighting for is civil liberties. Russia is governed by a former spymaster who continues to use the surveillance powers he learned, who regularly imprisons his political opponents, and strips them of all their assets, for whom a personal enemy is ipso facto, an enemy of the state. I know this is the point at which Snowden's defenders will crow about Bradley Manning, but for all the possible injustice in that case the parallel is a bad one. It is much more as if, having won the election, Obama had charges filed against Romney, imprisoned him, and took his fortune. Just last week, a Putin opponent running for mayor of Moscow was convicted on trumped-up charges so that he cannot run for office. This is where our warrior for openness and civil rights and liberties will be living, a country in which being "pro-gay" comes with a prison sentence, in which gay tourists are now being detained, in which any non-governmental organization with any foreign contact is shut down as a tool of foreign governments.

Of course, Russia wasn't his intended destination, but the records of China, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela with respect to openness, civil liberties, and freedom of the press are not much better. In the end, it looks like Snowden and his defenders care about abuses to the degree they are carried out by the United States. When others do the same or worse, it matters not at all. 

I do await his brave statements about the evils of Russian society, but I assume I wait in vain.