A social function of literature

In The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye argues for a social function of literature:

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as possibilities. (pp.77-78)

Note that Frye does not say, or suggest, that literature has the power of changing people who are already intolerant. Literature's encouragement of tolerance will have, in most if not all cases, no effect on bigots and fanatics, the most intolerant among the intolerant. Although bigots and fanatics do see others' beliefs as possibilities, they see those beliefs as mere possibilities, while seeing their own beliefs as the truths. If they do read literature, they will see more possibilities as a result. However, the more possibilities they see, the more they may think what they see are mere possibilities, and the more they may assure themselves that their own beliefs are the truths. Not only does literature fail to encourage bigots and fanatics to be tolerant, it may even  encourage them to be more intolerant!

But isn't it part of the concept of belief that to believe that p is to believe that p is true? Whether a person is a bigot (or fanatic) or not, he has to take what he believes to be true --- no one can consistently believe that p without taking p to be true. So, how are we different from bigots and fanatics in this respect? In this respect there is indeed no difference; the difference lies in somewhere else: bigots and fanatics are so committed to their beliefs that they are not capable of taking seriously the possibility that their beliefs are false. They cannot, as it were, detach themselves from their beliefs, while we can ours if we try.

According to Frye, literature encourages tolerance by means of encouraging detachment of this kind:

What produces the tolerance is the power of detachment in the imagination, where things are removed just out of reach of belief and action. Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way that the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in  practical life. Literature reverses this process. (p.78)

Through the imaginative lens of literature, we can see even our own beliefs from a certain psychological distance, which may be sufficient for making us more tolerant, even if in the end we do not give up any of our beliefs.

Three concepts of identity

What I mean by ‘identity’ here is not the relation of sameness between two persons at two different times, but a characteristic or a mark that a person has. In this sense of ‘identity’, a person can have more than one identity. There are, however, three different concepts of identity in this sense.

The first can be called the concept of plain identity. This is the concept of identity understood in the most unrestrictive way, that is, when ‘identity’ is understood to mean simply ‘that which a person can be identified as’. On this concept of identity, as long as something is true of a person, we can refer to it as one of her identities. The concept of plain identity is so unrestrictive that a plain identity of a person does not even have to be something that the person can be uniquely identified as. I have, for instance, the unique identity as my son’s father, but I also have the identity as a father, which is not unique. This feature of plain identity accords well with our everyday use of the word ‘identity’, such as when we speak of our cultural, social, national, or professional identities and when we speak of different people’s having the same identity.

It is clear that in this unrestrictive sense of identity I can have many identities; some of them cover a large set of my activities and a long period of time, while others cover just a particular involvement at a particular time. One of my plain identities is a professor of philosophy, which is a long-term identity that involves doing different kinds of things; it is also one of my plain identities that I am the person who is writing this very sentence that I am now writing, and this is one single activity that lasts only for a very short while. Not only activities or projects that I positively undertake form my plain identities, things that are entirely not up to me, or not entirely up to me, also form my plain identities.

The second concept of identity can be called the concept of self-identity. A person’s plain identity becomes his self-identity if he identifies himself, or self-identifies, with that identity --- if he sees the identity as defining who he is, or at least part of who he is. In one of its usages, the term ‘self’ refers precisely to self-identity as I define it here. In this usage, as David Velleman points out, “the term ‘self’ refers --- not to the person, or a part of the person, represented reflexively --- but to the person’s own reflexive representations, which make up his self-image or self-conception” and which gives him “his sense of who he is” (Velleman, Self to Self, pp.355-356).

It is obvious that not every one of my plain identities is what I would consider to be part of who I am, or constitutes part of my self-image or self-conception. It is, for example, a plain identity of mine that I am the person who is typing this very sentence that I am now typing, but I certainly do not think this identity is part of who I am. Indeed, even when a plain identity of mine is considered by others to be who I am because it is, as they see it, an important identity, I may not agree with them. If I myself do not consider the plain identity as part of who I am, then it is not my self-identity. As Bernard Williams puts it, “[t]he difference between an identity which is mine and which I eagerly recognize as mine, and an identity as what someone else simply assumes me to be, is in one sense all the difference in the world” (Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, p.62).

Williams’s remark seems to suggest that if I self-identify with a plain identity of mine, it must be a plain identity that I value, that is, something that I want myself to be or something that I think I should be rather than merely something that I admit I actually am. Given that most people have the natural tendency to see themselves positively and have the psychological need for self-esteem, people normally value their self-identities. This may be why some philosophers understand self-identity in terms of reflective endorsement: what it is for a person to identify herself with her identity is for her to approve of it after reflecting on whether she should approve of it.

However, given the complexity of human psychology, as exemplified by phenomena like self-hatred and despising oneself, it does not seem difficult to imagine a person who self-identifies with an identity that she disvalues. If I were a Dalit (an untouchable) in India, I might, because of how I was brought up and because of how the caste system works, self-identify with my identity as a Dalit and see myself as being obligated by that identity to act in particular ways, but I did not have to value that identity (why should I?). In any case, I certainly can identify myself with an identity that I do not value or disvalue ¾ not everything that I admit as defining who I am is also something that I am proud of being, something that I see as good in some way, something that I think I should be.

The third concept of identity, which is closely relation to the concept of self-identity and also what we need for evaluating a biographical life, can be called the concept of unifying-identity. A unifying-identity is a self-identity that unifies different parts of a person’s biographical life into a narrative whole that can easily develop further by virtue of that very self-identity (if the person continues to live). Since a unifying-identity unifies different parts of a person’s life, it contains many plain identities of that person, some of which may be that person’s self-identities. A unifying-identity must itself be a self-identity, but a self-identity is not necessarily a unifying-identity, just as a self-identity must itself be a plain identity, but a plain identity is not necessarily a self-identity. A self-identity that is not a unifying-identity may still form a narrative whole in the sense that it constitutes a story that has a beginning and an end; the reason why it is not a unifying-identity is that the narrative whole cannot easily develop further by virtue of that self-identity. Since a self-identity can be a unifying-identity, if some of the self-identities contained in a unifying-identity are themselves unifying-identities, it will be a case of a unifying-identity containing other unifying-identities as its parts.

The distinction between self-identity and unifying-identity is not clear-cut, that is, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a self-identity is also a unifying-identity. But it is not hard to see that there is a distinction when what we consider is not a borderline case.

Why 'meaning'?

When people are troubled by questions like ‘What is the meaning of my life?’, ‘Does my life have meaning?’, and ‘Is my life meaningful?’, there are, presumably, some concerns they have that they think can be expressed by asking such questions. But what are these concerns? And why can they all be expressed by asking questions about meaning or meaningfulness?

In his attempt to look for a concept of meaning or meaningfulness common to the major theories or conceptions of a meaningful life, Thaddeus Metz suggests, after failing to find such a common concept, that these theories or conceptions are united by family resemblances, for they all address some of the questions in a group of related questions. He does not explain how the questions are related or what determines whether a question should be put in the group; he gives us only examples of such questions (“questions such as the following: how may a person bring purpose to her life, where this is not just a matter of pursuing happiness or acting rightly?  How should an individual connect with intrinsic value beyond his animal nature? How might one do something worthy of great admiration?” (“The Concept of a Meaningful Life”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 38, pp.150-151)). But even if he had explained in some way how these questions are related, he might still not have explained why they are all questions about meaning or meaningfulness.

According to Susan Wolf, a meaningful life is “one that has within it the basis for an affirmative answer to the needs or longings that are characteristically described as needs for meaning” (“Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life”, Social Philosophy and Policy, 14, p.208, italics added). And the concerns that she thinks people have when they are troubled by the problem about meaningfulness are “whether their lives have been (or are) worth living, whether they have had any point, and the sort of questions one asks when considering suicide and wondering whether one has any reason to go on” (p.209). Should we then say that what explains why the concerns can all be expressed by questions that are asked in terms of the concept of meaning is that the questions can all be used to express needs for meaning? We can certainly say that, but it does not seem to get us very far, for the term ‘meaning’ is used in ‘needs for meaning’. We still have to explain why it is that what these questions express is needs for meaning rather than needs for something else.

The best answer, I suggest, is that all the concerns are related to the meaning of the word ‘meaning’ (and its cognates). Or more precisely, all the concerns people have when they are troubled by the problem about meaningfulness are related to the meaning of the word ‘meaning’ when it is used in some other contexts as well as in the context of thinking or talking about the meaning or meaningfulness of one’s life.

To see the plausibility of this suggestion, we can first consider linguistic meaning, that is, the meaning of ‘meaning’ when the word is applied to linguistic items such as words and sentences. As a matter of fact, it is not only in English that the very same word is used in both ‘the meaning of a life’ and ‘the meaning of a sentence’ (or ‘the meaning of a word’). In each of the other major languages the same word is applied to both a life and a sentence: in German, it is the word ‘Bedeutung’; in French, ‘sens’; in Spanish, ‘sentido’; in Italian, ‘significato’; in Portuguese, ‘significação’; in Russian, ‘значе́ние’; and in Chinese, ‘意義’.

Linguistic items can be evaluated as having meaning or not having meaning, or as being meaningful or being meaningless. It is good for a linguistic item to have meaning, and bad for it not to have meaning. Some may think that anything that is meaningless is not a linguistic item. Let us grant that, for instance, a meaningless string of letters from the English alphabet, such as ‘rytwe’, is not really a linguistic item, but it is clear that a grammatical but meaningless string of meaningful words, such as Noam Chomsky’s famous example of ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’, is a linguistic item ¾ it is a sentence. Sometimes a linguistic item is not literally meaningless in the way Chomsky’s example is, but it is still considered meaningless or nonsensical in the context in which it is used because it does not fit in with the context and does not provide information it is supposed to provide, such as when someone utters ‘I think Epictetus was cooler than Jesus’ as an answer to the question ‘Are you coming to my party tonight?’.

One reason why a meaningless linguistic item is bad is that it hinders, or at least fails to facilitate, communication and understanding. In other words, it fails to fulfill its proper function. Another reason may be that it is an aberration in something that is otherwise orderly and systematic. That is, a meaningless linguistic item is disagreeable. There may be other reasons, but here I need only to point out the fact that linguistic meaning has an evaluative aspect; when we apply ‘meaning’ or ‘meaningful’ to a linguistic item, we are making an evaluative judgment. Likewise, when ‘meaning’ or ‘meaningful’ is applied to a life, the resulting judgment is also evaluative. Accordingly, when a person asks the question ‘Does my life have meaning?’ or ‘Is my life meaningful?’, she can be expressing her concern about the evaluation of her life.

When we evaluate a linguistic item as having a meaning, we certainly do not mean that it has the meaning that all other linguistic items have. There is simply no such thing. In most cases, each linguistic item has its own meaning, or is meaningful in its own way. Like meaningful linguistic items, meaningful lives can be meaningful in very different ways, though it is not as clear that there is no such thing as the meaning of life (this is why some people are looking for it). And when a person looks for the meaning of her life, she is not looking for a generic meaning that all lives have in common ¾ even if there was such a meaning.

The big questions and the professionalization of philosophy

Most people are unaware that philosophy has become highly professionalized. Professionalization leads to specialization and technicalization, and most philosophers nowadays work on very specific problems in a particular area of philosophy and write in technical terms, both of which ¾ the problems and the language ¾ require abundant academic training to understand.

It may not be true that philosophers are no longer interested in big questions like ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, ‘Where did the universe come from?’, ‘What is our place in the world?’, and ‘What makes a life meaningful?’, but even if some of them are still tackling these problems, they are likely to be doing so in such a way that it is not easy for lay people to see that it is these big questions that they are trying to answer.

For one thing, it is likely that these philosophers have analyzed the big questions into manageable smaller problems and are working on these smaller problems without making clear how they are related to the big questions (probably because they themselves are not yet clear about how the relation between these problems should be understood). For another, they are so used to writing for the readership of fellow philosophers (assuming background knowledge, using jargon, etc.) that the way they write may not be accessible to lay people.

Professionalization is good for philosophers at least to the extent that it allows them to have extensive intellectual interactions and, relatedly, intellectual division of labor.* If not being accessible to lay people is the price for enjoying these benefits of professionalization, philosophers may be willing to pay it. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to ask what philosophers have to offer to those lay people who care to think about, or are even troubled by, the big questions, for philosophers are in the best position to tackle these problems. After all, they have got the training and, thanks to the professionalization of philosophy, the time needed to tackle these problems.

For people who want to have answers to the big questions, many of these questions are ultimately about how we should live our lives. It would be expecting too much if we expect philosophers to be wise people in the sense that they are able to see through all the vanities, illusions, and foolishness that are common among human beings, and live accordingly. In other words, it would be expecting too much if we expect philosophers to set examples of how we should live our lives. It is reasonable, however, to expect philosophers to be able to analyze problems clearly, avoid confusions and mistakes in thinking, and draw conceptual connections when necessary, so as to obtain whatever knowledge and understanding that can be obtained by human beings concerning some important general aspects of the world and human life ¾ to give good answers to some of the big questions. And people may find these answers helpful in determining how they should live their lives.

So, the question is: How many professional philosophers would feel obliged to meet such a reasonable expectation?

* Of course, the professionalization of philosophy has its dark side. As Barry Stroud points out, the professionalization of philosophy was made possible by the connection between philosophy and the university; and since “what universities, even the best universities, now demand from individual professors, on the whole, is quantity of publications, frequency of citation in the professional literature, widely certified distinction in the profession, and other quantifiable measures of an impressive resume”, this “ has rendered much more of philosophy sterile, empty, and boring” (Stroud, “What is Philosophy?”).

Probability in the eye of the beholder?

In his debate with Daniel Dennett on whether science and religion are compatible, Alvin Plantinga asks the following question:

Let D be the proposition that the variety of the living world has come to be by Darwinian processes, E the relevant biological evidence, G the proposition that evolution is guided, and U the proposition that it is unguided. Then our question is which is greater: P(D/E&G) or P(D/E&U)? (Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, p.12)

"P(D/E&G)" means "the probability of D, given E and G" and "P(D/E&U)" means "the probability of D, given E and U". Plantinga claims that P(D/E&G) > P(D/E&U). His grounds for this claim are:

1. "Clearly God could have created living things by way of natural selection, causing the right mutations to arise at the right time, preserving the relevant populations from disaster, and the like."
2. "The eye, the mammalian brain, and other organs remain difficult problems for unguided evolution."
3. "[T]he stupefying complexity of the living cell, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic."

1 is his reason for thinking that "P(D/E&G) is perhaps not terribly low", while 2 and 3 are his reasons for thinking that "P(D/E&U) is exceedingly low". "Not terribly low" and "exceedingly low" are both vague expressions, but no doubt everyone would agree that "exceedingly low" is lower than "not terribly low". Indeed, Plantinga thinks it is "orders of magnitude lower" .

It is clear that 2 is just the old argument from complexity and 3 is the new(ish) argument from irreducible complexity. Let us put aside the fact that both 2 and 3 have been adequately addressed by evolutionary biologists, and focus on 1 and the claim that "P(D/E&G) is perhaps not terribly low".

If we looked only at the complexity of some aspects or features of life on earth, we might agree with Plantinga's estimation of P(D/E&G). But complexity is not all there is to D. What about the messiness of evolution and all the evolutionary dead ends? If we look at the latter as well, and if we, like Plantinga, understand the "guided" in G to mean "guided by God", where God is supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient, shouldn't we estimate P(D/E&G) to be lower, perhaps way lower, than Plantinga's "not terribly low"? More simply put, what is the chance of God's having done such a lousy job?

The point I have just made is fairly simple; the interesting question is why Plantinga doesn't see it.

Being clever isn't enough

Bernard Williams gave his last interview at Oxford in December 2002, not long before he died. The interview was published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy (Volume XII, Spring 2004), and the editor noted that Williams "did not have the opportunity to correct the transcript of the interview". In any case, it is, though short, a fascinating interview. Anyone who admires Williams would enjoy reading it; anyone who is not familiar with Williams's work but wants to know why he is so admired would too.

I was particularly intrigued by Williams's remarks on being clever and doing philosophy. Williams himself is an exceptionally clever philosopher, but he says:

Another person who had one kind of influence on me --- though I'm glad to say I think she didn't influence me in other ways! --- was Elizabeth Anscombe. One thing that she did, which she got from Wittgenstein, was that she impressed upon one that being clever wasn't enough. Oxford philosophy, and this is still true to a certain extent, had a great tendency to be clever. It was very eristic: there was a lot of competitive dialectical exchange and showing that other people were wrong. I was quite good at all that. But Elizabeth conveyed a strong sense of the seriousness of the subject, and how the subject was difficult in ways that simply being clever wasn't going to get around.

"I was quite good at all that" --- there was presumably a time when he was not aware that being clever wasn't enough, and it took a philosopher he did not otherwise admire to make him see that.

Williams's response to the interviewer's follow-up question "What is required in addition to being clever?" is also edifying:

A good appreciation of what is not there in the argument or on the page, and also some imagination. Many philosophers pursue a line of argument in a very linear fashion, in which one proof caps another proof, or a refutation refutes some other supposed proof, instead of thinking laterally about what it all might mean. There is a tendency to forget the main issue, which is what the distinction that was made was supposed to be doing in the first place. An obvious example is that people used to go on about what the difference is between a moral and a non-moral 'this-that-and-the-other'. What is a moral consideration as opposed to a non-moral consideration? What is a moral judgment as opposed to a non-moral judgment? They belabored these questions without ever asking why the distinction was supposed to be so important in the first place.

Love and reality

Simone Weil writes:

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being? It is much more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from having lived. That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination. (Gravity and Grace, p.57)

These remarks sound deep, but they oversimplify the relation between love and reality. The reality love needs is not all or nothing --- in most cases, the person we love is partly real, partly imaginary. It is rare, if possible at all, for us to know and understand our beloved so well that we see her completely as she really is, without any distortions or fantasies. It is also rare for our beloved to be nothing but the product of our imagination, an imaginary being that we are attaching to the body of a person who we don't really know or understand.

Besides, it is not clear that imagination in love is all bad. A little imagination can be like light makeup: it makes our beloved look better without making her unreal. In love, sometimes fantasies can even breed reality.

Weil is still right that it is terrible to discover that we have been loving an imaginary (or mostly imaginary) being. What is terrifying, however, is not just the realization that the person we love has never existed, but also the realization that we have been so delusional. We may, because of the latter realization, lose our self-trust. If we need self-trust to trust another person (we need to trust ourselves in order to trust our trust in another person), and if we need to trust a person to love her, we may thereby lose our capacity for love. That's truly terrifying.

Readers' perception of an author

In an interview published in 1980 ("The Masked Philosopher"), Foucault was interviewed anonymously. When asked why in this interview he chose not to reveal his identity, he said:

Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader, the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy.

And then he made an interesting proposal, obviously not seriously:

I shall propose a game: that of the "year without a name." For a year, books would be published without their authors' names. The critics would have to cope with a mass of entirely anonymous books. But, now that I come to think of it, it's possible they would have nothing to do: all the authors would wait until the following year before publishing their books ...

Of course, what Foucault was talking about was not just names, but fame --- names that are well-known or at least recognized. An author's name will not have the kind of effect on readers that Foucault lamented if it is a name nobody knows. After all, none of Foucault's earliest work was published anonymously; as he himself understood it, what he said back then "had some chance of being heard" because his name was still "quite unknown", not because he did not use any name.

However, readers' perception of an author is not just a matter of how famous the author is. At the beginning of the interview and before he made the remarks quoted above, Foucault mentioned a story:

You know the story of the psychologists who went to make a little film test in a village in darkest Africa. They then asked the spectators to tell the story in their own words. Well, only one thing interested them in this story involving three characters: the movement of the light and shadow through the trees.

These African villagers were not interested in the characters of the film; perhaps they were not interested in characters generally. By contrast, as Foucault pointed out:

In our societies, characters dominate our perceptions. Our attention tends to be arrested by the activities of faces that come and go, emerge and disappear.

Readers' perception of an author is not just a matter of how famous the author is; it is also a matter of seeing the author as a character. If the author was seen only as the creator of some text, where attention was paid exclusively to the text, that would not be much of a perception of the author. If we are interested in the text enough to be interested in its creator, and if the text does not tell us much about the author, we will somehow create a character to be the author, sometimes by researching the life of the author, sometimes by reading more of the author's work, and sometimes by imagination alone.

But why are we so fascinated with characters? Because, I think, we see individual human lives as different stories, and stories require characters. If the African villagers were really not interested in characters at all, that was probably because they did not see their lives as stories, or, their lives were too simple to be seen as stories.

Now that we know "the masked philosopher" was Foucault, we won't be able to read the interview the way it was read in 1980 --- we won't be able to read it without seeing the character Foucault in it.

Arguing with the less sophisticated

I always find it difficult to argue with the less sophisticated. Since I see things in a more complex way than they do and my understanding may be beyond their comprehension, they rarely argue in my terms for the simple reason that they are not capable of doing so. In order to go on with the argument, I have to argue in their terms. However, expressing my points in their terms is not easy, if possible at all. And on top of this disadvantage, I may have to, when the less sophisticated have lost the debate, show them how they have lost it.