Hummings in the Fly-Bottle

Three concepts of identity

2012-01-12T13:55:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

The second concept of identity can be called the conceptof self-identity. A person’s plainidentity becomes his self-identity if he identifies himself, orself-identifies, with that identity --- if he sees the identity as defining who he is, or atleast part of who he is. In one of its usages, the term ‘self’ refers preciselyto self-identity as I define it here. In this usage, as David Velleman pointsout, “the term ‘self’ refers --- not to the person, or a part of the person, representedreflexively --- but to the person’s own reflexive representations, which make up his self-imageor 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 identitiesis what I would consider to be part of who I am, or constitutes part of myself-image or self-conception. It is, for example, a plain identity of minethat I am the person who is typing this very sentence that I am now typing, butI certainly do not think this identity is part of who I am. Indeed, even when aplain identity of mine is considered by others to be who I am because it is, asthey see it, an important identity, I may not agree with them. If I myself donot consider the plain identity as part of who I am, then it is not myself-identity. As Bernard Williams puts it, “[t]he difference between anidentity which is mine and which I eagerly recognize as mine, and an identityas what someone else simply assumes me to be, is in one sense all thedifference in the world” (Williams, Philosophyas a Humanistic Discipline, p.62).

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

However, given the complexity of human psychology, asexemplified by phenomena like self-hatred and despising oneself, it does notseem difficult to imagine a person who self-identifies with an identity that shedisvalues. If I were a Dalit (an untouchable) in India, I might, because of howI was brought up and because of how the caste system works, self-identify with myidentity as a Dalit and see myself as being obligated by that identity to actin particular ways, but I did not have to value that identity (why should I?). Inany case, I certainly can identify myself with an identity that I do not valueor disvalue ¾not everything that I admit as defining who I am is also something that I amproud of being, something that I see as good in some way, something that Ithink I should be.

The third concept of identity, which is closely relationto the concept of self-identity and also what we need for evaluating abiographical life, can be called the concept of unifying-identity. A unifying-identity is a self-identity thatunifies different parts of a person’s biographical life into a narrative wholethat can easily develop further by virtue of that very self-identity (if theperson continues to live). Since a unifying-identity unifies different parts ofa person’s life, it contains many plain identities of that person, some ofwhich may be that person’s self-identities. A unifying-identity must itself bea 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 identityis not necessarily a self-identity. A self-identity that is not aunifying-identity may still form a narrative whole in the sense that itconstitutes a story that has a beginning and an end; the reason why it is not aunifying-identity is that the narrative whole cannot easily develop further byvirtue 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 themselvesunifying-identities, it will be a case of a unifying-identity containing otherunifying-identities as its parts.

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

Why 'meaning'?

2012-01-02T18:05:00.000-08:00

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

In his attempt to look for a concept of meaning ormeaningfulness common to the major theories or conceptions of a meaningfullife, Thaddeus Metz suggests, after failing to find such a common concept, thatthese theories or conceptions are united by family resemblances, for they alladdress some of the questions in a group of related questions. He does notexplain how the questions are related or what determines whether a questionshould 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 withintrinsic value beyond his animal nature? How might one do something worthy ofgreat admiration?” (“The Concept of a Meaningful Life”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 38, pp.150-151)). But even if hehad explained in some way how these questions are related, he might still nothave explained why they are all questions aboutmeaning or meaningfulness.

According to Susan Wolf, a meaningful life is “one thathas within it the basis for an affirmative answer to the needs or longings thatare characteristically described as needsfor meaning” (“Happiness and Meaning:Two Aspects of the Good Life”, SocialPhilosophy and Policy, 14, p.208, italics added). And the concerns that shethinks 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 anypoint, and the sort of questions one asks when considering suicide andwondering whether one has any reason to go on” (p.209). Should we then say thatwhat explains why the concerns can all be expressed by questions that are askedin terms of the concept of meaning is that the questions can all be used to expressneeds for meaning? We can certainly say that, but it does not seem to get usvery far, for the term ‘meaning’ is used in ‘needs for meaning’. We still haveto explain why it is that what these questions express is needs for meaning ratherthan needs for something else.

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

To see the plausibility of this suggestion, we can firstconsider linguistic meaning, that is, the meaning of ‘meaning’ when the word isapplied 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 meaningof a life’ and ‘the meaning of a sentence’ (or ‘the meaning of a word’). Ineach of the other major languages the same word is applied to both a life and asentence: in German, it is the word ‘Bedeutung’; in French, ‘sens’; in Spanish,‘sentido’; in Italian, ‘significato’; in Portuguese, ‘significação’; inRussian, ‘значе́ние’; and in Chinese, ‘意義’.

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

One reason why a meaningless linguistic item is bad isthat it hinders, or at least fails to facilitate, communication andunderstanding. In other words, it fails to fulfill its proper function. Anotherreason may be that it is an aberration in something that is otherwise orderlyand systematic. That is, a meaningless linguistic item is disagreeable. Theremay be other reasons, but here I need only to point out the fact thatlinguistic 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 alsoevaluative. Accordingly, when a person asks the question ‘Does my life havemeaning?’ or ‘Is my life meaningful?’, she can be expressing her concern aboutthe evaluation of her life.

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

The big questions and the professionalization of philosophy

2011-12-20T09:43:00.000-08:00

Mostpeople are unaware that philosophy has become highly professionalized.Professionalization leads to specialization and technicalization, and mostphilosophers nowadays work on very specific problems in a particular area ofphilosophy and write in technical terms, both of which ¾ the problems and the language ¾ require abundant academictraining to understand.

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

Forone thing, it is likely that these philosophers have analyzed the big questionsinto manageable smaller problems and are working on these smaller problemswithout making clear how they are related to the big questions (probably becausethey themselves are not yet clear about how the relation between these problemsshould be understood). For another, they are so used to writing for thereadership of fellow philosophers (assuming background knowledge, using jargon,etc.) that the way they write may not be accessible to lay people.

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

Forpeople who want to have answers to the big questions, many ofthese questions are ultimately about how we should live our lives. It would beexpecting too much if we expect philosophers to be wise people in the sensethat they are able to see through all the vanities, illusions, and foolishnessthat are common among human beings, andlive accordingly. In other words, it would be expecting too much if weexpect philosophers to set examples of how we should live our lives. It isreasonable, however, to expect philosophers to be able to analyze problemsclearly, avoid confusions and mistakes in thinking, and draw conceptualconnections when necessary, so as to obtain whatever knowledge andunderstanding that can be obtained by human beings concerning some importantgeneral aspects of the world and human life ¾ to give good answers to some ofthe big questions. And people may find these answers helpful indetermining how they should live their lives.

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

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

Probability in the eye of the beholder?

2011-11-18T17:10:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-16T11:12:00.001-08:00

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 thetranscript 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

2011-10-19T16:10:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-18T22:49:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-31T23:55:00.000-07:00

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.

A simple logical error

2011-07-31T11:26:00.000-07:00

It is well known, at least among social psychologists, that even bright and highly educated people may perform poorly in some simple reasoning tests. Many tested subjects, for example, committed the conjunction fallacy and picked the wrong cards in the selection task. Here is an anecdote that I myself experienced about highly educated people making a simple logical error.

I was at a university committee meeting and someone proposed a rule that said:

(1A) Students are not allowed to do X and Y.

Everyone at the meeting agreed that students should not be allowed to do X and students should not be allowed to do Y, so everyone supported the following two rules:

(1') Students are not allowed to do X.
(1*) Students are not allowed to do Y.

(1A) was proposed as, and almost everyone there thought it was, a combination of (1') and (1*). In fact, the following, rather than (1A), is such a combination:

(1B) Students are not allowed to do X or Y.

A student had to do both X and Y to violate (1A), but he would violate (1B) if he did only X, only Y, or both X and Y.

Thinking and feeling

2011-06-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

Nietzsche says, "We have to learn to think differently --- in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently." (Daybreak) He is right that difference in thinking, at least in some cases and given sufficient time, will lead to difference in feeling. However, we all know that it is hard to think differently, particularly when the way of thinking involved is imbued with feelings. We can say that in such cases thinking is anchored to feeling. In such cases, thinking is unlikely to change unless feeling changes first.

Although a change in thinking may lead to a change in feeling, feeling does not have to change through a change in thinking. Sometimes feeling changes for other reasons (if we don't know what causes our feeling to change, we may say it just changes). And when feeling changes, thinking is likely to change too.

Here is a personal example: I did not like to travel and usually felt bored (because what I saw did not interest me) and anxious (because I was in a place that I was unfamiliar with) when I was traveling. I traveled simply because my wife enjoyed traveling and I had to accompany her. However, such feelings have changed lately --- I enjoyed my trip to the Silk Road thoroughly and did not feel bored or anxious at all, and I look forward to my next trip (probably South Korea). Why? I don't know. It was not because of the Silk Road, for I had been to places that were no less interesting. In any case, I now think what one can learn about a place by visiting there is essentially different from what one can learn about it by reading books and looking at pictures, while I used to think they were basically the same. This was a change in thinking, but the change in feeling came first.

The worship of reason?

2011-05-20T23:23:00.000-07:00

Being the kind of philosopher I am, I am sometimes accused of worshiping reason (or Reason?). I don't worship anything, which entails that I don't worship reason. I do rely on reason as the best guide for belief and action, but that does not make me a worshiper of reason. I rely on my five senses too, but I don't worship them either.

Why do I rely on reason as the best guide for belief and action? Because it works --- because I want my beliefs to be true and my actions right, and relying on reason helps me achieve that aim. Indeed, there is no way of achieving that aim that is more effective.

Those who accuse me of worshiping reason may point out that it is just my belief that relying on reason is the most effective way of acquiring true beliefs and making right decisions (and acting accordingly). How should I respond? Well, what else can I say other than that I have good reason for believing that. Does that mean there is no escaping the charge of worshiping reason? No. It means only that there is no escaping the need for justifying or giving reason for one's belief.

Charming jokes

2011-04-30T23:58:00.000-07:00

Schopenhauer called the ontological argument for the existence of God a "charming joke". What a charming way of putting it!

Some may think being a charming joke is not that bad for a philosophical argument; at least it is not as bad as just being a joke. However, when a philosopher gets carried away by his cleverness and produces a philosophical argument that is nothing but a charming joke, he may never be able to see that it is nonetheless still a joke simply because it is charming and because the charm is a result of his cleverness. For this reason, a charming joke is worse.

Knowing the limits of one's expertise

2011-04-11T23:51:00.000-07:00

People who are experts in an area may be tempted to think and act as if their expertise is not limited to that area. A philosopher may expect others to take his view on arts as seriously as they take his philosophical view; a folklore expert may comment on politics in an authoritative tone even though he did not have any training in political theory or political analysis; a scientist may criticize a philosopher's argument because he does not understand how different are philosophical investigation and scientific investigation. Richard Feynman, for example, said this about Spinoza:

My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza --- and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these Attributes, and Substances, all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now, how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there was no excuse for it! In that same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world --- and you can't tell which is right. (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, p.195)

Of course you can't tell which of Spinoza's propositions is true by looking at the world; you are not supposed to! Spinoza was not doing bad science; he was doing metaphysics.

However, Feynman was not unaware of the limits of his expertise. In another place he said this:

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy --- and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter. (Ibid., p.142)

Here he was referring particularly to social problems, and he certainly knew that social problems are utterly different from scientific ones. He laughed at Spinoza presumably because he thought that both he and Spinoza were investigating the world, or , reality, and that Spinoza did it in a laughable way.

Feynman might not think he went beyond science when he criticized Spinoza's philosophy. If that was the case, he was not as arrogant as those experts who knowingly exceed the limits of their expertise. But some philosophers would insist that a scientist looking at philosophical problems is just as dumb as the next guy and will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter.

WWJD

2011-03-31T09:45:00.000-07:00

A simple proof that the correct answer to "What would Jesus do?" is "I don’t know":

1. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

2. When X works in mysterious ways, the correct answer to "What would X do?" is "I don't know".

3. Jesus is the Lord.

From 1 & 3, it follows that

4. Jesus works in mysterious ways.

From 2 & 4, it follows that

5. The correct answer to "What would Jesus do?" is "I don't know".

Christian techniques of the self

2011-03-25T21:29:00.000-07:00

According to Foucault, in all societies there is a kind of technique that he calls "techniques of the self" (or "technologies of the self"); these are "techniques that permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power" (from his short essay "Sexuality and Solitude"; he elaborates the notion in a much longer essay entitled "Technologies of the Self". Both essays are collected in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth).

The notion of techniques of the self is interesting enough, but what I find even more interesting is Foucault's application of the notion to Christianity. He first points out that each technique of the self implies some truth obligations such as telling the truth, discovering the truth, and being enlightened by the truth. These obligations are either instrumental to or constitutive of the transformation of the self. He then describes the truth obligations implied by Christian techniques of the self:

Everyone in Christianity has the duty to explore who he is, what is happening within himself, the faults he may have committed, the temptations to which he is exposed. Moreover, everyone is obliged to tell these things to other people, and thus to bear witness against himself... First, there is the task of clearing up all the illusions, temptations, and seductions that can occur in the mind, and of discovering the reality of what is going on within ourselves.

I think most Christians would not disagree with this description. But this is not the interesting part yet. As Foucault goes on:

Second, one must get free from attachment to the self, not because the self is an illusion but because the self is much too real. The more we discover the truth about ourselves, the more we must renounce ourselves; and the more we want to renounce ourselves, the more we need to bring to light the reality of ourselves. This is what we would call the spiral of truth formulation and reality renouncement which is at the heart of Christian techniques of the self.

It is not clear that most Christians would accept these words. They may not see themselves as renouncing their selves, for they, like most human beings, do care about their selves.

What Foucault's characterization of Christian techniques of the self captures is precisely Christians' ambivalence towards their selves --- they both care about and renounce their selves. There is such ambivalence because Christianity is both a salvation religion and a confession religion: one has to care about one's self enough to see the need of salvation, but one also has to renounce one's self as a result of confession. In most cases the psychological condition is just ambivalence, but in some cases it may become so severe that it would not be much of an exaggeration to call it a form of schizophrenia.

Self-ignorance and self-misunderstanding

2011-03-10T14:34:00.000-08:00

The lack of self-knowledge may just be self-ignorance, but it can also be self-misunderstanding. If, for example, you are a stingy person but are not aware that you are --- you don't know that you are stingy, nor do you believe that you are not stingy, then you are just self-ignorant. But if you have the false belief that you are a generous person, then you have self-misunderstanding. This is an important distinction because which form your lack of self-knowledge takes makes some difference to how difficult it will be for you to gain the relevant self-knowledge.

It may appear that self-misunderstanding is a greater hurdle for self-knowledge, for you have to get rid of the false belief as well as acquiring the true one. The false belief stands in the way, and it seems to take more effort to acquire the true belief than in the case of mere self-ignorance.

There is, however, reason to think that self-misunderstanding is, at least in some cases, less of a hurdle for self-knowledge. If you have a false belief about yourself (such as the belief that are a generous person, when in fact you are stingy), it may sooner or later come into conflict with what happens around you (such as your repeatedly refusing to help your friends even when you can easily help them). The conflict, or rather your experience of it, can prompt you to consider the possibility that your belief is false and to see what happens around you as evidence for the opposite belief, that is, the true one.

By contrast, if you are merely self-ignorant, then even if what happens around you is evidence for a certain belief about yourself, you may not even pay attention to it. When this is the case, it is not that you dismiss the evidence; you simply don't see the import of what happens around you --- you don't see it as evidence for or against anything.

Proust's insight

2011-02-19T09:11:00.000-08:00

In his famous article "Personal Identity", Derek Parfit quotes Proust:

We are incapable, while we are in love, of acting as fit predecessors of the next persons who, when we are in love no longer, we shall presently have become . . . . (Parfit's translation)

Parfit is interested in the notion of successive selves, which he thinks Proust employs, at least implicitly ("the next persons"), in this sentence. I am more interested in the insight about love that Proust expresses in it. In fact, Proust's insight does not have to be put in terms of the notion of a person or the self. What he seems to mean is that when we are in love, we are incapable of acting in such a way that we are prepared not to be in love any more. It is not just that we do not act that way; we are simply incapable of doing so, for the incapability is part of what it is to be in love.

Derrida and bullshit

2011-02-12T12:31:00.000-08:00

John Searle famously remarked that Derrida's work is the kind of stuff that gives bullshit a bad name. I have never read a single word by Derrida, and I would generally refrain from commenting on any philosopher whose work I have not read. Besides, there are philosophers I take seriously (such as Stanley Cavell) who take Derrida seriously, so I have never joined in when some of my friends trashed Derrida.

Today, however, I came across a book that may be evidence that Derrida was quite capable of bullshitting. The book includes an interview with Derrida a few weeks after the 9/11 attack, and here is the first five hundred words or so of Derrida's response to the question "Do you consider what we now tend to call 'September 11' an unprecedented event, one that radically alters the way we see ourselves?":

Le 11 septembre, as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, "September 11." We will have to return later to this question of language. As well as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say "September 11" you are already citing, are you not? You are inviting me to speak here by recalling, as if in quotation marks, a date or a dating that has taken over our public space and our private lives for five weeks now. Something fait date, I would say in a French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history; that is always what's most striking, the very impact of what is at least felt, in an apparently immediate way, to be an event that truly marks, that truly makes its mark, a singular and, as they say here, "unprecedented" event. I say "apparently immediate" because this "feeling" is actually less spontaneous than it appears: it is to a large extent conditioned, constituted, if not actually constructed, circulated at any rate through the media by means of a prodigious techno-socio-political machine. "To mark a date in history" presupposes, in any case, that "something" comes or happens for the first and last time, "something" that we do not yet really know how to identify, determine, recognize, or analyze but that should remain from here on in unforgettable: an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are—and I want to insist on this at the outset—only suppositions and presuppositions. Unrefined and dogmatic, or else carefully considered, organized, calculated, strategic—or all of these at once. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. Namely, the fact that we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this "thing" that has just happened, this supposed "event." An act of "international terrorism," for example, and we will return to this, is anything but a rigorous concept that would help us grasp the singularity of what we will be trying to discuss. "Something" took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the "thing." But this very thing, the place and meaning of this "event," remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy—a name, a number—points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.

I would have no better response to this than: Was talking about the 9/11 attack that complicated? Give me a break!

Can you love the whole world?

2011-01-06T21:31:00.000-08:00

Alva Noë has written a short piece on love for NPR, which ends with the question "Can you love the whole world?". What is interesting is not the question itself, but what he compares the question to:

Can you love the whole world? I suppose this is like the question, Is there a God?

My answer to both questions is "No" (if "the whole world" refers to every human being in the world and if "God" refers to a personal God who listens to and answers prayers). There are, however, many people who would answer "No" to the first question but "Yes" to the second. But even for these people, the two questions are alike in the respect that both require us to look beyond ourselves and our immediate concerns. Both are in this sense demanding questions and should not be answered lightly.

Wittgenstein on the difficulty of speaking

2010-12-09T23:00:00.000-08:00

I read the following entry in one of Wittgenstein's diaries today:

I speak far too easily. --- Through a question or an objection one can seduce me to produce a stream of words. While I talk I sometimes see that I am on an ugly track: that I say more than I mean, talk to amuse the other, draw in irrelevancies in order to impressionate and so forth. I then strive to correct the conversation, to steer it back onto a more decent course. But only turn it a little and not enough out of fear --- lack of courage --- & retain a bad taste.

This happens to me easily especially in England since the difficulty of communication (because of character, not because of the language) are enormous from the start. So that one must perform one's exercises on a swaying raft rather than on solid ground. For one never knows whether the other has entirely understood one; & the other has never understood oneentirely.

This entry is particularly interesting to me because the very same words can be used to express my own experience. Indeed, I find that the difficulty of communication makes me speak far too easily. This is not paradoxical, for the word "easily" does not mean without difficulty, but means likely to happen.

I speak faster in English than in Chinese even though English is my second language, and even though my spoken English is far from good. When I speak English, I am "on a swaying raft rather than on solid ground", so I have to move a lot to make sure that I am heading in the right direction.

Absence of evidence and evidence of absence

2010-11-14T15:59:00.000-08:00

Is it true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence? The best answer is: It depends on the case. Let us consider three cases:

I. There is no evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life, but the absence of evidence is not evidence that there is no extraterrestrial life. This is because we may have reason to believe that it is improbable for life not to exist somewhere other than Earth.

II. You are investigating a murder case and there are only two persons, A and B, who might have motivation for murdering the victim. A and B are the only suspects; you have some (but not overwhelming) evidence that A committed the crime, but you do not have any evidence that B did it. The absence of evidence that B did it is not evidence that he didn't do it --- he is still a suspect. However, if later on there is more and more evidence that it was A who committed the crime, this will allow you to give more weight to the fact that there is no evidence that B did it, and you can accordingly say that the absence of evidence is now evidence that he didn't do it.

III. Suppose Jennifer believes that there are unicorns. You point out that unicorns are mythical creatures and there is no evidence that they exist. She responds by insisting that the absence of evidence for the existence of unicorns is not evidence that they don't exist. Is this a reasonable response? No, for we have very good reasons for believing that there are no unicorns and there is no need for having any evidence for the truth of the belief.

There can be a more systematic treatment of "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"; the point I want to make here is just that we should not accept it as a general principle.

How was Jesus sacrificed when he did not really die?

2010-10-17T17:34:00.000-07:00

Christians believe that Jesus died for our sins, but they also believe that Jesus rose from the dead, that is, Jesus did not die after all. If Jesus did not really die, then he wasn’t really sacrificed, was he? Cf. If you slaughtered an animal in order to sacrifice it to your god(s), but it came back to life immediately, was the animal sacrificed?

Indeed, if you believe that Jesus is God, and that God cannot die, then you have to believe that Jesus cannot die either. You can at most believe that that human organism which was Jesus' body ceased to function and then was revived by God. (This was, by the way, no big deal for God. Remember, God is omnipotent!) But then this would be compatible with Jesus the person not being dead at any time. If Jesus is God, then there was no point of time at which the person Jesus --- who is God --- was dead.

So, strictly speaking, Jesus was not sacrificed; it was Jesus' body that was sacrificed (even this, as I pointed out in the first paragraph, is questionable since his body was revived). But there is no reason to believe that that particular human body was so special that the sacrifice of it was sufficient for redeeming us, for God could easily have taken on another human body.

It may be objected that if, as Christians believe, humans have an immaterial soul, then in the sense in which Jesus did not die, humans whose bodies ceased to function did not die either, nor, for that reason,could any of them be sacrificed. True, but that only strengthens my point. If not even humans can be sacrificed, then how could Jesus be sacrificed? (There is, however, an important difference between normal humans and Jesus: even if humans have an immaterial soul, a human soul can be destroyed by God, while Jesus cannot cease to exist.)

Love at first sight

2010-10-10T22:02:00.000-07:00

Is there such a thing as love at first sight? I think it depends on how literally we take the word 'love' here. If 'love' here means no more than a feeling of romantic attraction, then there is certainly love at first sight. However, if 'love' here means, well, love, then it is not clear that most of the cases that people would describe as 'love at first sight' are really love.

When someone describes his first encounter with his beloved as 'love at first sight', it is usually a retrospective description. It is in the light of his love for her now that he sees the first encounter that way. If after the first encounter their relationship had not developed further, that would not have changed that experience, but he probably would not have described it as 'love at first sight'. So it is more reasonable to think that the first encounter was not love at first sight; it is just that it is seen as love at first sight retrospectively.

The largest class ever

2010-09-25T00:33:00.000-07:00

It is unusual for a philosophy book written by a famous professional philosopher to be a New York Times bestseller, but here is one: Michael Sandel's Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?. It is based on Sandel's "Justice" course at Harvard, which has been one of the most popular courses at Harvard since it was first offered about twenty years ago. The class is usually very large, and in Fall 2007, it had 1.115 students, making it the largest class ever at Harvard. I can't imagine what it is like to be teaching such a huge class. I am teaching a 120-student class this semester, and it is already too large for me. My teaching has been improving though. This is the fifth week of the semester and I think I have learnt a few tricks to teach the class more effectively. But it is still not easy. Over a thousand students? No way!

By the way, I have skimmed through Sandel's book and got the impression that it is a very interesting introduction to moral philosophy.

Surprise

2010-09-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.

So true. But who says this? Surprise, surprise: it's Nietzsche!

Is everyone a philosopher?

2010-09-01T19:53:00.000-07:00

Is everyone a philosopher? For me the answer is clearly 'No'. Some may think we can define 'philosopher' so loosely that anyone who thinks about how to live and answers the question --- who thereby has her own 'philosophy of life' --- is a philosopher. But the fact is, not everyone thinks about how to live. Some people are incurably unreflective; they should not be considered philosophers even on the above extremely loose definition of the term.

There are, however, people who think that even if they are not philosophers, they will understand philosophy if they try to. They believe that if they pick up a philosophy book and read it, they will understand it; they also believe that if two philosophers are discussing a philosophical problem, they can easily chime in and contribute to the discussion. They have no idea that some philosophical ideas/problems/arguments/theories are impossible to understand without some training and background knowledge.

How do I know there are such people? From the following experience: I was reading a rather difficult philosophy book; a friend saw that and asked me what I was reading. I told him the title, and he went on to ask me what the book was about. I tried my best to explain the problem discussed in the book in terms that he might understand. His response was, "How interesting! That will be the next book on my reading list." And I said, certainly unwisely, "I think this book is a bit too advanced for you." He seemed offended.

It is hard to imagine that this would have happened if I were a physicist and the book I read were on quantum mechanics.

Living and understanding life

2010-08-07T19:48:00.000-07:00

"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." This famous saying of Kierkegaard may seem obviously true: the future is indeterminate, so 'my life in the future' is not something definite that I can understand now; by contrast, my life in the past is fixed, but it is gone now and I can only live in the present, moving forwards into the future.

However, I can have a plan for my future and understand what my life should be like according to the plan. This is, in a sense, understanding life forwards. On the other hand, I cannot live without being affected by my memories of the past. If my memories are so powerful that they dictate how I live my life now, then I am in a sense living in the past, living my life backwards.

There is indeed an entry in Kierkegaard's journal in which he remarks that "life must be understood backwards", but what he says next is a qualification of the remark:

And if one thinks over the proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time simply because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it --- backwards.

There is no resting-place because my life changes constantly for as long as I live. How I understand my life so far depends on how I see things and how I live my life now, but both of these can change (and usually not as a result of my own decision), and my understanding of my life will change accordingly. My understanding of my life is thus always tentative.

Ignore, ignorant, and ignorance

2010-07-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

Is "ignore" the root of "ignorant" and "ignorance"? I suppose etymologically the three words must be related, maybe having the same Latin root, but in English "ignore" forms an interesting contrast in meaning with "ignorant" and "ignorance". Ignorance of X is lack of knowledge of X, but to ignore X one has to know of X in the first place, that is, one cannot ignore something that one is ignorant of.

However, if one ignores X, one will not be able to know X further than one already does. So, in a way, ignoring X does lead to ignorance of X. On this understanding, knowledge is a matter of degree, and so is ignorance.

Philosophy and masturbation

2010-07-13T00:34:00.000-07:00

There are two things Karl Marx says about philosophy that I think every philosopher should give some thought to:

(1) Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex.
(2) The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

I don't think (1) is true of all philosophy, but it is easy to philosophize in such a way that all we are doing is no more than finding our way out of a conceptual maze we have created, a maze that does not tell us anything beyond itself. It would be fun, intellectually, if we got out of the maze, and in a sense this would be solving the problem. But we should also ask: Why does it matter?

As for (2), I am not sure philosophers should always try to change the world. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to think that some philosophy (such as social and political philosophy, normative ethics, and even some philosophy of mind) has the potential to change the world, though it may take a long time.

(1) and (2) are, of course, related. If one's philosophy is nothing but conceptual masturbation, it should be not expected to be able to change the world.

What's wrong with the unexamined life?

2010-07-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

According to Socrates, an unexamined life is not worth living. Call this the Socratic view. Some would disagree with the Socratic view, insisting that an unexamined life can be flourishing, fulfilling, satisfying, happy, valuable, meaningful, and hence worth living. Call this the other view. I think the other view is correct, but there is a way of understanding the Socratic view so that it is compatible with the other view.

The Socratic view should be understood against the background of the question "How should I live my life?". Call this the Socratic question. Anyone can ask the Socratic question, but not everyone does ask it. But for a person who has asked the Socratic question, the only way to answer it is to examine her life so far and see how she should move on (or whether she should move on at all). To put it another way, a person who has asked the Socratic question is already self-reflective, and her attempt to answer it consists in having further self-reflection. If she finds an answer to the question and knows how she should live her life, that must also be a life that she thinks is worth living.

The Socratic view is thus true for a person who has asked the Socratic question, for it means no more than that a person cannot answer the question "How should I live my life?" and say, earnestly and firmly, "Yes, my life is worth living!" without having examined her own life.

On this understanding, the Socratic view is thoroughly first-personal. The other view, by contrast, is third-personal. It is possible for a person's life to be considered worth living by others while he himself does not have the belief that his life is worth living because he has not asked the Socratic question.

Two views of philosophy

2010-06-22T00:05:00.000-07:00

The following is David Lewis's characterization of philosophy:

One comes to philosophy already endowed with a stock of opinions. It is not the business of philosophy either to undermine or to justify these preexisting opinions, to any great extent, but only to try to discover ways of expanding them into an orderly system. [...] There is some give-and-take, but not too much: some of us sometimes change our minds on some points of common opinion, if they conflict irremediably with a doctrine that commands our belief by its systematic beauty and its agreement with more important common opinions. (Counterfactuals, p.88)

I am not sure what to make of it. On the one hand, this goes against my conviction that philosophy is by nature self-critical; on the other hand, I have to admit that what Lewis says is true of many philosophers, including himself.

Compare this with the following passage by Foucault:

After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. [...] what is philosophy today --- philosophical activity, I mean --- if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? (The Use of Pleasure, p.8)

I find myself agreeing with Foucault, though I am not sure to what extent philosophical reflection can change one's fundamental world view. Yes, "to the extent possible", but what is that extent? So, this is inspirational, but I am not sure how true it is of actual philosophers.

I am torn between these two views of philosophy.

How to read Foucault

2010-06-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

I had read a few introductory books on Foucault and did not find any of them very helpful. Yesterday I picked up this one by Jonanna Oksala, entitled How to Read Foucault. and liked it immediately after reading just the first two chapters. It is one of the books in the "How to Read" series published by WW Norton & Company, all of which are fairly short (just around 100 pages).

The book is very clearly written and informative, but what I was most impressed with so far is how quickly it succeeds in presenting Foucault as an intriguing and important thinker. Some of the things it highlights are instructive as to how one should read Foucault's writings. Here is an example:

Foucault once noted in an interview that, while there were truth books and demonstration books, his books were experience books. By this he meant that the experience of reading potentially changed the reader and prevented him from 'always being the same or from having the same relation with things and with others'. (p.24)

This is actually Foucault's own advice, and I am glad that I saw this in Oksala's book before I start to read Foucault's writings.

Kundera's definition of novel

2010-06-13T23:16:00.000-07:00

Here is how Kundera defines "novel" in his The Art of Novel :

The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some great themes of existence.

I like this definition, particularly the idea that characters in a novel are the author's experimental selves.

The paradox of tolerance

2010-06-02T21:01:00.000-07:00

It is a truism that anyone who is tolerant is against intolerance. This truism will, however, turn into an apparent paradox if it is put this way: anyone who is tolerant is intolerant of intolerance. It seems that a tolerant person is necessarily intolerant in some respect, and this is supposed to be paradoxical.

I am not sure I understand why this is paradoxical. First of all, it is not clear that a tolerant person has to be tolerant of everything. Tolerance is a matter of degree. Perhaps we have to say that a tolerant person who is intolerant of intolerance is not completely or perfectly tolerant, but it is not paradoxical to say so. Secondly, we may distinguish between reasonable tolerance and unreasonable tolerance, and hold that tolerance of intolerance is unreasonable, and hence that it is all right for a tolerant person to be intolerant of intolerance.

In any case, I doubt that the truism that anyone who is tolerant is against intolerance is equivalent to the apparently paradoxical claim that anyone who is tolerant is intolerant of intolerance. To be tolerant of a view, a value, or an action, one does not have to accept it or agree with it; one only has to refrain from trying to suppress it or interfere with it. So it is possible for one to be against something and still be tolerant of it. I am, for example, against religion, but I am certainly tolerant of it.

The truism is thus not paradoxical, and the apparently paradoxical claim does not seem true. So, where is the paradox?

Hume's best remark on religion and philosophy

2010-05-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had to reread the conclusion of Book I of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature and saw this wonderful remark on religion and philosophy:

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

I certainly had read this remark before and liked it, but I didn't remember it. So when I was rereading it, it was as if I was reading it the first time and I was able to experience anew the feeling of being deeply impressed. It was a wonderful feeling.

Berkeley's reminder

2010-05-18T22:45:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been thinking a lot about Berkeley's famous remark on philosophy:

We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.

I have become more and more convinced that most published philosophy nowadays, probably including my own writings, fits this description.

I am suffering from intellectual self-doubt; what I doubt is not my intellectual abilities, but my intellectual activities and their products. I am feeling a bit lost; I need a new direction.

Polygamy and infidelity

2010-05-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

Adam Phillips again. Here is what he says about monogamy that I find quite interesting:

Like a magnet that collects our virtues and vices, monogamy makes the larger abstractions real, as religion once did. Faith, hope, trust, morality; these are domestic matters now. Indeed, we contrast monogamy not with bigamy or polygamy but with infidelity, because it is our secular religion. God may be dead, but the faithful couple won't lie down. (Monogamy, p.10)

There are indeed people whose understanding of monogamy comes from their religion, but Phillips are not talking about them. What he suggests is that people, including (or particularly) those who do not have a religion, need monogamy the way they need religion.

This sounds to me an exaggeration. I do think, however, he is right that we contrast monogamy with infidelity. This raises a question: How is infidelity in polygamy different from infidelity in monogamy? In polygamy, when the husband (or the wife if it is polyandry) is unfaithful, he is unfaithful to more than one person. Is it worse than, or not as bad as, being unfaithful to just one person as in the case of infidelity in monogamy? Conversely, when one of the wives is unfaithful, can we say that she is unfaithful only to part of the husband because she shares him with his other wives? If we can say that, should we also say that her infidelity is not as bad as that in monogamy?

John Cage and literal meaning

2010-04-26T22:49:00.000-07:00

I read the following story in Adam Phillips's Darwin's Worms:

John Cage tells the story somewhere of going to a concert of music composed by a friend of his. The composer had also written the programme notes for the music in which he said, among other things, that he hoped his music might go some way to diminishing the suffering in the world. After the concert his friend asked him what he thought of the event and Cage answered, "I love the music but I hated the programme notes." "But don't you think there's too much suffering in the world?" the friend asked, obviously put out. "No," Cage replied, "I think there's just the right amount."

Perhaps Cage really thought there is just the right amount of suffering in the world; perhaps he was one of those who think the amount of suffering in the world is just the amount that God allows. But suppose he did not think that. In that case he did not literally mean what he said, but he sill managed to express what he wanted to express. And it is this reading of what he said that makes the story interesting.

So what did Cage express? Well, we can understand what he expressed differently. I think what he meant to express was that it is not the job of music to diminish the suffering in the world. However, if he had said, "It's not the job of music to diminish the suffering in the world,", he would not have expressed what he wanted to express in the way he wanted to express it, and the effect of his words would have been different.

A Buddhist story

2010-04-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I came across a Buddhist story that I found strangely moving:

A monk set off on a long pilgrimage to find the Buddha. He devoted many years to his search until he finally reached the land where the Buddha was said to live. While crossing the river to this country, the monk looked around as the boatman rowed. He noticed something floating towards them. As it got closer, he realized that it was the corpse of a person. When it drifted so close that he could almost touch it, he suddenly recognized the dead body --- it was his own! He lost all control and wailed at the sight of himself, still and lifeless, drifting along the river's currents. That moment was the beginning of his liberation.

After reading the story, the image of the man seeing his own dead body got stuck in my head for a long time. I don't know why.

Being predictable and being reliable

2010-03-31T21:43:00.000-07:00

I am a fairly predictable person; people who know me, even those who know me not really that well, can quite accurately predict what I will do under different circumstances. For example, everyone can predict correctly that I will try to be the first one to ask the speaker questions after a talk. I am also a fairly reliable person; if I agree to do something, I will usually get it done and get it done on time.

So, can I be described as predictably reliable? Well, that sounds redundant, for my being reliable implies that people can quite accurately predict that I will do what I agree to do. How about being reliably predictable? This is redundant too if it means "can be predicted correctly most of the time". There is another sense in which it is redundant: given that I am predictable, people obviously can rely on their prediction of what I will do.

Being predictable and being reliable, however, are not the same, at least for the reason that a person who is predictable may not be reliable. Indeed, a person can be predictably unreliable. Isn't "predictably unreliable" redundant too? No, for a person who is unreliable is not a person who always does not do what he has agreed to do, but a person who does not always do what he has agreed to do. That is, sometimes he does, sometimes he does not. If this makes such a person unpredictable, then perhaps we can call him "predictably unpredictable"!

It may still work without God

2010-03-26T16:35:00.000-07:00

I used to, when I was still a Christian, like Reinhold Niebuhr's so-called Serenity Prayer very much, particularly the following lines:

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

When I look at these lines again now, I can't help wondering why I thought I needed God in order to have the attitudes advocated in these lines. Why can't I develop the serenity, courage, and wisdom on my own? It may still work without God.

"I am flattered'

2010-03-19T00:12:00.000-07:00

I am always puzzled by the use of the expression "I am flattered". To flatter someone is, in most cases, to praise her insincerely and excessively for gain or advantage; sometimes the praise can be both sincere and true, but the motivation for gain or advantage is still there, which is why flattering is still not a decent thing to do in such cases. Accordingly, if we say of a person A that she flattered another person B, we are giving a negative evaluation of A.

Suppose I was B and A praised me. Now if I responded to A by saying "I am flattered", I would not be giving a negative evaluation of A. But why? Isn't it the same fact that was being expressed when I said "I am flattered" and when a third person said "A flattered B"?

One possible explanation is that when a person says "I am flattered", she is trying to be modest, that is, what she means is "You are praising me too much". This is not, however, a completely satisfying explanation, for "praising someone too much" does not seem to mean the same as "flattering someone".

Missing hours

2010-03-11T11:08:00.000-08:00

I am considered by my friends to be efficient and self-disciplined. Like most people, however, I still waste a lot of time. When I try to count the hours I spend on different kinds of things on a typical day, there are at least one or two hours unaccounted for. I have, as it were, some missing hours every day.

A typical teaching day:
Teaching (preparation, lectures, seeing students) --- 5 hours
Reading --- 2 hours
Cooking --- 1 hour
Eating meals --- 1 hour
Internet (email, reading news and blogs, etc) --- 2 hours
Driving (house and campus) --- 0.5 hour
House chores --- 1 hour
Family time (talking and doing stuff with son and wife) --- 1.5 hours
Writing (blogs, papers) --- 1 hour
Physical exercise --- 0.5 hour
Sleeping --- 6.5 hours

* Missing hours --- 2 hours

A typical non-teaching day:
Reading --- 4 hours
Cooking --- 1 hour
Eating meals --- 1 hour
Internet (email, reading news and blogs, etc) --- 3 hours
Driving (house and gym) --- 0.5 hour
House chores --- 1 hour
Family time (talking and doing stuff with son and wife) --- 1.5 hours
Writing (blogs, papers) --- 3 hours
Physical exercise --- 1.5 hours
Sleeping --- 6.5 hours

* Missing hours --- 2 hours.

Time travel and regrets

2010-03-06T10:41:00.000-08:00

I have always been fascinated with the possibility of time travel. It seems that this is true of many people too. When I was talking about fatalism in the Metaphysics class and asked the question whether a person who traveled to the past and made predictions about the future (i.e. future from the perspective of the past that he was now in) always made correct predictions (the answer seems to be "Yes" because he was from the future), the whole class jumped in the discussion, but focused entirely on the possibility of time travel, whether the past can be changed, etc. I had to remind them that our topic was fatalism, not time travel (yet).

I think the most fascinating aspect of the possibility of time travel is not the possibility of knowing or seeing the past (or the future), but the possibility of changing the past, and hence changing the future as well. It is so fascinating because most of us would very much like to change at least some parts of our past. We all have regrets. There were actions that we wish we had not taken. There were decisions that we now see as wrong. There were things that we wish we could have stopped from happening...

If fatalism is true...

2010-03-01T12:14:00.000-08:00

Fatalism is the view that whatever happens is unavoidable. When people say they believe in fate or destiny, they are not necessarily expressing fatalism. They may apply the concept of fate only to things that are important to them, such as love, career, and health, but not to mundane things like what to eat for breakfast. It is not clear that this selective concept of fate is even coherent.

If fatalism is true, then everything that happens is unavoidable. I find fatalism extremely hard to accept; even if there was a forceful argument for fatalism, I am not sure I would be able to accept its conclusion, that is, accept that everything that happens is unavoidable. Accepting fatalism would mean to me the loss of motivations to plan for and strive to achieve anything.

Richard Taylor thinks, however, that fatalism should imply "the attitude of calm acceptance":

And this is a comfort, both in fortune and in adversity. We shall say of him who turns out bad and mean that he was going to; of him who turns out happy and blessed that he was going to: neither praising nor berating fortune, crying over what has been, lamenting what was going to be, or passing moral judgments.

Then he goes on to ask this:

Shall we, then, sit idly by, passively observing the changing scene without participation, never testing our strength and our goodness, having no hand in what happens, or in making things come out as they should?

And his answer is:

This is a question for which each will find his own answer.

This answer can be understood fatalistically: Our attitude towards fatalism is also fated and unavoidable!

Crystallization and confirmation bias

2010-02-24T21:58:00.001-08:00

In De L'Amour Stendhal suggests the concept of crystallization, which according to him is part of the process of being in love. Crystallization is, as Stendhal puts it, "a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one". I think Stendhal is right, that is, that everyone who has the experience of being in love has the experience of crystallization.

"Crystallization" seems to me, however, just a fancy term for the kind of confirmation bias that a lover has towards her beloved. A person has confirmation bias towards something that she wants to be the case when she selectively notices or focuses upon evidence that would support it while ignoring evidence that would confute it. A lover wants her beloved to be perfect, which is why she "draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one", and is blind to whatever flaws her beloved has. When you call this confirmation bias, it sounds bad; but when you call it crystallization, it sounds romantic. As it is sometimes said, this is mere semantics.

Stendhal's epitaph

2010-02-22T11:32:00.000-08:00

Stendhal wrote his own epitaph: "Errico Beyle, Milanese: visse, scrisse, amò." (Henri Beyle, Milanese: he lived, wrote, loved.) His real name was Marie-Henri Beyle, and he did live, write, and love. If I were him, however, I would reverse the order of the words and write "he loved, wrote, lived". It was because he loved that he was able to write about the things he wrote, and it was because he loved and wrote that he lived his life to the fullest extent.

Fame as a disequilibrium

2010-02-17T13:39:00.000-08:00

In The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, Milan Kundera says something very interesting about fame:

A man becomes famous when the number of people who know him is markedly greater than the number he knows. The recognition enjoyed by a great surgeon is not fame: he is admired not by a public but by his patients, by his colleagues. He lives in equilibrium. Fame is a disequilibrium. There are professions that drag it along behind them necessarily, unavoidably: politicians, supermodels, athletes, artists.

Kundera seems to imply that fame as a disequilibrium is a bad thing, that is, bad for the person who is famous. But why is it bad for a person that the number of people who know him greatly exceeds the number of people he knows?

I think in order for fame to be bad for the person who is famous, there has to be another disequilibrium: the number of people who know him is markedly greater than the number of people who have good reasons to know him. Such disequilibrium is bad for the person who is famous because what he gets is no more than others' attention. Such attention is not accompanied by respect or admiration, but may still give the person who receives the attention a false sense of accomplishment and an inflated ego.

How to read Wittgenstein

2010-02-13T10:50:00.000-08:00

I always emphasize to my students that philosophy starts with problems rather than answers or solutions: if you have not been troubled by and grappled with a philosophical problem, it would be a waste of time for you to try to understand suggested solutions to the problem. This is, I think, Wittgenstein's view of philosophy too. I cannot agree more with John W. Cook when he writes:

It would go very much against Wittgenstein's spirit to proceed as though one could recognize the solution to a philosophical problem without being oneself in the grip of that problem. Unfortunately, many of Wittgenstein's would-be followers seem to think that one can do philosophy by starting from Wittgenstein's view that philosophical problems are nothing but intellectual muddles. Those who proceed in this manner tend to think that philosophical problems can be dealt with, as it were, from the outside, as if one could plant oneself firmly in some safe, uncontaminated region and hand down solutions in a pontifical manner. The 'solutions' thus arrived at typically fail to engage with the problems they are meant to solve, but they also, because of their glibness, infuriate philosophers who are grappling with those problems. Their glibness, which is merely annoying, is of less moment than the fact that they fail to engage with the targeted problem, which makes it appear that Wittgenstein, too, failed to address those problems. (Wittgenstein, Empiricism, and Language, p.202)

This passage beautifully connects Wittgenstein's view of philosophy to how Wittgenstein's philosophy should be read. Bravo!

State of nature in the snow

2010-02-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting moral question posed in an article in The New Republic:

For those who managed to liberate their cars from the Snowpocalypse of 2010, another tricky moral dilemma can lead to some volatile confrontations: If you dig your car out from its frozen tomb, do you then own that parking spot until the sun melts open the rest of the curbside space?

Some cities have laws that help answer that question. Boston has, for example, a city law that says if you dig out your car in a snow emergency, you can mark that spot as yours for at least two days. Most cities, however, don't have such laws.

If this kind of situation is considered a small-scale state of nature, then we may use Locke's definition of private property in the state of nature to answer the above question: You own something if it is a result of your mixing your labor with freely available materials. The answer is thus "Yes, you own that parking spot." But there must be laws to make sure that people act according to this definition.

Indeed, in those cities in which there are no relevant laws helping determine who owns a parking spot like that, the situation does look like a small-scale state of nature. Here is the closing paragraph of the article:

After the 1996 storm, a man was killed outside New York after a dispute over a shoveled parking spot. In Philadelphia in 2000, it happened again. In South Boston, a handful of assaults, slashed tires and other cases of vandalism end up in District Court each year after drivers are perceived to have broken the code.

Randomness

2010-02-07T12:26:00.000-08:00

I have always found the notion of randomness hard to understand. It is not that I don't understand what people are saying when they use the word "random" in certain everyday contexts, such as when someone says "I was randomly assigned to this team", but that I don't have a clear understanding of how randomness is supposed to be understood as related to probability, chance, and predictability.

Right after the first appearance of the word "random" in his An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic, Ian Hacking remarks, "Randomness is a very hard idea." This really struck a chord with me when I first read it. Although Hacking goes on to give something like a definition of "randomness", he is very careful in formulating it:

Outcomes from a chance setup are random (we think) if outcomes are not influenced by the outcomes of previous trials.

Notice the parenthetical "we think".

I am going to read with some colleagues Hacking's famous book The Emergence of Probability. Hope this will help me understand randomness better.

Murakami's trick

2010-02-03T19:36:00.000-08:00

I like to write in the morning, particularly if I am writing something long and difficult, something that requires a very clear mind. However, if I start in the morning but am not able to get much written after several hours, I will feel like I have lost my momentum and for the rest of the day I probably won't be able to write much either. The following trick that Haruki Murakami uses, which he mentions in his book What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, may help solve my problem:

Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up with the rhythm.

What is metaphysics?

2010-01-31T20:47:00.000-08:00

In the very first lecture of my Metaphysics class this semester, I told my students that I have no answer to the question "What is metaphysics?", that I won't give them any definition of "metaphysics" for the simple reason that I don't have one. They seemed surprised. To assure them that I am indeed qualified to teach metaphysics, I told them that I could tell them a lot of things about metaphysics, it's just that I don't think there is a definition of "metaphysics" that would cover all and only views or theories that are considered metaphysics.

My approach in this class is to introduce and discuss some standard metaphysical issues, such as personal identity, free will and determinism, and possibility and necessity, before we talk about what metaphysics is. My hope is that towards the end of the semester they will have a good sense of what metaphysics is without being given a definition of it.

The curse of the silver medal

2010-01-28T21:42:00.000-08:00

According to some psychological research, silver medalists in a competition are less happy than bronze medalists; and that is true of even silver medalists in the Olympic Games. If this is a true phenomenon, it cannot be explained simply by the fact that we evaluate ourselves in terms of comparison, for the silver medalist should feel good by comparing himself with the bronze medalist. One plausible explanation is that the silver medalist is influenced by counterfactual thoughts, more specifically, the counterfactual thought that he might have won the gold medal.

But why isn't the counterfactual thought the one that he might have got only the bronze medal? This is, I think, because the silver medalist is compelled by his wish to win the gold medal to focus on it rather than the bronze medal. And wishful thinking may be working here, for the silver medalist may believe that he could easily have won the gold medal ("I was so close", "I was just having bad luck", etc.).

What about the bronze medalist? Why doesn't he feel unhappy because he has not won the silver medal? Unlike the silver medalist, who would still have won a medal, namely, the bronze one, even if he had lost to the bronze medalist, the bronze medalist would have got nothing if he had not performed as well as he did. So, in his case, the most compelling counterfactual thought is the one that he might easily have got nothing.

Aging and dying

2010-01-26T15:29:00.000-08:00

If aging is getting older and dying is getting closer to death, then we are aging and dying every day. This is not, however, what people usually mean when they talk about aging and dying as things they fear or worry over. What they mean by "aging" is showing signs of being old. In this sense, you are already old when you are aging; and in the process of aging, you are getting more and more signs of being old, and those signs are getting more and more obvious. What they mean by "dying" is approaching death in such a way that death is imminent and caused by some kind of illness. The final stage of aging overlaps dying, for the end of aging is not just getting very old, but death. (But the final stage of dying does not have to overlap aging, for a person can die young.)

I do not fear death, for I see my death as nothing but the non-existence of me (again). But I fear both aging and dying because I fear physical and mental decline, and fear the pain that is likely to accompany the illness that will be the cause of my death. Because of this fear, I have this irrational inclination to believe that I will not live to an old age. This is, I think, a weak form of wishful thinking.

The philosophical vs the ordinary

2010-01-24T19:49:00.001-08:00

If someone points to a wall and asks, "Is this wall really yellow?", a proper answer to such a question would be something like "No, it's not really yellow. Just take off your sunglasses and you'll see" or "Of course, what would you call this color if not yellow?".

The person, however, may be using the exact same words to ask a totally different question, a question to which the above answers would not be acceptable. Suppose you answer, "No, nothing is really yellow, for colors are subjective." He may disagree with you or ask you to clarify what you mean by "subjective", but at least you are giving him the right kind of answer, namely, a philosophical view of the thing in question.

Indeed, if the light is normal, the person is not wearing a pair of sunglasses, the wall is clearly yellow, etc., the question "Is this wall really yellow?" would not make any sense except as a philosophical question. But what does it take for a person to ask such a philosophical question?

Sagan's principle and Hume's insight

2010-01-22T20:28:00.000-08:00

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Carl Sagan was not the first who said this, but he was the one who made this principle famous. This is a sensible principle, and it seems that most people follow it most of the time. If, for example, you told someone that you had spent a night at Hotel Palomar San Francisco, she would just believe you. But if you told her that you had spent a night in the White House's Lincoln Bedroom, she would not believe you until you showed her some evidence (probably evidence stronger than just a few pictures, which could easily be fakes).

David Hume seems to be referring to the same principle when he remarks that "we readily reject any fact which is unusual and incredible in an ordinary degree". What he says next, however, is truly insightful:

Yet in advancing farther, the mind observes not always the same rule; but when anything is affirmed utterly absurd and miraculous, it rather the more readily admits of such a fact, upon account of that very circumstance, which ought to destroy all its authority. The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events, from which it is derived. And this goes so far, that even those who cannot enjoy this pleasure immediately, nor can believe those miraculous events, of which they are informed, yet love to partake of the satisfaction at second-hand or by rebound, and place a pride and delight in exciting the admiration of others. ("Of Miracles")

To put Hume's insight in the language of Sagan's principle, many people act as if extra-extraordinary claims require no evidence at all. Let me extend the above example. Yes, if you told someone that you had spent a night in the White House's Lincoln Bedroom, she would not believe you until you showed her some strong evidence. But if you told her that you had spent a night with an angel at the top of a mountain, who demonstrated his power to you to prove that he's really an angel and then revealed some parts of your future to you, she might just believe you (and she might not even have the same religion as yours)!

Snobbery

2010-01-20T17:22:00.000-08:00

Nobody likes snobs, but the fact is, most of us are snobbish to some extent. Most of us have the need to feel (or to become) superior in some way, and snobbery is indeed quite effortless. For one thing, it does not take wealth, power, prestige, pedigree, fame, or social status for a person to be snobbish against some other people. No matter what place you occupy, there are people who are "beneath" you. For another, there is the distinction between, as Joseph Epstein puts it, downward-looking snobbery and upward-looking snobbery. If downward-looking snobbery does not work for you, that means upward-looking snobbery is more readily available to you.

Epstein wrote a whole book on snobbery. It's a good read, entertaining and at times insightful. I like the way he defines "snobbery":

For a beginning or working definition, then, I take the snob to be someone out to impress his betters or depress those he takes to be his inferiors, and sometimes both; someone with an exaggerated respect for social position, wealth, and all the accouterments of status; someone who accepts what he reckons to be the world's valuation on people and things, and acts --- sometimes cruelly, sometimes ridiculously --- on that reckoning; someone, finally, whose pride and accomplishment never come from within but always await the approving judgment of others. People not content with their place in the world, not reconciled with themselves, are especially susceptible to snobbery. The problem here is that at one time or another, and in varying degrees, this may well include us all.

Mental reservation

2010-01-17T16:22:00.000-08:00

One of the Ten Commandments is "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" (in the Exodus 20:2–17 and Deuteronomy 5:6–21 versions). Some Christians take it to mean we should never lie. How do they follow this commandment if they understand it this way? If we define "lying" as "saying or writing something that one believes or knows to be false", then it is indeed hard to see how they can follow the commandment (thus understood) all the time.

Just imagine that a little girl, after being teased by some other children as being ugly, asks you, "Am I really that ugly?", and she is in fact very ugly (or at least you do believe that she is very ugly). What would you say? You may try not to answer the question directly by saying something like "Only shallow people pay so much attention to a person's face". But if the girl insists, "Please tell me the truth. Yes or No?" Would you just say "Yes, you are ugly"?

There is a way out. You can try mental reservation. It was invented in the 13th century and further developed in the 17th century by some Catholic priests. The easiest among the techniques is "strict mental reservation": instead of uttering the whole sentence, you utter only part of it and reserve the rest for "mental utterance" (i.e. utter it internally to yourself). According to the doctrine of mental reservation, if the whole sentence is true, you will not be considered by God to be lying even if the part you utter explicitly is false, provided that the false part is uttered for doing good. Applying this to the above example, you could just say to the girl "You are not ugly" and utter internally "if 'ugly' is redefined to mean beautiful". A perfect solution: the girl is happy and you don't have to lie!

The singular "they" again

2010-01-16T16:53:00.000-08:00

Here is an example of a bad English sentence Richard Mitchell gives in his highly readable Less Than Words Can Say (which is out of print now):

A Department of Transportation manual suggests that "If a guest becomes intoxicated," you might "take his or her car keys and send them home in a taxi."

The problem Mitchell has in mind is, I suppose, the use of "them" in the sentence (he doesn't say so explicitly in the text). Given the use of "his or her", a simple correction of the mistake is changing "them" to "him or her".

Since many people nowadays use "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, they may consider the original sentence correct. The structure of the sentence, however, makes it more natural to understand the "them" to refer to "his or her car keys". In that case, even if you accept the singular use of "they", the sentence may still sound funny.

Skipping God

2010-01-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

This may be surprising to some of my friends and students, but I have decided to delete the topic "God" from my Metaphysics syllabus, at least for next semester. The reason is simple: I am fed up with talking about God. I will replace the topic with "Personal Identity", which is a very interesting one for most students.

"Confused" and "confusing"

2010-01-13T21:44:00.001-08:00

When a student does not understand some reading material (or a lecture), it is likely that she will say that the material is confusing. Of course she would also admit that she is confused, but most likely her point is that it is because the material is confusing that she is confused.

Now if the material is in fact confusing, then there is nothing wrong with her saying so, and it is understandable why she is confused. It is possible, however, for the material to be very clear while the student is still confused. She is confused because, say, she is not reading the material carefully enough or because the material is too advanced for her.

From a third person perspective, we can make this distinction: the material is clear, but she is confused. But from the student's first person perspective, such a distinction seems unavailable. It seems incoherent for her to say, "The material is very clear, but I am confused."

Although the student who is confused cannot judge that the material is clear (when it is in fact clear), she can still entertain the possibility that the material is actually clear. If she takes this possibility seriously, then she may find it more appropriate to say "I am confused" without saying "The material is confusing".

God doesn't give a shit

2010-01-12T23:11:00.000-08:00

God always gets the credit and never gets the blame. Thank God for the failure of the Underwear Bomber's attempt, but God was not to blame even though he did not stop the September 11th attack. The truth is, if you look at the world, I mean the world as a whole, not just your comfortable little world, the only reasonable conclusion you can draw is, even if God exists, he doesn't give a shit.

Hidden complexity

2010-01-11T16:32:00.000-08:00

We all know that the world, particularly when it involves social and institutional activities rather than just movements of physical or biological objects, is highly complex. Politics, financial systems, scientific research, cultural developments, etc. cannot be easily understood because of their complexity. As a matter of fact, however, most mundane aspects of our lives are also very complex; it's just that the complexity is not right in front of us. It usually takes a thinker to notice the complexity, while most people don't think much about things that appear simple (even though they are in fact complex).

I really like the following words by John Searle in his The Construction of Social Reality, which expresses elegantly the point I have just made:

Consider a simple scene like the following. I go into a cafe in Paris and sit in a chair at a table. The waiter comes and I utter a fragment of a French sentence.... The waiter brings the beer and I drink it. I leave some money on the table and leave. An innocent scene, but its metaphysical complexity is truly staggering, and its complexity would have taken Kant's breath away if he had ever bothered to think about such things. Notice that we cannot capture the features of the description I have just given in the language of physics and chemistry.... Notice, furthermore, that the scene as described has a huge, invisible ontology: the waiter did not actually own the beer he gave me, but he is employed by the restaurant, which owned it. The restaurant is required to post a list of the prices of all the boissons, and even if I never see such a list, I am required to pay only the listed price. The owner of the restaurant is licensed by the French government to operate it. As such, he is subject to a thousand rules and regulations I know nothing about. I am entitled to be there in the first place only because I am a citizen of the United States, the bearer of a valid passport, and I have entered France legally... If, after leaving the restaurant, I then go to listen to a lecture or attend a party, the size of the metaphysical burden I am carrying only increases; and one sometimes wonders how anyone can bear it.

Cryonics and love

2010-01-10T22:46:00.000-08:00

Imagine cryonics works. After a person "died", her blood is drained and her body frozen until there is a way of making her body function normally again (curing a disease, fixing an organ, etc.). Here is a thought-provoking situation. Suppose your loved one died young, say at the age of thirty. You decide to have her body cryopreserved. Question: Should you continue to live or have your body cryopreserved too?

If you continue to live, you may live a long life. Say you live up to eight-five and then have your body cryopreserved. One day both you and your loved one are revived, but you are already an old man and she is still a young lady. Can you still love each other?

If you choose to have your body cryopreserved immediately, you will miss a lot of things that you will be able to do only with certain people at certain times. Even if there is a guarantee that you and your loved one will live again together someday, isn't that too big a sacrifice?

Floccinaucinihilipilification

2010-01-09T20:31:00.000-08:00

I have just learned this really long word, "floccinaucinihilipilification", from Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened Of. The word means the estimation of something as valueless.

Barnes's book, by the way, is a rather good read, serious and funny at the same time. It is Barnes's reflections on death and dying, with a lot of autobiograhpical elements.

Teaching and showmanship

2010-01-08T19:27:00.000-08:00

Whenever I am giving a lecture, I have a strong sense of putting on a show. I don't have to force myself to act; it comes naturally. I naturally talk in an enthusiastic and dramatic way; I naturally have all kinds of expressive facial expressions; and I naturally tell jokes and make students laugh. Indeed, for me all this is part of the fun of teaching. How well I performance usually depends on the reactions of my audience, i.e., my students. If I feel that they like my performance, I will perform even better. And I enjoy meeting the challenge of answering students' unexpected questions offhand. Teaching has to have some improvisation elements to be lively and exciting.

Stumbling on happiness

2010-01-07T23:57:00.001-08:00

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.

Willa Cather, "le Lavandou"

Tao Te Ching

2010-01-06T21:33:00.000-08:00

I am always skeptical about translating the Tao Te Ching. Classical Chinese is very flexible (much more so than modern Chinese), and when the prose of a text is both dense and poetic, like that of the Tao Te Ching, it is impossible to retain most of the possible meanings of the text in a translation. To see this, just look at the following translations of the first two lines of the Tao Te Ching (name of the translator in brackets):

The Tao that can be told of is not the Absolute Tao;
The Names that can be given are not Absolute Names. (Lin Yutang)

The Way as “way” bespeaks no common lasting Way,
The name as “name” no common lasting name. (Moss Roberts)

The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.
The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. (James Legge)

To guide what can be guided is not constant guiding.
To name what can be named is not constant naming. (Chad Hansen)

Ways can be guided; they are not fixed ways.
Names can be named; they are not fixed names. (Chad Hansen, a different translation)

The problem is not that these are incorrect translations, but that each of them at best captures only one of the possible meanings of the original.

Self-complexity

2010-01-05T21:54:00.000-08:00

We all have a self-image, and it is in terms of such a self-image that we evaluate how happy our life is. If my self-image is mainly an academic, then how happy I think I am depends on how successful I am as an academic.

Our self-image can be more or less complex. I can, for example, identify myself just as an academic, but I can also identify myself as an academic, a philosopher, a father, a husband, a poet, a writer, and a cook. According to the psychologist Patricia Linville, the more complex a person's self-image is, the less likely that her happiness in life swings up and down when she does well or poorly at some specific thing. This is easy to understand, for if my self-image has many aspects, then even if one aspect is damaged, my self-image as a whole may still be intact, particularly when I am doing well concerning some of the other aspects.

Of course the matter is not that simple, for it is possible for us to have a false self-image.

A damnable doctrine

2010-01-04T21:26:00.000-08:00

There is a passage in Darwin's autobiography (or more precisely, autobiographical sketch) that I particularly like. I still remember how moved I was when I first read it long time ago:

But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeji or elsewhere which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlasting punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

I like this passage not only because I agree with what Darwin said, but also because my experience was similar to his. I felt like he was speaking for me too.

The second arrow

2010-01-03T20:00:00.001-08:00

I like the Buddhist analogy of the second arrow. The first arrow is the bad thing that happens to you, usually unexpectedly. But a second arrow may follow the first one, making you suffer even more; and the pain caused by the second arrow may last much longer than that of the first.

The second arrow is your awareness of your suffering from the first arrow and your bitterness towards the fact that it has happened to you. So the second arrow is actually shot by yourself. In most cases there is not much you can do to avoid the first arrow, but the second arrow is to a large extent within your control.

Detachment

2010-01-02T22:13:00.000-08:00

I began to have a certain kind of experience when I was still a teenager, which I think can be best described as "the experience of detachment". Sometimes I had the experience almost every day; it felt very strange. I could find no better description of such experience than the following passage in James Joyce's short story "A Painful Case" (in Dubliners):

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense…. Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice…. he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognized as his own.

I still experience this, though less often now. When it first happened to me, I had no control of it; it suddenly took place, and suddenly disappeared. Over the years I have learned how to bring it about at will and how to stop it. I wonder how many people have similar experience.

A cheap ticket to heaven

2009-12-30T22:30:00.000-08:00

There are "Christians" who don't go to church, who don't read the Bible, and who don't follow Jesus' teachings to any substantive degree. They may be sincere when they say that they believe in God and accept Jesus as their savior, but what they really want is probably just a cheap ticket to heaven.

Is God lonely and bored?

2009-12-29T10:24:00.000-08:00

God's thoughts and feelings (if God has feelings at all) are supposed to be beyond our comprehension, so what I am going to say is probably nonsense. But I am going to say it anyway. Sometimes even nonsense can be instructive.

I always wonder whether God, if exists, is lonely and bored. Before God created anything, there's nothing but God. Just imagine what it is like to exist all alone with nothing to do (there was nothing yet to which or with which God could do something), nothing to wonder about (God knows everything), nothing to care about (again, there was nothing yet about which God could care), nothing to look forward to (God is not in time), and no one to communicate with (even if God is trinity, whatever that means, there is no need for communication because God is still one; besides, he is omniscient).

After God created something, the universe, the earth, us, etc., God certainly has things to do. But God already knows what he* is going to do before he does it and what will result from it. So, no surprises or excitement. He still does not need communication and has nothing to wonder about. How about caring about something? Does God care about, say, us? Maybe. But then God does not care about us the way we care about one another. He has no sense of uncertainty concerning us; he does not identify himself with us; he is not emotionally dependent on us in any way. Simply put, God does not need us; he needs nothing.

How can God not be lonely and bored? Certainly I am anthropomorphizing God. But who aren't when they are thinking about God?

* There is no appropriate pronoun for "God"; I could have used "she", "it", or even "they". Strictly speaking, however, there is an appropriate pronoun, namely, "you". Of course, "you" can be used only when we talk to God or God speaks to us.

Proofreading and the human mind

2009-12-28T14:06:00.001-08:00

If you have ever done any proofreading, you know how easy it is to miss a typo. No matter how carefully you read a passage, somehow you still missed some very obvious typos. But why? This may be the answer:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deso’nt mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wihtuot porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Schopenhauer's wisdom

2009-12-27T16:49:00.000-08:00

I know very little about Schopenhauer's philosophy. This is partly because I don't like big books and Schopenhauer's central work, The World as Will and Representation, is very very big. In any case, I am fairly certain that I would not like the book even if I read it, for it is mostly speculative metaphysics. But Schopenhauer wrote quite a large number of essays and some small books on more practical matters, most of which are very readable. The small book The Wisdom of Life, for example, is a book that would be enjoyed by most of those who like to think about how they should live their lives. He divided the subject into "Personality, or What a Man is", "Property, or What a Man Has", and "Position, or a Man's Place in the Estimation of Others". Here is a nice passage from the last part:

The truth is that the value we set upon the opinion of others, and our constant endeavour in respect of it, are each quite out of proportion to any result we may reasonably hope to attain; so that this attention to other people's attitude may be regarded as a kind of universal mania which everyone inherits. In all we do, almost the first thing we think about is: What will people say; and nearly half the troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score; it is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified because it is so very morbidly sensitive.

If you are interested in reading the book, click the link above. The whole book is there.

Words

2009-12-26T11:13:00.000-08:00

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton", V

"Hopefully"

2009-12-25T17:11:00.000-08:00

In The Elements of Style, my bible of writing, we can find the following passage about the word "hopefully":

This once-useful adverb meaning "with hope" has been distorted and is now widely used to mean "I hope" or "it is to be hoped." Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly. To say, "Hopefully I'll leave on the noon plane" is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you'll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you'll leave on the noon plane. Whichever you mean, you haven't said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense.

I am using the third edition, which was published in 1979. And in the first edition of the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, which was published in 1975, the following question was put to the panel of consultants, which had more than 130 members:

The adverb "hopefully" is often heard in the sense of "we hope" in such sentences as "Hopefully, the war will soon be ended." Would you accept this formulation?

Here was the result:

In speech Yes: 42% No: 58%
In writing Yes: 24% No: 76%

Twenty years later, in the New Fowler's Modern English Usage, the use of "hopefully" in sentences like "Hopefully, one day we will not argue any more about the use of the word 'hopefully'" is still referred to as "the disputed modern usage". As the book says, "[t]he unofficial war rumbles on."

But I think if we now had a panel of consultants like the one mentioned above, their answers to the question about "hopefully" would probably lean more towards "Yes".

A simple conception of luck

2009-12-24T22:22:00.001-08:00

For me, the concept of luck is purely descriptive. Luck does not explain why something happens to someone. If someone wins the lottery we can say that he is lucky. It is not, however, because he is lucky that he wins the lottery; rather, his winning the lottery is what his being lucky consists in. To say that he is lucky in winning the lottery is just another way of saying that it is very unlikely that he wins but he wins anyway.

Unless you understand luck to be some kind of mystical force that causes things to happen to people, you should not talk as if luck has causal power. Without such an understanding, it is nonsense to say of someone that because she is a lucky person, it is more likely that something good is going to happen to her (or that because she is an unlucky person, it is more likely that something bad is going to happen to her).

On my conception, a lucky person is simply a person to whom good things happen noticeably more often than to others. And a person is lucky on a particular occasion when what happens to her is good but very unlikely to happen. (Mutatis mutandis for an unlucky person.)

Interpretive charity

2009-12-23T19:59:00.000-08:00

How far should one be interpretively charitable? I don't think there are rules; it is mostly a matter of balancing one's confidence in oneself and one's confidence in the author. If you are reading something that is very hard to understand, then generally you should read it in such a way that it is at least coherent and intelligible. But what if the author really does not make any sense? If you have enough confidence in yourself, you will find out fairly soon; if you have more confidence in the author, you will be wasting more of your time.

Just this morning I was commenting on a paper, and the comments will have to be sent to the author. When I first read the paper, I found it almost impossible to understand. I was so frustrated. Should I simply write "This paper is unintelligible; I have no idea what the author is trying to say"? No, such comments would be unacceptable. Besides, the author is a well-known philosopher. What he wrote must make sense! I forced myself to reread the paper a couple of times. Finally the paper became (more) intelligible, and I managed to write some comments that I think were sensible and reasonable.

I couldn't help asking myself: Would my comments have been very different if he was not a well-known philosopher?

How to write like a cook

2009-12-22T18:17:00.000-08:00

Many people who like to cook may not also like to write, but if you love both cooking and writing, there is a good chance that you are a fan of M.F.K. Fisher. I am a fan. When I first read Fisher’s book How to Cook a Wolf, I was totally charmed by her stylish prose and the way she wrote about food and cooking. The book was written during the Second World War when food was rationed. Although it is not a cook book (or not an ordinary cook book), it does contain many recipes. There is, however, no recipe for cooking a wolf, for the wolf is just a metaphor for hard times when food is scarce.

W. H. Auden once said of Fisher, "I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose." (Well, E. B. White was still alive!) And John Updike called her "poet of the appetites". If you have never read Fisher, here's a sample of her prose:

Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken. Until then, you would think its secrets are its own, hidden behind the impassive beautiful curvings of its shell, white or brown or speckled. It emerges full-formed, almost painlessly from the hen. It lies without thought in the straw, and unless there is a thunderstorm or a sharp rise in temperature it stays fresh enough to please the human palate for several days. ("How Not to Boil an Egg")

In the revised edition of the book she added the following notes between 'painlessly' and 'from the hen':

The egg may not be bothered, but nine years and two daughters after writing this I wonder somewhat more about the hen. I wrote, perhaps, too glibly.

Her book The Art of Eating is a great buy; it is actually a collection of five of her most well-known books, including How to Cook a Wolf, for the price of one book.

I have just known that there is a restaurant in Seattle called How to Cook a Wolf, which was named after the Fisher book.

From business to philosophy

2009-12-21T10:49:00.000-08:00

One of the books I ordered yesterday was Peter Goldie's On Personality. I am always interested in books on personality, but what makes this book particularly interesting to me is that Goldie is a philosopher, not a psychologist. Although I have already got the book (I ordered a Kindle version), I probably won’t be reading it until many months later. All I can say about the book now is that it looks very interesting. According to the "Product Description" on amazon.com, Goldie questions our practice of relying on personality to describe, judge, understand, explain, and predict others as well as ourselves. And one reviewer says "the style is delightful, the non-philosophical works called on eclectic and quite fascinating ... the humour engaging ... the sub-headings excellent signposts and the chapters beautifully balanced".

It's not just Goldie's book that is interesting; Goldie himself is interesting too. He turned to philosophy in 1990 after a 25-year career in business (see this), and is currently Samuel Hall Chair and Head of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. So when he began to study philosophy, he was probably over forty years old. From business to philosophy, what a change, and that late! His DPhil thesis, by the way, was supervised by Bernard Williams, one of my most favorite philosophers.

Buying books vs reading books

2009-12-20T01:21:00.001-08:00

I have too many books; too many both because I do not have enough space to keep them and because I do not have enough time to read them. But then why do I keep buying books? I suppose I can say I am truly interested in the books I bought and think one day I will read them. But if I have to psychologically analyze myself, I may say buying and owning books gives me a false sense of becoming more knowledgeable. It is a false sense because buying and owning books is, obviously, not the same as reading them. I am not sure whether this is a form of self-deception, but what makes it psychologically interesting is that even though I know that it is a false sense, I can't help feeling the same way. Just today I ordered two books, not knowing when I will read them, but felt good just because I bought them; and I know that I will feel even better when the books arrive and I can touch them (well, one of them is a Kindle book and can't really be touched).

A poem for my son

2009-12-18T16:50:00.000-08:00

The Big Bang Theory

You have never asked me, where the universe came from
Nor have you asked, the stars in the sky
Whether they are more numerous than people down here
That evening, when we went to see Mars
The huge telescope
Was like a robotic arm reaching for the stars
Mine was warm
When you were holding it
When we were leaving it was pitch-dark
You said, you were not afraid even a bit

That evening, even if there were neither moon nor stars
I would still go with you, just to see Mars
And you knew that, my arm would be warm as always
And I knew that, you would still need me to lead the way

I have heard about, one Big Bang Theory
In your life there is a singularity
When people around you
Are not ready
It explodes
Into your own universe

In your universe, there is always
A big, bright, and warm
Star
Bigger, brighter, and warmer
Than all the others

* This is a loose translation of a Chinese poem I wrote a few weeks ago.

Immortality

2009-12-17T13:52:00.001-08:00

Bernard Williams in his brilliant essay "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality" argues that immortality is undesirable. I think what he says in that essay is mostly right, but I am not going to repeat his points here. If you are interested, the essay is in Williams's book Problems of the Self. For me, the main problem for a person who desires immortality is that she has no idea of what it is like to be living forever, and the notion of an immortal life for a human person is doubly unintelligible when an immortal life is supposed to be incorporeal. Just ask someone who thinks it is good to live forever what it is so good about it and most likely he will not be able to give you a satisfactory answer. I think many people desire immortality simply because they confuse not wanting to die soon (i.e. in less than a hundred years) and wanting to live forever. I certainly don't want to live forever, but I do want to live for as long as I like.

Singular "they"

2009-12-16T13:34:00.000-08:00

I have just noticed that there is a Wikipedia entry on the use of "they" as a singular pronoun. It is an interesting entry and worth reading. I still can't stand people using "they" as a singular pronoun in writing, but it seems that almost everyone is using it that way in speaking. And it is becoming more acceptable in writing too. In the textbook I am using for my Introduction to Philosophy class, I find the following sentence:

Suppose that someone is a good, kind, nice-tempered person and then has a car accident and spends the last year of their life with a changed personality.

"They" refers to the "someone". What can I say?

Atheism and shallowness

2009-12-15T14:01:00.000-08:00

A common response to an atheist's criticism of religion (or a particular religion, or some specific religious belief) is that the criticism is shallow. The suggestion is, presumably, that the criticism does not touch on the important aspects of religion and focus on something that is not essential to it. Usually there is no elaboration of what these important aspects are, and when there is, it turns out to be irrelevant to the criticism. So, please, stop calling atheism shallow; what matters is whether atheism is true (I am sure some would consider this very last claim shallow!).

Mark Johnston in his new book Saving God: Religion after Idolatry refers to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, et al. as "undergraduate atheists". That is, he thinks they are shallow (or sophomoric, if you will). I hope Johnston, being a well-known philosopher, has substantiated this claim in his book. But I doubt it.

The noble savage

2009-12-14T09:40:00.000-08:00

Rousseau is derogating the social man when he says "the savage lives in himself; the man accustomed to the ways of society is always outside himself and knows how to live only in the opinion of others. And it is, as it were, from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence" (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality). The problem with his view is not just that he romanticizes the savage, but also that his evaluation of our social nature is one-sided. It is not true, as Rousseau thinks, that we are "always asking others what we are and never daring to question ourselves on the matter". Being social, we have to question ourselves as well as ask others; being social, we do not simply conform to the values and reasons of others but share many of those values and reasons. This is the case when we make normative judgments generally, and when we make judgments about meaningfulness particularly. A savage, even a noble one, if completely non-social, cannot have a life that is meaningful (or meaningless).

Russell on envy

2009-12-13T11:59:00.000-08:00

Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness is probably not a very deep book, but here and there in the book Russell does give some good advice. The following is what he says about envy:

Envy, in fact, is a form of vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations. I am earning, let us say, a salary sufficient for my needs. I should be content, but I hear that some one else whom I believe to be in no way my superior is earning a salary twice as great as mine. Instantly, if I am of an envious disposition, the satisfactions to be derived from what I have grow dim, and I begin to be eaten up with a sense of injustice. For all this the proper cure is mental discipline, the habit of not thinking profitless thoughts. After all, what is more enviable than happiness? And if I can cure myself of envy I can acquire happiness and become enviable.

I would emphasize the word 'habit'. Once you acquire the habit, you don't have to struggle with envious thoughts.

When everyone thinks you are wrong

2009-12-12T12:09:00.000-08:00

My friend John W. Cook published three books on Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein’s Metaphysics, Wittgenstein, Empiricism, and Language, and The Undiscovered Wittgenstein. His early essays "Wittgenstein on Privacy" and "Human Beings" are considered by some to be two of the best essays on Wittgenstein, but he repudiated much of his early view on Wittgenstein long time ago. The interpretation he offers in his three books has been, however, widely scoffed by other Wittgenstein scholars. The books got extremely hostile reviews, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that everyone thinks he is wrong. I still don’t agree with John’s interpretation, but I think there is much more to it than most of his critics think. The fact that everyone thinks he is wrong doesn’t mean he is wrong; and the scholarship, the intellectual courage, and persistence John exhibits are all admirable.

John inscribed the following words in one of his books he gave me: "May we sometimes agree." We may. But even if in the end I still don’t accept his interpretation, I have at least been inspired by him to decide to read all of Wittgenstein’s published works chronologically. And I will do it soon.

Do you really believe that?

2009-12-10T21:50:00.001-08:00

Sometimes even when someone sincerely says that she believes something, it is not clear that she really believes it. This may be so even when she says she strongly believes it. My favorite example is this: A fundamentalist Christian sincerely says she believes that anyone who does not accept Jesus as his savior will go to Hell and be burnt forever there. Does she really believe this? Well, it depends. Suppose her parents do not believe in Jesus and she had tried several times to convert them but gave up eventually. Now if she really believed that her parents will be burnt in Hell forever, she should not have given up so easily. Just imagine that her parents are going to drink something that she believes to be fatally poisonous; she has tried to convince them not to drink it but failed. If she loves her parents and believes that what they are going to drink is poisonous, she will certainly not give up. If they still don’t listen, she will try something more drastic. And don’t forget that being killed by poison is less painful than being burnt, and much much less painful than being burnt forever.

Envy and jealousy

2009-12-08T23:34:00.001-08:00

What is the difference between envy and jealousy? My son once asked me this question. He was only eight or nine, so I had to explain it in a way that he would understand. Here’s my answer:

"If I gave both you and your best friend Josh a Christmas present, but his was much nicer than yours and you were not happy about it, that's jealousy. It didn’t have to be Josh; it could be another friend and you would feel the same because your bad feeling had more to do with me than with Josh. Now suppose you and Josh were always competing with each other. If Josh won the Spelling Bee and you felt bad about it (though you might also be happy for him because he’s your friend), then that’s envy. It had to be Josh, for if someone else at your school had won the Spelling Bee, you would not have felt bad at all."

Correct me if my answer was wrong.

Please sit down and write

2009-12-07T22:17:00.000-08:00

In "Conversations with Wittgenstein" (in Recollections of Wittgenstein), M. O’C. Drury writes:

I told Wittgenstein that my friend James, who had been working on his Ph.D. thesis for a year, had decided in the end that he had nothing original to say and would therefore not submit his thesis or obtain his degree.

Wittgenstein: For that action alone they should give him his Ph.D. degree.

Drury: Dawes Hicks was very displeased with James about this decision. He told James that when he started to write his book on Kant he had no idea what he was going to say. This seems to me an extraordinary, queer attitude.

Wittgenstein: No, Dawes Hicks was quite right in one way. It is only the attempt to write down your ideas that enables them to develop.

Notice that Wittgenstein did not say "Dawes Hicks was quite right” but said "Dawes Hicks was quite right in one way". If Hicks really had no idea at all what he was going to say in his book, then there were probably no ideas that he could attempt to write down. However, if he had some ideas but did not know how they would develop, then attempting to write down his ideas might be the best way to enable them to develop. Actually I have this kind of experience quite often. It is as if my mind is too small for the ideas and they need the space between written sentences to become active, to get connected with one another, and to generate new ideas.

The music of words

2009-12-06T00:07:00.001-08:00

I wish I could write like E. B. White, whose prose is both plain and exquisite. Plain is easy, exquisite is hard, but plain and exquisite is almost unattainable. I think part of what makes White's prose both plain and exquisite is that it has a rhythm that sounds right, sounds good. Here is the beginning of "Death of a Pig", one of my most favorite:

I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting. Even now, so close to the event, I cannot recall the hours sharply and am not ready to say whether death came on the third night or the fourth night. This uncertainty afflicts me with a sense of personal deterioration; if I were in decent health I would know how many nights I had sat up with a pig.

Now let me rearrange the order of the words and change a few of them:

In mid-September I spent several days and nights with an ailing pig. The pig died at last, and I lived. Since things might easily have gone the other way round and there might have had no one left to do the accounting, I feel driven to account for this sketch of time. Although it is now still so close to the event, I cannot recall the hours sharply, nor am I ready to say whether death came on the third or the fourth night. This uncertainty afflicts me with a sense of personal deterioration because I would know how many nights I had sat up with a pig if I were in decent health.

This is, I think, still acceptable prose; it just doesn't have the musicality that the original has. I can't help wanting to quote another passage by White; this is what he says about poetry:

I think poetry is the greatest of the arts. It combines music and painting and story-telling and prophecy and the dance. It is religious in tone, scientific in attitude. A true poem contains the seed of wonder; but a bad poem, egg-fashion, stinks. I think there is no such thing as a long poem. If it is long it isn't a poem; it is something else. A book like John Brown's Body, for instance, is not a poem --- it is a series of poems tied together with cord. Poetry is intensity, and nothing is intense for long. ("Poetry")

These words are music to my ears.

The Case for God

2009-12-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

My colleague Troy Jollimore wrote a wonderful review of Karen Armstrong's new book The Case for God. The view Armstrong defends in this book is attractive to many people, mostly intellectuals who want to keep their faith without having to deal with any of the problems their rationality would otherwise pressure them to face. As Troy so pithily puts it, Armstrong's view is "mysticism and metaphysical hand-waving raised to a truly objectionable level". Actually, it seems that Troy is more tolerant than I am; for me, all mysticism and metaphysical hand-waving are objectionable.

When a couple fought

2009-12-05T00:51:00.000-08:00

My movie buddies and I saw Hurlyburly together last night. Although we did not all like the movie, there was a scene that we all thought was great (see below). It was a dramatic but believable depiction of how a couple fought about something that was, on the surface, trivial, while the fight was actually caused by something deeply problematic in their relationship.

Why hummings? Why fly-bottle?

2009-12-04T16:43:00.000-08:00

The name of this blog comes from Wittgenstein's famous remark, "What is your aim in philosophy? --- To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." (PI §309). I am not going to, however, limit what I write to philosophy. Indeed, I probably won't talk much philosophy here. This blog does not have a theme; it is simply a record of some of my thoughts that I would like to share with others. Naturally I will be writing on things that interest me, which include philosophy, psychology, literature, science, religion, politics, music, and movies.

The word "hummings" is meant to imply that I may not express myself clearly, at least not all the time. As for "the fly-bottle", I mean even when I express myself clearly, I am still limited by my ignorance, biases, and the numerous assumptions I make. This is fine, I suppose, insofar as my views are not set in stone.

I will try to post at least once a week. Comments are welcome, though I probably won't be able to respond to most of them.