Self-alienation

Consider a woman who has a phenomenal talent for music, who always wants to be a cellist, but who decided to pursue a medical career because that was what her parents very much wanted her, and pressured her, to do. She has finally become a top brain surgeon after years of study and hard work, but this has never been what she really wants herself to be. Suppose someone congratulates her on her achievement; if she responds by saying "Thank you, but that's my parents' achievement, not mine", she will be saying something that is in a clear sense true. Since being a brain surgeon is not what she wants herself to be ¾ since she alienates herself from her identity as a brain surgeon, she cannot address positively her concern about who she is by answering "I am a brain surgeon" even if she can annex something positive to it such as "who helps people in a big way". The problem is that, for her, the "I am" is misplaced in such an answer.

We all have some identities that we do not identify ourselves with; this is just normal, for a person can have a strong and stable sense of who he is only if there are not too many things that he thinks he is, that he thinks define who he is. It would not be a problem if a person alienates himself from some, or even many, of his identities, but it would be a serious problem if he alienates himself from all of his identities. When a person has no identities that he identifies himself with, he is alienating himself from his whole biographical life. In that case, he is indeed alienating himself from himself, for some of his identities must define who he is in order for him to be the person who is living the biographical life that he is living, to be the I who would own the first-person version of his biography, i.e., his autobiography. As Camus so vividly and penetratingly portrays it in L’Étranger,* the life of a person who alienates himself not only from the world around him, but also from himself, is a meaningless life to the person himself.

* “Étranger” in French means either "foreigner", "outsider", or "stranger". Some English translations use the title The Stranger, some the title The Outsider. The protagonist Meursault is a stranger, a foreigner, or an outsider not only to people around him, but also to himself.

Harmless sexual immorality?

Are there harmless sexual activities that are immoral? If all harmless activities are morally permissible, the answer is obviously "no" --- as long as an activity is harmless, it is not immoral, whether sexual or not (people may understand "harmless" differently, but that does not affect the point).

But suppose a harmless activity may still be immoral, and suppose some sexual activities are harmless. On these suppositions, the question whether there are harmless sexual activities that are immoral does not have a clear answer. However, for those who are interested in the question and think it is important to have an answer to it, there are two views they need to distinguish:

(S)  If there are harmless sexual activities that are immoral, they are immoral by virtue of their sexual aspects.
(N)  If there are harmless sexual activities that are immoral, they are immoral by virtue of some non-sexual aspects of the activities; it just happens to be the case that these are sexual activities.

People who believe that sexual activities in themselves are amoral (i.e. neither moral nor immoral) cannot consistently accept (S). That is, they should accept (N). But accepting (N) implies seeing the sexual aspects of the activities as irrelevant to their being immoral or not. For them, if there are harmless activities that are immoral, it should not make any moral difference whether the activities are sexual or not, just as it should not make any moral difference whether the activities involved people who wear glasses or not.

Thus, to see the question whether there are harmless sexual activities that are immoral as a morally significant question, one has to accept (S). And to consistently accept (S), one has to believe that at least some sexual activities are not amoral --- they are in themselves either moral or immoral. Now unless people who believe that at least some sexual activities are not amoral also believe that all those sexual activities are moral, they already have an answer to the question whether there are harmless sexual activities that are immoral, namely, "yes".

It seems to be the case that people who are interested in the question whether there are harmless sexual activities that are immoral usually think it is a morally significant question, and it also seems to be the case that these people usually answer (or are inclined to answer) "yes" to the question. Given the above analysis, this should not be surprising at all.

Kierkegaard on Socrates

In his diary, Kierkegaard asks, "Why did Socrates compare himself to a gadfly?" A popular and amusing answer is that it is because Socrates knew that he was a pain in the ass to those whose cherished beliefs and claims of knowledge he kept questioning. Kierkegaard's answer is not as amusing, but much more insightful :

Because he only wished his influence to be ethical. He did not want to be an admired genius, standing apart from the rest, whereby he actually would have made life easier for them, as they would say: "Yes, it's all very fine for him, he is a genius." No, he merely did what every human being can do; he comprehend what every human being can comprehend. There in lies the epigrammatic. He grabbed hold of the individual and worried him, ceaselessly compelling and teasing him with this ordinary, universally human stuff. That made him a gadfly stirring up a person's passion, and he did not permit that person indolently and effeminately to admire and go on admiring, but claimed his very soul. When a human being possesses ethical strength, people like to elevate him into a genius, just to be rid of him; for his life constitutes a claim, a demand, on them. (The Diary of Soren Kierkegaard, edited by Peter Rohde, Carol Publishing Group, 1993, p.123)

The ethical, like the aesthetic and the religious, is for Kierkegaard not just a matter of thinking and understanding, but essentially a matter of living. Living, not just thinking how to live. What Kierkegaard means by "ethical strength" here is thus the strength to live the way one understands to be the right way to live. One's influence would be ethical in this sense if one could affect others in such a way that they not only think about how to live but also live accordingly. And the influence would be doubly ethical if it is by means of exemplifying a way of life that one affects how others live their lives.

Kierkegaard says Socrates "wished his influence to be ethical"; the word "wished" is telling. Not "wanted", not "hoped", but "wished", which suggests that Socrates realized that his influence failed to be ethical (in the above sense). Although he had shown his ethical strength, stirred up people's passion, compelled them to think and examine their own lives, most of them did not change for the better --- did not change their way of life --- as a result. Change is hard; change for the better is even harder.

A person's way of life won't be changed by what he considers to be another person's wisdom, no matter how much he appreciates the wisdom and admires the person who has it. In order for the wisdom to change  his way of life, it has to become his wisdom. That is, he has to change first --- the wisdom has to become part of his most natural way of seeing things, part of his worldview, and part of what he identifies himself with. Until then, the wisdom is mere words.

This might be why Socrates denied that he was wise. He didn't want people to see him as wise because he didn't want them to disregard the demands his life made on them as something that only a "genius" like Socrates himself would be able to meet. Examining one's own life and living accordingly is "ordinary, universally human stuff". You can admire Socrates as much as you can, but not even Socrates could examine your life for you. You have to do it yourself, and this is "what every human being can do". But it is hard. Most people would choose to remain no more than an admirer of Socrates rather than do what Socrates did.

A social function of literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three concepts of identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why 'meaning'?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The big questions and the professionalization of philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Probability in the eye of the beholder?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being clever isn't enough

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

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

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

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

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

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