Truth

A Christian account of truth should be able to do three things, at a minimum.

1. Show how statements can be true or false.
2. Show how God can be the truth.
3. Show how truth can be something one walks in.

Now, it is possible that these three involve different sorts of truth, the term "truth" used in three different ways. Even so, a Christian account should show how the uses are connected and that the extension of the term makes sense.

If we start with the everyday notion of truth as correspondence with reality, we can make some vague headway. We will need to articulate what correspondence consists in, but we can make sense of how we can walk in correspondence with reality, and how God can be the ultimate reality and thus in fundamental correspondence with it. With this talk of correspondence uniting our success at achieving our the three criteria, we now must show what this correspondence consists in in each case, and how the kinds of correspondence are at least similar.

The standard talk about correspondence as a theory of truth applied to statements tends to be quite unclear. It says that a statement is true if and only if what it says actually is. But this does not get us any further: it is still unclear what has to be if what it says is to be.We have other resources, however: recall that I have already argued that knowledge that something is the case can be understood in terms of the capacities which one possesses if one possesses that knowledge. Thus, the truth conditions of a statement should be able to be cashed out in terms of capacities in some manner. We may better expand this to dispositions in the case of beliefs, although true beliefs produce dispositions which are also capacities.

How shall we articulate this truth in terms of dispositions? There are two properties which the dispositions must possess: they must be are fruitful and they must be stable. Fruitfulness means that the dispositions have benefit: you can get something from them. Stability requires that the dispositions stick. It means that having further experiences does not remove the disposition. To articulate truth in these terms, however, we should take the long view: fruitfulness and stability over the course of eternity is what matters, short-run fruitfulness and stability are only hints of the long-run fruitfulness and stability.

With an account of the truth of statements in place, the account of walking in the truth is relatively easy. To walk in the truth is simply to act in such a way that one is exercising those dispositions and capacities which knowing the truth produces. We can also articulate it as walking in correspondence with reality, since this is what knowing truth claims enables one to do. Knowing the truth enables walking in the truth.

In the case of God being the Truth, correspondence is not much at issue. Rather, the fact that God is who must be known if we are to live rightly, if we are live fruitful and stable lives in accord with how things are, is made clear. It is only in knowing God's power and mercy, his foresight and provision, his deep knowledge of us and his deep love for us, that we can live well. To live without this personal knowledge is to be doomed to live without good dispositions and without the capacity to--at least reliably and for the right reason--do what is right.

Multitasking

The term "multitasking" is ambiguous. We can consider different forms of multitasking along two dimensions: how multi and how tasking. As to how multi the multitasking is, I do not mean how many tasks, but how close together the tasks are in time. Thus, the basic three options are: simultaneous, rapidly alternating, and slowly alternating. The options for tasking have to do with how much of a task the various tasks are, by which I mean how much they require attention. Again, there are roughly three options: no attention, second-nature attention, and full attention.

Simultaneous no attention/other multitasking occurs all the time. Your heart beating is a case of a no attention "task." Simultaneous second-nature/second-nature or second-nature/full attention multitasking, on the other hand, never fully occurs, but likely approximates slow cycling multi-tasking because of the low attention required of the second-nature tasks. When we think we are simultaneous full/full multitasking, we are actually rapid cycling multitasking.

Rapid cycle multitasking involves shifting one's attention between tasks at a fast pace. It is what we generally mean when we colloquially refer to something as multitasking. because rapid cycle multitasking precludes keeping one's attention on a single task for much time at all, it thereby encourages short attention spans, and precludes following an argument of much depth, since one is likely to miss bits in-between. Because one will tend to miss things in both tasks while multitasking, and because it precludes careful argumentation and giving someone else careful consideration and giving careful thought to one's own words--since one is spending, say, half as much time considering them--rapid cycle multitasking is corrosive to community and promotes sound-bite discourse.

Slow cycle multitasking also has some costs to it, since one still has to refocus on what one was doing, but, provided that slow means slow (that is, probably over an hour between shifts) it is far less corrosive to one's ability to pay attention when one needs to, and thus is more civically responsible. This is, presumably, what employers mean by "multitasking" when they list it as a desired skill, although my proposed time between shifts is unlikely to be the actual time in such environments. In any case, since rapid cycle multitasking is what we mean by the term colloquially, the use of the term "multitasking" to refer to a valued skill promotes the value of rapid cycle multitasking and is thereby civically irresponsible.

Value and Money

Money has the property of being exchangeable for anything which one can exchange for. It is the medium of fungible value, or to put it in the vernacular, it can buy anything that can be bought. There are valuable things which cannot be bought. These are internal goods, such as virtue, or social goods, such as community. These goods which cannot be purchased are still considered worth monetary value, however, via the supposed equivalency of time and money. The value of the internal goods may not correlate with how much time they require, however.

It is also worth noting that the value of items is variable. I do not simply mean that prices change, but that the value of an item is agent relative, and this in several ways. The most obvious way in which the value of an item is agent relative is that we prefer different things and have different needs. Another way in which things vary in value is that we have different funds, and thus for the poorer, the more essential items are worth more. The essentials are of basically infinite worth, although how one attains those essentials, what kind of food one gets, may depend on other factors, including one's budget.

Some of the preferences we have, and thus the values we regard things as having, are irrational. The costs of some items therefore do not fit with what it takes to make those items, but is simply dependent on how much we want them. This drives up costs for those who do not regard those items as worth the cost.

Some items could be made so that they would be worth more to us, and yet no one has any interest in producing them. In particular, planned obsolescence ensures that purchasers buy more often, and introduces more bad quality items into the market, and thus into the junkyard. If a company wants to prove that it cares about the environment, making products to last would be a good way. Other ways cost companies little, but gain them the applause of nominal environmentalists.

Some internal and social goods have an absolute value which is independent of both economic status and preferences. It is just as worthwhile to cultivate virtue and community no matter where one is in society. Nevertheless, it costs differently for different groups. The time it takes is actually worth more for those who are poor, despite their hourly wage generally being lower, because it costs more directly in the necessities of life. The rich can cultivate virtue in the spare time which they can afford because they have more money than is requisite to securing the necessities of life. The opportunity costs, then, of living a good life, are greater for the poor than for the rich.

In fact, this can be generalized to almost anything: opportunity costs of acquiring goods, internal or external, are greater for the poor than for the wealthy. Not every dollar is of equal value. Because of this, the less one has, the less ability one has to impact the economy, and thus the more one must buy according to a traditional account where quality and cheapness of the goods matters, and the supplier is fungible. Thus, the poor cannot use their purchasing patterns to push back against companies which hire them for little, because they are either dependent upon those companies for acquiring what they need, or could not purchase from those companies if they wanted to.

The same applies to work choices. The wealthy can afford to be concerned with life/work balance. The poor cannot. If a company requires workaholism (otherwise known as being "career oriented" "dedicated to the company" etc.), and it pays, then there is a class of workers which cannot avoid being formed into a vicious form of life.

None of this is limited to the poor qua low income. There is also a group which we may call the poor qua high outgo. What matters is that both groups get to keep a small amount of money, if any, after food is bought, bills are paid, etc. Whether this is due to loans or bad jobs, both are in a situation which is harmful to cultivating virtue and community. Companies then sell to these groups by promising them community and virtuous living--promises which cannot be kept, because they promise what cannot be sold.

Legitimacy and Responsiveness

In the context of the free will debate, Fisher and Ravizza use a concept of reasons responsiveness to account for when an action is performed freely. I want to apply a similar account to the legitimacy of actions performed by government entities.

On a reasons-responsive view of freedom, an action is performed freely only if it is caused by a mechanism that is somewhat responsive to reasons. This concept of "being responsive" needs to be spelled out more, however. The strongest way would be to say that an agent performs an action freely only if they would have done something else in any situation where there was good reason to do otherwise and not good reason to perform the action. This is likely too strong, however. For one, it requires an agent to be omniscient as to what the reasons are (at least, on reasons externalism). Alternatively, we could hold that the agent performs the action freely only if the action is performed via a mechanism which might have produced a different action in some close situations where there was good reason to do otherwise.

My aim here is to use a similar notion to account for the legitimacy of government actions. I take it that, to be legitimate, the government action needs to be responsive to the values of the people it governs. The values of those people should be responsive to reasons, of course, but that might not be required for the legitimacy of the government. The government action must be performed through a mechanism which usually produces actions as if motivated by the values of the people it governs.

There is a problem here, of course: how do we aggregate the diverse values of a populous? I am not sure there has to be just one answer to this question. It is open to a government to weight different values differently, provided that the weightings, in turn, are motivated by the values of the citizenry. So the aggregation scheme must be such that it provides the result that it is legitimate. Further, it should count all the citizens. It is possible for it to weight the values of some values differently than others, although this should be motivated by values regarding whose values are expected to be the most accurate, rather than which class is preferred. The limit here is provided by the threat of citizens regarding the government as ignoring them. When this occurs, it is safe to say, that government has failed to be sufficiently responsive.

This may be because it is impossible to be responsive to the values of the whole citizenry, or it may be due to failure to attend to the values of some group and take seriously the concerns of that group. In either case, there is a failure of society, a failure of the state as social body to maintain its unity. At such points, the government becomes either a tyranny of one group over another, it splits into two governments, or it finds some way to satisfy both parties, e.g., by ensuring that members of both groups have a role with some degree of efficacy in the government, so that both groups are confident that they are having a say. All of these are attempts at preserving at least a veneer of legitimacy. A government becomes illegitimate in the first case alone. In the other two cases, the legitimacy is repaired. My claim, then, is that a state becomes illegitimate only when it regularly fails to take the values of the whole citizenry into consideration, and thus where a mass of the citizenry has a long-standing sense of disenfranchisement, whatever their legal situation may be.

This is the root of representative democracies. A representative democracy is an attempt at ensuring that the government is responsive to the values of the citizenry. It is possible to maintain this level of legitimacy in non-democratic systems, however, and it is possible to impose a democratic system which fails to be legitimate precisely because it is democratic. The latter case would occur, for instance, if one tried to impose democracy somewhere where people believed that it was a terrible system of government. The former case would occur where a king, for instance, truly cared about his people and considered their values and well-being in his decisions (as, e.g., will be the case in the divine government in heaven).

Government and Fallenness

It seems to be a common assumption that government exists because of the fall, not as a symptom of the fall, but as a bandage. The view seems to be that we would have anarchy if the fall had not happened, but because of the fall we need government to restrain us from the more egregious sins.

I disagree. As plausible as it is to suppose that government would be extraneous in a perfect world, this relies on a one-sided view of the role of government. Government exists, not only to secure justice against unrighteous agents, but to impose an order on society which will go beyond not sinning to securing justice which requires logistical support.

Here is one way of putting my claim: systemic injustice can occur without any individual qua citizen sinning. It may instead involve individuals qua government authorities sinning--I am not claiming that systemic injustice could occur in a world which did not fall, but that it could, and likely would, occur in a world which was perfect except for lacking government.

Apart from the fall, it may be that the government would have just been God, and that in heaven we may again find ourselves in a theocracy. My argument does not hinge on this, however, and God may well have seen fit to work through humans granted logistical gifts in an unfallen world just as he has in our fallen world, and this need not involve God's presence being mediated, only his logistical procedures being realized through a human being. Either way, such government would have existed without the fall.

If we recognize that the government has this logistical role, then we must recognize the authority of government to regulate, to tax, to build roads and such. These are all logistical roles. We might argue about the proper shape of regulation, but, granting that we are aided in doing the right thing by having regulations laying down how we are channeling our efforts toward the common good, even a sinless society would benefit from regulations which would ensure harmony between the actions of different individuals and companies.

Consider how important logistical thought is in putting together the simplest event, or in shipping items from place to place. Such logistics do not presuppose a fallen world. My claim is that similar logistical thought would be required in a perfect world, that this logistical thought would need to be performed from a relatively high vantage point on society, and thus that whatever performed this role would be, in function, a government.

Contractualist Politics

Contractualism is probably the dominant account of political legitimacy currently. Let me sketch what it is, why I claim it is dominant, and why that is a problem.

A contractualist account of political legitimacy holds that a government is an implicit contract of all citizens to give up some rights to get others to do likewise and to gain certain rights. It supposes that there can be no (political) justice or injustice unless some entity with authority dictates laws. It also supposes that no entity can have such authority unless we the people grant it such authority. It operates with the point of view that there is a default state, or state of nature, which we are trying to avoid, and thus that we contract together to solve the problems of that default state. What the government can do, therefore, is limited by what we can suppose individuals would let it do in order to get out of the default state. If the situation in the government is worse than the default state, then the people cannot be supposed to have authorized it, and thus the government must be illegitimate.

The default state is generally viewed as a state where each person is alone, where it is one's own effort and labor by which one survives. Whether the contract is formed for security against aggressors or for the benefits of division of labor, the contract is what first brings people into communities. Even Rawls's veil of ignorance has each individual considering what the best situation would be for one, not knowing what social location or what talents or abilities one might have.

The strongest versions will form a multilayered structure where only the most basic elements rely on a contract of everyone with everyone, and thus preclude such anarchistic tendencies as suggested by "not my president." For instance, our own government relies for its authority on the constitution. Nevertheless, if we the people established the constitution, then we the people can revoke it, and secession is easier than accession. To establish the constitution one needs a critical mass of people to form a citizenry. To disestablish it, one must merely lose such a mass. Of course, what keeps a constitutionalist government going, on its own account, is that everyone hopefully prefers it to the alternative. How long one can keep that up depend on what people take the alternative to be and how people feel about how things are going under the government.

The United States is founded on contractualist political philosophy: the preamble to our constitution is explicit that "We the people of the United States...do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The revolution was based on the premise that the people have a right to revolt against a government which is not providing for the citizens' improvement beyond the default condition, but which is rather, as it was viewed, merely using the citizens for its own benefit. The colonists held that they could improve on the default condition better than Mother England, and so, in virtue of that fact and the failure of the existing government, held that they had a right and even a duty to rebel and instate a government which would be truly legitimate. This same attitude recurs when we hear "not my president," claims that because the taxes are unfair one needn't feel bad about cheating on them, or see individuals speeding because others are doing so and they can get away with it. If the government is not succeeding at improving on the default condition, and if it is failing to secure my rights, then the rights I gave up for that security may be retained.

There are two big problems with this view: the notion of a default state and the account of legitimacy are both problematic. They both play into an individualistic view of authority and persons.

The problem with the notion of the default state is that there is no sense that one might rightly uphold a government because it is one's own. This may be an unfair critique of Rawls, insofar as what the veil of ignorance is supposed to establish is the shape of justice, which is the end point, not where we are quite expected to be now. Rawls has been critiqued in this way before, by those who see his establishment of the goal as prior to figuring out how to get there as problematic, but that is not the present point. The present point is that contractualist views of political legitimacy encourage one to judge any present government for failing to achieve justice. They occlude the importance of our present situation for any analysis of what we should do now. Rawls can grant that the question of how to reach justice may be a difficult one requiring an analysis of present social realities. What Rawls occludes is how our view of what we would see from behind the veil of ignorance is always situated in our society. We can never get fully behind the veil, because we are already situated in some society which has formed us to value some things over others. Even our account of who goes behind the curtain or what counts as a social location is modified by who we take to count as a citizen. How disabled, how young, and how old can one be and still count?

The account of legitimacy is likewise problematic. Because we are situated already in a society, we do not, in the ordinary course of things, consider ourselves the source of the legitimacy of the government. We do not, contrary to what contract theorists originally hoped, view the government as legislating on our behalf such that the law is decreed by us by proxy. Rather, we view the government either as doing well or doing poorly, promoting the welfare of society or not. The legitimacy of the government appears to be secured by the government's attitude toward the governed. Thus, the justice of revolt arises, not because the citizenry can do better or because the default state would be better, but because the government does not take the citizenry into account in its deliberations. It is the alienation of the citizenry from the government, and not the failure of the government per se, which delegitimatizes the government. What is accurate about contractualism is that citizens ought to see their interests represented in the legislation, and not merely interests of the state as such or interests of other institutions (although such will be brought in via the interests of the citizenry). The requirement that it be an equal contract is accurate in that the interests of the whole citizenry ought to be represented in legislation, not simply the powerful citizens.

But what I am suggesting is right about the legitimation scheme of contractualism is a different account of legitimation. The source of legitimacy is no longer the consent of the citizenry, but the success of the government as a government, where a government is not defined as a group of contracting individuals, but as providing order and protection to a group of interested social agents, who are situated in a society which is already under way, in a way consonant with how those agents and that society is.

We can also view these two problems from a theological standpoint. The authority of the rulers and authorities of this world is derived from God's authority. The legitimacy of a government is ultimately a matter of its fulfilling God's purpose for government. Where contractualism makes our collective purposes the standard for good government and the source of its authority, we must affirm that, viewed theologically, it is God's purposes which matter and he is the source of all authority. Contractualism--I suggest, recognizing that there is room for push-back--is a political philosophy which views the citizenry as a god, catering to our idolatrous hearts.

Fulfillment

The notion which provides the title for this post finds use in a rather wide spread of "western" thought. Whether or not it finds use outside of thought which the West has drawn from, I cannot say. There are two distinct sources which come into understanding this notion: one is the Aristotelian concept of the fulfillment of a telos, the other is the Biblical concept of fulfillment of a prophetic theme. These are connected concepts, but not identical.

The Aristotelian concept of fulfillment is that of satisfaction. A fulfills something (a telos or desire) B if, and only if, B had specified A, or an item with property P where A has P, as its condition of satisfaction. Thus, a desire for something sweet can be satisfied by chocolate because chocolate is sweet, although a desire for chocolate cannot be satisfied by candy corn. On this notion of fulfillment, something can only be the fulfillment of a desire or something else which has a telos, and can only do so by meeting that telos. A human can only be fulfilled, in this sense, by becoming all that a human is supposed to be, by fulfilling the human telos, by matching the goal specified by one's human nature. One cannot fulfill the telos of a being by altering the underlying nature, for then one is simply altering the being to be a different being. Turning a human into a giraffe does not change the telos of the same being, but eliminates one being and brings another into existence, and this is precisely because the telos changes so fundamentally.

The Biblical concept of fulfillment is similar, but different. It is evident that Biblical fulfillment can apply to things which do not possess inherent teloi, or can apply to things which possess inherent teloi without satisfying their surface level satisfaction conditions. Thus, Jesus can fulfill the law while, on the face of it, breaking the Sabbath. This is because the Biblical concept of fulfillment is a narrative-based concept. To fulfill something in this sense is to bring the story of which it is a part to completion in such a way that the part one is fulfilling is evidenced as important to the plot. This variety of fulfillment not only brings an underlying pervasive telos to satisfaction, but draws together the narrative threads which pointed to it and exhibits them in such a way as to accomplish their sense. The Biblical concept thus adds a narrative component which is lacking in the Aristotelian desire satisfaction account. The Biblical concept does not specify that it is the essence of a thing which specifies the telos to be satisfied, however. This is not to say that the Bible excludes that possibility, it simply does not tend to operate in terms of essences and teloi so much as narratives.

Hegel's reinterpretation of Christianity and drawing of the Creation-Fall-Redemption cycle together with an expressive account of reality brings the Biblical concept into philosophy and begins to unify the Aristotelian and Biblical concepts, but I find the existentialist account of action brings these two concepts together more clearly. Ironically, we can see this most clearly in thinkers like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty whose metaphysics generally seem opposed to Christian metaphysics. Sartre emphasizes that we lay down a past behind us, a sediment as it were, which makes us a certain way which we never at the same time are. One's past defines one, in a way, that is, one's objective being is only how one has been in appearance, yet that appearance cannot limit you. Sartre is opposed to a narrative construal of life, yet emphasizes the way that my past can only be understood in light of the future it gave rise to--if one finds oneself weeping over one's faults, this may be a moment of repentance or of weakness, depending on what one does from there. One's sincerity or insincerity can only be ascertained--only holds, even--in light of how one lives from there.

Merleau-Ponty is more sympathetic to a narrative understanding of life. His thought operates in terms of Gestalts. That is, he thinks in terms of wholes which are composed of parts in dynamic relation to each other. In this way of thinking, the whole can only be understood in terms of its parts and vice-versa. Applied to a life as a whole, then, there is a kind of unity which is to be attained, and that unity is a unity which must be constructed by living in such a way that one's life forms a narrative whole. For Merleau-Ponty as for Sartre this narrative whole does not pre-exist our construction of it, but unlike Sartre, the narrative has validity to it. One's past thus makes a certain demand on one's present and future to be such that the whole life forms a unified whole and not merely a set of moments one outside the other, as Sartre seems to claim all lives essentially are.

This narrative notion of life as being such that it ought to be unified presses us towards a Biblical concept of fulfillment. Yet Merleau-Ponty has not abandoned the Aristotelian concept, either. The essence has been replaced by a dynamic of forces which seek equilibrium and that equilibrium specifies a telos. This is a telos of self-maintenance, but self-maintenance as the kind of being one is, and thus this notion draws in the narrative concept of fulfillment because it endorses Sartre's idea of sedimentation. If we sediment ourselves, then that becomes part of who we are which must be maintained, any break with it must itself have a place in the narrative unity we are making of our lives.

From this vantage point, there is another kind of fulfillment which we can make out in the Bible. I do not think it is ever called fulfillment, but it is, itself, fulfilled in light of this concept of fulfillment I am drawing out here. Take the story of Abraham and Isaac or the story of Job, or really any of the stories which mirror Christ's cycle of life, death, and resurrection. In all of these stories, an inner reality is expressed, sedimented, proved. Abraham's faith is proven to the highest extent, it is given opportunity to express itself and sediment itself as a part of his life. Job's faith, likewise, is expressed in his life in a way it could not have been otherwise. In these stories we find God desiring to make evident what is only visible to himself. Even in Creation we see God wanting to make himself visible to others. Abraham fulfills his faith by offering his son. Job fulfills his faith by holding fast to God in suffering. In this way, we can see these events as generous gifts of God both to those who went through the trials and to us. For them, they are fulfilled by fulfilling who they have become in a hidden manner. For us, we are granted to see what only God could see before.

There is a general principle which I draw from all this: whatever exists is proven to exist in the way it exists. This can be applied as a principle of metaphysics, epistemology, or value-theory. What is good is proven good, what is real is proven real. The notion of proof here is correlative to the notion of fulfillment. I could equally say: whatever exists is fulfilled. This is a very Hegelian claim, but it does not require the rest of Hegel's metaphysics, and fits well with existentialist thought as well as Christian thought about the eschaton, when Christ will be proven Lord of all and all things will be made right.

This does not mean that it is fulfilled in the straightforward Aristotelian manner. It does not mean that everyone will one day have their telos satisfied completely. Rather, there is a narrative dimension which also applies. Those of us who have faith in Christ, who participate in his death and therefore also in his life, will be fulfilled in our narrative and fulfill the narrative which Christ has lived ahead of us. Yet this ending which we look forward to is tied to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and that narrative must be made our own. This is not to say that we must act perfectly like Christ or forego Christ's ending, but it does mean that we must recognize our lives as narratives in his mold. We can only claim our lives as of our own writing in ways which we also live as moments, not of sincerity, but of weakness. Our sins must take a particular role in our narratives, and Christ must take his place as Lord of our lives. The unrighteous, on the other hand, will receive their due punishment in order that their actions may form a narrative which fulfills the nature of injustice. If this attempt at explaining how this principle does not give rise to universalism makes little sense, do not worry. It is a single paragraph tackling a subject on which books are written.

Addiction, Regulation, and Social Media

This is a brief argument. Note that I mean the term "regulation" very broadly, to include "sin taxes" and other such non-regulatory pressures placed, by the government, on things because "we" disapprove of them.

Premise: we regulate (in this broad sense) addictive substances.
Premise: social media platforms are addictive.
Conclusion: we should regulate (in this broad sense) social media.

Now, there are some obvious objections. For one, we do not regulate all addictive substances, nor do we regulate them simply because they are addictive. For instance, coffee is addictive, yet basically unregulated in this way. Rather, we regulate substances which are particularly dangerous, and we particularly regulate dangerous substances which are addictive. Nevertheless, social media, at least broadly, seems to qualify. I doubt I need to link to the research on how social media tends to significantly affect markers of depression, or the ways that social media has corroded connection and aided the production of epistemic bubbles. So, the altered form of the argument goes:

P: we regulate dangerous addictive substances.
P. social media platforms are dangerous and addictive
C: we should regulate social media platforms

Now, some will object that we ought not regulate dangerous addictive substances because it infringes on the liberty of consumers. The view seems to be that consumers should be trusted to exercise their liberty according to their own views of their best interests. This view strikes me as a little bizarre in this case, since the whole point is that these substances in particular are capable of subverting what rationality we do have. It does not seem to be conducive to liberty to permit people to easily enslave themselves to dangerous addictive substances any more than it would be to permit them to easily enslave themselves to other humans. The regulation's purpose in these cases is to preserve liberty.

If one accepts this argument, then the chief puzzle is how one goes about regulating, in this sense, something like Facebook or Twitter. The kinds of regulations we have used for dangerous addictive substances in the past are not easily applicable to an ethereal substance which is accessible anywhere without paying money. Even a "no Facebook zone" would be hard to enforce. One might attempt requirements on applications designed to reduce either the harmful effects or the degree of addictiveness, although these will need to be constantly updated to keep up with new developments, making it an arms race between social media companies and regulators.

Another option might be to provide just enough nominal regulation to get the point across that social media usage is a dangerous addictive substance, and thus should be engaged in only in moderation. The aim here would be to change social attitudes toward social media usage, making it more socially acceptable to try to avoid social media usage, less socially acceptable to appear addicted to it, etc. This kind of tactic could operate without the regulation, of course, provided a sufficient number of people began expressing such views. I would almost be surprised if this is not the direction we are moving in. Social media addiction may soon be regarded similarly to alcoholism: both are addictive, correlated with depression, and isolating.

Mourning and Perspective

Bad events justify mourning. Bad events, being bad, are mourn-worthy. This seems like an accurate statement, but it must be refined. Do we mean that every bad event justifies everyone mourning forever? If not, why not? It cannot be because the proper response is not, for some people, to mourn, supposing that the mourn-worthiness is inherent in the event. Of course, we might give an account on which the mourn-worthiness of events is relative to the agent. In that case, what makes an event mourn-worthy to some but not others?

Now, there are likely some events which are mourn-worthy only for some and not for others. I would like to set those aside for now, however, and consider only those events which are mourn-worthy for anyone who hears of them. Even in such cases, the degree may vary. I want to suggest that, where the badness to the agents is the same but the mourn-worthiness differs, this is a result of how worthy those events are of consideration by the agents.

On this account, we have more reason to consider bad events the more they affect our lives and the lives of those close to us. Two equally mourn-worthy events, or the same mourn-worthy event at two different times, may rightfully elicit different degrees of mournfulness from us on account of our differing practical relations to them. The events continue to provide reasons for us to mourn, but we cease to be in a situation where those reasons warrant as much consideration.

Depending on one's conception of reasons, this may amount to the events giving less reason. That is, if a reason just is something which should be given consideration in practical reasoning, then the fact that one has reason, all things considered, not to give weight to a fact in practical reasoning entails that the fact is not a reason for one, and similarly if one merely has some reason not to give weight to a reason, then the reason is less weighty of a reason. If this is one's account of reasons, then it should be no surprise that reasons come and go over time.

If, on the other hand, we presuppose that reasons are eternal in the way that other ideal entities are supposed to be (e.g., numbers, the predicate "being red," etc.,), then the reason goes along with the event, and is just as much a reason whether or not we have reason to take it into (or exclude it from) consideration. Translated into a less Platonist idiom, this might becomes the view that an event provides a reason for action phi provided only that, were one to consider it and only it, then one would rightly reach the practical conclusion *phi*. Combinations of events will provide different reasons from their isolated parts, and might not provide a reason derivable from their parts. This conflicts with our ordinary language of "weighing reasons" which seems to suggest that distinct reasons can be placed alongside each other. Yet it is not an uncommon claim that it is only in a context that reasons exist and have force. That the light turned green is only a reason to go because of its situation in a set of laws, and it seems to provide no reason to go if the road is blocked ahead of me. Again, the reason appears to evaporate in certain contexts.

So we seem to be forced to claim that reasons are ephemeral things. Nevertheless, mourn-worthy events remain mourn-worthy. That is, they remain such that the proper reaction to them, when faced with them, is to mourn over them to an extent corresponding to their degree of mournfulness and how directly one is faced with them. The reason to mourn provided by a mourn-worthy event may evaporate, but this is not because the event ceases to be mourn-worthy, but because we lack reason to consider it. The mourn-worthy event only provided reason to mourn at all because it occurred in a context where it made it fitting for someone to mourn. If we were given fresh reason to consider the event, as on the anniversary of the event, then the reason to mourn would revive because the event retains whatever features made it a mourn-worthy event.

Self-Awareness

When one is aware, one are aware of something. To be self-aware is to be aware of oneself. One can be aware without being aware of oneself if, for instance, one is aware of a ball in front of oneself instead. But is this right? If one is aware of a ball in front of oneself, isn't one implicitly aware of oneself? This turns on what we mean by awareness.

There are, potentially, at least two ways in which one can be aware of something. One can have the object of awareness before one, or one may have the object of awareness as an understood correlate of one's experience. When one is aware of a tree, for instance, one is aware of the part of the tree facing one, but one is also aware of the whole tree. The back and insides of the tree are merely understood as the correlate of the front of the tree. Likewise, then, one may be aware of oneself as one examines oneself or as one recognizes oneself as a correlate of one's experience as centered on a body.

When one views a tree, the existence of a front and behind, of a left and right, involves a relation to the point of view from which it is viewed, and thus the experience entails a perceiving being. This may be noted more or less. It is possible that animals might have experiences which imply their particular beings without noticing this implication. They would thus be self-aware in a very weak sense. We are able to direct our awareness to the implied particular being, ourselves, and thus shift from being aware of ourselves as an understood correlate to the direct object of awareness.

If one means by awareness only direct awareness, then one can be aware of things without being aware of oneself. If one means both varieties of awareness, then any being with awareness at all is aware of itself. I suspect that, when we are discussing self-awareness, we mean awareness of the direct kind.

We may be peculiar in being able to reflect on the perspectival nature of our engagement with the world. One can notice that One is seeing things only from one's own point of view, and one can reflect on how one's point of view may alter what one sees. One can do this at several levels, not only with perception of objects, where one can consider the possible effects of optical illusions, obstructions, and deception, but also with our thoughts. One can thus consider how ideas appear to one perspectivally, and hence how one's considerations may be being altered. One can ask, for instance, what would make one's argument stronger or weaker.

We might structure kinds of self-awareness by what elements of the self the awareness takes in. Some creatures might be self-aware in recognizing that their perceptions are perspectivally bound and might therefore engage in a particular kind of exploratory or group behavior. One might suppose that the use of lookouts hints at this degree of self-awareness in many creatures. Others may be aware that their thoughts are perspectivally bound in that they are restricted by the ideas they are aware of and their cognitive capacities. Others may recognize that their emotions are perspectivally bound, and this in one of two ways. Their emotions are perspectivally bound in being elicited by what they are aware of from their perspectival vantage point, but their emotions are also perspectivally bound by being an expression of their particular values. The former kind of self-awareness, I would suspect, would be more common, or stronger, than the latter. As humans, we are capable of all of these varieties of self-awareness. Some of these come more naturally than others. The perceptual and the first emotional kinds are likely the most straightforward, whereas those relating to thoughts and the latter emotional kind take more effort or reflection. Thus, it is incredibly difficult to genuinely wonder whether one's conclusions are accurate and whether one's emotional reactions are fitting.

Out of the Echo Chamber Wars

I noted in the previous post that our present predicament bears some similarities to Hegel's master-slave dialectic in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In this post, I want to use that as a clue to how we might expect our cultural development to go from here. However, having taken time to examine that region of the Phenomenology of Spirit a little bit more, it turns out that Hegel later discusses a phenomenon closer to our own culture, and so we will examine that discussion, not the master-slave dialectic. We will also discuss Hegel's account of the French Revolution and Terror. It is noting, however, that the feature which all of these share, that is, that of hostility between groups which each want unilateral recognition, is based, in both cases, on a desire for independence which does not permit mediated independence.

The sections we are interested in to begin with are  labeled (in my copy) The  Law of the Heart, and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit (C.V.B.b., pp.209-15) and Absolute Freedom and Terror (C.VI.III., pp.343-50). First, I want to show how this section matches our current predicament, then I want to examine whether Hegel's account of this phase's transition can be made sense of from where we are. Be warned that I find these sections difficult, and will be relying somewhat on Charles Taylor's reading in his Hegel (Ch.V.3.II., and Ch.VI.2., pp.163-7, 184-188). Even with such aid, however, I may not be able to make this as clear as I would like.

Taylor sets the stage as one where self-consciousness wants to recognize itself in the state, and believes itself to be naturally good and the world to be at its service. Thus, it wants to reform the state in its own image. This natural goodness, however, means that it thinks that the problem is law itself. Thus, it finds laws, generally, to be bad. For this reason, self-consciousness cannot, here, stop trying to reform the law and finds any law it passes to be an alien imposition upon it again. What one generation reforms the state into, the next (if both are in this stage) reforms it back out of. This comes out especially in Hegel's discussion of the French Revolution:

This process is consequently the interaction of consciousness with itself, in which it lets nothing break away and assume the shape of a determinate object standing over against it. It follows from this, that it cannot arrive at a positive accomplishment of anything, either in the way of universal works of language or of those of actual reality, either in the shape of laws and universal regulations of conscious freedom, or of deeds and works of active freedom.

Now, Hegel describes how get conflict from here:

Hence others find in this content not the law of their heart fulfilled, but rather that of someone else; and precisely in accordance with the universal law, that each is to find his own heart in what is law, they turn against that reality which he set up, just as he on his side turned against theirs. (p.212, emphasis in original)

And, in the case of the French Terror:

Universal freedom can thus produce neither o positive achievement nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the rage and fury of destruction. (p.346)

The government is itself nothing but the self-established focus, the individual embodiment of the universal will. ... By no manner of means, therefore, can it exhibit itself as anything but a faction. The victorious faction only is called the government; and just in that it is a faction lies the direct necessity of its overthrow; (p.347)

Because the government is a faction, it is guilty, and thus cannot prove the guilt of its opposition, thus,

Being suspected, therefore, takes the place, or has the significance and effect,  of being guilty; and the external reaction against this reality that lies in bare inward intention, consists in the arid barren destruction of this particular existent self, (ibid.)

And towards the end of Hegel's analysis (after discussing how this stage goes crazy):

The universal here presented, therefore, is only a universal resistance and struggle of all against one another. ... What appears as public ordinance is thus this state of war of each against all.  (p.215)

I have now presented the two contradictions in the opposite order to Taylor (and Hegel). Taylor follows his explanation of these two contradictions with the shift which they require:

If the world order is the law of all hearts, then it can be considered as potentially capable of expressing the universal. What it would require on this view would be simply to be purged of individual self-seeking. (pp.165-6)

Because the source of the problem here is holding to one's own individuality, the next phase is a stage of self-denial. As I cannot yet make sense of Hegel himself in this following section, we will deal with Taylor here.

The peculiar feature of this kind of phase is man's sense of his own unworthiness, his apologizing for his existence, and his attempt to suppress his particularity, and become nothing but universal will. (p.166)

If Taylor's reading of Hegel is right, and if our era is sufficiently like the previous phase, then a Hegelian prediction for our future would be that we will transition into this self-denying phase. What could this look like? I think we already see this developing in a concern with "checking one's privilege" and avoiding assimilating other cultural expressions for fear that we will do so in an offensive manner. It shows up in other ways as well, but the general direction is towards putting oneself and one's own group down. This may also account for the amount of depression if we take depression to be internalized anger, anger with oneself. This is strongest in groups which form a majority, but I suspect it spreads to other groups, and most people are part of some kind of majority.

However, this takes self-consciousness on a road to a Kantian philosophy of duty. This is a duty which can never be fulfilled, because its fulfillment would be its end. Just as our current attempts at being authentic tend to involve seeking to be different from others, this kind of duty seeks to do the duties because they are duties and not because that is how we can be true to ourselves. What is needed is an account where being true to oneself and doing one's duty, as one is called to it by one's society, can come together, and thus where one can attain both true authenticity and fulfill one's duty. The Kantian account divides happiness from duty, whereas the account Hegel is driving at has it that our ultimate fulfillment is a fulfillment of duty, happiness is found in doing what is truly one's duty.

Because of this contradiction, we come around to a Romantic notion which holds to a moral intuition which is divided into a virtue-signaling speaker and a confidently active person who fails to attain to a genuine universal, who is thus charged with hypocrisy by the virtue-signaler who is likewise a hypocrite. Each is confident that it is in harmony with the universal, but they are still operating from intuition, not reason. They hold their views as a kind of divine revelation through intuition of the divine mind, but not one which can be thought, rather, it is only felt. This phase finally ends in a reconciliation between the two parties, and seems to complete the development of political culture in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Perhaps there are other hints as to directions of development elsewhere, and we should certainly be open to the possibilities that Hegel may easily have gotten things wrong, missed stages, or failed to recognize a continuation.

This is not an entirely optimistic bit of futurology, but this discussion also does not bring us to the end of the line. We can hope that it is a short lived phase, and that we get to a decent stage before too long. Or we can hope that we take a good long time getting there, for the following one appears to be coming, one of letting the intention count for everything, on the one hand, and a struggle over what our actions mean on the other, which goes along with the Romantic phase I briefly noted above. This already appears, in our development, tied up both with entitlement and with the fear of appropriation just noted. It is a long road out if Hegel is correct and if we do not speed up.

It is worth noting that this account has twists and turns. On this account, we are not doomed to go farther and farther in the direction we are now going. I have not articulated how these twists might actually impact those trends which we are currently concerned about, but there are glimpses of hope for concerns about entitlement, linguistic tyranny, and, I think, racism.

A small note on race and Hegel. Hegel can look quite racist, and I wouldn't deny that he is, in fact, racist. However, his account of slavery's position in history and the development of consciousness does not validate slavery or racism in the end, although it grants it a position in the development of a people. Hegel would say a similar thing about the French Terror. The various iterations of master-slave-type dialectics can be seen as transitions enabling a previously hierarchized relation to reach equality. This is, roughly, how I see Marx appropriating the master-slave dialectic in economic relations. Thus, our present transition through extreme opposition may be seen, from a Hegelian standpoint, as a stage in racial reconciliation.

I should also note that I am not completely sold on Hegel's philosophy. I find it intriguing, and an interesting tool for thinking through these things and gaining a new perspective on them. It is worth trying to see how well what Hegel would say fits with where we are, and how much we might be able to use to make better progress. 

No, We Are Not Postmodern

The notion that we live in a postmodern world is bandied about, still. Primarily, I come across it among conservatives, political and theological, who tend to mean something about our culture not caring about truth or believing that truth is relative.

Perhaps there are some circles where the concept of postmodernism is applicable. Perhaps it is even clear what postmodernism is. I doubt it holds of American culture broadly. If it does hold, it holds more among conservatives themselves than liberals.

First of all, my argument is not that we actually tend to attain truth, nor that we actually act like we care about truth, but that we would claim to care about truth and claim to aim at it. Further, there are some postmodernist claims which we completely disavow. Yet there is continuity with postmodernism. We used to be more postmodern, but things have changed. It was a phase of which we retain a residue.

The very use of the terms "Post-Truth" and "Fake News" expose, not a lack of concern with truth, but a massive concern with truth, a weaponized concern with truth. Truth cannot be relative in the stereotypical postmodern sense without making these terms incoherent. These terms do not claim that the other side's news is true for them but not for the speaker, rather, it claims that the other side's news is false and usually suggests that the news is maliciously false (whether by intending to be false or maliciously being unconcerned with whether or not it is true). What we do not do, however, is claim that this is good or right.

The use of the term "Fake News" is also incompatible with a radical postmodern take on interpretation which would hold that there are no facts, only infinitely questionable interpretations. We do not claim that the news we call fake is merely an interpretation which is equally possible if one approaches with particular presuppositions; rather, we claim that they are accounts of matters of fact which get things wrong. We object, not only to what we take to be false factual claims, but to what we take to be unjustified interpretations. The postmodern instinct, on the other hand, is suspicious of claims about facts, being extremely aware of how statistics can lie, likely to a fault.

The belief that there is a "right side of history" or that America or a particular ideology is destined for greatness collides head on with the postmodern suspicion of metanarratives. Metanarratives being just such claims about history having a purpose, an overarching structure which gives historical action meaning and our actions meaning in historical perspective.

This shift has come about gradually, and there is important continuity with postmodernism here. We are strongly aware of the sociology of knowledge, that is, how our social groups set up plausibility structures and provide claims as to what can count as knowledge. This underlies the concern with bubbles and echo chambers. We are also aware of a need to listen to and understand those who disagree with us, which at least points in the direction of needing to be aware of each others' presuppositions in order to understand and communicate with each other across ideological lines.

The shift we have undergone is one which moves us from an individualistic way of securing certainty and tolerance by blocking argument to a communal way of doing so. Instead of individually trying to hold off arguments by denying that truths of certain kinds can reasonably be argued for, we form cultures which deny the possibility of any sane argument for certain claims, and regard all arguments for such claims as insane in some form, often maliciously so. Instead of individually demanding tolerance for our views, we merely isolate ourselves to groups of people who do tolerate our views and keep at arms length those who do not tolerate our views.

This shift has occurred because we want our truth claims to be recognized--again, the sociology of knowledge ideas which postmodern theorists largely popularized. In order to gain recognition for our truths, we need groups which will recognize those truths as truths. But we have also retained the desire to avoid needing to argue carefully for our views in response to all-comers. We are uncomfortable with argument, perhaps largely because one of the things we have retained from the postmodern era is a suspicion of reason. The only way to gain recognition for truth claims and avoid argument (and thus gain something have the form of certainty but lacking its power) is to form echo chambers. The two desires of our era are, then, the recognition of our own truth claims and the avoidance of conflict. In some ways, the latter is an extreme manifestation of the former--conflict occurs where truth claims are not recognized. To sum it up in a single desire: we desire certainty. This, too, is opposed to what "postmodernism" is ordinarily used to mean. A true postmodernism is comfortable with uncertainty, indeed, would hold it to be our necessary condition.

This era, too, will give way. We all recognize that echo chambers are a problem and that we have produced a situation where ideologies routinely talk past each other. The challenge is to alter our desires and forms of life in such a way as to move beyond our current era. We must move beyond, rather than back to the "good old" days of modernism, because we cannot unlearn the ways in which our rationality is affected by more than reason, the ways that reason can be used to manipulate, and the ways in which we are situated in cultures.

In pursuing these desires, however, we have cut ourselves off from the genuine community which comes only where conflict can occur and from the pursuit of objective truth, that is, truth which can be recognized by any who genuinely and carefully seek it. We fail, then, to achieve recognition for our claims to objective truth, because our claims are recognized merely as a truth of the community we are in, not as objective truth, that is, the truth of, in principle, everyone. Hegel would claim, I think, that this kind of recognition occurs in the state, and this would account for the way in which the legal system is weaponized by all sides against their opponents in arguments about what is good.

At some point, I hope, we will recognize that we have merely substituted one kind of conflict for another. In seeking recognition for our claims to possess objective truth, we have attempted to wrest it unilaterally from each other by force of law, thus pressing us into a conflict which must end in either annihilation or subjugation of the other view. We are engaging, in other words, in something very similar to a community-level or thought-level occurrence of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. We are operating at a different level, but the same dynamics of conflict are at work, and both ordinary conclusions will be unsatisfactory because they will not prove the truth claims to be objective.

This post has gone long enough. I will end by summarizing. We are not postmodern, but are distinctly not postmodern. Nevertheless, we possess an inheritance from postmodernism which affects how we live, and casts light on our present predicament. When seen in this light, we can see that our present predicament, too, must pass on into a further stage of culture, and cannot retreat to an apparently better age.

The Transcendent and Immanent Frames

I find two theses compelling which are somewhat at odds with each other. The first regards the nature of human activity and the second regards the nature of time.

First, let us consider my view of time. I hold a block theory of time. This theory holds that all times are equally real. It is difficult to articulate the theory in English since English does not permit us to speak without designating time. When I say that all times "are" equally real, this can be misheard as saying that they are all real at the same time. They clearly are not at the same time. They are at different times. Each moment of time is equally determinate, equally specified as being as it was, is, or will be. I thus reject the view that any time possesses the real property "is present" or "is future" or "is past." Rather, on my view, these must be what one might call "pseudo-properties" or "secondary properties." They are properties which hold of phenomena only perspectivally, that is, from a certain point of view. In this case, a time is past only with respect to other times which are future with respect to it.

Let us now turn to the view of human activity. The view is the expressivist one which we considered a few days ago. This is the view that a human's action determines that human more specifically. The view is that an action specifies and clarifies what one is more determinately. The view thus holds that how one is is more indeterminate further in the past, and becomes more determinate as one acts. From this point of view, my future is indeterminate until I act and thereby specify it.

This view of human action also seems to conflict with another view of human activity which I hold, that is, a compatibilist account of human freedom. I hold that our actions may be fully responsible, fully expressive even, whether or not our actions are determined by facts prior to and independent of them. Thus, I am committed to a view on which the expressivity of human action, if it holds, is independent of whether or not those actions are fully determined by the past together with the laws of nature or by divine decree.

Thus, I have a view on which our future is both indeterminate and determinate. In traditional philosophical fashion, I propose to resolve this dilemma with a distinction. The distinction is between an immanent and a transcendent frame, or two different perspectives on human activity.

The transcendent frame is the perspective from which we see things from eternity, as it were. It is the perspective which grants all reality equal being, and registers properties as they appear in their place in the whole. In this point of view, it is fully determinate that George Washington would be president, and it is fully determinate at his birth that he would be so, because we are observing all of these moments together, relating them together. In this frame, everything is as it occurs in its full development throughout time.

The immanent frame, on the other hand, is the perspective of beings in time, agents acting responsively to events. This perspective acts in relation to a determinate present, a less determinate past, and an even less determinate future. It is the perspective of agent-perceivers, and thus the perspective of situated beings who negotiate an environment.

The challenge, then, is to show that these two perspectives are not at odds with each other, but compatible. In fact, it is necessary for me, as someone who holds that God views the world through both frames at once, to argue that the two frames can be used together, that they provide complementary, rather than opposed, views on the world.

Because I am arguing that God views the world through both frames, it is not open to me to hold that the immanent frame is one of ignorance. In our case, it is an ignorant frame. In our case, the immanent frame's perspective of the past is indeterminate because we are forgetful, and the future is indeterminate because we do not yet know what it holds, but my claim is that these degrees of indeterminacy hold when God views the world through the immanent frame, too. Yet God knows what the past held and what the future holds, so how can this be so?

The crucial distinction between the two frames is that the immanent frame is the frame of agents. Agents perform actions which impact the development of the future and the interpretation of the past. So the difference between the immanent and transcendent frames is the difference between being part of the course of events and being a mere observer, respectively. It is the fact that the immanent frame necessarily observes the flow as one in which one can intervene, whereas the transcendent frame observes the flow as completed. One decides, the other observes the results of the decisions.

God decides in full knowledge of what he will decide, but this is not a problem for his use of the immanent frame since he is perfectly good and takes it all in together. The indeterminacy of the immanent frame for God is strangely ambivalent. It is one which is hardly there, since there is no space in which he has not already determined what he will do, yet it is a supposition of his decision--his decision determines the future as much, if not more so, in his case as in ours. It thus fills in what "was" indeterminate, what would otherwise be determined differently.

This is not a synthesis or a pair of frames which it is easy to hold together. It is easy to view them as incompatible, and it mirrors the difficulty others have in melding a scientific and ordinary view of the world. One of the challenges of philosophy in general is melding together, in some coherent way, the world as revealed by science and the world we seem to find ourselves, the world of quarks and E=mc^2 and the world of ordinary clocks, chairs, and trees. The division into two perspectives is a frequent way of trying to solve this problem, but often has the result of opposing the two views. My hope that my pair of perspectives are more clearly compatible than others.

By temperament, I am opposed to dualisms, and this pair of views is close to being yet another dualism. Ideally, we can locate a unity beneath the difference which would support and motivate the difference. I am not sure. Alternatively, perhaps there is a point of view from which both perspectives can be united in ordinary life, not just in the life of God. It is a benefit of my view, however, that it is required to permit the two views to occur alongside one another in at least the case of God.

The Unity of Thought and Feeling

There is a claim that some people are "thinkers" and others are "feelers," that some people are logical and others rely on their emotions. I want to contest that claim here.

First, a note on what I will not be claiming: I will not claim that we are all alike in how we think and feel. Clearly, some people are more comfortable going with their gut and others are more comfortable when they have an argument in propositional form. What I am contesting is the idea feeling and thinking are separable, that the two do not blend together, are not, at root, one.

Second, I want to establish the terms at stake here. Thinking, in the sense used here, is propositional, logical, and linear. Feeling, in the sense used here, is emotive, passionate, and might not be able to be articulated in a manner commensurable with thought in the sense used here. Both are ways of making sense of reality and determining what to do. Both result in a practical conclusion: the phi-ing which the process directs one to.

My claim, then, is, first, that there is a logic to emotion and a passion to thought, second, that these intertwine in such a way that it is not easy to pull them apart, and third, that attempting to separate the two weakens both.

That there is a logic to emotions can be seen from the fact that we expect to be able to give reasons for our emotions. There are right and wrong--rational and irrational--ways of feeling about things. In general, emotions are reactions to how we take things to be, and they motivate us to respond in particular ways. Thus, emotions can go wrong in one of two ways: they can be wrong because things are not actually as we take them to be, or they can be wrong because they motivate actions which do not fit with how things actually are. In the ordinary case, these two ways of going wrong go together. They can come apart when we are wrong about situations but, by a fluke, our emotions still motivate us properly, or when we are right about the situation but have not developed our emotions to motivate us well. I will return to this latter case below.

The passion to thought is a little less obvious, perhaps particularly in our age. Thought involves the analysis of a situation and thus enables us to clarify how things actually are, and thus how we ought to feel about them. Thought occurs in language which expresses not only propositions but also passion. Even the cold logical language of a textbook expresses a careful concern with precision. Those of us with a strong bent towards using such modes of thought are often quite passionate about precision and clarity.

Emotion and thought are united in language. Words carry with them emotional connotations as well as forming propositions. Emotions are often expressed linguistically, and our linguistic abilities enable us to specify and form more particular kinds of emotion. Thoughts are expressed passionately, and the propositional form of thought ensures that every proposition is intertwined with emotion. It is striking the way that some thinkers' lives mirror their ideas.

There have been studies showing how much our thought is motivated by our values, and this is often considered a problem for our rationality, but I want to argue that it is, in fact, conducive and necessary to our rationality. Our values and emotions, when they are working well, orient us toward how things are, toward what it is important to think about. Freedom is more heavily theorized when it is under threat, when freedom is seized as a value by people who understand it differently or when it is denied as a value by some and held to by others. Getting clear on what we are passionate about is generally how thought starts. Post-hoc rationalization may exist because it is generally the best way to get things right, because our reasons for acting are only available after the fact and are most likely to be in alignment with our values. It may also enable us to form a unity because it forces us to express reasons on which we will be expected to continue to act, forces us to clarify what our values are and how they influence our actions.

It has also been suggested that too much thought inhibits feeling. I want to argue that thought is necessary for certain kinds of feeling and especially for feeling correctly. Emotion gains determinate content and nuance in its expression in language. One can be indeterminately angry, but this becomes experienced differently when one considers one's situation and articulates what one is angry about and why. This, then, guides the actions which the anger motivates in a more profitable manner, and enables us to judge our emotions as rational or irrational. Being clear about our values enables us to understand our emotions better, and enables the emotions to motivate more fitting actions. Thought also develops emotions generally, enabling us to express emotions in new ways, and thus honing the expressions of various emotions to fit better with how things are in a general way. We can learn to express anger without throwing temper tantrums, and this is done, in part, through thinking through how the world works and how to express anger well given how the world works.

This brings me to a final comment on this unity. Neither thought nor feeling is developed in isolation from society. Many emotions are communal emotions, like shame and indignation. Thought relies on language, which is a social phenomenon. I would argue that thought also occurs in inherently social and embodied ways, such that the way I learn not to throw temper tantrums need not be by articulating and reasoning solely with propositions, but may occur via dialogue with others, by experimentation, and by developing my values by participating in a social life which relies on both feeling and thought and the linguistic meshing of the two, as well as the social development of both.

Knowledge-Of and -That

To finish off this mini-series about kinds of knowledge, I want to consider the relationship between knowledge-of and knowledge-that. We have already said that both rely on knowledge-how. One might therefore think that one could have either one without the other. I have not given any reason to think otherwise.

Instead, I want to argue that they are equally basic but not independent. I do not claim that to possess knowledge-of one must also require knowledge-that or vice-versa, but that, if one can possess knowledge-of, then one can also possess knowledge-that, and vice-versa.

Knowledge-that requires the ability to use language to communicate to others what one knows and the ability to operate on propositions logically. This linguistic requirement entails the requirement that one be able to know others personally. To be able to communicate a proposition in a language, and thus, on my account, to know a proposition, one must know how to use language. The use of language, in turn, requires the ability to recognize others as possessing mentality, for instance, recognizing others as meaning something, as aiming at some goal, etc.

If one has this ability, then one is able to achieve knowledge-of people. Knowledge-of is built out of an understanding of the mental architecture, as it were, of another: the other's abiding mental features, such as their hopes and fears, the way they feel and think, etc. This underlying ability is, moreover, sufficient, together with a general capacity for knowledge in general (that is, the ability to retain this recognition), for knowledge-of, and likewise for language and knowledge-that.

This claim, that the ability to recognize others as possessing mentality is sufficient for learning language, may seem like an odd claim. It seems contentious whether animals possess such a capacity. I therefore owe an argument for that claim.

Particularly with respect to propositional knowledge, language's distinctive feature is its ability to refer to things and attribute predicates of those things. My claim is that our ability to recognize and know others' mental features, together with the ability to retain such knowledge, enables us to recognize objects as subject to referential relations, in part because it enables imaginative activity. We are able to retain another's attitudes toward things and thus are able to retain a kind of link between sounds and objects which is flexible enough for language. Attitudes which embed further attitudes depend on a reciprocity of this kind of knowledge of other minds--A fears that B hopes that C intends to come tomorrow--and permits this embedding in language and thereby permits full-fledged language.

This is just a sketch of my account, and others may run things differently, perhaps arguing that language enables what I have counted as the more basic capacities. The problem with running it backwards is that it makes it harder to account for the origin of language if one needs language in order to recognize others as minded. If we instead suppose that humans come into the world with certain capacities to recognize others, and that language builds on this, then we can account for the origin of language without magic.

Personal Knowledge

In the previous two posts, I have focused on knowledge-how and knowledge-that. There is a third kind of knowledge which might be called knowledge-of. Knowledge-of is also called personal knowledge. It is the knowledge one has of people when one says one knows them. If I know about someone, I merely possess knowledge-that certain facts obtain regarding that person. If I know them, I can predict their actions and understand them.

The obvious question, after yesterday's post, is whether knowledge-how is more or less basic than knowledge-of. I think knowledge-how is the more basic of the two, and thus, barring further kinds of knowledge, the most basic kind of knowledge. Why do I think this?

Let me first raise an objection to my view. One might say that knowledge of others is more basic than even capacities because it is how we gain capacities. We learn how to act by observing others acting, and we learn how to respond to various events by watching others respond. On this account, a capacity would be something more than a possible action. It would have to be an possible action which could also fail to occur, so that I learn that there is more than the obvious thing to do by observing that others respond differently. If we were to define capacities in this manner, I think this account would be right. I also think that it would make knowledge-how unnecessary for knowledge-that and capacities unnecessary for knowledge-how. I will return to this point below.

When we get to know others, we gain capacities. If I know you well, I have certain capacities: the capacity to predict how you will respond to certain claims, foods, or environments. The capacity to understand your train of thought. The capacity to recognize you by how you walk, or how you talk. Many of these capacities are subtle and unconscious. Someone who knows of me only by reading these posts may know a great deal about how I think through things and what my views on things are, but such a reader will not know how I operate in real-time conversations, nor what certain faces I make mean, let alone what I like to eat or the way my thoughts flow when they are not written. These are a particular sort of knowledge-how. Humans generally have the know-how required to get to know each other. What is peculiar about knowledge-of, and what sets it apart from knowledge-how and knowledge-that, is that it is based on knowledge of another's dispositions, another's knowledge-how and -that, and it can rarely if ever be fully communicated. Knowledge-of is peculiar, then, because it manifests the peculiar human sensitivity to others as other selves like ourselves.

Propositional Knowledge

I suggested yesterday that knowledge is more basically knowledge-how than knowledge-that. In other words that knowledge is more basically knowledge of how to do things than knowledge of propositions. In this post, I want to articulate a view of propositional knowledge which builds on yesterday's account. One might easily have thought, given yesterday's post, that I would simply reduce all knowledge to capacities--that is basically where I left the discussion in yesterday's post.

While I do claim that all knowledge involves capacities, knowledge-that is distinctive in the kinds of capacities it involves. Knowledge-that involves a particular kind of linguistic capacities. The knowledge of a language uses linguistic capacities of a different sort--the ability to say things in French is a kind of knowledge-how, but not, in itself, a kind of knowledge-that. When one knows a proposition, one can work linguistically and logically with that proposition to derive further knowledge.

If I know where my wife is, there are two kinds of capacities which I may possess. I may have the ability to go find my wife. Stopping here, all I need to have is know-how. I may also have the ability to state where she is, and to make inferences based on the articulation of that claim. I can also transfer the information to others in a particular fashion, that is, without directly exhibiting other capacities. I could teach you how to find my wife be showing you my own capacity to find her, just as most of us learn physical activities partially by watching others do the actions involved and mimicking them, but if I need you to go get her for me, then that will not help. Propositions are able to package some capacities with them, given shared background understandings, in such a way that we can teach those capacities more efficiently. One may need to understand the field in order to understand the proposition and thus gain the capacities--it is not enough to be able to repeat the proposition--yet this is a distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. This account leaves know-how as the more basic of the two, but does not completely reduce knowledge-that to knowledge-how.

One might respond that I have reduced knowledge-that to knowledge-how, since I have given an account of knowledge-that in terms of capacities, albeit a particular kind of capacity. In a sense, this is right, but I have not simply defined every instance of knowledge as identical to a set of capacities. This can be applied more broadly: two individuals can know how to play baseball equally well, yet have different baseball-relevant capacities: one might throw farther, the other might run faster. The two individuals might even know equally well how to throw a baseball, yet one might have torn a ligament in his shoulder and thus lack the capacity. So knowledge is not just capacities. Nevertheless, the basis of knowledge is formed by capacities.

So, to refine my claim: capacities are more basic than knowledge-how, and knowledge-how is, in turn more basic than knowledge-that. Each one adds to the prior and goes beyond it, so that it might exist apart from it. I can know a proposition without being able to do anything with it, but I can only know propositions because they usually enable me to make use of information contained in them, and my knowledge of a currently useless proposition presumes that it might become useful to me, perhaps after I have learned more about the field it is about. Similarly, knowledge-how may occur without capacities, but I can only possess knowledge-how because I can possess capacities, and I can only be said to know how to do something without possessing the capacity to do it now under the assumption that I might possess the capacity should I be in a suitable position to use my know-how.

Learning, The Nature of Knowledge, and Dewey

learning involves someone coming to know something something which the learner did not know before. Thus, it involves a transmission from not knowing to knowing. I suspect that this gives us a hint as to the nature of knowledge. I will finish with a note on how our understanding of knowledge might affect our pedagogy by noting how John Dewey's account, which is similar to the one I push for here, affected his pedagogy.

To learn something requires that one be able to do something with it. If I teach you the definition of a term, and you cannot apply the term accurately, I will not say that you have learned the term. Learning, then, whether learning a sport or learning an academic subject, involves the acquisition of capacities. Thus, knowledge is practical: it involves possessing abilities. Or, to put it another way: learning is practical: it involves gaining new capacities (I do not, at this point, make a distinction between an ability and a capacity).

The puzzles about knowledge which this helps us address are multiple. The first one I want to address, however, is about the nature of a state of knowledge. Given my claim that learning involves gaining capacities and that knowledge entails possessing such capacities, it is not entirely clear whether we gain the capacities and thus gain knowledge or gain knowledge which necessarily provides us with the capacities. To put it another way: are the capacities equivalent to the knowledge or merely a symptom of the knowledge?

Think about how we teach things. We may talk, and articulate propositions, and even expect the student to be able to regurgitate some of these propositions, but the end goal is always a kind of action. If we are teaching mathematics, we give students problems to solve, and we measure the students' understanding by their ability to solve the problems. The focus on abilities is even clearer in sports or languages, where the entire goal is to form certain capacities, not to have the students be able to regurgitate propositions on command.

This does not mean that knowledge just is the capacities we teach. However, it strongly suggests that knowledge is not chiefly knowledge of propositions, which it is frequently taken to be by those who think that knowledge merely results in abilities. The basic kind of knowledge, to use more technical terms, is more likely to be knowledge-how than knowledge-that.

This should help explain why a pragmatist like Dewey develops the kind of pedagogical approach he does. Pragmatists tend to hold that what matters about a proposition is its use-value: what one does with it. They thus tend to hold much closer to a view of knowledge as consisting in capacities than others. Dewey's pedagogy relies a huge amount on having students interacting practically with the subject matter, because he believed that the closer you can tie the point of an action--the capacities whose development is being developed in teaching the subject--to teaching it, the easier it is to learn. That is, he generalizes from the claim that one cannot learn to play baseball except by playing baseball to the claim that one cannot learn, for instance, biology, without actually doing biology, whereas the default mode of teaching is to teach the products of biology.

Politically Correct Speech

I want to begin this post by articulating what seems to be a common account of expression in continental philosophy. I first encountered it clearly in M.C. Dillon's Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, and Charles Taylor, early on in his Hegel, for instance, articulates its development in the late 18th century, focusing on Herder. I will draw primarily from Taylor's account.

Expression in this technical sense means an articulation which at the same time defines what it articulates. That is, rather than simply referring to something, saying something about something outside it which exists independently of it, an expression contributes to what the thing it is about is. When I express myself in this way, then, I not only give vent to something about myself, make myself known to others, but I also give voice to something which may not quite have existed otherwise. I actualize a potential in me by giving voice to it, and may make something my goal by claiming it as my goal. My nature does not pre-exist my development in the way that a blueprint pre-exists a building, although it may be latent in me as the tree is latent in the acorn.

On this account, whenever we speak we give voice to a view of reality, we articulate a relationship between ourselves and ourselves, others, and nature. Our speech, perhaps especially our spontaneous speech, therefore shapes us, and it shapes us whether or not we are aware of it. By using sets of words which are burdened with particular associations in the language we find ourselves in, we are molded by those associations. The truth of the claim that we should speak in a politically correct manner is that words do more than come together to form propositions, they express views on the world, and even a single word or phrase might warp our vision of reality simply be remaining in use.

If this is right, then the conflict about political correctness is a conflict over how to view reality. It might merely be a conflict over whether this account of expression is accurate, except that many of those who object to being politically correct have their own terms which they would exclude, at least in some domains. It might merely be about how free we should be to express ourselves how we want, except that those who are against political correctness are also against some forms of self-expression. Instead, I suspect hesitancy about being politically correct occurs where people hold that the terms being excluded are necessary to (or express concepts necessary to) an accurate understanding of reality.

Another consequence of this view is the old view that we should be careful what we put in our minds, or what we sing, or otherwise what we do. That is, if expression forms us, forms our view of ourselves and reality, molds our desires and natures, then the words we sing and dance to mold us too. The movies we watch and the stories we tell, likewise, shape us. To endorse political correctness requires endorsing a view of entertainment as having an edificational dimension: a movie can corrupt us or edify us, and very few, if any, do neither. We can thus critique movies based on the account of reality and the good life which they tell, and both liberals and conservatives do. The objections of some liberals to casting decisions is quite like the objections of some Christians to sex scenes--both believe that consuming such media forms us in a bad way. The disagreement is merely as to what is good and bad in entertainment. What does edifying speech look like? That is the question raised in the conflict over politically correct speech.

Recognition and Social Efficacy

Yesterday (that is, the day I am writing this) I finished Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Tomorrow I begin Charles Taylor's Hegel, though, so we are not done with Hegel posts. At any rate, there was a theme which is not clearly located in any particular part of that work, but which was my main takeaway: recognition.

Prior to reading much Hegel for myself, my impression of Hegelian recognition was that it was about individuals recognizing each other or the law recognizing citizens as legal persons. The theme is actually much broader. I won't be citing particular passages in this post, since a) it is a blog post, not an essay for scholars, b) it would take a lot of time to find such, and c) I am mainly working from impressions.

In Hegel's system, a huge role is played by the relationship between appearance and essence. These are discussed as what a thing is in appearance (for itself or for others) and what it is in itself (as we see it from our vantage point at the end of its development). Spirit, in particular, has a "desire" to be seen as what it is. It wants what it is for others and for itself to fit with how it is in itself. To put it another way, the essence requires actualization. Thus, in the master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit, the starting point is that Spirit knows itself as pure Spirit and thus wants to be recognized as pure Spirit, so it posits another Spirit to recognize it. Similarly elsewhere, when Spirit knows itself as a legal person, it posits some spiritual reality (e.g., law or constitution) to recognize its personhood.

There is another sort of recognition, however, and this is the one which was particularly striking to me. Not only does Spirit want to be recognized in its own actualization, but individuals, as Spirit, want to recognize themselves in the world. Thus, the reason Hegel argues for a constitutional monarchy is not merely so that an individual can be at the head of the individual state, but also so that we can recognize our individuality in the state. We want our essence, not only as persons, but also as manifestations of Spirit and thus as free willing beings to be manifested in the Spirit in which, Hegel would say, we live and move and have our being (there is a kind of divinization of the State in Hegel, which I am not sure what to do with). As persons, we can exist only in relations with others, and thus are dependent moments of a whole. We thus seek to recognize ourselves--our essential nature--in that whole.

Why is this so striking to me? Well, if you look back on my post on Autonomy and Economics, you will see that I was basically arguing that we want to recognize ourselves in the economic system we find ourselves in. The same basic argument can be made for much of political life, and forms the basis for the democratic element of any political system. The dissatisfaction which some feel with "political correctness" originates primarily from a similar desire to find oneself in one's language. We have a need, as it were, to have efficacy in our lives. This is perhaps the strongest truth in modern conservatism and libertarianism, but is also recognized by the best liberals. Martha Nussbaum argues that the important thing is that we have the ability to pursue certain activities, not that we actually do pursue those activities, and this claim is based on a very similar insight.

Others have argued that this lack of efficacy, or in Hegel's terms this lack of recognition of self in society, plays a role in various social issues, from riots to the opioid epidemic (and both certain sorts of social justice warriors and their detractors). The lack of efficacy arises from various factors, but tends to run through or result in poverty. Money gives one some capacities. Education provides still others, as Nussbaum notes. If we are seeking to increase the equality of social efficacy, which I think is a better target than equality of money or education per se, and which I suspect would better reach the root of other inequalities, then the aim is tied up with an aim for liberty, insofar as one cannot have efficacy without the liberty to exercise it. I think this aim cuts across the political spectrum. Equality is valuable because it enables social efficacy, but it is also necessary that there be a modicum of equality because without it we crush the social efficacy of those at the bottom of the heap.

The challenge is to develop concrete policies which might address the issue. I do not claim to be in a position, as of yet, to propose any, but that is--very slowly--what I am trying to reach for. Getting clear on our aims, however, is a massive step forward. If we could all get on the same page as to the goal, and recognize each other as aiming for the same goal, this would vastly increase our ability to discuss potential policies across the aisle.

Method in Theology

Theology is in the unenviable position (to me, at any rate) of trying to deal in a precise manner with language which is not trying to be precise. The Bible is written with a large helping of metaphor, language designed to make sense to just about any reading level, and talk whose emphasis is more on its affective than its propositional content. Theology is not a task for literalists.

This suggests that doctrine abstracts from the Bible, and thus requires us to notice what doctrine necessarily leaves out--the affective component, in particular, but also, to some extent, other ways in which the Bible is designed so that it changes us. Even perfect doctrine would not be able to do all that the Bible does.

Yet doctrine has a place: doctrine articulates what we believe. Often, the work of articulating doctrine has a salutary effect on those who do that work. We are required to think more carefully about what God is doing in and by his Word. We are able--and required--to spell out more clearly differences of interpretation. We must search for language which will do justice to the majesty of God, and in our inability to fully comprehend what the Bible has for us, we appreciate the depths of God's wisdom.

Having argued that doctrine has a place, I turn to the question of method. If we are trying to deal with this kind of language precisely, we need to keep in mind the kind of language being used. We cannot jump from the text to a literal interpretation of it, but must examine the context and the manner in which the language is being used. To get to a level where we can work precisely, there is a kind of translation which has to take place.

To give an example, there is some debate about whether Christ was abandoned at the cross. That is, when Christ says "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is there any break between God the Son and God the Father? The debate here tends to have two sides: those who say that being forsaken is a relational break and those who say that there can be no break in the trinity because the trinity is essentially a unity. To answer this question, we would need to know what the unity of the trinity consists in, and what the break in question would consist in. We cannot simply say that break is incompatible with unity, nor that being forsaken is a break, without clarifying what is meant by those terms. The break in question may be a kind of break which is compatible with tri-unity. Indeed, when we use the language of break, we may ourselves be using metaphorical and predominantly affective language to try to articulate what is happening at the cross.

When we ask what these various terms mean, our first step is to ask how the language is actually used in the Bible. What possibilities are being excluded by the use of these terms? When dealing with the Trinity, we ask what the unity we see present in Scripture, which we call the Trinity, consists in. What are we justified in saying about the unity of the Godhead from the language of the Bible? All three persons are God, and God is one--and what does "one" mean here? Of course, it should be noticed that there are few technical terms in the Bible--again, the language in use is vernacular, metaphorical language designed primarily to reach the whole person as a willing, loving, thinking being, not merely the rational side of some individuals.

The next step is to bring the terms together to see what entails what, what is incompatible with what, and what is indifferent to what. At this stage we can argue for a position regarding the break between Father and Son at the cross. The first stage simply gets the material for this second stage, and articulates what is being said. At this stage, we locate the implications of what is said with reference to a particular question.

The final step is to bring several of these kinds of examinations together to form a high-level account of God's nature and our nature in relation to God. There will often be circles, however. We may find ourselves with different arguments for opposed positions, such that we are forced to re-examine our account of how words are being used in the Bible. Our high-level accounts will feed back into lower level accounts and into our interpretations, even when we do not notice or are trying not to permit it.

Theology is not a tidy business, but it is necessary to engage carefully in the task, recognizing the difficulty which the Bible's way of using language presents for the precise work of articulating doctrine. Too often, we read off the text too literally, not recognizing that our assumptions about the way the language is being used may be valid only for articulating one side of how things are, albeit the side God is most concerned to emphasize at that point.