Category: philosophy

Philosophy and How One Acts

A friend with whom I have been reading various philosophical attempts to come to terms with what consciousness is and does writes to me about “illusionism,” the claim that we do not have selves. We are simply mistaken in thinking the self exists. The basic argument is the classic empiricist case against “substance.” There are various phenomena (let’s call them “mental states” in this case), but no stuff, no thing, no self, to which those mental states adhere, or in which they are collected. Thomas Metzger is one philosopher who holds this position and in an interview tells us that his position has no experiential consequences. It is not clear to me whether Metzger thinks (in a Nietzschean way) that the self is an unavoidable illusion or if Metzger thinks that ll the phenomena we attribute to the self would just continue to be experienced in exactly the same way even if we dispensed with the notion (illusion) of the self. In either case, accepting or denying Metzger’s position changes nothing. Belief or non-belief in the self is not a “difference that makes a difference” to recall William James’s formula in the first chapter of his book, Pragmatism.

The issue, then, seems to be what motivates a certain kind of intellectual restlessness, a desire to describe the world (the terms of existence) in ways that “get it right”–especially if the motive does not seem to be any effect on actual behavior. It’s “pure” theory, abstracted from any consequences in how one goes about the actualities of daily life.

There does exist, for some people, a certain kind of restless questioning. I have had a small number of close friends in my life, and what they share is that kind of restlessness. A desire to come up with coherent accounts of why things are the way they are, especially of why people act the ways they do. People are endlessly surprising and fascinating. Accounting for them leads to speculations that are constantly being revised and restated because each account seems, in one way or another, to fail to “get things right.” There is always the need for another round of words, of efforts to grasp the “why” and “how” of things. Most people, in my experience, don’t feel this need to push at things. I was always trying to get my students to push their thinking on to the next twist—and rarely succeeded in getting them to do so. And for myself this restless, endless inquiry generates a constant stream of words, since each inadequate account means a new effort to try to get it more accurately this time.

Clearly, since I tried to get my students to do this, I think of such relentless questioning as an intellectual virtue. But what is it good for? I take that to be the core issue of your long email to me. And I don’t have an answer. Where id is, ego shall be. But it seems very clear that being able to articulate one’s habitual ways of (for example) relating to one’s lover, to know what triggers anger or sadness or neediness, does little (if anything) to change the established patterns. Understanding (even if there were any way to show that the understanding was actually accurate) doesn’t yield much in the way of behavioral results.

This gets to your comment that if people really believed Darwin was right, as many people do, then they wouldn’t eat animals. William James came to believe that we have our convictions first—and then invent the intellectual accounts/theories that we say justify the convictions. In other words, we mistake the causal sequence. We take the cause (our convictions) as the effect (our theory), when it is really the other way around. Nietzsche was prone to say the very same thing.

One way to say this: we have Darwin, but will use him to justify exactly opposite behaviors. You say if we believed Darwin we wouldn’t eat animals. I assume that the logic is that Darwin reveals animals as our kin, so eating them is a kind of cannibalism. We don’t eat dogs because they feel “too close” to us; that feeling should be extended to all animals, not just fellow humans and domestic pets. (The French eat horse meat although Americans won’t). But many people use Darwin to rationalize just the opposite. We humans have evolved as protein seeking omnivores and we developed domesticating animals we eat just as we developed agriculture to grow plants we eat. Even if we argue that domestication and agriculture were disasters, proponents of so-called “paleo diets” include meat eating in their attempt to get back to something thought basic to our evolved requirements. So even is Darwin is absolutely right about how life—and specifically human life—emerged, people will use the content of his theory to justify completely contradictory behaviors.

This analysis, of course, raises two questions. 1) What is the cause of our convictions if it is not some set of articulable beliefs about how the world is? James only answer is “temperament,” an in-built sensibility, a predilection to see the world in a certain way. (Another book I have just finished reading, Kevin Mitchell’s Free Agents [Princeton UP, 2023], says about 50% of our personality is genetically determined and that less than 10% is derived from family environment. Mitchell has an earlier book, titled Innate [Princeton UP, 2018], where he goes into detail about how such a claim is supported.) Nietzsche, in some places, posits an in-built will to power. All the articulations and intellectualisms are just after the fact rationalizations. In any case, “temperament” is obviously no answer at all. We do what we do because we are who we are—and how we got to be who we are is a black box. Try your damndest, it’s just about impossible to make sure your child ends up heterosexual or with some other set of desires.

2)So why are James and Nietzsche still pursuing an articulated account of “how it really works”? Is there no consequence at all at “getting it right”? Shouldn’t their theories also be understood as just another set of “after the fact” rationalization? In other words, reason is always late to the party—which suggests that consciousness is not essential to behavior, just an after-effect.

That last statement, of course, is the conclusion put forward by the famous Libet tests. The ones that say we move our hand milli-seconds before we consciously order our hand to move. Both Dennett [in Freedom Evolves (Penguin, 2003) and Mitchell (in Free Agents) have to claim the Libet experiment is faulty in order to save any causal power for consciousness. For the two of them, who want to show that humans actually possess free will, consciousness must be given a role in the unfolding of action. There has to be a moment of deliberation, of choosing between options—and that choosing is guided by reason (by an evaluation of the options and a decision made between those options) and beliefs (some picture of how the world really is.) I know, from experience, that I have trouble sleeping if I drink coffee after 2pm. I reason that I should not drink coffee after 2pm if I want to sleep. So I refrain from doing so. A belief about a fact that is connected to a reasoned account of a causal sequence and a desire to have one thing happen rather than another: presto! I choose to do one thing rather than another based on that belief and those reasons. To make that evaluation certainly seems to require consciousness—a consciousness that observes patterns, that remembers singular experiences that can be assembled into those patterns, that can have positive forward-looking desires to have some outcomes rather than others (hence evaluation of various possible bodily and worldly states of affairs), and that can reason about what courses of action are most likely to bring those states of affairs into being. (In short, the classical account of “rationality” and of “reason-based action.”)

If this kind of feedback loop actually exists, if I can learn that some actions produce desirable results more dependably than others, then the question becomes (it seems to me): at what level of abstraction does “knowledge” no longer connect to action? Here’s what I am struggling to see. Learned behavior, directed by experiences that provide concrete feedback, seems fairly easy to describe in terms of very concrete instances. But what happens when we get to belief in God—or Darwin? With belief in God, we seem to see that humans can persist in beliefs without getting any positive feedback at all. I believe in a loving god even as my child dies of cancer and all my prayers for divine intervention yield no result. (The classic overdramatized example.) Faced with this fact, many theologians will just say: it’s not reasonable, so your models of reasoned behavior are simply irrelevant at this point. A form of dualism. There’s another belief-to-action loop at play. Another black box.

On Darwin it seems to me a question of intervention. Natural selection exists entirely apart from human action/intention/desire etc. It does its thing whether there are humans in the world or not. That humans can “discover” the fact of natural selection’s existence and give detailed accounts of how it works is neither here nor there to natural selection itself. This is science (in one idealized version of what science is): an accurate description of how nature works. The next step seems to be: is there any way for humans to intervene in natural processes to either 1) change them (as when we try to combat cancer) or 2) harness the energies or processes of nature to serve specific human ends. (This is separate from how human actions inadvertently, unintentionally, alter natural processes–as is the case in global warming. I am currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future–and will discuss it in a future post.)

In both cases (i.e intentionally changing a natural process of harnessing the energies of a natural process toward a specifically human-introduced end), what’s driving the human behavior are desires for certain outcomes (health in the case of the cancer patient), or any number of possible desires in the cases of intervention. I don’t think the scientific explanation has any direct relation to those desires. In other words, nothing about the Darwinian account of how the world is dictates how one should desire to stand in relation to that world. Darwin’s theory of evolution, I am saying, has no obvious, necessary, or univocal ethical consequences. It does not tell us how to live—even if certain Darwinian fundamentalists will bloviate about “survival of the fittest” and gender roles in hunter-gatherer societies.

I keep trying to avoid it, but I am a dualist when it comes to ethics. The non-human universe has no values, no meanings, no clues about how humans should live. Hurricanes are facts, just like evolution is a fact. As facts, they inform us about the world we inhabit—and mark out certain limits that it is very, very useful for us to know. But the use we put them to is entirely human generated, just as the uses the mosquito puts his world to are entirely mosquito driven. To ignore the facts, the limits, can be disastrous, but pushing against them, trying to alter them, is also a possibility. And the scientific knowledge can be very useful in indicating which kinds of intervention will prove effective. But it has nothing to say about what kinds of intervention are desirable.

I am deeply uncomfortable in reaching this position. Like most of the philosophers I read, I do not want to be a dualist. I want to be a naturalist—where “naturalism” means that everything that exists is a product of natural forces. Hence all the efforts out there to offer an evolutionary account of “consciousness” (thus avoiding any kind of Cartesian dualism) and the complementary efforts to provide an evolutionary account of morality (for example, Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project [Harvard UP, 2011.) I am down with the idea that morality is an evolutionary product—i.e. that it develops out of the history and “ecology” of humans as social animals. But there still seems to me a discontinuity between the morality that humans have developed and the lack of morality of cancer cells, gravity, hurricanes, photosynthesis, and the laws of thermodynamics. Similarly, there seems to me a gap between the non-consciousness of rocks and the consciousness of living beings. So I can’t get down with panpsychism even if I am open to evolutionary accounts of the emergence of consciousness from more primitive forms to full-blown self-consciousness.

Of course, some Darwinians don’t see a problem. Evolution does provide all living creatures with a purpose—to survive—and a meaning—to pass on one’s genes. Success in life (satisfaction) derives from those two master motives—and morality could be derived from serving those two motives. Human sociality is a product of those motives (driven in particular by the long immaturity, non-self-sustaining condition, of human children)—and morality is just the set of rules that makes sociality tenable. So the theory of evolution gives us morality along with an account of how things are. The fact/value gap overcome. How to square this picture of evolution with its randomness, its not having any end state in view, is unclear. The problem of attributing purposes to natural selection, to personifying it, has bedeviled evolutionary theory from the start.

For Dennett, if I am reading him correctly, the cross-over point is “culture,”—and, more specifically, language. Language provides a storage device, a way of accumulating knowledge of how things work and of successful ways of coping in this world. Culture is a natural product, but once in place it offers a vantage point for reflection upon and intervention in natural processes. Humans are the unnatural animal, the ones who can perversely deviate from the two master motives of evolution (survival and procreation) even as they strive to submit nature to their whims. It’s an old theme: humans appear more free from natural drivers, but even as freedom is a source of their pride and glory, it often is the cause of their downfall. (Hubris anyone?) Humans are not content with the natural order as they find it. They constantly try to change it—with sometimes marvelous, with other times disastrous, results.

But that only returns us to the mystery of where this restless desire to revise the very terms of existence comes from. To go back to James and Nietzsche: it doesn’t seem like our theories, our abstract reasonings and philosophies, are what generate the behavior. Instead, the restlessness comes first—and the philosophizing comes after as a way of explaining the actions. See, the philosophers say, the world is this particular way, so it makes sense for me to behave in this specific way. But, says James, the inclination to behave that way came first—and then the philosophy was tailored to match.

So, to end this overlong wandering, back where I began. Bertrand Russell (in his A History of Western Philosophy) said that Darwin’s theory is the perfect expression of rapacious capitalism—and thus it is no surprise that it was devised during the heyday of laissez-faire. That analysis troubles me because it offers a plausible suspicion of Darwin’s theory along the William James line. The theory just says the “world is this way” in a manner that justifies the British empire and British capitalism in 1860. But I really do believe Darwin is right, that he has not just transposed a capitalist world view into nature. I am, however, having trouble squaring this circle. That is, how much our philosophizing, our theories, just offer abstract versions of our pre-existing predilections—and how much those theories offer us genuine insights about the world we inhabit, insights that will then effect our behavior on the ground. A very long-winded way of saying I can’t come up with a good answer to the questions your email posed.

Panpsychism and the Philosophers Pondering Consciousness

“In a 2019 essay David Chalmers notes that when he was in graduate school, there was a saying about philosophers. ‘One starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up an idealist.’ Although Chalmers cannot account for where the truism originated, he argues that its logic is more or less intuitive. In the beginning one is impressed by the success of science and its ability to reduce everything to causal mechanism. Then, once it becomes clear that materialism has not managed to explain consciousness, dualism begins to seem more attractive. Eventually, the inelegance of dualism leads one to a greater appreciation for the inscrutability of matter, which leads to an embrace of panpsychism. By taking each of these frameworks to their logical unsatisfying conclusions, ‘one comes to think that there is little reason to believe in anything beyond consciousness and that the physical world is wholly constituted by consciousness.’ This is idealism.” (Quoted from Meghan O’Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, first paragraph of Chapter 10, publication date: 2021).

I take Chalmers here to be joking, to be offering this little journey as a reductio. What could be more absurd, more illustrative of human pretension, than to end up claiming consciousness is all there is? We spin the whole universe out of our own brains.

But Chalmers is a philosopher—so maybe I am wrong and he is dead serious. (My last two posts have considered how seriously philosophers are addicted to being serious.) Ever since Thales philosophers have been searching for that one definitive thing that everything else boils down to. The perennial problem of the One and the Many. The search for some fundamental stuff is on.

Note the language of the quoted passage. Nothing about how what we encounter is experience contributes to the position a philosopher takes. At issue is whether a claim is logical, if it avoids being “inelegant.” Yes, there is a nod to that one mysterious phenomenon—consciousness—that throws a spanner in the works. How can it be explained, accounted for? Only, the joke goes, by asserting its dominance over all the rest.

My beef here has three prongs. First, philosophers believe they can think their way to the answer. Quantum theory alone should suggest that “logic” and “elegance” and “non-contradiction” are not likely to win the day when trying to explain “inscrutable matter.”

Two, the search for a “primitive.” Most philosophers start out with a strong bias toward some version of monism. It’s just a question of identifying the correct basic thing from which all else emanates. Except for a few apostates (and it is one of the glories of the philosophic tradition that it constantly generates dissidents), most philosophers abhor dualism, not to mention the messy horror that is pluralism. The inelegance of dualism just fries their order-seeking souls.

Here’s a wonderful William James passage on the philosopher’s avoidance of mess.

“The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean, and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill. In point of fact it is less an account of the actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape” (Pragmatism, p. 15 in the Penguin edition.)

Third, the focus on origins, on the generative. William James said that his pragmatism concerned itself not with “first things,” but with consequences, with the “fruits” of experience or situations. He offers “an attitude of orientation: . . . the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (p. 29, Pragmatism, Penguin Edition).

James, of course, was living in the aftermath of the Darwinian revolution—which should mean, among many other things, introducing a strong dose of temporality into our accounts of how we got to our current pass. Panpsychism—the notion that consciousness is inherent in all matter—seems to me to have given up on the possibility of telling any kind of evolutionary story about how consciousness comes into existence. Rather, since we have consciousness now, it must have always been there. Yes, I understand that the panpsychist will say it was only there in potential, that everything necessary for its emergence was always already in place, but that it would take certain triggering events to bring it into full actual presence. The principled claim here is that all the materials of life are there from the outset; there can be nothing new. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Take that claim as axiomatic and panpsychism stands on fairly solid ground.

The panpsychist is then at one with Spinoza. There is an eternal substance and all that history yields are modes in which that substance is expressed (or instantiated). But everything can be traced back to that substance.

I am disinclined to this position. I am agnostic as to whether new matter can come into existence as opposed to an assertion that it was all there from the start. Which means I want to avoid some kind of substance/mode distinction where “substance” is the real stuff and “mode” just some emanation of substance. I want to avoid that kind of appearance/reality distinction altogether. What appears is real—as is evidenced by one’s responses to and engagements with what appears. To ask if what appears is “really real” seems fruitless to me (a deliberate echo of James’ injunction to look to the “fruits” of things, not their origin.) The key point is that the interactions of the “stuff” of which the world and experience is made keeps yielding novelties that exceed the ability of our principles or theories to predict. Theories, as what James calls “answers to enigmas” (Pragmatism, p. 28), always (finally) disappoint, always fail to answer our questions—because they always reduce complexity and multitudiousness to simplicities that don’t, when push comes to shove, do the job. The world exceeds the intellectual models we construct in an attempt to encompass it. There is, James insists, always “more.”

All of which is to say that consciousness emerges in particular circumstances and through particular interactions. Figuring out the actual form of that emergence has proved remarkably difficult—the “hard problem” that Chalmers famously identified almost forty years ago now. I will be discussing in subsequent posts some of these emergentist accounts.

For now, I will just identify two tracks on which the hard problem has been approached. The first is bio-chemical. There has been remarkable progress in setting out the bio-chemical processes by which sight works. What has proved more elusive (as Chalmers indicated) is nailing down the bio-chemical processes by which I self-consciously understand that I am currently seeing something. It’s this experience of an experiencing self that continues to defy a bio-chemical account. (With the consequence that some strict materialists then argue that this “self-consciousness” is an illusion. If the science can’t account for it, then it must not exist.)

The second track is Darwinian, where the effort is focused on providing an evolutionary account of the emergence of consciousness. The panpsychists are not necessarily opposed to a Darwinian account. They are just committed to insisting that some rudimentary consciousness is—or, even more minimally, the necessary ingredients for the recipe for consciousness being enacted are—always already present. What I am saying is that I don’t see 1) how it makes any difference if those elements were there from the beginning or only emerge later on and 2) how we could ever adjudicate disputes about this assertion about origins. Hence my agnosticism. And my suspicion that it’s one of the professional deformations of philosophy to spend so much time obsessing about getting an account of an origin that is also monistic. The messy world unfolds irrespective of whether there is some “fundamental stuff” and whether that stuff has always been there.

My position: matter is multi-faceted; its components share no fundamental, essential quality (so, for example, living and non-living things are both, in some sense, matter, but the differences between rocks and giraffes are more significant than some very abstract similarity they share); and the interactions among elements of this multitudinous matter keep producing things that surprise us, that are novelties. Probabilities are the best we can do by way of predicting the results of those interactions; there is not some straight-forward line of causation from origin point A to produced result E (with our being able to trace the path through B, C, and D that got us there.) Of course, after the fact we can often trace that path from A to E. But before the fact, E was only one possible outcome of starting from A, and we might be able to assess the probability of E’s occurrence, but cannot guarantee it—unless we stringently control what interactions A enters into. It is precisely the multiple things with which A will interact that makes prediction so uncertain once we are beyond laboratory controls.

Does that leave me throwing up my hands, and joining the likes of Colin McGinn and John Searle, who tend to believe we will never have a satisfactory account of consciousness. Certainly the insistence that “you scientists are guilty of hubris when you set out to explain everything” is familiar ground for humanists. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I don’t think that’s where I want to take my stand. There are, it seems to me, interesting things to say about consciousness, about its qualities, its emergence, its capabilities, about what enhances it and what disables it. I will try to consider some of these is subsequent posts. My point here is that panpsychism has just about nothing to say about these more concrete issues: that is, the capabilities of consciousness and how they can be activated or thwarted. Panpsychism exists on way too abstract a level, trying to answer global questions about origins and possibility that have little bite, little consequence, when more specific questions are taken up. And that I think the development of a theory like panpsychism comes from the philosopher’s bias toward identifying ultimate building blocks of the universe, a bias that yields speculation about fairly unanswerable questions, but (more crucially) yields answers that contribute little to more concrete engagements with the elements of experience.

To ask the William James question: what would be different about our experience of consciousness (and how we act as conscious beings) if panpsychism were true instead of dualism? I don’t see how it would make any difference at all. I might say: nice to know that consciousness is out there potentially in all matter (maybe I shouldn’t, like Dr. Johnson, kick rocks), but that offers me nothing in regards to how I think about my own consciousness and how I wish to activate it. It doesn’t help in the least for addressing the perplexing questions of how consciousness varies among the wide range of living creatures, from molds through plants through insects through vertebrates to humans.

I set out writing this post with the title “Panpsychism and Moral Realism.” But, obviously, never got to moral realism. So I will write about moral realism before eventually moving on to what seem to me more enlightening approaches than panpsychism to the enigmas of consciousness.

Seriously (2)

A few additional thoughts on the charge that someone is not being serious.

To say “you are not serious” is probably best understood as expressing the assertion that “I do not take you seriously.” And that assertion justifies me in not engaging with the reasons or beliefs that underwrite your position. I refuse to consider those reasons and beliefs as worthy of any consideration, or any respect. They—and you—can be dismissed out of hand. I stand on solid ground, you have no standing at all. Whatever reasons you think you have for acting that way, or believing what you say you believe, are frivolous and insubstantial.

The further twist (in some cases) is that “your stated reasons” cannot (because so insubstantial) really be the reasons (the motives, the causes) for your behavior. You are not “serious” in offering that account of your action because any thoughtful person would recognize how flimsy, how implausible, those reasons are. You are being disingenuous, pretending to be offering a sincere account of why you act this way or believe this thing, when you are in fact dissembling.

And you are dissembling either because you are not willing to publicly embrace (affirm) your real reasons/motive or because you are an unreflective person, totally out of touch with your real reasons and motives. Or, the other way around, you are pretending to believe something that you can’t really believe—and that your actions show that you don’t really believe. You are stubbornly holding onto an intellectual position the consequences of which cannot be lived. (This is Gaita’s response to skepticism.)

My thoughts about my non-serious grad school colleagues took, I think, this form: they were unserious because they were avoiding (for any number of reasons) actually thinking about what they were up to and where they were trying to get to. It was too scary to take stock, to clearly consider what they desired, and then to think about what actions would move them closer to the realization of those desires. Better to live in a haze than to commit wholeheartedly to something they might fail to achieve. A kind of self-protective diffidence.

Flipping back to the one who makes the charge “you are not serious.” What is withheld is respect for the other person. I don’t respect your choices, your actions, or your stated reasons/motives when I declare you are not serious. And that means I take myself off the hook from any effort to empathize, any effort to understand who you are and what moves you to act and believe as you do. The charge is dismissive in ways that border on cruelty—and the charge is also, I am insisting, in bad faith when trotted out in any dialogic situation. It shuts down any possibility of an exchange of views, of an opening up of minds on either side of a disagreement. To say “you are not serious” is simply a form of dogmatism. I am right, you are wrong—and so wrong that you can’t seriously believe what you are saying. You can only be saying it disingenuously or out of lamentable (but blameworthy) ignorance.

It is this element of contemptuous dismissal that bugs me so much about the way philosophers use the word “serious.” And so proudly, so self-righteously, as if it was the ultimate refutation of the other’s position. I really do not think that non-philosophers retreat to a charge of “non-seriousness” as often as philosophers do.

Gaita (5): Seriously?

“Socrates called his partners in conversation to a kind of seriousness. They could respond to that call only if they spoke in an effort of disciplined lucidity out of what they had made of themselves. That does not mean that he wanted them to voice their sincere personal opinion. Their sincere personal opinion was worthless unless constrained by the discipline of thought and character which conditions the proper contrast between what is personal and what is impersonal in moral thought and discussion” (Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2^nd edition, 2004, p. 275; my italics).

Lots to unpack here. At a minimum, an effort to attain “lucidity”—and “disciplined thought”—are required to be accorded the accolade of “serious” for Gaita. And one hallmark of seriousness is attention to one’s character, to the integrity and unity of that character, to the way it develops over time, and is instantiated in one’s actions, especially the way one treats others. Furthermore, morality attains “impersonality,” a kind of validity that transcends a merely personal sense of right and wrong, when one approaches moral questions with disciplined thought. Only that way could a moral claim actually carry any obligation for someone beyond the self. Socrates in the dialogues is working to establish articulations of morality that carry weight (may even ascend to a right to be called “true”) for everyone.

Gaita, in fact, seems utterly incapable of presenting the most central planks of his thought without the word “serious” slipped in. Here’s two examples:

“When we ask what makes a principle a moral principle, a rule a moral rule, an obligation a moral obligation—then I think we should seek a least some part of the answer in the kind of elaboration we give when we express most seriously our sense of what it means to wrong someone. Nowhere is that sense more sober than in lucid remorse” (xxi.)

“The concept of goodness is closely tied to need, to being responsive to the needs of others. Simone Weil went so far as to say that all obligation is tied to need. That is to link two notions of necessity—moral necessity and the necessity of need. Whether one wishes to go so far, it seems to me that she is clearly right in thinking that moral necessity is (conceptually) tied (not always directly) to what is inescapably serious in life” (90).

You always know a philosopher is at ground zero of his thinking when the term “necessity” is trotted out. There’s the hard stuff: the inescapable. That to which you must pay heed. If you ignore it, you are not serious. (Please hear John McEnroe ringing in your head at this point.)

I am on record as hating the way philosophers deploy the terms “necessity” and “serious.” I think 95% of such uses are question-begging. Those terms simply plant a flag where the philosopher has run out of arguments against some opposing position. That other position will be dismissed as “not serious.” Gaita devotes the whole last chapter of his book to denouncing various philosophical positions (including moral skepticism) as non-serious and corrupt. I wish some wise editor had told him that this chapter is a terrible way to end his superb—and often inspiring—book. Here’s a good sample of the sputtering that characterizes that final chapter:

“It seems that we cannot take seriously the idea that people could reject or even question the reality of evil . . . merely because they have thought themselves to such a position—no more than we can take seriously the idea that genuine despair could issue merely from an argument that concluded that life is meaningless. There are many different kinds of propositions that cannot be seriously asserted, or seriously asserted as the conclusions of a process of reasoning. I have called them, disparagingly, ‘blackboard conclusions,’ because a proposition which cannot seriously be asserted, or one which we take to be asserted seriously only when we see that it was not and could not be the outcome only of thought, is a conclusion in a secondary sense” (316-317). Six uses of the word “serious” in three sentences! I think he protests too much.

Certainly, you can offer reasons why you will not engage with someone else’s thoughts and beliefs. They may prove uninteresting to you or offer you no point of entry for engagement. But trotting out the charge that they are not “serious” does no work at all. To say Sidney Powell was not “serious” when she proffered her claims about the election of 2020 being “stolen” adds nothing. It’s just another way of saying you think she is wrong—with perhaps the additional claim that she is insincere when advancing those claims. But you need to provide evidence and reasons for the conclusion that the election was not stolen—and for the conclusion that she, in fact, knows that her claims otherwise are false. Throwing around the term “not serious” is not part of that work. In fact, the “not serious” charge absolves you from doing that work. As I have said, one is not obliged to respond to every position someone out there is taking. But dismissing such positions as “not serious,” while a convenient short cut, is simply a refusal to engage, not an actual (dare I say not a “serious”) refutation of a position.

Similarly, as I have written in the past, philosophers repeatedly in my view appeal to “false” necessities. It is one of the professional deformations of philosophy that its work is oriented to identifying a bedrock of necessity. (That’s why it is pretty comical that Gaita claims his position in “non-foundational,” but then can go on to talk of “moral necessity,” and the “necessity of needs,” and the “absolute” obligation that the preciousness of every human individual imposes on us. And can insist we are “not serious” when we don’t pay attention to what is “inescapably serious” in a human life.) Wherever a philosopher identifies a “necessity” is exactly where we should begin any examination of his thought and the ways in which it is warranted.

More globally, I suspect that “necessities” tend to over-simplify, to work to gather within a single framework what is a diverse range of phenomena that don’t actually all boil down to being rooted in the same overarching necessity. I have always taken Wittgenstein’s attack on essentialism, on the idea that everything we call a “game” shares some essential quality in common, to advocate for a pluralism that finds appeals to necessity suspect. J. L. Austin makes the same point in his usual wry way:

“And is it complicated? Well, it is complicated a bit; but life and truth and things do tend to be complicated. It’s not things, it’s philosophers that are simple. You will have heard it said, I expect, that over-simplification is the occupational disease of philosophers, and in a way one might agree with that. But for a sneaking suspicion that it’s their occupation” (“Performative Utterances,” last paragraph of that essay).

Ruling certain positions out of bounds as “not serious” is just a way of narrowing down the complexities of human behavior, reasoning, and beliefs.

OK. My antipathy to the habitual use of “serious” as a gate keeper for many philosophers is clear enough. But now I want to shift ground and consider how Gaita makes me wonder if the term “serious” points me toward something I want to (for lack of a better phrase) take seriously.

Here’s the issue for me. I went to grad school with a number of people whose lives seemed to me to be adrift. I was very focused: I wanted to get my degree and I wanted to have a career as a college teacher. Similarly, I was in a committed relationship which I thought of as having no end point (turns out I was wrong about that.) In short, I was very earnest, very goal directed, very invested in what I was doing. I could be characterized as “serious.” I also, I think it is fair to say, had a fairly strong sense of “integrity.” There were things I would not allow myself to do because I believed not just that they were wrong, but that they besmirched my sense of myself, would undermine my self-respect. I would have called such things shabby, or beneath me, or unworthy of the kind of person I took myself to be. Was I a prig? No doubt, but what I am trying to express here was that I had a strong sense of self, of who I was and who I wanted to be—and that sense of self governed a lot of my choices and actions. In short, I aspired to the kind of “unity” of character and faithfulness to that character that Gaita associates with Socrates. (More on Socrates in a bit.)

It is this kind of “seriousness” to which Gaita appeals when trying to flesh out his sense that every individual is precious—and thus obliges us to care for them (with the full resonance of what “care” means, i.e. an object of concern that calls for our active work to promote its well-being.) “We must not only see that someone has ‘projects and categorical desires with which that person is identified.’ [The quote is from Bernard Williams.] We must be able to take those desires and projects, and so him, seriously. This is a condition of his having the kind of individuality that we mark by speaking of his irreplaceability” (153).

Within these terms, some of my fellow grad students, I think it fair to say, did not take life seriously. They were not bound to projects and desires that were the cornerstones of their identities. They had no strong sense of identity at all—and thus had only the most nebulous of “projects.” They vaguely wanted to get their PhD, but were not making any progress toward that goal. There was a kind of magical thinking here. I am standing at point A and say to myself that some day I will be standing at point D. I may firmly believe that point D will be my position sometime in the future—and claim to be deeply committed to getting there. But I am doing nothing that will actually get me from point A to point D. I am adrift. Similarly, I am sleeping with E, F, or G, but only casually, with no sense that my life is entangled with theirs, or that we have some kind of partnership.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I am not saying that monogamy, some form of committed and open-ended relationship, is the only kind to be considered “proper” or “morally” acceptable. What I am trying to get at is living a life in which one does things (goes to classes, has friends and sexual partners, works as a barista in order to pay the rent) that are not expected to “add up” to anything in particular, that are done in relation to immediate imperatives, but are not seen as having any long-term consequences (or only in the most vague way)—and are certainly not viewed in relation to some notion of one’s character, of one’s selfhood, of one’s considered way of being-in-the-world and with others.

Again, I want to do justice to the full diversity of human desires and needs. It would be absurd to say that everyone wants a committed relationship or a PhD. What I am trying to get at are lives lived without any kind of attention to desires one is committed to. I am tempted to say: my “unserious” friends were handicapped by having learned (no matter how) that they were unworthy of having desires—or of straight-forwardly pursuing them. Another version: you could say they simply didn’t know what they wanted, and were just trying things out. In either of these two cases, what they lacked was a strong sense of self, an idea of who they were and of how that identity could then be expressed through their actions. They weren’t acting seriously because they didn’t take themselves seriously.

Lots of possible reasons for not taking oneself seriously. Having imbibed the notion that self-assertion is wrong. Fearing failure; feeling like one wasn’t capable to achieving things that looked attractive from afar, but which one had no idea of how to actually achieve; feeling out of place in an environment where the expectations and unwritten rules were an almost complete mystery; diffidence of all kinds; lack of self confidence etc. etc.

What I want to emphasize, however, is the way that such “unseriousness” goes along with a disbelief in the consequences of action. Since I am pretty much a non-entity, then the things that I do make little to no impact on the world, on others, and (perhaps most importantly) on myself. Nothing comes of my actions. Nothing connects up. I am just going from day to day, dealing with what is throws in my path. This has the superficial attraction of the grasshopper life in Aesop’s fable, but is really underwritten by a failure to take myself seriously, a failure to believe I am anything of account. I am adrift—and nothing I do matters.

I think Gaita’s reflections on Socrates push in this direction. Recall his announced “strong commitment to a version of the Socratic claim that an unexamined life—a life that does not rise to a requirement to be lucid about its meaning(s)—is unworthy of a human life” (xxii). Unless we are “serious” in this sense, we have done less with our life than we should have. We have not risen to the occasion that life affords us, we have fallen short of being “worthy” or admirable.

No matter how much I bristle as such moralism, at its arrogant scolding tone, I do have to admit that some lives are more admirable than others, more worthy of emulation. Are those lives characterized by “lucid” reflection, by an ever-vigilant examination of “its meaning(s)?” I am not sure. Temperament, forbearance, kindness all seem crucial here—and I am not sure any of those things are products of reflection, or even require reflection for their presence.

But I do think Gaita may well be right that some kind of image of self that cannot be violated without a strong sense of disquiet is important here. An investment in a certain form of integrity, an investment underwritten by a strong sense of self (both the self I am and the self I aspire to be), if not a sine non qua of an admirable life does seem to offer a strong support of efforts to live that life. Gaita turns to Socrates’s “point . . . that there are things which are impossible to do even though no obstacles of the kind which may be overcome with force, efforts of will or ingenious strategies stand in the way” (292). Rather, the impossibility comes from the fact that doing that action would utterly devastate the agent, completely dissolve his lived understanding of who he is, leave him being nothing at all—or with the despair of self-contempt.

Within these terms, Gaita spends a long time trying to defend Socrates’ claim that “it is better to suffer evil than to do it.” His exposition of his reasoning here is meandering and often (at least for me) hard to follow. But the core is that to do evil would be to violate an identity on which one’s whole sense of one’s life (its significance, its integrity, its unity, its worthiness) is based. If I cannot respect myself, I have no place to stand. I will be devastated. And it seems that if I am not someone who could be devastated in that way, then I am someone who is not taking his life “seriously.” I neither have a sense of an identity in which I am invested, nor a sense of actions being possible violations of that identity. I am (it is only a slight exaggeration to say) no one.

I don’t know what to do with this line of thinking. It seems harsh to me, using “seriousness,” and “lucidity,” and “integrity,” and “the examined life” as clubs to beat the vast unwashed unworthies. Yet I suspect that some sense of integrity, some sensibility that responds to some possible actions as things “it is impossible for me to do” simply because of “who I am,” is central to ethics, to my distinctive answer to what is the best way for me to live my life. And it does seem “unserious” to simply never consider the question of “how I should live my life,” to simply drift through life, taking it as it comes.

I am going to end my engagement with Gaita here. Certainly, we can say that my “unserious” fellow grad students did little harm in the world. They may have heedlessly hurt others or themselves, but the extent of the harm they did was very limited. The harms being done currently by Russia, Israel, and Hamas encompass evils that Gaita’s account seems woefully inadequate to even contemplate, no less explain or ameliorate. Killings that do not generate an ounce of remorse are way outside his ken. It is one thing to be careless and/or thoughtless about the hurt one inflicts on others. It is quite another thing to actively and deliberately act to harm others. Such acts of harm are not heedless, nor the product of a lack of reflection. They are chosen quite self-consciously.