Tag: philosophy

The Strong Programme: Issues of Method and Advocacy in Presenting Intellectual and Political Positions

This post is a follow-up to the previous one: https://jzmcgowan.com/2025/03/11/moral-renewal/

In particular, I am intrigued by Alexandre Lefebvre’s desire to write a description of illiberal thought that does not verve immediately (or even eventually) into a critique of that thought.  Instead, the idea is to describe illiberal thought on its own terms.  With the pay-off being 1) a better understanding of illiberal views (because not biased, not looking out for “gotchas” as that thought is described) and 2) a way of understanding how illiberal views are appealing to illiberalism’s followers.  Since illiberalism obviously makes sense to millions of people now, it is better not to disparage its followers or insist that they are misinformed, stupid, malicious etc.  Is it possible, in other words, to be illiberal in good faith? And what would an outsider’s account of illiberalism look like if good faith on the part of its adherents was assumed?

I am trying to think through the implications of this approach to the thinking of writers/activists/politicians with whom I deeply disagree. For starters, I am entirely on board with the desire to stop preaching to the choir, i.e. to the endless conversations among progressives (for lack of a better term) about the horrors of the right wing.  I have become notorious among my friends for calling a halt to conversations in which we all sit around tut-tutting about the latest Trump outrages.  Such conversations follow completely predictable lines and feel smug, like the Pharisee in the gospel, to me.  Not to mention that it is incredibly rare for anything new or interesting to be said.

On the positive side, I am perplexed by the appeal of these anti-liberal guys to half the American populace.  (Russia and China didn’t get to vote for their anti-liberal overlords; Modi’s India is perhaps closer to the US in that regard, i.e. in having secured popular support.) So, yes, trying to provide an unbiased, straight up account of what these guys have to say for themselves is an incredibly worthwhile project. 

But I would want to couple that account with some more speculative thinking about why people buy into that worldview.  What about it resonates with them?  We all know the familiar memes that try to answer that question.  Status loss; owning the libs; resentment against cultural elites; feeling disrespected by those elites; loss of solid blue collar jobs to deindustrialization; the rise of women and people of color.  All true enough, but why would these erstwhile new deal democrats turn their backs on the social democratic regulations and institutions that produced a large middle class?  Why fail to see that the attack on social democracy, and on unions, was orchestrated and bank-rolled by those who were determined to redistribute wealth upwards?  Why, in short, do the ideals and actual achievements of social democracy now inspire hostility more than loyalty? 

All that’s familiar territory—and, it would seem, territory Lefebvre does not want to traverse since it is well-trodden.  Fair enough.  He wants to attempt something different: to enter into the mindset of various anti-liberals without any prejudice as to the truth or validity of those mindsets. 

His project resonates with the “strong programme” in sociology (it had its heyday in the 80s and 90s).  Its practitioners tried to achieve “epistemic symmetry”; that is, they wanted to approach all webs of belief as equivalent and contingent.  In other words, they wanted to avoid the starting premise that my beliefs are true, but the other guy’s are false.  Instead, the starting premise should be that the other guy is as rational or irrational as I am, that he has “reasons” for his beliefs just as I do for mine.  So in attempting to describe and understand his beliefs I should evaluate them along exactly the same lines that I would evaluate my own.

Here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry on the strong programme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_programme

And here’s a long quote from Barbara Herrnstein Smith that lays out the basic idea.  (From Belief and Resistance, Harvard UP, 1997, p. xvi, Smith’s italics).

“If what I believe is true, then how is the other fellow’s skepticism or different belief possible? The stability of every contested belief depends on a stable explanation for the resistance to that belief and, with it, a more or less coherent account of how beliefs generally are formed and validated, that is, an epistemology (though not necessarily a formal one).  The two favored solutions to the puzzle just posed seem to be demonology and, so to speak, dementology: that is, the comforting and sometimes automatic conclusion that the other fellow . . . is either a devil or a fool—or, in more enlightened terms, that he or she suffers from defects or deficiencies of character and/or intellect: ignorance, innate incapacity, delusion, poor training, captivity to false doctrine, and so on.  Both solutions reflect a more general tendency of some significance here, namely ‘epistemic self-privileging’ or ‘epistemic asymmetry’: that is, our inclination to believe that we believe the true and sensible things we do because they are true and sensible, while other people believe the foolish and outrageous things they do because there is something the matter with those people. . . .

[What would it mean/entail] to maintain ‘symmetry’ in analyses of scientific and other beliefs, those beliefs currently seen as absurd and wrong as well as those generally accepted as true?  Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, this commitment to methodological symmetry is not equivalent to maintaining that all beliefs are equally valid (objectively? subjectively?)  Such a claim would have to be, from a constructivist perspective, either vacuous (constructivism, by definition, rejects classic ideas of objective validity) or tautologous (to say all beliefs are equally subjectively valid is just to say that people really believe what they believe).  That commitment is equivalent, however, to maintaining that the credibility of all beliefs, including those currently regarded as true, reasonable, self-evident, and so forth, is equally contingent: equally the product, in other words, of conditions (experiential, contextual, institutional, and so forth) that are fundamentally variable and always to some extent unpredictable and uncontrollable.”

The model here would be Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (Harvard UP, 1987), which attempts to lay out all those variables that combine to make a scientific theory or a scientific “fact” acquire widespread consent.

I am very attracted to a project that aspires to methodological symmetry.  And want to cheer on any and all attempts to overcome the temptations to demonology or dementology.  I think such a project is very, very difficult to pull off—all the more reason to try it.

The Herrnstein Smith description of the enterprise is not, however, to provide a simple recapitulation of some one’s views.  Rather, she is describing what might be called a “transcendent” account of a view—if we take “transcendent” in its Kantian sense.  She wants also to delineate the underlying “conditions” (or factors) that combine to make a viewpoint plausible, credible, attract a substantial number of adherents.  It’s the William James point: truth is made; it only comes into existence through a process; it is not an inert, pre-existing, self-evident thing.

Since I spent my whole writing life basically describing and assessing the views of other writers, I was pushed to think about how my own practice over the years aligns with the “Strong programme”—and with what I take to be Lefebvre’s project.  The most obvious thing to say is that I have never come close to (and have never really undertaken) a “transcendent” analysis.  I have not considered the material, societal, institutional, and political bases that leads ideas or beliefs to be formulated, disseminated, and endorsed by various social groups.  I have speculated some on the professional proclivities of intellectuals and on the nature of their institutional base: the university.  But generally in that work [certain essays, and in Democracy’s Children (Cornell UP, 2002)] I don’t consider how their social positioning affects the actual ideas articulated or the belief/nonbelief attached to particular views.

Instead, I have (as philosophers tend to do) tried to 1) lay out what a certain writer thinks, 2) make sense of that thought in the places where it seems hard to understand, and 3) evaluate the plausibility of the thinking in relation to canons of consistency and rationality (very generally construed in terms of what renders an argument convincing) and what can roughly be categorized as “reflective equilibrium.”  That is, do the presented ideas make sense in relation to other things we know about the world, where those “other things” come from experience, from alternative views presented by other writers than the one being examined, and from a sense of what kinds of claims “hang together” as opposed to negating one another. (One key issue here is the role of “intuitions.” How much does my judgment of a writer’s positions depend on whether they align with my pre-rational, originary, intuitions about how the world works and what is right. William James leads us to suspect that a basic sensibility, a basic orientation to others and the world, comes first–and our ideas, our articulated viewpoints, only come second. Those viewpoints exist as after the fact attempts to rationalize, to make seem reasonable, convictions that aren’t based on reason at all. I think he is right about the grounding of our convictions in the pre-rational, but also think that the process of having to articulate reasons for our views–often in response to others who challenge those views–can lead to revisions of our beliefs and commitments.)

Granting that I have not done the work of a “transcendent” account, I still think my work can be seen as occupying four different registers of philosophical presentation.  1. In Postmodernism and its Critics (Cornell UP, 1992), I did offer overviews of various writers (Derrida, Foucault, Said as well as short sections on Kant, Hegel etc.) that could serve as introductions to people not familiar with their work.  However, my overviews were biased in relation to an overarching argument about the nature of postmodern thought generally.  Thus, I was at pains to show what these writers shared—and how they understood and used the work of their 19th century predecessors (hence the sections on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche).  So my descriptions of any writer’s work was “motivated”—and their work was evaluated (even as it was explained) within the framework of a contrast between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.”  In short, an introduction (to postmodern thought) with an attitude.  I was not an unbiased explicator, but I was trying to be a trustworthy one even as I acknowledged my biases.  So I was trying to accomplish a two-sided goal.  I wanted my readers to better understand the postmodern thinkers I discussed, but I also wanted to convince them of the political deficiencies of postmodern thinking.

2)  In my book on Hannah Arendt [Hannah Arendt: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1998) I took the more standard route of attempting to provide a synthetic overview of a writer’s whole career (although I will eternally regret that I didn’t include her book on totalitarianism in my account, an omission that made no sense at the time and much less sense now).  But the book is not mere description of what Arendt thought because 1) it strives to make sense of things in Arendt that are perplexing (such as her hostility to the “social” and the puzzle about what the content of political action could actually be given her views); that is, I try to put together the most plausible reconstructive accounts that would explain moments in her text that are particularly hard to make sense of.  And 2) I do evaluate her thinking, allowing myself to explain where I think she gets things wrong or makes assertions that are dubious or that contradict what she asserts elsewhere.  All of this, however, sticks closely to the logic and arguments of Arendt’s own writing, with very little (really, almost none) attention to the “conditions” in which Arendt wrote or under which her work circulated and found adherents/critics.

3) My work on the headnotes for the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, first edition 2001; third edition 2018) was much more straightforward textbook work.  The idea was to offer a short summary of a writer’s characteristic concerns and ideas, with a look at how that writer’s work responded to or was aligned with various traditions (or schools) in the field, and a very short synapses of some objections other writers had raised to the work of the writer in question.  The first person was strictly absent.  I was not evaluating this writer’s views.  I was simply explaining what they believed and how they were located in the field and what some responses to their work had been.  All judgment was left to the reader—or, perhaps, to the field. 

I don’t think Lefebvre is necessarily looking for this kind of textbook impersonality in his project.  But this does approach the suspension of judgment (along with eschewing any temptation to debunking or critique or moral condemnation) that he seems to aspire to.  One trouble, of course, is that textbooks are boring.  The “view from nowhere” style (neither an advocate, or even in sympathy, with the views examined, nor a critic of those views) can prove unreadable after a while.  Advocacy yields piquancy. On the other hand, the Olympian style of all-seeing and impartial Homer has a sublimity of its own to recommend it.  So non-advocacy can have its own style, its own sources of interest.  I think they are hard for a writer to access/deploy, but hardly impossible.  I don’t think anyone would really want to read the over 150 headnotes in our Norton anthology one right after the other.

4) I had one final mode that was pretty much present in all my books, but was absolutely to the fore both in American Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Pragmatist Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).  These works were very much in line with a certain kind of philosophic practice—one that would be called (mostly by those hostile to it) “idealist” and “presentist.”  My goal in both books was to present a particular understanding of what “liberalism” and “democracy” “mean” in normative (or ideal) terms.  To what does an adherence to liberalism or democracy commit a person if those two ideals are understood in the way that I present? So the books argue for a certain understanding of liberalism and democracy, attempt to lay out the consequences of accepting that the presented understanding of these terms is normative and desirable, and to then consider how actual conditions in 21st century America fall short of the ideal.

In pursuing that goal, I raid writers for whatever ideas or arguments are useful to my making my case. (The subtitle of the pragmatist book is “making the case for liberal democracy.”) So I am not 1) offering an examination or explication of the various writers I do discuss and 2) am very partial in what I take from those writers—partial in both senses of the word.  I am biased in what I choose to focus on in their work and incomplete in my engagement with their work.  So, for example, I offer a very secular view of William James, ignoring all his mystical yearnings and interest in the para-normal.  I announce in my preface that I have no investment in offering an “accurate” reading of James’s work or of any of the other pragmatist writers (Peirce, Dewey, Rorty).  I am just stealing from them ideas and arguments I find help me toward articulating my own position.  Thus, in sharp distinction from my postmodernism book, in making my argument in these two later books, a charge of inaccuracy in my portrayal of various writers would be beside the point.  But in the postmodernism book, my whole argument would fall apart if what I had to say about Derrida or Foucault was not “true” in the sense of being a very plausible account of what they have to say.  Accuracy matters in the postmodernism case, but not in the other one. The two latter books stand or fall on the basis of how convincing my “case” is, not on whether I have gotten James or Dewey “right.”

OK.  So where does Lefebvre’s project fit amidst all these ways of skinning the cat.  I don’t know, but I think he wants to get as close as possible to neutral, non-judgmental description.

Is pure, neutral distillation possible—in the manner of an introduction for those unfamiliar with the terrain?  Lefebvre would do the hard work for us of reading/listening to various right-wing voices and then present us with an overview of their thinking, their commitments, and their beliefs.  The audience consists of people with only vague and incomplete ideas about the right-wing world view and right-wing aspirations.  So now, after reading his (projected) book, I know more about the right-wingers.

But . . . How much does it advance our understanding of those views if Lefebvre eschews any analysis or evaluation of them?  Wouldn’t he need, at the very least, to identify the “perks” of becoming the kind of person the right-wing perfectionists want you to be?  In other words, the right-wing views have their negative side (a critique of the liberal world “we” all swim in, where “we” hardly includes the majority of the world’s population) and their positive side (the blessings they say will accrue to people living in illiberal societies).  But those blessings are not very well articulated (at least in right-wing American discourse).  Only vague promises of more economic prosperity and retrieval of lost status are offered; their vision of illiberal man (akin to Lefebvre vision of liberal personhood in his liberalism book [Liberalism as a Way of Life, Princeton UP, 2024]) needs to be fleshed out since it is only hinted at.  Does Lefebvre just let these silences sit unnoticed as he offers his overview of their thinking?  In other words, his liberalism book draws out the implications of liberalism as a “comprehensive doctrine” even where those implications have rarely been noted or highlighted.  The implications are a neglected feature of liberalism.  Wouldn’t a writer be called upon to do the same in an exposition of right-wing views? (I have written a review of Lefebvre liberalism book that I will post in the next few days.)

Once a writer begins articulating unexpressed implications, it is very hard to avoid evaluation.  As Herrnstein Smith says, all positions engage in demonology—and that is what Lefebvre is striving mightily to avoid.  But the right-wing is addicted to telling lies about its opponents and to identifying scapegoats to explain current dysfunctions.  Muslims for Modi; Uighurs and Tibetans for the Chinese; Mexican rapists and drug dealing immigrants for Trump etc.  This isn’t a side-note for right wing views; it’s explicitly and persistently built in.  So Lefebvre is going to need a strategy for addressing those claims about the enemies within—and perhaps he is also going to need to do some kind of Latourian analysis in order to avoid arm-chair psychologizing and/or his own version of demonology/dementology.  In short, the goal of symmetrical epistemology is to not pathologize the right-wing views he describes. So he has to show how right-wing beliefs do make sense within a broad experiential and institutional context; but that shouldn’t mean (in my view) that he can’t point to the huge effort right-wingers make to disseminate lies and to foster animosities.

Similarly, I don’t see how Lefebvre can sidestep the fact that calls to violence are a feature, not a bug, of right-wing views.  Not pathologizing such views does not entail ignoring their real world consequences.  To understand why some people believe that some other people need to be deported, jailed, censored, or killed is not to condone such beliefs.  But that’s a line that will be fuzzy (I think) if repudiation of violence is not made explicit.  In other words, pure description of right-wing views would necessarily include accounts of right-wing hate mongering.  I guess one could just lay out the fact of such hate-mongering and leave it to the reader to pass judgment. But that’s not a position (i.e. neutral and non-judgmental about violent repudiation of demonized groups of people) I would want to occupy.  So, for example, can a writer just report the claims about Haitians eating cats in Ohio without also doing some fact-checking?

Maybe the easiest way to say all this is that right-wing views double down on the ”closed Society” that Lebrvre describes in his Bergson book [Human Rights as a Way of Life, Stanford UP, 2014.] For my synapsis of this book, see https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/27/alexandre-lefebvres-human-rights-as-a-way-of-life-on-bergsons-political-philosophy/

The right-wingers are stalwart opponents of “open societies”—their whole world view is built on the conviction that open societies are soul-destroying, depriving individuals of grounded communities, and upsetting the unanimity, the untroubled consensus in values and beliefs, enjoyed by tight-knit, closed groups.  Hannah Arendt believed that totalitarian regimes must lie, must strive to replace the real world with a fictional one, precisely because there is no unity in the real world—never was and never will be.  Plurality is a fundamental, inescapable fact about “the human condition.”  And her hopeful belief was that totalitarian fictions must inevitably collapse in the face of the fundamental fact of plurality.  That’s probably too optimistic; totalitarian fictions, underwritten by violence (by terror) wielded by the state can last a very long time. Historical examples abound. What such totalitarian regimes can never achieve is the moment of conflict-free harmony they claim to aspire to.  Instead, the violence is unending as ever new enemies (the ones responsible for harmony not arriving) are identified. 

My point is that  recognizing how seductive narratives of a return to lost idylls of unity can be is very different from refusing to say how the consequences of those narratives are catastrophic.  Right-wing visions must, like every world view, be disseminated through various channels that aim to persuade others of their validity, their desirability.  Lefebvre’s liberalism book is an attempt to contribute to the dissemination of liberalism.  His current project, it would seem, wants to stand above or beside any persuasive motive or effect.  He is just going to present what right-wingers believe, without prejudicing his account by taking a negative stance toward those beliefs. No demonology, no pathologizing.  As I have said, the attempt intrigues me even as I see problems with it. 

Life as No One Knows It

Sara Imari Walker is a physicist, (or more properly, an astrophysicist, or even more properly, an astrobiologist since she is looking for “life” in the universe) who has written a book to introduce “assembly theory” to a wider public: Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (Riverhead Books, 2024).  I was drawn to read it because a superficial notice about it in the New Yorker suggested that her positions aligned to some degree with the issues I tangled with in my two recent posts on “Consciousness and Life.”  (Links: https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/05/consciousness-and-life/ and

https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/13/consciousness-and-life-response-and-clarification/).

Reading the book showed that those links were not all that substantial.  But Walker does declare outright that “to this day . . . we cannot derive life from the known laws of physics, even if we are pretty sure it must be consistent with them” (21).  Hence, she shares my view that physics as the science of matter cannot account for life—which leads us to biology, or biochemistry, as the appropriate sciences if we want to get a handle on life.

Interestingly, because “life” stumps physics, there are various physicists who claim life does not exist: since “modern science has taught us that life is not a property of matter” (6), the very category of life is a mistake, “not a natural kind” (22), but a figment of human thought that doesn’t map onto the way the world really is.  The parallel with those who declare consciousness an “illusion” is fairly direct.  Faced with something we can’t account for within our current scientific paradigms, some just insist those unaccounted-for somethings are not real. 

Walker, instead, thinks the available paradigms are insufficient, not that the data (the fact that life exists) should be discounted.  Her book is going to introduce the “new paradigm” she and her colleagues are attempting to put into place.  That paradigm is called “Assembly theory.”

Before diving into that theory, I must applaud Walker’s quick, but sharp, dismissal of panpsychism.  She describes the panpsychist position succinctly: “perhaps consciousness is fundamental, and therefore all matter is conscious” (40).  Her dismissal is just as succinct: “an easy way to kill two hard problems [i.e. the nature of matter and the nature of consciousness] with one stone is to make the unexplained thing fundamental” (41-2).  Moving the counters around is not a solution (or explanation), but just a way to duck the problem.

So what does “an explanation” look like?  “[B]etter explanations are those that explain more observations, change surprising facts into a matter of course, yield accurate predictions of what one should and should not observe, are falsifiable, rest on relatively few assumptions, and are hard to vary such that changing the details dramatically changes the predictions” (152).  It doesn’t help that Walker uses the word “explain” in this definition.  What does it mean to “explain more observations”?  Usually, I dare say the notion of “explain” is linked to some designation of the causal processes that bring the observed thing into existence.  And that does seem to be what “assembly theory” attempts to do.  I will get to that.  In the meantime, we can register Walker’s assertion that “scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts are driven by new explanations, not necessarily new evidence” (152). The observables are there already (in some cases), we just lack a good explanation of them.  Such, Walker argues, is the case for “life.”  But we should note that, in other cases, there are new observables because new technologies of perception (microscopes, telescopes etc.) bring new objects into view.

Walker’s approach is not to ask “what life is,” but to ask “what life can do”?  And that approach starts from consciousness.  “Here we are not measuring whether something has experience (what consciousness is), but instead whether something that has experience can do different things because it has an internal world (what consciousness does)” (45).  “Does anything in the universe exist that might not be possible if subjective inner worlds did not exist?” (45).  The syntax is tortured here, but the question is whether there are existing things that could not exist if consciousness did not exist.  Walker’s answer to this question is a resounding Yes. Everything in the built world—cities, technologies, books—depends on humans imagining those things first (in some kind of embodied thought space) and then doing the work of constructing them.  “Some things that exist are imagined through abstraction (are counterfactual) and become physical (made actual) through a phenomenon deeply connected to what we call consciousness.  It is not that all matter is conscious, but that consciousness is potentially a window into the mechanism for bringing specific configurations of matter into existence across time.  If this conjecture is true, consciousness creates the possibility for things to exist that otherwise couldn’t because they did not exist in the past” (47-8).  “The key feature is the ability to imagine or represent things that do not exist, such that the act of imagination becomes causal to the existence of some objects” (73).

Construction is, as its name suggests, central to assembly theory.  What Walker wants to locate in the universe is causal power (my term, not hers), or to be more Promethean about it, creative power.  Basically, she is going to make the same claim about “life” that she makes about consciousness.  “Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects that are composed of many, unique, recursively constructed parts” (90).  The word “many” is crucial to this description of life.  There are simple objects in the universe, ones that are “prebiotic” (her term); that is, they existed before the emergence of life—and, in some cases, still exist in their simple a-biotic (my term) way.  These a-biotic objects are not “life” because they do not possess the capacity to generate new objects. Also, they are generally not complex. Living objects contain many parts. (It seems, although I am not sure I understood this correctly, that Walker tells us that only objects that are comprised of at least 15 different biochemical components cross the threshold over into “life.”)

Walker begins from a variant of a traditional philosophical conundrum: why is there something rather than nothing?  Her variant is: why does the universe contain these specific objects instead of the many other possible objects that do not exist?  Why possible in this posing of the question?  Because there are molecular combinations that do not exist even though they, according to the laws of physics, could exist.  In fact, humans have managed to create some of these non-existants in the lab.  Humans have added to what nature produced on its own. So there are more possible objects than actually existing ones.

So: what caused some objects to come into existence and others not?  The causal mechanism Walker turns to is no surprise: evolution and selection.  Evolution here is doing its usual work, producing random variations over time as organisms reproduce.  Coming into existence takes place over long stretches of time.  It is not clear to me how radically Walker wants to upset the idea that all the matter that ever existed or will ever exist was present from the very start.  But she does want to insist that “time” is an intrinsic component of (living?) matter, not just the stage upon which matter does its thing.  (My “living” with the question mark indicates I am not sure if she is saying “time” is an intrinsic property of all matter, or only of living matter.  I am clear that she does divide matter into that which has life and that which does not.)  In any case, evolution over time means the emergence of new forms of matter, including forms we would designate as “living.” Life is not there from the beginning, but emerges somewhere down the line.  But what emerges as evolution unfolds sets up a variety of constraints; some possible objects become very improbable, close to impossible, once evolution produces a different group of possible objects.  The chain of causes is pretty determinative (even if there is always some randomness in reproduction).

Evolution, thus, produces variants (but within fairly predictable ranges once things are fairly launched), just as it does in modern-day (i.e. genetically informed) Darwinian theory.  More novel is Walker’s understanding of “selection.”  Assembly theory asserts that objects that are “alive” are too complex to simply emerge as products of random genetic mutations, or through any other random physical process.  “Some objects require information—an algorithm—to make them.  These objects will never spontaneously form and must always be constructed via selection and evolution. . . . All objects that require information to specify their existence constitute ‘life’” (146).  “Complex objects, such as molecules, can come into existence only if there is something that can build them reliably, whether it is a cell, an environment, or an intelligent agent. These objects require an algorithmic process to assemble them.  Assembly theory considers the algorithm to be an intrinsic property of the object, rather than a feature of the machine that outputs it” (143).  [Sidenote: Walker does seem to reproduce the very error she mocks the panpsychists for making; she takes the causal mechanisms she needs, namely time and the informational algorithm, and make them “intrinsic” to matter.]

Selection, then, is made by the algorithm that informs (quite literally) the reproduction of the object—or, maybe it is better to say the persistence of the object over time.  It is not the individual who possesses life so much as it is the “lineage” of information that causes the continuity of life forms over time.  This shift in locus can be illustrated even in the case of the individual human being.  “Over your lifetime you are alive because you are constantly reconstructing yourself—what persists in the informational pattern over time, not the matter (at least not in the traditional sense of the word ‘matter’). . . The fundamental unit of life is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time” (150).

Life is a process—a process of regeneration where the information to bring new forms into existence (or to continually reproduce existing forms that substitute in for prior ones) plays the role of selection.  Without that information’s causal power, no life.  It is clear that, in Walker’s view, information is necessary to the existence of life, is, in fact, the distinctive “marker” of life.  But whether information is also sufficient to the existence of life is less clear.  Presumably, there is physical “stuff,” the “objects” she keeps talking about.  Information, it would seem, needs to be embodied.  There has to be “matter” for information to be “intrinsic” to.  I don’t think Walker would deny this.  She wants to retain all the laws of current-day physics; she just wants to supplement its accounts of matter and causation with this addition of information as a causal agent embedded in matter.  She is not such a complete “process theorist” as to deny any “objectivity” to objects (as William James and Alfred Whitehead at times approach doing.)  Or if she is that radical a process theorist, her continual (unexamined) talk of “objects” (possible and existing) undermines that radicalism.  Life in her view, it is clear, is a continual making and unmaking, but some of the made things have a relatively stable existence for at least some duration.

In sum, the basic innovation of assembly theory, its supplement to contemporary physics, is the claim that information is causal—and that we cannot explain life without seeing information as its basic cause.  There are secondary innovations about how “life” designates complex objects that are “assembled” out of earlier existing objects which embody the information required to construct the new forms.  That view opens up vistas of novelty and creativity a more straight-jacketed physics might deny.  As usual, the precise biochemistry of information’s creativity is not specified—just as the neural correlates of consciousness continue to elude researchers.  Like panpsychism, assembly theory works to animate matter, to introduce principles of motion within matter that do not reduce to the laws of gravity, acceleration, and entropy found in standard physics. 

I have left out of my account, Walker’s interest in finding out if life exists in worlds (planets) other than Earth.  That’s her astrobiology hat.  I will confess to having little interest in that question.  Life here on earth is more (in fact, too much!) than enough for me.  But to offer a quick and dirty summary of her position (especially since it explains the title of her book, which from my summary of it thus far would be utterly mysterious): since the emergence of life on this planet followed a determinant path set out by the earliest moves in the game, there is no reason to believe that life outside Earth would follow a similar path.  Thus, looking for “signatures” of life on Mars (or anywhere else), such as water or oxygen or amino acids, is the wrong way to go.  Life on other planets might very well have developed from completely different material bases.  The key is informationally driven reproductive processes, not specific molecules or elements.  So “life” elsewhere might differ radically from “life as we know it.”

How does Walker’s book—and assembly theory more generally—jive with the questions I raised about consciousness and life? Certainly, I have to appreciate someone who is a real scientist asserting that physics does not have a way of addressing the concept (the fact) of living beings.  And Walker, as well, must be counted among the thinkers who is trying to advance new accounts of causation, ones that supplement (at least; perhaps they supplant) traditional mechanistic understandings of cause. Which reinforces my sense (derived from a number of writers) that Darwinian theory does not align with mechanistic (“efficient” in Aristotle’s terms) models of causation–and thus calls for other ways of understanding causation. I also think Walker’s focus on what life and consciousness do (their observable effects) as contrasted to worrying about what they are seems a fruitful and sensible way to proceed. Finally, although she never explicitly says so, I think Walker would agree that consciousness is a feature of “living matter,” not of all matter–and that addressing the puzzle of what life is and does is prior to understanding the nature of consciousness. Understanding life is the best way to make progress in understanding consciousness.

Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy

I recently finished Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford UP, 2013). It was a great read!  Maybe that’s just me in recoil from all the consciousness stuff I’ve been reading—glad to be back in more familiar territory: political philosophy.  Not just that, however.  It is just enthralling to read a closely reasoned, carefully constructed, argument.  There just are too few well-written and well-thought (if I can coin that adjective) books. 

Interestingly, when I think through what Lefebvre has to say in order to offer up the gist in this post, it’s not all that startling.  It is the care with which he makes his case that is exhilarating, not the substance (although it is hardly shabby. Just not all that startling either.)

So here’s the summary.

Bergson is a follower of Darwin. His reliance on evolutionary explanations for human phenomenon (like religion and morality) is quirky because he is a vitalist.  He believes in a fundamental “life force” that drives evolution, so is prone to 1) ascribe intention to evolution and 2) to think evolution has a single, dominating force (instead of resulting from a multitude of random—and unrelated—genetic mutations.)

In addition, Bergson is a dualist.  He believes that there exist spiritual entities that are distinct from material ones—and that the failure to give the spiritual its due is disastrous for human beings.  Bergson quite cheerfully declares himself a “mystic” and asserts that the spiritual is ineffable even as humans have various intimations of its existence (and importance!).

How do these basic commitments on Bergson’s part play into an account of human rights?  It all stems from the paradoxes built into morality.  For Bergson, human morality is a product of evolution.  “The evolutionary function of moral obligation is to hold society together. Its function is to ‘ensure the cohesion of the group.’” (page 25; quoted passage is from Bergson).  Unlike other theorists of morals, Bergson is adamant that morality is “natural,” is produced by evolution, as opposed to something that humans add on top of evolution.  Morality is not a human contrivance that tries to counteract natural impulses; instead, morality itself is a natural impulse.  Humans are social animals, utterly dependent on social relations to stay alive and to reproduce (the Darwinian imperatives).  Morality, insofar as it make sociality possible, is thus produced by evolution as are other human capacities essential to survival and reproduction.

The paradox comes from the fact that morality is exclusive.  Societies are “closed,” non-infinite, groupings.  One of the things essential to a society’s and its members’ survival and flourishing is protection from external threats.  Morality performs its service to life in part by distinguishing between friend (insider, fellow member) and enemy (outside, threat, non-member). 

“Closure is essential to moral obligation because its evolutionary purpose is to ensure the cohesion of the group in the face of an adversary.  It is this feature of exclusivity that Bergson brings to the fore with the concept of the closed society.  The purpose of this concept is not to claim that this or that society is closed.  Instead, it designates a tendency toward closure on the part of all societies” (25).

For this reason, war seems inevitable—and certainly human history appears to demonstrate that war is ineradicable.  Morality is good for the survival of particular societies—but is not conducive to the survival of human beings as a whole (especially once technology has given humans the means to mass annihilation) or to the survival of individuals (even the “winning side” in a war has many of its members killed in the contest).  To put it most bluntly: human morality generates not only cooperation and fellow-feeling with insiders, but also aggression toward outsiders.  For all the sophistication of his argument, Lefebvre ends up in a very familiar place: the claim that exclusion justifies doing harm to those designated as “other,” as beyond the pale.

Human rights, then, are an attempt to counteract the tendency of morality to sanction violence.  “Human rights are . . . an effort . . . that seeks to counteract our evolved moral nature. . . . Bergson [offers] a vision not just of what human rights must protect us from (i.e., morality) but also why (i.e., because of its [morality’s] biological origins” (54, 57). 

The standard way to address this paradox—that we need morality and that we also need something to counteract morality—depends on two planks.  The first recognizes that morality (the closed society) at least in the so-called Western world post 1700 functions most powerfully in the form of the nation-state.  Wars take place between nation-states—and the brutalities inflicted upon “enemies” have only increased since that time.  (The bombing of cities, the murder of refugees.)  Even in times of peace between nation-states, a particular state can identify certain people who live within its boundaries as “enemies within” and treat them differently and harshly in distinction from fully admitted members (citizens).

In response, there have been repeated efforts to create supra-national institutions that could rein in the aggressions of nation-states.  Such institutions have proved mostly ineffective.  When it comes to actually wielding power—and in securing the affective consent of people—the nation-state stands supreme, only minimally beholden to efforts to establish (and enforce) international law.  The institutionalization of human rights has mostly been a failure. Human rights are most fully protected when and where the state’s power has been used to uphold them.  But that’s useless in cases where it is the state itself that is abusing the human rights of some peoples living in its territory, not to mention its abuse of human rights on enemies during wartime.

The second plank is to widen morality in such a way that it is no longer exclusive.  The relevant “in group” would be all human beings—or, as proponents of animal rights desire—all animals.  Lefebvre demonstrates convincingly that the idea of “widening the circle” to be more inclusive is a prevalent call in much of contemporary political and moral philosophy.  Human rights are meant to apply “universally” and thus stand in direct opposition to any and all distinctions that would justify treating some people (or some groups) differently from others. 

Philosophers calling for expanding the circle offer different accounts of how that might be achieved.  Basically, the Humeans call for extending sympathy outwards.  Fellow feeling for those who can suffer—humans and animals—will underwrite our extending our consideration to them.  Kantians rely on reason to bring us to the recognition that only universalism keeps us from self-contradiction.  Utilitarians ask us to admit that suffering is a wrong—and then to avoid all actions that would increase the amount of suffering in the world. 

Levebvre’s most original contribution to such debates is to deny (forcefully) that expanding the circle is possible or adequate.  Morality, he insists, must be exclusive.  That is its whole modus operandi.  It only performs its natural function by being exclusive.  So it’s simply wrong to think it can be transformed into something non-exclusive. 

Human rights, therefore, must be something utterly different from morality, not an extension of it.  Lefebvre expresses this point by contrasting a distinction in quantity from one in quality.  We run into Bergson’s dualism here (although I doubt whether we have to embrace that dualism in order to adopt the distinction between a difference in quantity from a difference in quality.)  In any case, Bergson thinks “intelligence” deals in quantities and that we need another faculty (intuition or insight) to handle qualities.  Here’s Lefebvre’s account of Bergson’s view:

“[I]ntelligence does some things very well but not others.  It has a natural affinity with space and quantity and a natural aversion to time and quality.  More to the point, given its aptitude for quantity and number, intelligence views all forms of change in terms of (quantitative) differences of degree rather than (qualitative) differences in kind.  This includes moral change, of course.  It is no accident or simple error, therefore, which leads us to consider the evolution of morality in terms of expansion, growth, and continuous progress. . . . Intelligence is by its nature driven to picture the evolution of morality as the extension of a selfsame core (i.e., moral obligation) to more and more people” (49-50).

Bergson, then, wants to introduce an entirely different principle, one not based on moral obligation, as the underpinning of a human rights regime. Bergson wants to provide the basis for an “open society” that contrasts with closed societies that standard morality creates.  He strives to point his readers toward “a qualitatively different kind of morality, irreducible to obligation.  It [intelligence] struggles to conceive of a moral tendency that is not object attached.  And it struggles, as Bergson will come to say, to imagine a way to love that does not grow out of exclusive attachments” (50).

Before getting to a description of this “different kind of morality,” a morality of love, one other preliminary point must be made.  Bergson doubts the motivational power of reason.  He does not think that practical reason of the Kantian sort can move people to action.  Instead, he thinks morality must be a matter of habitus, of practice. 

“It is helpful to observe what Bergson has in common with an important strand of practical philosophy—call it antirationalism.  As Carl Power puts it, ‘Bergson might be said to join a counter-tradition that begins with Aristotle and includes more recent names such as Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, and Taylor.  What these disparate figures share is a propensity to see the human agent . . . as a being who is immediately engaged in the world and whose understanding of self and other is first and foremost expressed in practice.’ Broadly speaking, for these thinkers moral life is not primarily a matter of concepts and principles but of concrete durable practices that integrate moral obligations into the texture of everyday life. On that view, morality is not primarily a matter of weighing the purity of one’s intentions or assessing the partiality of one’s judgments.  Certainly these can be part of moral life; but they are not its backbone.  Instead, most of the time the performance of our moral obligations is prereflexive and embedded in the habits and activities of day-today life” (57-8).

It is precisely this emphasis on “practice” that explains Lefebvre’s title: human rights as a way of life.  Only through practice, through the embedding of human rights into the fabric of daily existence, can they take up a place in our world.  The “love” that Bergson advocates must be habitual for humans, must, in a concrete way, become routine.  It’s worth quoting Lefebvre a bit more on what a reliance of “habit” means.

“With his focus on habit, Bergson . . . wants to shift the attention of moral philosophy away from its preoccupation with the rational self-present agent.  Only on rare occasions does the performance of duty involve a conscious or deliberative process.  By and large, it is automatic, second nature, and unconscious. As he says, we ordinarily ‘conform to our obligations rather than think of them.’ Hence the importance of habits, which for Bergson are the true fabric of moral life.  In fact, moral or social life . . . is nothing other than an interlocking web of habits that connect the individual to a variety of groups.  But they don’t merely join the individual to different groups, as if he or she were pre-formed.  Rather, habits constitute the very stuff of our personalities.  They are what make us into parents, professionals, citizens, and the like” (58-9).

We are in recognizably Aristotelean territory here.  Character (personality, selfhood) is created through what we do—and our doings quickly become habits.  Humans are creatures, mostly, of regularity.  Which is not entirely a good thing.  “Habit seems to favor not only passivity and acquiescence but also conformity and laziness” (59).

The would-be moral reformer, the preacher, must lead the audience to become aware of their habits and to consider whether they are desirable or not.  Bergson “repeatedly characterizes love and openness as an ‘effort.’ Love [of the kind he advocated] does not extend moral obligation and it does not follow the habits of everyday life.  It defies them” (60).

So, Bergson wants to enlist the power of habit by making this open love habitual, but he must first break through the habits that make standard closed morality the default mode for most people.

OK!  Finally, what is this open love?  How to describe it, how to experience it, how to incorporate into one’s way of being in the world, how to make it “a way of life”?

Lefebvre cannot—and does not aim to—offer definitive answers to these questions.  The very idea (better: the very experience) of open love grows out of Bergson’s self-proclaimed “mysticism.”  Intelligence has nothing of use to say on this topic.  What Lefebvre wants to show is that “Human rights are works of love that initiate us into love” (89).  We can only proceed by way of examples—and of practices.  Examples “disclose love; they bring it into the world” (88).

As mostly practiced in contemporary society (the human rights practices and discourse most familiar to us), human rights attempts to regulate our world of closed societies, aiming to prevent or (at least mitigate) the abuses to which closed societies are prone.  Normal human rights strive to protect us from hate.

Open human rights aim not to protect, but to convert.  “Human rights are the best-placed institution for the open tendency to gain traction in the world” (89).  They offer a pathway toward a conversion to love, to taking up love as our way of life.

Lefebvre offers four examples of this way of life.  I don’t think they are meant to convince as much as meant to appeal. The first example is the person who says “yes” to the world and to existence, someone who radically affirms that this life is good and a source of joy. “In this sense, love is a disposition or a mood.  It is a way of being in the world, rather than a direct attachment to any particular thing in it” (93).

The second example is a radical indifference (i.e. making no distinctions, and hence an “open” justice), “according no preference to any of the beings in our path, in giving everyone our entire presence, and responding with precise faithfulness to the call they utter to us. . . . Yet this glance is the opposite of an insensitive glance; it is a loving glance which distinguishes, within each individual being, precisely what he or she needs: the words that touch him, and the treatment he deserves” (94 in Lefebvre; he is quoting Louis Lavelle). 

The third example comes from Deleuze’s description of the moment in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend when the on-looking crowd is deeply invested in Rogue Riderhood’s recovery from an apparent drowning.  That crowd is rooting for the life in Riderhood, not attuned to his specific person, personality, or history.  They extend those good wishes to everything that has life, but attuned to life’s manifestation in this singular instance which provides the specific occasion for this affirmation of life.

Finally, Lefebvre considers Elizabeth Costello, the main character of J. M. Coetzee’s novel of that name.  Elizabeth refuses the “insensibility to the pain of outsiders”(97) that, for her, must accompany the complicity with the slaughter of animals that all eating of meat entails.  She opens herself up to that pain—and in the process offends any number of human beings, to the extent that she doesn’t quite feel herself part of the human race any longer. 

In summary, Lefebvre tells us that “all four portraits are preoccupied with the care of others.  Or more precisely, each presents a mode of care made possible only once love ceases to be dedicated to a specific object. [With the first example] it is radiant joy and welcome; with Lavelle it is the responsiveness of indifference; with Deleuze it is attentiveness to singularity; and with Coetzee is it empathy not bound with the group” (100).

Obviously, just how moving these examples will prove to different readers will vary.  Lefebvre is offering, in a different key admittedly, his version of the argument between where to place one’s political efforts: in reforming laws and institutions or in reforming hearts and minds.  To his credit, he refuses to make this an either/or.  We need to do both; he resists the temptation (familiar in various leftist critiques) to see the discourse and institutions of human rights as corrupt and/or positively harmful. 

But, clearly, his focus is on conversion, on change at the individual level.  He struggles (in my view) to connect his perspective to Foucault’s (and the ancients) idea of “care for the self.”  I find this the least convincing move in his book—and I don’t think he really nails the connection he is trying to establish.  For me, even if I buy the idea of human rights as a “way of life,” that way of life had much more to do with my relation to others than it does to my relation to my self.  The “care” that Lefebvre focuses on in the passage quoted in the previous paragraph is not “care for the self” but “care of others.”  Both morality and love are about relations to what is beyond the self.  So I think it a mistake to try to bring them into the purview of the self.

I have undertaken to write a review of Lefebvre’s follow-up book, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton UP, 2024).  I haven’t started reading it yet, but am eager to get into it since I enjoyed reading this human rights book so much.  More on Lefebvre once I do finish the new book.

Judgment: Quality, Qualities, and Qualia

I have been noodling on about judgment on this blog for quite some time now (years!).  And I have written about judgment in Kant and Hannah Arendt in published work, including a forthcoming essay on Arendt that I will post on this blog sometime in the near future.

Still, judgment is a very capacious term and it is often unclear what various thinkers—or me—actually is using the term to designate.  So this post will be an attempt to list a variety of ways the term judgment gets used (Wittgenstein: a word’s meaning is its use) and to see if the various uses are tied to one another or are separate (and better left separate).  Quality, Qualities, and Qualia as a title is meant to outline the territory to be covered although I am afraid those three terms won’t quite do the whole trick.  Complexities will creep in.  But let’s start.

Quality. 

This is mostly the easy one.  Judgment is very commonly tied to an evaluation of something.  I judge whether something is good or bad.  I am, then, considering what is the “quality” of the item in question.  Aristotle thought such judgments were based on a prior conception of the item’s purpose.  A good knife is one that cuts well since cutting is a knife’s purpose.  Judgments in such cases may be absolute (to cut well is to be a good knife), but in practice tend to be comparative.  This knife is better than that knife because this knife cuts better.  It requires a Platonic ideal of good cutting to make an absolute judgment about a particular knife.  In practice, we usually have something rougher in mind: this knife is “good enough” because it gets the job done.  Whether it is the ne plus ultra of knives doesn’t concern us.  We are dealing with the knives available to us in the here and now, not the whole range of all existing and possible knives.  We make our judgment, we choose, among the alternatives we actually have access to.

Judgments, however, can proceed along different axes.  We can judge the knife aesthetically.  In that case, its qualities (first appearance of my second term in the title) as a cutter are subordinated to other qualities (its shape, its color, its weight).  Aesthetic qualities are ones that please the senses (the root meaning of the word “aesthetic”) and are only tangentially related to function, if at all.  Aristotle’s focus on “purpose” is functionalist, whereas the aesthetic is usually only tangential to function, and can be in overt hostility to function.  An aesthetic judgment, then, considers an item’s quality in relation to a different set of criteria than a functional judgment does.  Notoriously, aesthetic judgments seem squishy as compared to functional ones—and generate much more confusion and controversy over what the criteria for judgment are.  Even where there is some agreement and clarity about the criteria being invoked in an aesthetic judgment, disagreement in actual judgments remains very common.

The lack of such disagreements in functional judgments is connected to the use to which the object is being put.  If I am using the knife to cut something, then the degree to which it aids or hampers that effort provides the ground for judgment. If I am trying to use the knife to punch a hole in leather or paper, the fact that the knife proves a poor tool for that endeavor indicates I am using it for a purpose it cannot do well.  With aesthetic objects, however, their purpose is less clear cut.  Do I value the painting because it is pleasing to the eye, because it fills up an empty space on the wall, because it reflects upon a certain tradition in painting, because it indicates my wealth, status, education, and taste?  All of these are possibilities and none of them necessarily excludes the others.  Aesthetic objects have multiple uses, while seemingly not tied to any specific use.  Hence the fuzziness of aesthetic judgments, which vary according to the objective criteria being applied and according to the subjective taste of the one who judges.

The term “value” snuck into last paragraph.  A judgment is an evaluation.  It makes a determination as to the “quality” of some thing—and such judgments seem inevitably tied to an assessment of that thing’s “value.”  A knife that cuts well is more valuable than one that does not.  I would rather possess (and use) the good knife than the poor one.  (Again, comparative in relation to the possible.)  We value things in relation to whether their qualities are desirable and are conducive to advancing our own purposes. 

To pragmatic (purpose oriented) and aesthetic judgments, we must add moral judgments.  The criteria in moral judgments is not exclusively whether an action furthers achievement of a purpose or if the action is “pleasing” to witness or contemplate.  These two bases for judgement need not be excluded in making a moral judgment, but they are neither necessary nor (crucially) sufficient.  A moral judgment must involve a further consideration: the quality of the action in relation to specifically moral criteria.  Identifying moral criteria has proved just about as tricky and ambiguous as identifying aesthetic criteria.  The ongoing debates between Kantians and utilitarians is just one instance of the inability to designate criteria for moral judgments that convince everyone.  Such debates often end up appealing to “moral intuitions” to make their case (Wittgenstein: here my spade turns; I can say no more).  It’s as if “I know a moral action when I see one” for moral judgments crops up alongside the “I know what I like when I see it” explanation of aesthetic judgments.  Moral judgments seem to be endemic—and necessary!—to human social life.  But disputes over moral judgments are as frequent as (and seem much more consequential than) disputes over aesthetic judgments.

To sum up before moving on to qualities: judgments are evaluations of the “quality” of something (an object, an action, even of a person).  Such judgments, at the crudest level, decide whether something is good or bad.  A good knife, a good painting, a good action, a good person as contrasted to ones that are less good or even positively bad.  And we in most cases value good instances of things over bad instances.  There are notable exceptions to this last statement.  We perverse humans can find all sorts of reasons to make the bad our good (to quote Milton’s Satan).

OK. Right now, we are in the land of endless and irresolvable disputes over aesthetic and moral judgments.  One common response to that problem has been to say the fact of disagreement can be wildly exaggerated. Do we really disagree over whether the sexual abuse of a child is good or bad?  Is there anyone out there insisting that Love Story is a better novel than Middlemarch?  Of course there are difficult cases for making moral and aesthetic judgments, but there are many more cases where there is widespread, close to universal, agreement.  It’s only philosophers who agonize over the hard cases.  For the rest of us, we have “good enough” consensus and learn to live with the instances where consensus cannot be reached.  Yes, some disputes lead to serious conflict since human beings are an argumentative and aggressive lot.  But humans have also instituted procedures for conflict resolution—and when we are persistent and lucky such institutions do their job and bloodshed is avoided.

Qualities

The informal, non-institutionalized, form of conflict resolution is talking things over and through.  And this is where “qualities” enter the picture.  We disagree over the quality of a painting.  To talk through that disagreement, the best strategy (it seems to me) is to step back from the judgment and to instead focus on describing the painting to one another.  Are the colors vibrant or muted?  Do they harmonize or clash? How is the space of the canvas allotted? Are the figures representational or abstract (or some blend of the two)?  Et cetera.  Judgment relies upon, is based on, a discernment of qualities.  Various writers, Hannah Arendt among them, wrap this discernment function into the very notion of judgment. 

Arguably, Kant does as well.  A Kantian determinate judgment is an act of apprehension.  For Kant, we apprehend the qualities of a thing—and then judge what kind of thing it is.  We very rarely disagree as to whether something is a knife, not a spoon, fork, or kettle.  So the most basic judgment is what kind of thing a thing is.  And the “kind” is supplied to us by culture, by our language.  We don’t invent a new category, or word, or kind, to identify this knife as “a knife.”  We use the term our language has already given to us.  In this way, we occupy a common world. 

Judgment understood this way is non-individual.  It is the way that individuals participate in a shared universe.  Individuals re-affirm their deep connection to others as they make these mundane (automatic, rarely reflective) judgments constantly.  Solipsism is a boogy-man.  It is impossible to be a solipsist so long as you use the common language.  I read Wittgenstein’s claim that a private language is impossible as saying that the individual cannot construct a world to occupy on his or her own.  The world only achieves solidity through its being “worded” by an ensemble of selves.  Kant’s determinate judgments refer to specific instances where we encounter some thing and need to identify it.  But there is no individual ability to make determinate judgments based on a completely individual set of “categories” or “kinds” or “concepts” (to go back to my earlier posts on percept/concept).

It is, I am suggesting, just a further refinement on judgment as discernment to dive down into the “qualities” of things.  There is the crude first determination: that is a knife.  But now we can appeal to other culturally provided descriptors to be more detailed.  The knife has a certain shape, a certain weight, a certain size.  Again, agreement about these features should not be hard to achieve.  Evaluation of these features is likely to be more various.  I might prefer a knife of a certain heft, while you find it too heavy.  I might find a certain shape of its handle comfortable and thus a way to make it better for me to use—while that may not be the case for you.  But we have narrowed down, specified more concretely, why your evaluative judgment of the knife differs from mine.

We can take the same approach to aesthetic disputes.  If we can agree that the work’s colors are vibrant and non-harmonious, we can then understand if we disagree about whether such an effect is pleasing or not. Aesthetic objects, however, are complex.  What we value in certain critics is their ability to draw our attention to features of the aesthetic object that we had not noticed.  Here we recognize that some people, in relation to some kinds of objects, have greater powers of discernment. These people apprehend more—and have a talent for articulating what they apprehend.  When we read a superb critic of a literary work (for example), we see things in the work that we missed.  Judgment as discernment highlights “qualities” and appeals to others to acknowledge the presence of those qualities.  It enriches the experience of encountering a thing.  Taking a hike with a naturalist is analogous.  I am alerted to features of the forest that I miss when hiking by myself.

It is still an open question how to evaluate those features.  I may find them boring and wish the naturalist wouldn’t bang on about this or that.  But I am not inclined to disagree about whether the features actually are present in the forest.  Again, when it comes to aesthetic objects, matters can be more complicated.  Since a certain form of literary criticism highly values “unity,” we find critics who work very hard to “prove” that Moby Dick or Ulysses are unified works, whereas I find those two books wildly incoherent, manic in their throwing together of disparate materials and thought. But, then again, I don’t rate “unity” as such a valuable criteria for aesthetic judgment as many others do. A conversation about such matters can make at least some progress by clarifying what features (qualities) I think a work has and what criteria I employ to judge its quality. My interlocutor and I can at least see where we agree, where disagree.

Another way to say this is that our stake in making evaluations generates our powers of discernment.  That is why judgment comes to encompass both evaluation and discernment.  I have increased powers of discernment where something is of value, of particular interest, to me.  If I don’t care much about the differences between oaks and spruces or between different varieties of ferns, then I am much more likely not to notice those differences.  Where I am engaged, I can discern more.  And that’s why we turn to “experts,” to people who have a command of the relevant terms and features that allow more discerning and detailed descriptions of particular things.  Those are the people whose judgment about a thing’s “qualities” we have come to trust.  I think this is what we mean when we talk of an “informed judgment.”  Someone able to apprehend the “qualities” of something in rich detail is more informed about that thing and, thus, has more information on which to base a judgment of its quality.

Pragmatic Judgment

This lead me (before I get to qualia) to another common way to use the term “judgment”—a way not quite consonant with my quality, qualities, qualia rubric.  This meaning of judgment is pragmatic, and connected with the Aristotelean term “phronesis” (often translated as “practical wisdom.”)  The colloquial usage here is to characterize a person as having “good judgment.”  Judgment in this case involves evaluating what is possible and/or desirable to do in this particular set of circumstances.  It requires (so the thinking goes) an excellent discernment of the actual features of the situation plus an ability to discern what the situation affords plus a clear sense of one’s own needs/desires plus a sensible prioritizing among those needs/desires in relation to what is possible here and now.  Phronesis is both very specific (tied to this situation and to my purposes) and very holistic (it sees the situation in its full complexity).  Quality and qualities are intertwined here.  I must discern the features of the situation even as I aim to act in ways that enhance the quality of my position.  Embedded in the world, I have the meliorist (William James) goal of bettering my position at every turn, fending off threats to well-being even as I also try to improve that well-being.  Good judgment leads to success in that endeavor—a fact brought home by witnessing how often human actions are counter-productive, make things worse instead of better.  Good judgment is hard and fairly rare, hence its being awarded the honorific term of “wisdom.”

One version of good judgment is to be a “good judge of character.”  Since one of the most crucial wild cards in judging any situation is how much I can rely on the other people who occupy the world alongside me, it is very important to assess accurately the talents and trustworthiness of others.  I can only expect help from people capable of providing that help (I don’t expect a doctor to fix my clogged pipes) and can only enlist that help from people who will be willing to provide it.  So I must make a judgment before the fact as to whether this or that person will actually do what I need them to do.  Relying on someone who lets me down is a failure of judgment, of phronesis. 

Qualia

OK.  Now let me turn to qualia.  In the literature on consciousness, the term “qualia” names the “sensation” that accompanies any experience.  It feels like something to see a Matisse painting.  There is the perception of the painting—and there is the feeling that the perception produces.  An organism can be conscious of something; it is only when that consciousness of something is accompanied by consciousness of an internal feeling (some state of being for the perceiving consciousness) that we have “sensation” as well as “perception.”  (I am following Nicholas Humphrey here, from his book Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023), but Humphrey’s usage is fairly standard in the literature.  Only “fairly standard,” of course, because there is disagreement about everything relating to these matters among those who consider them.) “Phenomenal consciousness” is the term deployed to designate the experience of a “feeling,” a sensation (an awareness) of an internal state of being.

Quick aside: the “hard problem” in consciousness studies is how to explain the fact of phenomenal consciousness.  Current science can do a good job of explaining the physiological processes that enable one to see the Matisse painting, but we have no remotely adequate account of the processes that would generate the “feeling” that accompanies that perception.  The holy grail of consciousness studies is to explain phenomenal consciousness.  The “mysterians” say we will never get that explanation; the hard-core materialists say phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, not a real thing that needs to be explained.  But most writers accept that phenomenal consciousness is real—and that we lack a good account of its reality.

Back to qualia.  What has they got to do with judgment? Everything if we adopt the James-Lange theory of emotions.  Basically, that theory says that our bodies react immediately to the environmental circumstances one confronts in any situation.  (And situations keep unfolding, keep popping up, because the world we inhabit is much more one of constant change than one of stasis.)  Living things are reactive—finely tuned to apprehend the environment and to adjust to the circumstances.  For James-Lange, feelings (sensations) follow from that bodily adjustment/attunement.  The sensation is how we come to realize what our body’s reaction is.  Feelings are informational; they inform us of how our body has responded to what the world is throwing at it. 

If this theory is correct, then judgment is instantaneous.  Our body both judges what the circumstances are (picking out especially what is most relevant to its most important concerns) and judges (acts upon) what an appropriate response to those circumstances are.  Qualia (our sensation or feeling) registers for our conscious selves the judgment that has already been made on an unconscious, bodily level. 

There are various ways one can argue that it’s evolutionary useful for organisms to acquire an ability to be consciously aware of these unconscious bodily responses.  If we know what our body is doing, we can monitor and even (possibly) revise its responses.  I return here to the recurrent notion that consciousness introduces a pause into the processes of stimulus/response.  The body (in the James-Lange theory) responds immediately and automatically, without any involvement on the part of consciousness.  The bodily judgment is direct; it does not pass through consciousness.  But the ability to pick up the signal that informs consciousness of what that response is provides the possibility of assessing it and revising it.  I.e. there is now a second moment of judgment superimposed on the first, automatic one.  This seems similar to the “thinking fast and slow” that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky introduced into the social sciences. (Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow [Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011]). And it chimes with the work of Martha Nussbaum and others on the cognitive function of the emotions. (Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions [Cambridge UP, 2003].) We know about things, about our environment, through our emotional responses to things.  But we are not ruled entirely by our emotions if consciousness allows for us to examine them, to consider if they are appropriate responses to the situations that elicited them.

What, then, of the discernment judgement calls forth (as described in my thoughts on “qualities.”) For James, efforts to explain a judgment always come after the fact.  We strive to “rationalize,” to provide reasons for, the judgments our body has already made.  We want to “justify” a decision after the fact.  Deliberation, we might say, comes after, not before, action.  Still, this desire to justify can hone attention, can make us more discerning.  And that training of apprehension can then influence future instances of immediate, bodily judgment.  Organisms learn.  Feedback from one instance gets incorporated (in the literal sense of that word: taken into the body) in ways that manifest themselves in future interactions.

The desire to justify points us toward the communal pressures upon judgment that Kant (and Arendt in her reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment) emphasizes.  Others demand of us an explanation of our judgments and the actions based upon them.  Why do you think Picasso a lesser artist than Matisse?  Why did you do that?  In answering such questions, we are very likely to point toward features of the paintings or features of the situation we faced as explaining why made the choices we made.  Even if these explanations are “rationalizations” in the negative sense of being excuses for judgments or actions actually made unthinkingly, they do heighten consciousness about our own proclivities and about the complexities (the manifold details) of worldly things and situations.  Because we are called upon to give an account of our judgments and actions, we develop our powers of discernment. 

Arendt translates Kant as saying that our attempts at justification “woo the consent of the other.” There are no absolutely compelling justifications; they are always contestable.  But we want to stand in the good graces of others, so we try to get them to see it our way (as Paul McCartney puts it). 

For Nicholas Humphrey, this need to justify ourselves provides an evolutionary reason for the emergence of phenomenal consciousness.  Because we are social animals, humans must find a way to “work it out” (to quote McCartney again).  And we can only do that, Humphrey thinks, if we have some sense of what others think and feel.  How can we know what “reasons” others will find convincing as we strive to get them to accept our excuses, our ex post facto explanations?  The self-consciousness that phenomenal consciousness enables allows us to imagine how our fellow humans take things, what their sensations are in response to different situations.  Judgment moves from being the purely individual response to the environment toward an always already socially-inflected response.  Our need for, dependence on, others means that their responses to our judgments (and the actions those judgments will inspire) influence the judgments from the start.  Another way to say this: the environment humans face always includes other humans and maintaining desirable relations to those humans is a high priority in any assessment of appropriate responses/adaptations to the environment.  Our learning includes a big dose of learning how other humans respond to us when we make this or that judgment, take this or that action.  We “norm” our taste to fit the groups to which we want to remain members in good standing.

The changing musical tastes of college students offer a good illustration of that last point.  Students will abandon old favorites in favor of more ”sophisticated” ones as they learn new codes of distinction.  Is the music they now listen to “better” than the music they abandon?  Hard to say.  Depends on the criteria applied.  But they will almost certainly acquire a richer vocabulary in which to describe and justify their tastes, while also learning what counts as compelling justifications of taste judgments to the people whose consent they are trying to “woo.” And they will learn what musical tastes are deemed outside the pale.

I will end by saying that the entanglement of judgment with “sociality” (to invoke Arendt on Kant again) is where much of my interest lies.  I want to nail down (and feel I have yet to do so to my satisfaction) the way that judgments are not just influenced by, but are only possible within, intersubjective relations.  Relevant factors are the non-private languages in which judgments are articulated/communicated and the pressure to explain/justify our judgments.  But I still feel like something is missing here, some key piece to the puzzle of how what seems individually located (the response of my body to a situation and my subsequent conscious awareness of that response) is not very individual at all.