Why cheat?

Posted by on May 21, 2013 2 comments

Stephen Mumford explains why it is wrong to cheat in sport. This article appears in Issue 61 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

Widespread moral outrage has been prompted by Lance Armstrong finally coming clean on his use of performance enhancing drugs in his sport. Some purchasers of his autobiography have demanded refunds on the ground of the work having being bought as fact that is now considered fiction. Armstrong was a cheat; and we feel cheated.

There is a good reason for this. Ethical and aesthetic values can be closely connected, as the case of sport illustrates. In Watching Sport, I argued that moral flaws can detract from the aesthetic value of sport, while moral virtues can increase it, and I used Lance Armstrong as one illustration. Back then, Armstrong fell into the latter category. The beauty of his victories was enhanced by his return from cancer. Now that we know there was a different kind of enhancement involved, the aesthetic is ruined. Ben Johnson’s 1988 Olympic sprint was similarly destroyed aesthetically by its basis in cheating.

If we assume that sporting beauty can be defeated by an ethical vice, we had better be sure that the use of drugs in sport really is wrong. While the judgements of sporting authorities are all or nothing – guilt or innocence – the arguments are not always so cut and dried. Chemicals in bodies come in degrees, and disqualifications do not. Some such chemicals are naturally occurring, such as testosterone. Up to a certain level, an athlete is innocent of wrong-doing. The slightest degree over the limit, and they bear absolute guilt. Might an athlete then try to get as close to the legal limit as they can, without exceeding it? Some other cases are claimed to have been a result of accidental ingestion of a drug, as in the case of British skier Alain Baxter, who was stripped of his 2002 Winter Olympic medal after the use of a shop-bought inhaler. And although the drug in his body was on the banned list, it was acknowledged to be an inactive variety of it. The drug had no performance-enhancing value. The wrongness of drug-cheating in sport does not, therefore, rest only on level-playing field considerations or unfair advantage. And it is not always a question of protection of the athletes either. Some performance-enhancers are damaging to health, but not all are. Maybe the harmless ones should be allowed.

Here is a different approach. Perhaps the wrongness of drugs in sport resides in nothing more than that it is against the rules. It’s wrong because it’s cheating. We want the rules obeyed, whatever they are, and some of those just happen to concern drug use. After all, some of the arguments above could apply to other cases of cheating in sport or violation of the rules. A snooker player cannot hope to escape sanction just because a hanging sleeve knocked a ball accidentally, and nor would it matter if the ball’s movement was of no advantage. It’s a foul either way. And in football, the ball can be taken as close to the boundary of play as one likes, but once it crosses that line – no matter how little – it is out of play absolutely. All or nothing calls are frequently essential in sport. At least the rules for drugs in sport are relatively clear.

Why, though, would anyone knowingly cheat, even if they thought they could escape punishment? In one of the finest books in the philosophy of sport, Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper, the playing of games is defended as an end in itself. One plays for its own sake, and consequently we should expect game-playing to be the centrepiece of any imagined utopia. It follows, argues Suits, that one accepts the rules of a game precisely because it is a precondition of the playing of the game. One accepts a lusory goal in sport, an inefficient means of achieving some task, precisely because without the constraint of rules, game playing would not be possible. Thus, one accepts that one has to jump over the bar, rather than walk under it; one has to run all the way around the track instead of cutting across the infield; and one has to get the ball in the hole by hitting it with a club instead of carrying it and dropping it in there. Some of these constraints are fairly arbitrary. Games can and do evolve in all sorts of ways. But unless one accepts those rules, one is not playing. You may get to the other side of the bar, but unless you have done so by jumping over it, you are not playing high jump. And similarly, it can be contended, if one breaks the rules of drug use, one has opted out of the sport.

Assuming that is right, what tempts someone like Armstrong to knowingly opt out of the sport? Why did he voluntarily stop competing in cycling? Indeed, why would anyone cut across the infield in a 400-metre race, even if they could do so undetected? And would they really have “won” the race if they did so? Arguably not. But if someone willingly stops playing, while adopting the appearance of playing, doesn’t that show that something has gone wrong with sport? It is no longer befitting Suits’ utopia. It is not being done for its own sake but, rather, for the rewards of finance and fame. In that case, something has gone wrong in society’s institutionalisation of sport.

And here is a more general lesson, for cheating does not occur only in sport. Academics are acutely aware of incidents of plagiarism. One website was found offering to write undergraduate essays, with a pricing scale determined by length and class of the essay. The same site even offered to write PhD theses, for a price. Why would anyone want to take up that offer? Why graduate knowing that it is not one’s own achievement? Just like sport, learning should be its own reward. If we reach the point where the instrumental value of such achievements outweighs their intrinsic value, then we have created a defective society and a recipe for cheating.

Stephen Mumford is professor of metaphysics in the department of philosophy and dean of the faculty of arts at University of Nottingham, as well as adjunct professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is author of Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion (Routledge, 2011) and Metaphysics: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012).

A Theory of Justice: The Musical – a romp through 2,500 years of philosophy

Posted by on May 10, 2013 3 comments

Rebecca Reilly-Cooper is astonished by “A Theory of Justice: The Musical”, a hilarious combination of musical theatre and political philosophy. This article appears in Issue 61 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

The priority of equal basic liberties over fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle might be an important element of a theory of justice, but on the face of it, the subject doesn’t have much comedic promise. I’m pretty certain that the lexical priority of liberty has never caused me to laugh out loud before. Neither has Rousseau’s republicanism, nor Lockean theories of initial acquisition. But that was before I saw A Theory of Justice: The Musical, written, produced and performed by undergraduates at the University of Oxford. On opening night, these ideas and more had me laughing until the tears streamed down my face and my cheeks were aching.

Political philosophy and musical theatre are two of my life’s highest pleasures, but even so, prior to seeing the show, a combination of the two did not strike me as a guaranteed success. A musical romp through 2,500 years of philosophy would probably be highly entertaining; but possibly in a so bad, it’s good sort of way. Well, I was halfway right. The show was highly entertaining, but in a genuinely excellent, astonishingly brilliant sort of way.

The story follows a diffident, tweedy Professor John Rawls who – alongside the object of his desires, the beautiful but elusive Fairness – travels back in time and meets political philosophers of the past. He is pursued by his nemesis and archrival Robert Nozick, who aims to foil Rawls’s plan to write a new and groundbreaking theory of justice. Along the way, the great thinkers share their theories with Rawls in surprising and hugely comical ways: a ventriloquist Plato preaches to the masses at the agora through his dummy, Socrates; ruffian Thomas Hobbes and gentleman John Locke engage in a furious rap battle over the details of life in the state of nature; and a charmingly naïve and tender barbershop quartet of utilitarians espouse their morality of maximising happiness.

All of these scenes are so cleverly and originally interpreted that, as well as being utterly hilarious, they have real pedagogical value. As the oversensitive, childlike utilitarians sang to make themselves feel happy, and cried when hearing of someone else’s unhappiness, through my giggles I wondered why I had never thought of utilitarianism in that way before.

Given the paucity of women in the canon and the neglect of gender politics by most philosophers, I had wondered how the show would deal with this. So I was delighted to see Mary Wollstonecraft and her backing singers of Emmeline Pankhurst and Catharine Macaulay arrive to lambast the men for their disregard for women’s equality (and amused when Rawls dismissively promises to deal with the family in a later chapter).

While there were many excellent performances, for me the show was stolen by the evil libertarian duo of smooth and dastardly Nozick, played by Luke Rollason, and the terrifying dominatrix Ayn Rand, played by Clare Joyce. Their seductive and slightly deranged tango, in which Rand extols to Nozick the virtues of selfishness, was my highlight of the show. But special mention must also go to David Wigley as Rawls’s drag queen fairy mother, Immanuel Kant, who in a climactic scene worthy of a reality television montage, shows Rawls that the theory of justice he has been searching for won’t be found in the outside world; he must search within (but using his reason, and not his emotions, of course).

To create something that has both philosophical accuracy and genuine comedy is no mean feat, and yet Eylon Aslan-Levy, Ramin Sabi and Tommy Peto have somehow managed to write a script that has both, by the bucket load. Admittedly, much of the comedy is of a distinctly geeky nature – in-jokes predicated on our shared recognition and comprehension. I doubt an audience comprised of non-philosophers would have laughed so heartily at Kant responding to Rawls’s “that’s phenomenal!” with the exclamation “No, it’s noumenal!” So this might not be a show to take the whole family to. But philosophy students at university campuses around the world would, I’m sure, pack out theatres and howl with laughter. I hope a longer run, and perhaps even a tour, beckons; I will be taking my undergraduates.

At the end of the show, as he slunk off the stage, vanquished, Nozick promised to return in three years’ time with Anarchy, State and Utopia: The Opera. I think that may have been another joke. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

A Theory of Justice: The Musical was written by Eylon Aslan-Levy, Ramin Sabi and Tommy Peto, and directed by Esmé Hicks and Robert Natzler.

Rebecca Reilly-Cooper is lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Oxford.

God’s artillery opens fire

Posted by on May 1, 2013 10 comments

Julian Baggini reviews Alvin Plantinga’s “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism”. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

It’s hard to resist the pull of military metaphors when talking about the recent battles between religion and the so called new-atheists: Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchins, Sam Harris et al. Fighting talk is only natural when combatants on both sides have often been vicious in their attacks. And like the western front in World War I, for all the blasts and flashes, neither side ever manages to advance its trenches. Yet in the very definition of madness, both forces persist in trying the same tactics that have never worked before as though they might suddenly prove efficacious.

So it is with some anticipation that God’s army has finally moved one of its heavier pieces of artillery to the front line. Alvin Plantinga is no household name, but in philosophy and theology he is widely recognised as one of the world’s smartest Christian thinkers. His new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, is not just a robust defence of religion against the claim that it is defeated by science, but also a bold counter-attack.

If you want to make sense of this quagmire, where do you begin? With the question of where we all begin, because that is the key issue that Plantinga’s book illuminates. Those on the naturalist side of the debate – people who believe that the natural world is all there is – start with evidence, the hard, objective kind that anyone can examine and assess for themselves. For the religious, however, it’s quite different. “Maybe a few people accept religious beliefs strictly on the basis of what they take the evidence to be,” writes Plantinga. “But for most of us, our religious beliefs are not like scientific hypotheses” and “we are none the worse [for that].”

Plantinga is here referring to his enduring contribution to the theory of knowledge, his idea that some beliefs we have are “properly basic”. The belief that other people have minds and are not just zombies or automata, for example, is not one we can ultimately justify. Nonetheless, not only is holding such a belief justified, I’d be considered psychotic if I didn’t hold it. Belief in God, argues Plantinga, stands alongside other beliefs we can be “fully and entirely rational” in holding, even if we have no evidence or argument at all.

To his opponents, there is a clear difference between the basic beliefs that fit together and that everyone does and must share, and the enormous variety of religious beliefs that are clearly optional and which contradict each other. However, if you do grant that religious beliefs are properly basic, you effectively provide a Get out of Jail Free Card for almost (but not all) apparent cases of conflict between science and religion. The argument here is simple. For the naturalist, certain religious claims become untenable on the scientific evidence base. Perhaps surprisingly, the religious would agree. But, they would add, their evidence base includes facts other than scientific ones, such as the existence of a loving creator. If you add that to the scientific evidence for evolution, you will think that the most likely explanation for the emergence of life is that God works through random mutation to ensure creatures like us have evolved. And, he claims, nothing in evolutionary theory denies that possibility. The idea that the process is entirely unguided is a “metaphysical or theological add-on”. For all the theory says, “God could have achieved the results he wanted by causing the right mutations to arise at the right times, letting natural selection do the rest.”

There is much more in this book, including the latest iteration of Plantinga’s argument that naturalism undermines itself. Briefly, if you are a naturalist and so believe that human minds are simply the product of unguided evolution, you have a reason to think minds will enhance our survival prospects, but no reason to think they will generate true beliefs. So you no longer have any good reason to trust that your belief in naturalism is true. Hence the title of Plantinga’s book: the real conflict in which science is embroiled is with naturalism, not religion.

As usual, this is clever, but there are plenty of replies. And counter-replies. And counter-counter-replies. What Plantinga really shows in this mainly readable but often academically opaque book is why the war will end only in exhaustion. Where the conflict really lies is right down at the very basis of why people believe what they do, yet the war is fought over the beliefs themselves. It’s like trying to get rid of Japanese knot weed by hacking at the stems when the root system is too deep, too capable of regenerating itself even when viciously cut. Plantinga has a pretty sharp scythe and generally speaking he wields it well, despite some viciously personal attacks on the new atheists. But all he’s done is provide space for his own weeds to thrive for a while before they too are cut down to size and the whole cycle starts again.

Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism by Alvin Plantinga (Oxford University Press), £17.99/$27.95.

Julian Baggini) is co-founder of TPM and the author of The Ego Trick (Granta).

Grassroots philosophy

Posted by on April 9, 2013 4 comments

Jules Evans, co-organiser of the London philosophy club, charts the amazing rise of philosophy groups. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

I first became involved with philosophy groups through my interest in Stoicism, as unlikely as that sounds. Stoic philosophy helped me through an emotional crisis in my early twenties, and I then looked around for other people who had been helped by ancient Greek philosophy. That led me to an online community of Stoics, called NewStoa.com. I helped organise a “gathering of the Stoics” on Marcus Aurelius’ birthday (April 26) in San Diego in 2010. The gathering brought together ordinary people interested in Stoicism from all over the world. However, it turned out that modern Stoics were often quite libertarian and prickly people, and building a “Stoic community” proved difficult. I decided that if philosophy was going to appeal to a broader segment of the population and become a genuine community, it would itself need to be broader and more pluralistic.

In late 2010, I heard about the London Philosophy Club, a group of people who met up to discuss philosophy once a month. I gave a talk at the club in November 2010, and became a co-organiser shortly afterwards. In the last two years, I’ve watched in wonder as our membership broke through the 1,000 mark, then the 2,000 mark – it’s now at 2,400, making us the second-biggest philosophy club in the world (the biggest is in New York, but they mainly organise cocktail nights. We’re not in any way competitive. Honestly.) We’ve hosted speakers including Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Ree and Robert Skidelsky – our Christmas speaker was Angie Hobbs. We also have a popular reading group, philosophy meals and drinks, and group discussions across London, including an idyllic picnic-debate in Hyde Park last spring on the ethics of torture.

Over the last two years, I’ve researched other grassroots philosophy groups for a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, called “Philosophical Communities”. The picture I’ve built up is surprising, even for people within the scene. There are 850 groups on meetup.com that describe themselves as “philosophy groups”, in 384 cities and 25 countries, with a combined membership of 125,000. Some of those might stretch your definition of “philosophy”, but it’s still a striking amount. There are 229 ethics meetups, 528 Skeptic meetups, 126 feminist meetups, 60 Socrates Cafes, and 660 meetups dedicated to “intellectual discussion”. And, as I’ve discovered, there are many philosophy groups off the meetup map. There are around 200 Skeptic, atheist and Humanist groups around the United States. There are Cafe Philosophiques across France and Holland. There is the Philosophy in Pubs (PIPs) network, which has 15 groups around Merseyside and a total of 30 around the United Kingdom. There is Philosophy For All, set up by Anja Steinbauer, which has been organising philosophy talks, debates and walks in London since 1998. There are philosophy groups for retired people, run through the University of the Third Age or independently, like the venerable Pinner Philosophy Group in Harrow. There are philosophy cafes and societies on many student campuses. And there are radical ideas groups like Occupy London, who as I speak are recreating the Putney Debates.

And then there are the commercial organisers of ideas events. TED is now almost twenty years old and Intelligence Squared is ten years old, but in the last few years the “ideas event”market has become more crowded. In 2008, Alain de Botton and friends launched the School of Life in London, in imitation of Epicurus’ Garden. It’s since welcomed 50,000 people through its doors, and is launching branches in Australia, Holland, Brazil and beyond. In 2010, Tom Hodgkinson opened the Idler Academy in west London. Both the School of Life and the Idler organise philosophy workshops at festivals like Wilderness and Port Eliot. There are also festivals dedicated to ideas and philosophy, like the Battle of Ideas (launched in 2005), HowTheLightGetsIn (launched in 2008), the Month of Philosophy in Amsterdam, the Modena philosophy festival in Italy, and Recontres de Sophie in France.

Evidently, philosophy is flourishing beyond the walls of academia. This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, philosophy has often flourished through informal groups of friends. As the sociologist Randall Collins wrote, “the history of philosophy is, to a considerable extent, the history of groups”. No sooner was philosophy born than it challenged traditional forms of community and gave rise to new forms, like the symposium of Socrates, the Garden of Epicurus or the cult of Pythagoras. When philosophy broke free of the Church in the fourteenth century, it spread through informal networks of friends, like the humanist circles of Erasmus or Salutati or the Platonic Academy of Ficino. The Enlightenment spread through the salons of Madame Necker and Madame Geoffrin, the Junto of Benjamin Franklin and the Select Society of Smith and Hume. And socialism likewise spread, through the Doctor’s Club of the Young Hegelians, the Tchaikovsky circle of the Russian intelligentsia, or the Sunday booze-ups at Engels’ house in Primrose Hill.

The question of who was welcome in these networks was always contentious. In the Enlightenment, middle-class thinkers like Voltaire pushed their way into the circle through the sheer brilliance of their intellect, but there was always the risk they would be snubbed or even flogged by an elitist aristocrat. Women were typically excluded from the London debating clubs of the 18th century, so they set up their own clubs, like the Female Congress and Carlisle House Debates for Ladies Only. Working-class men and women weren’t welcome in Enlightenment coffeehouses, so they also set up their own groups in the pub, like the London Corresponding Society, while middle-class philanthropists set up clubs for them like the London Mechanics Institute or, in the US, the Lyceum and Chautauqua networks.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, however, philosophy became more formal and professionalised. Self-run working class mutual improvement clubs evolved into the Worker’s Education Association, which provided courses at Oxford University’s Ruskin College. Mechanics Institutes and extension colleges turned into universities (Birkbeck College grew out of the London Mechanics Institute). Academic philosophy became more specialised, and impenetrable for amateurs. Yet some clusters of non-academic philosophy stubbornly survived, like Asterix’ indomitable village resisting the Roman Empire. There were still, in the 1890s, figures like Tommy Davidson, the exuberant and stubbornly unacademic Scots-American thinker, who travelled across the US and Europe, joining and inspiring philosophy clubs wherever he went, including the Radical Club of Bronson Alcott, the Metaphysical Club of William James, the Aristotelian Society, and his own Fellowship of New Life.

It’s only in the last few years that philosophy groups have become a mass phenomenon. The reasons for their rise are complex. Melvyn Bragg, who I interviewed for my research project, suggests they are a consequence of the rise of the “mass intelligentsia”. Bragg points to the huge expansion of higher education since the 1960s, which he suggests has created a large minority with the capacity and desire to discuss ideas that were once the province of a small intellectual elite. As The Economist’s John Parker pointed out in a great 2008 article called “The age of mass intelligence”, the mass intelligentsia are defined by their willingness to spend their leisure consuming or discussing culture – hence the popularity of book clubs (a survey by Jenny Hartley estimated their membership at 50,000 in the UK in 2001), literary festivals (there are now roughly 300 literary festivals in the UK every year), museums and galleries (attendance rose by 100% from 2000 to 2010, according to the UK Statistics Agency), classical music (Classic FM is now the most popular commercial station in the UK), intelligent mass TV (particularly HBO), intelligent mass cinema (David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Charlie Kaufmann) and intelligent mass media, particularly online ideas podcasts and talks like TED, Philosophy Bites, This American Life and In Our Times.

The concept of the mass intelligentsia was, in fact, first put forward by Richard Flacks, a sociologist and member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), to explain the mass campus uprisings that took place in universities in the 1960s. The concept was also used by the sociologist Daniel Bell, who suggested that the rise of the knowledge economy necessitated the expansion of universities and the creation of a “new intellectual class”, to work in the sciences, media and professions in the new knowledge economy. This new class, the mass intelligentsia, acquired on a mass scale many of the attributes of the former elite intelligentsia – a desire for authenticity, self-expression, sexual freedom and spiritual choice.

The rise of the mass intelligentsia has been a cause of deep concern for communitarians like Charles Taylor, who blames them for undermining traditional community values (particularly traditional religion). And yet the mass intelligentsia is not, as a class, quite as individualistic or selfish as Taylor supposes. They showed a desire, very early on, not just to destroy old forms of community, but also to create new forms, new experiments in living together, such as the commune, the happening, or the consciousness-raising circle. Sixties student radicals would sit around for hours, sometimes for days, in earnest ethical discussion about how to live well together. And they tried to extend the ethical conversation into society, through the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, the environmental movement. Tom Hayden, the philosophy graduate and principal author of the SDS’ Port Huron Statement, called for a new “participatory democracy”, in which the public were informed, engaged, and talking to each other. It was a vision close to John Dewey’s dream of a Great Society, where “neighbours on the street corner” could “converse freely with one another”.

If the mass intelligentsia is the demographic driver behind the contemporary emergence of philosophy groups, then the internet is the main technological driver. In the late 1990s, philosophy groups had to post notices on library boards and cafe windows to attract members. Now the London Philosophy Club posts its meetings on meetup, and within a day 100 people have signed up (not that they all necessarily turn up, but that’s another story). Sites like meetup.com and Facebook allow people interested in ideas (still a minority, alas) to find each other, get together, and form groups. The loneliness of the intellectual can be overcome, outside of academia.

The internet has made philosophy far more social and interactive. It has bridged the divide between the intellectual and the masses. In the 1940s, intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin or A J Ayer opined on the Third Programme, and the masses simply listened, their mouths agape. Now, through the internet, they can share, comment and create their own ideas, and host speakers at their own local clubs. Intellectual life has become ruddily democratic and boisterous. As David Brooks wrote: “People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.”

The Skeptic movement is a good example of the anarchism of grassroots philosophy. Modern Skepticism was launched in the late 1970s by Paul Kurtz, an academic philosopher and Humanist inspired by John Dewey’s vision of public philosophy. Kurtz feared America was sinking beneath a flood of irrational New Age beliefs, and wanted to promote critical thinking in mass society. In 1976, he founded an organisation of fellow Skeptics, called the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). The members were mainly white, male academics, along with the occasional magician. In the 1980s, CSICOP started to establish some grassroots organisations around the US and other countries. The grassroots Skeptic movement slowly grew, and then exploded in the last few years, thanks to podcasts, blogs and social networking sites. There are now 41 Skeptics in the Pubs groups in the UK – the newest, in Soho, just opened yesterday. As Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, told me: “Skepticism is now a grassroots movement. No one is in control.” Not even Paul Kurtz, who by the end of his life was perplexed by the aggressively atheist direction the Skeptic movement had gone.

The grassroots philosophy movement has sometimes locked horns with academic philosophy. Alain de Botton, who has done a lot to promote the idea of philosophy beyond academia, often criticises academic philosophy for ignoring practical questions of how to live well. Many academics, by contrast, simply have no idea of the grassroots movement, or if they do, they may consider it unserious and amateur. Yet the mutual animosity is gradually dissipating, as both sides recognise they need each other: academic philosophy without street philosophy risks becoming irrelevant, while street philosophy without academic philosophy risks becoming incoherent. Supporting grassroots philosophy groups can be a way for universities to revive their traditions of extension and liberal adult education, and to reaffirm their identity as places where life’s big questions are discussed.

Secondly, grassroots philosophy could be better supported with digital resources. Meetup.com, Facebook and Twitter are incredibly useful, but there’s a surprising lack of material on the internet about grassroots philosophy, such as videos or podcasts. As part of my project, I’ve launched a website called The Philosophy Hub, which will have a global map for people to find or register their local philosophy group, as well as other free resources for groups to use. Universities could also be encouraged to put more of their talks and seminars online, where groups can access them. Grassroots philosophy has already got onto the radio (through Radio 4‘s The Philosophers Arms) but it would be great to see it on TV too.

Thirdly, we could develop better philosophy events. We’ve come a long way, with the launch of philosophy festivals like HowTheLightGetsIn. But we could develop the “live philosophy” format further: events could be more entertaining, taking a leaf from Skeptic events like The Night of 400 Billion Stars, which combines science, music and comedy. They could be more multi-media and immersive. And they could certainly be more interactive and participatory. It would be great to have a national event that brought philosophy groups together, and then to expand that into an international event.

Finally, I would suggest that the mass intelligentsia – and philosophy groups in particular – could re-find the sense of social purpose that they had in the 1960s, and that earlier incarnations of the intelligentsia possessed. Roman Krznaric, one of the founding faculty members of the School of Life, says: “The main task of philosophy clubs is to turn into collective movements of social change, which are capable of tackling the great problems of our age. If we just obsesses about our own lifestyles, I don’t think we’ll get very far.” Philosophy clubs are wonderful places to meet up and talk, but can they also be vehicles for social action? I hope so.

Jules Evans is the author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations and the founder of www.thephilosophyhub.com. He blogs at www.philosophyforlife.org.

Class act

Posted by on April 2, 2013 3 comments

Peter Worley on his philosophical work with children in schools. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

I was coming to the end of my first degree in philosophy at University College London and was beginning to have to think about what to do next. I was just starting “to get” this philosophy stuff and had warmed very much to the Greeks, particularly Socrates and Plato and the way that the Greeks had seen philosophy as something applicable to one’s own life. It wasn’t only an academic concern for them. Then I read a series of articles in tpm by Tim LeBon describing philosophical counselling sessions. I wondered if this might be the route for me. I trained with Tim and began practicing as a philosophical counsellor, though I earned my living as a guitar teacher for The Lewisham Music Service in South East London. Because of the counselling I had also embarked on a part-time MA in philosophy at Birkbeck in order to strengthen my subject knowledge, particularly in ethics.

When teaching music I had noticed that there was something I now call “the ensemble effect”: that the overall sound of, say, five children playing together was often much better than each child could manage on their own. And I wondered if doing philosophy with children could be approached in a similar way. I mentioned this idea to a head teacher in one of the schools I was working in and she encouraged – no, prodded – me to put together a proposal for a philosophy pilot project. That was over ten years ago, but, even to this day, when people ask me “how is it possible to do philosophy with young children?” my first response is to say that it is very difficult to do philosophy with one child, because they often don’t have the range of intellectual responses needed to be able to sustain a philosophical discussion. However, doing philosophy with up to thirty children can solve this particular problem; thirty minds bring thirty different perspectives to an issue or problem. When one child makes a point there are up to thirty other minds thinking about it. This is where the basic fuel for doing philosophy for children comes from. It’s worth noting that one of the overall aims of The Philosophy Foundation when doing philosophy with children is to have the class model to each individual within the class how a philosophical conversation progresses. So, the children begin by philosophising externally with each other as a class but in doing so model how philosophy can be done internally, by each individual child, using the “silent dialogue” model. A similar transition is also suggested by Plato when Socrates talks about silent dialogue in the Theaetetus (recall that Plato’s dialogues are usually written in dialogue form where Socrates is engaged in external dialogues with others):

SOCRATES: And do you accept my description of the process of thinking?

THEAETETUS: How do you describe it?

SOCRATES: As a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. You must take this explanation as coming from an ignoramus, but I have a notion that, when the mind is thinking, it is simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no. When it reaches a decision – which may come slowly or in a sudden rush – when doubt is over and the two voices affirm the same thing, then we call this its “judgement”. So I should describe thinking as discourse, and judgement as a statement pronounced, not aloud to someone else, but silently to oneself.

An indication that this kind of transition is beginning to occur is when children start to say things like, “Now I’m going to disagree with myself” or “I know I said x but”. Some children naturally engage in this kind of dialogue with themselves but for others the modeling is essential. I think that this ability is one of the most important skills they can leave the classroom with. Actually, I would resist saying that developing silent dialogue is simply a skill, but more like a disposition. Research has suggested that the skills gained from engaging in philosophy at primary level remain with the children long after they stop doing philosophy (two years later it was found the children still demonstrated the reasoning skills gained from doing philosophy). A good essay or research project will include good “dialoguing” in the form of objections and responses to any claim made – the dialogue being implicit, as it is in Descartes’ Meditations, a dialogue in one voice, rather than explicit as with Plato’s dialogues.

I soon discovered that there were other approaches and methods for doing philosophy with children but, when I looked into them, I was somewhat concerned about the extent to which these endeavours really were philosophical. They seemed to be laudable attempts to make general education more reflective and enquiry-based but fell short of introducing genuine philosophy as I had come to understand it at university. This got me thinking: is the kind of academic philosophy I had learned something that can be done by young children, or is it simply out of their reach, something beyond their cognitive abilities? In many ways the charity I co-founded, The Philosophy Foundation, has been built on trying to answer this question. And I am happy to report that children are capable of the kind of thinking that characterises philosophy.

I have witnessed (and have corroborative footage to support this) primary aged children demonstrate a priori reasoning, spot an infinite regress, make use of reductio ad absurdum argumentation, draw distinctions, construct thought experiments, invent new words, discuss abstract, metaphysical questions and much more besides. In short: most of the thinking tools of philosophy. The Philosophers’ Magazine’s own Julian Baggini, who has on occasion spoken about philosophy in schools, has voiced a legitimate concern that, though he concedes young children may make statements that sound philosophically interesting, he is sceptical that they can sustain genuine lines of philosophical reasoning or develop arguments. This, I take it, is what Baggini thinks is necessary for being able to say that one is doing philosophy. Of course, there is a limit to the extent that children can develop arguments and/or lines of reasoning, but they are perfectly capable of doing so. For instance, here is an argument put forward by a 10-year-old boy:

“I’ve got an argument to prove there’s only one universe and nothing doesn’t exist:

I know the universe is infinite, but, say, half of this room is the universe and the other half of the room another universe.

When they meet together, they must have a point where they meet.

And what is to define that the two universes are different? I mean they [both] have the same description; they cover everything.

And if the universe was here [he points] and nothing was there [points elsewhere] the universe must be touching the nothing, and if it is touching it, it must physically exist, therefore…”

Though the argument shows a level of creative and logical thinking that is highly sophisticated, one may respond by saying that the argument is unsuccessful. If it is this does not, by itself, go on to show that children can’t philosophise. Take the example of Descartes. Many of his arguments are thought to be unsuccessful but this does not mean that he was failing to philosophise. As P F Strawson remarks about Descartes, in his essay “Self, Mind and Body”, “One of the marks … of a really great philosopher is to make a really great mistake.” Further, the boy who formulated this argument went on to defend his argument successfully from objections by other children in the group.

Another example comes from a group of Year 3 (age 7) children discussing whether it is better to be an unhappy person or a happy pig (see “The Prince and The Pig” in my book The If Machine for the lesson plan used with this class). One boy had said that it must be better to be a person because there is not much a pig can do, whereas a person can do so much more. Another boy said that you don’t know what makes the pig happy and that it may well be happy doing the few things that pigs do. But the first speaker was dissatisfied with this and responded by saying that you would know: you could just look at the pig and see if it is happy with what it is doing. Someone else interjected saying that you still wouldn’t know whether it was happy because you can’t know what the pig is feeling. The question was raised, “What if it looked happy? Would you know that it was happy?” Many of the children thought that they would know, except for one single child, a boy who had said nothing up to that point. He said that even though it looks happy, it doesn’t mean that it feels happy: “By magic [the speaker was referring to a magic spell that had featured in the story] someone may always have a smile on their face but underneath they may be very sad,” said one girl.

There are several interesting features about this exchange that help us to understand what the extent and limits of philosophy with children are:

  1. This is clearly a developed and sustained line of reasoning (something like an argument against behaviourism); it is not just a single, isolated statement that superficially resembles something profound such as “Life is a jigsaw with one piece missing”. There is a context, which demonstrates some of what the philosopher John White calls “philosophical intention”.

  2. The argument is put forward as part of a dialogue between speakers as opposed to being the product of just one thinker (as with the first example above).

  3. It would be very unlikely that the children – or at least many of them – would be able to recount the argument or the steps made after they had made it. (This of course changes as they get older and there are exceptional cases.)

  4. They are not necessarily aware of what it is they have actually done. They may have formulated an argument against a behaviourist-like position but would not be aware, more generally, that they had done this, or of the implications of such an argument. (Again, this changes as they get older and again, there are exceptional cases.)

  5. There were strategies and techniques that were employed by the facilitator that were needed to enable the children to construct this line of reasoning. Without them the level of sophistication present in the example simply would not have occurred (see The If Machine for examples of these strategies and techniques.)

From these observations we see not only that the children are capable of philosophical thinking but, where their philosophising is deficient, we can see a space for an argument for why they should do philosophy. Given that they have a basic ability to philosophise surely there is a case for saying that they be given the opportunity to practise philosophising so that they can develop the aspects that they are less good at, such as taking a wider, more holistic view of a discussion as a whole (points 3 and 4 above), what is sometimes called “the synoptic view”. As the philosopher Simon Glendinning said during an interview with Baggini after one of our events (a Philosophers’ Football match celebrating the famous Monty Python sketch), just because children are not very good at playing music or doing maths is no reason to refrain from teaching them music or maths or from encouraging them to do so. It is precisely because they are not good at them that they are taught them or encouraged to do them – so that they can get better.

Interestingly, philosophy has a good deal in common with both maths and music. It shares with maths a logical, conceptual foundation, and it shares with both of them an intrinsic value, i.e. that one is motivated to pursue it for its own sake and that it is good to pursue for its own sake. These are two powerful reasons for doing philosophy – with anyone, for that matter, not just children – but also two reasons that increasingly find themselves distanced from our instrumental, productivity-based society.

If we must, then here are some instrumental arguments (briefly put) for why philosophy should be taught in schools, or for that matter, why it should be taught at all:

The “basic” argument: Thinking and reasoning are even more basic than the three Rs (reading, writing and artithmetic) given that reasoning (the fourth “R”?) and the concepts involved in reasoning underpin all three. Philosophy is the subject that specialises in conceptual thinking and reasoning, therefore we may appeal to a very basic educational need for doing philosophy, i.e. conceptual thinking and reasoning.

The “truth” argument: By honing the concepts that we use in all other truth-seeking subjects (e.g. the sciences), philosophy, which is singularly concerned with concepts and reasoning, is the subject best placed to improve the thinking on which the other truth-seeking subjects are based, thereby improving our efforts to reach truth. (This is to paraphrase an argument owed to Catherine McCall.)

The incoherence argument: When incoherence occurs between disciplines (or simply in the way the world seems to “hang together” or not) one needs the tools to deal with such incoherence, to be able to attempt to make sense of it. Philosophy is the subject that specialises in making sense of incoherence. Therefore philosophy should be taught. (This is a paraphrase of an argument put forward to me by Stephen Boulter.)

It is worth noting that incoherence is just as much a feature of school children’s lives as anyone else’s. Just think of the way the children learn objectivity in the sciences but then are taught something like universal relativism in other aspects of their schooling, perhaps in religious education or the classroom mantra “opinions are never wrong” and such like.

The inescapability argument: Philosophical problems are inescapable. Every time you read something in a newspaper or on the internet you are faced with a philosophical problem: how do you know when something is true? When the teacher teaches you about atoms and shows you the atomic model: how do they know that atoms look like that if they’ve never seen one? If it’s true that philosophical problems are inescapable then surely there is an argument for preparing people/students for how to respond to these problems intelligently and philosophically. (This is a paraphrase of an argument put to me by Michael Hand.)

Perhaps the last word on teaching philosophy to children should go to Montaigne, who wrote, back in the sixteenth century: “Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?”

Peter Worley is co-founder and CEO of The Philosophy Foundation. He is author of The If Machine and The If Odyssey both published by Bloomsbury, editor and contributor for The Philosophy Shop and co-author of Thoughtings, both published by Crown House. Visit www.philosophy-foundation.org for more information.

Back to big thinking

Posted by on March 21, 2013 3 comments

Ideas still matter, says Hilary Lawson, director of the Institute of Art and Ideas. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

An editorial in one of the nation’s broadsheets is not the natural place to look for comment on the state of philosophy. But there it was. The Guardian, June 4th. Headed “Philosophy: Back to Big Thinking”.

“Stephen Hawking may have insisted that ‘philosophy is dead’ but the numbers queuing up for the HowTheLightGetsIn festival currently on at Hay-on-wye, suggest this isn’t a statement based on observable evidence”, the Guardian piece began. It continued in combative mode. “Throughout the 20th century Anglo Saxon analytic philosophers focused attention down on an increasingly narrow set of conceptual problems that often had all the imaginative range of a car manual.” Given the evidence of the week’s discussions at HowTheLightGetsIn the editorial concluded “the new mood in British philosophy is that the time has come for a more expansive role. Indeed, even the word ‘metaphysics’ is making something of a comeback.”

We were pleased of course. It was good to have an editorial about us and what we were up to. And good to be making an impact. When was the last editorial in a national newspaper about philosophy? It was only four years since the founding of IAI, the Institute of Art and Ideas, and three since we had put on our first philosophy festival: HowTheLightGetsIn. What a strange trip it had been.

When we began people asked how we were going to get anyone to come to a philosophy festival. In the popular mind philosophy was more typically associated with the Monty Python football match than anything one might take seriously. One of the aims of IAI was to change this perception and make philosophy relevant to people’s lives and more broadly to change our cultural space. Although when we started we were not rash enough to think it possible. Philosophy in France had achieved such a status – why could it not do so in Britain? More immediately, how were we to overcome the perception of philosophy as irrelevant technical nit-picking, a subject of comedic derision, and get people to come to an event with real philosophical conversation and debate? My answer was that all of us are concerned with philosophy whether we like it or not, though some only find out on their deathbed. So the thinking went, all we had to do was cast the net broadly and engage with what it is to be alive. It has to be said I wasn’t entirely convinced it was going to work.

Over the five days of our first HowTheLightGetsIn and a Herculean effort by the IAI festival team we put on thirty-five events and rather remarkably had three thousand people visit. More telling was that we had some great debates and passionate disputes. The most successful were those that made no concessions to popularisation but simply insisted on clarity of position and viewpoint.

Three years later we had added a nought to our numbers. Four hundred events and 30,000 visitors to the festival, making HowTheLightGetsIn by a substantial margin the world’s largest philosophy event.

It seems to me that it is not implausible to suggest that one can already detect a shifting of broader cultural attitudes. Philosophy is perhaps not quite as laughable. Other festivals incorporate philosophy events. The BBC seems more open to philosophical topics and series. Of course we’ve certainly not been alone in encouraging this shift. For a long time tpm has played an important role, along with others such as The School of Life, and the podcast Philosophy Bites. But shift it is, as the Guardian identified.

Why had philosophy become marginalised and what had made it such a figure of fun? It is tempting to suppose that philosophy is somehow un-British. That as a nation we have a natural inclination to the practical and down to earth, and a suspicion of airy fairy theorising and wild conjecture. No doubt a nation that was home to Newton and the world’s first industrial revolution has in its soul an attachment to science and practical endeavour. It seems implausible though to propose that the ridicule of philosophy is written into our cultural genes.

So how did it come about? The Guardian editorial lays the blame at the door of analytic philosophy. At the outset analytic philosophy was certainly no joke. It was a radical and powerful departure. It provided an attack on the Hegelianism of the preceding decades. It was a breath of fresh air in an intellectual milieu that was stymied in its own impenetrable jargon, talk of “being” and “the absolute”. Russell turned the insights of Frege and G E Moore into a new vision that would take philosophy out of the dark ages and into a science, making piecemeal but assured advance through the application of logical analysis. It was exciting, challenging and of the moment.

Russell was an undoubtedly brilliant mathematician, with a determination for clarity and directness in his philosophical writing. He was a controversial figure, but influential and taken seriously outside of the academy. Wittgenstein added an alternative and in some respects contrary perspective but cemented what we now see as the linguistic turn that placed language at the centre of philosophical concern.

But this was all nearly a hundred years ago. In the intervening time what came to be known as analytic philosophy developed its own arcane character and its own impenetrable terminology. In the process it has gradually walled itself in to its own ivory tower. At the outset the philosophy of logical analysis set out to provide the framework for others to do their thinking. It was to be the under-labourer clearing the ground. No grand theories here, just solid work aimed at making life more effective for other disciplines.

The very project of course in some sense demeaned philosophy – although it may have appealed to a British sense of understatement. Gone were the goals of a grand metaphysical vision. Instead, a limited role lay ahead. This would have been well if it had succeeded. If the clarifications it offered had indeed proved valuable to other disciplines and if other disciplines had taken its insights as a basis for their own investigations.

The reality has been rather more prosaic. A century of analytic philosophy is hard pushed to find a single clarification that has been of any real value to another discipline. Not least perhaps because such advances relied on the emergence of agreement amongst philosophical enquirers. How could other disciplines make use of the new insights if philosophers themselves were still in dispute? Philosophers in the public mind actually outpace economists or politicians in this respect as the philosophical joke currently doing the rounds neatly identifies: How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb? It depends on how you define “change”.

The application of logic to language never lived up to Russell’s dream. Having demonstrated that logic could describe mathematics, or so he believed, he understandably wished to extend this to language, thereby providing a perfect medium, free of error, for all to use. It was a great idea. It has motivated generations of philosophers and philosophy departments. The problem though is that the dream is impossible – as Wittgenstein thought he had demonstrated in the Tractatus, almost at the outset of the project.

Philosophy has not turned into a science. The twentieth century desire to do so can now be seen as a wide-eyed scientism, the response of a culture that was so enamoured with the success of science that it sought to replicate it in every field. A century on the idea seems far-fetched. Under-labourers are all very well but not so effective if each is challenging the others work. Logic was meant to cut through dispute and provide definitive conclusions. Unsurprisingly it failed to do so. Is there anyone who seriously believes that philosophy is closer to definitive conclusions today than it was a century ago?

There is though a further twist to this tale. Alongside the goal of turning philosophy into a science was the notion that metaphysics could be eradicated. Philosophically speaking I grew up at Oxford, the heartland of analytic philosophy and early on remember reading A J Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic and being excited by its attack on metaphysics, and the potential for a thorough going rationalism to sweep away the prejudices of the past.

Metaphysics however is not so easily eradicated. At its most elementary the denial of metaphysics is itself metaphysical. Ayer encountered a version of this paradox in the self-referential breakdown of his primary thesis. Ayer sought to eradicate metaphysics by arguing that, aside from tautological claims, only empirically verifiable statements had meaning. The paradox was acute because this claim, central to his entire philosophy, is itself not verifiable and therefore meaningless.

A more subtle version of this paradox applies both to Wittgenstein and Derrida. In very different contexts, and for different reasons, both philosophers conclude that an overall account of language and meaning is not possible and seek to avoid putting one forward. As if it might be possible to evade altogether the big question about the nature of language and its relation to the world. The paradox is that in order to understand their philosophies we have to impute to them an overall account, even though such an overall account is explicitly denied.

We might for example understand Wittgenstein’s Investigations as proposing that we are at play in a language game. Or make sense of Derrida’s philosophy as an attack on the possibility of decidable meaning using the methodology of deconstruction. Without an overall account of some sort the reader cannot make sense of the texts. The reader may of course engage in their own self-destruction of the account they have initially used to understand the texts, but if the destruction was fully carried through the text would become meaningless. We provide meaning to these texts at each and every reading by providing an overall metaphysics by which to understand them, and by doing so we therefore misunderstand them.

Metaphysics cannot be escaped. Big thinking is unavoidable. Even at those points when metaphysics is denied. The claim “metaphysics is over” carries within it an overall account of the world that is itself metaphysical, namely the supposition that the world can be described fully by a theory, and there be nothing left unsaid or that remains unsayable.

That’s why on a personal level I have felt that there is no philosophical choice but to address our inability to provide an overall account of language, and the subsequent paradox of relativism and postmodernism head on. Truth cannot be denied without self-referential chaos, nor metaphysics. I agree with Putnam that attempts to solve problems of self-reference with Russell’s theory of types or Tarski’s hierarchy of languages are little more than sophistry. The essential self-referential puzzle remains and has to be addressed.

My own attempt at a response to the problem has been to propose a non-realist metaphysics. This offers an account of the world in which the world is not seen as a thing that we might describe correctly or incorrectly. Instead I have proposed that we regard the world as open, and it is we who close that openness. I have set out to describe in some detail the process of closure by which this is achieved.

In proposing this way of going about things I am not claiming to have uncovered the truth – how could I do such a thing? Instead I offer a story about where we are which I hope enables us to make sense of our predicament and which helps us intervene effectively in the world. There will be other accounts and other ways to understand where we are, but for the moment it seems to me that the story of openness and closure is a powerful one capable of empirical application and improvement.

Which brings me back to the Institute of Art and Ideas and the HowTheLightGetsIn festival. IAI is not a vehicle for continental philosophy, or analytic philosophy, or for that matter my own particular brand of non-realist philosophy. What it sets out to do is to create a space where the very framework of our thought can be discussed and challenged. Where there are no off limit views, no correct positions, no authority that cannot be undermined. IAI events seek to stand at the edge of thought in each discipline and ask those troubling deep questions about our current theories, beliefs and direction that traditionally went by the description “philosophy”. As a consequence big thinking and metaphysics is at our core. We ask the questions that may not be capable of a final answer but which require an answer nevertheless because that answer, however temporary and limited, determines how we think about ourselves and our world.

At the outset people said to us that we would have to make the complex ideas that we were to debate palatable to a “lay” audience. That in effect we would have to dumb down and popularise the subject of philosophy. To our amazement and it has to be said also to our delight the reverse has proved the case. The most theoretical and most challenging debates have proved to be our most widely watched and appreciated. We have increasingly encouraged our speakers and participants to abandon concern that they should modify their mode of speaking for the public. Instead what we encourage is genuine conversation with other leading thinkers in the field. We have, it has to be said no time for obfuscation and pretension. Sadly too many academic discussions hide the emptiness of their thinking behind the appearance of depth provided by obtuse terminology.

Early in my career I was a speaker at a philosophical conference at the ICA and standing at the back with Richard Rorty listening to one of the lecturers. I found the talk unintelligible. As seemingly erudite questions were asked from the floor I turned to Rorty saying, “I didn’t understand any of that.” He responded, “I didn’t understand any of it either.” And then with his deadpan dry East coast humour added in hushed tones, “you know Hilary in the thirty years I’ve been attending philosophy conferences I’ve hardly ever understood any of the papers.”

It is understandable of course that in pursuit of the approbation of colleagues we are tempted to sound intelligent when we have nothing to say. But there should be no truck with this playground game if we are to make progress with the big intellectual issues.

At IAI events like the HowTheLightGetsIn festival, and online at IAI tv, we make no concessions to the audience. Unlike TED we insist on debate and challenge. We do not ask our speakers to moderate their language to encourage engagement. The aim of our speakers should simply be to convey their views cogently to their interlocutors. As Russell and Feynman demonstrated, you don’t have to be obtuse to be intelligent. Rather the reverse. As a result the speakers and audiences at our events leave enriched by the experience, excited by the conversations they have had and the challenges they have faced, and exhilarated by the notion that ideas are alive and matter in a world that so often appears to have abandoned them.

For all of these reasons we were encouraged by that Guardian piece. Big is back. And may it stay that way.

Hilary Lawson is director of the Institute of Art and Ideas, a non-realist philosopher, and author of Closure (Routledge, 2001).

Captive audience

Posted by on March 13, 2013 3 comments

Alan Smith on the highs and lows of teaching philosophy in prison. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

I began teaching in the prison in an offhand, unplanned way. There was a phone call from someone my wife knew asking me to step in for a teacher who was going on leave. Could I do a couple of hours with a class who were studying Hamlet? And I strolled into a fourteen year stretch. I’m not sure how it came about, but one day I mentioned that I was not actually an English graduate. “Oh really?” Jean said, Jean was the Education Manager, “what did you do then?” There is still something in me that is a bit reserved about this. I only did philosophy because it was the most obscure and useless thing on offer. When I was a kid in Sheffield in the fifties and sixties I lived in a heartland of common sense: what you needed was a good trade, security, your feet on the ground – you needed to know what was what. It was a dull deadening narrative that I hated and then, when UCAS came around, I applied for philosophy. Philosophy. It was a sort of insult, skyborn, head in the clouds. It was useless and, as everyone pointed out, would get me nowhere. Good.

“You did philosophy did you?” Jean was saying now, eyes gleaming with the romance of it all. “I’ve always thought that we should have a philosophy course here in the prison.” Of course it had only just occurred to her, but Gwen and Helen were in the staff room egging her on. Gwen wanted to make sure that I would have some takers and so she went off and spent the next couple of weeks selecting and recruiting. She found most of these students up on D Wing. It was the obvious place to look. D Wing was a little bit more steady, quieter than the other residential parts of the prison. We called it the Lifer Wing, but it was in fact for men whose sentences were longer than seven years.

Philosophy in the prison was a bit of a leap in the dark. “They’ll love it,” Gwen kept on saying. Gwen, after donkey’s years with these guys really did believe in their goodness. “He just wants his mum really,” was a typical remark for her to make when some shaven headed eighteen stoner had shuffled off, pouting, after one of her bollockings. So I shuffled off, myself, to get philosophy launched on the sea of scepticism that I was sure awaited me.

The first group she produced for me was overwhelming. Ahmed, a man I already knew from my literature class was there, but along with him he had brought Simon, Shayne and Bernard. They strolled in and, in their various ways, took me to pieces. They opened up a part of my life where I gave my class in the morning and then went to bed in the afternoon. Most of the guys were as unsure as me about what was going to happen. Philosophy: it did have a bit of a ring to it, especially doing it in prison; it sounded rather wise, stately, a little bit superior. It didn’t take long for us to leave that kind of nonsense behind. Shayne, direct as ever, got us started, “Come on then Al what’s it all about, philosophy? How would you define it?” I was tempted to ask him, “What do you mean, definition?” but some merciful instinct for self-preservation stopped me. They didn’t want some clever undergraduate posturing, these guys wanted an answer they could get a grip on right here and now, so I told them a bit about the Socratic method, the method of the idiot child. “You know,” I told them, “when some daft kid keeps on asking, why? why?” Yes, they knew about that. “Well, that’s all that philosophy is. Philosophers just ask why.”

There was a certain amount of storm to weather. “Is that it then? Is that all there is to it?”

“Well yes,” I said, suddenly fearful that they would walk out on me and leave me to face Jean and Gwen with the ruin that I had made of their bright idea.

Time went by and I settled down with a regular group of men, mostly from D Wing. People came and went, though, as sentences ended and new guys were shipped in, and this meant that there were quite regular crises as philosophy virgins were seduced into our strange ways. Philosophy attracted men who had long sentences to serve, and they brought into class the hard faced generosity that gets them through the years. They said things that frightened me to death. Shayne on abortion: “If we could turn back the years, Sim, wouldn’t it be better, knowing as we do now that you were going to turn out to be a murdering nut-case who’s been nothing but a drain on society, wouldn’t aborting you have been a good idea?” Dear God, I thought, head in hands, he’s gone too far this time. I ought to have warned him about all the trouble that Socrates was landed in by philosophy. But these guys were neighbours on the wing. They smiled at each other. Sometimes, less often now, I got a bad time for being a weakling. It was usually to do with my problems with authority.

“For God’s sake Al will you use your authority and sort these bastards out.”

“I have no authority, I repudiate it, I spit on authority.”

“Don’t start all that shit,” Simon would tell me, knowing my game.

“Right,” said Shayne, brusquely, “come on let’s get on with this.”

“I’ll read this next bit shall I?” said Simon. I would shrug and away we would go.

Shayne was a real asset; he just kept on asking the obvious questions that no one else would ask for fear of looking stupid. He knows nothing. Or does he? Were his questions just a bit too good naturedly naïve? I promised myself to get someone to have a peak in his pad where I suspect there were walls full of Philosophy books. “Hold on,” he said, playing the devious Yorkshire simpleton, “what’s metaphysics then?” Before I could tumble into his trap Bernard turned to him and treated us all to a lucid, delightful explanation. Bernard was the youngest by far and got terrible stick, but I suspected that he has just done himself a power of good. “Right, okay,” Shayne said nodding gently into Bernard’s beaming face.

We had been talking about aesthetics, and I started to realise that philosophy had the potential to create all kinds of perils. Aesthetics led us on to censorship, and one week we had been reading J M Coetzee on taking offence. Coetzee suggests that taking offence is a transaction where the powerful and the powerless exchange roles and potencies. Far too late it dawned on me that making this explicit could get one or two of the more idealistic guys into trouble back on the wings where shifts in power, suspected or real, could have swift and devastating consequences. “Now don’t try this at home,” I kept on saying, panic mounting as I wished more and more that I had stuck to epistemology or philosophy of mind.

Fortunately I had Ahmed and Simon in the class. These were the steadiest men you could hope to meet, both well into their second decade of imprisonment. Men I admired. Both of them scholars who put me to shame. They tried out the idea, tried its fit into various contexts: apartheid South Africa, family, prison. Shayne, who had really taken a shine to my version of Socratic method harried them into explanations, forced the occasional pursed lipped concession. They watched me struggle to get a word in and smiled as they saw my temper going and language deteriorating. I was so unpleasant in one session that I brought in a bag of sweets by way of apology. They were not impressed. “He only bought these,” Ahmed pointed out, without a hint of a thank you, “because he was such a right bastard last time.”

I hadn’t met Simon before the philosophy classes started. Before we could begin with philosophy there were things he had to get straight. He started me off with some conventional politics, some remarks about New Labour and then we were into the history of the Labour Party, trades unions and their relationship with Marxism. Somehow we’d drifted into Darwin and scientific method before I realised that he was interviewing me. He was a slightly built blond haired guy, and he sat there with his flask of tea in our shabby classroom wondering if he would award me a fellowship at the Oxbridge college he obviously ran.

Simon taught me how and when to go onto the attack. If I hadn’t gone for him, he wouldn’t have stayed in the class. This was quite a complicated interview. I not only had to know more than him but I also had to say upfront when I didn’t. But, not submissively. “Well, I don’t know anything about that, Simon, but what I do know is that your way of presenting that particular case is just not good enough, feeble minded even. Just think will you, just for once in your life?” Mostly the teaching life is a life of restraint and understanding; with Simon there were wonderful moments when I could just let fly.

Mo would say: “That’s a bit harsh Al.”

And I would say: “Well, fuck it,” and away we went.

Simon was absolutely determined to be himself and, to be honest, it could be a bit wearing. There would be heart stopping moments when, in a room where there were half a dozen drugs offenders, he would say:

“Anyone who deals smack is just a fucking scumbag and anyone who does smack is just a fucking moron.” A quick look around at the faces, “Alright?” There was some bleak part of him that didn’t care. I often found myself defending people against him, or perhaps I was defending Simon from the reprisals, which, to me, looked likely. Someone, inevitably someone a lot bigger than Simon, might mention God. “You fucking moron,” Simon would remark, venomously, “only a fucking moron would believe in God.” Or some similar opening gambit.

“That’s a bit harsh Sim,” Ahmed would say which would prompt me into a way of finding a way through the storm of emotion that Simon had generated.

“That you see is the sort of emotional response that first order distinctions can generate. When Simon explodes like that, philosophy wants to pull him back into something rather more cold-blooded.”

“Yeah,” Simon would say, “fuckin right.” And away we would go again.

We were a small group, and mostly we institutionalised Simon’s enthusiasm, although I sometimes felt a bit anxious, even panic stricken, at the way things were going. It was difficult for newcomers, but then quite often Simon himself took them in hand. There were close conversations during the break or while I was doing the register.

“You can’t come in her taking offence” I heard him say. With philosophy you have to leave your feelings at the door. It’s special, alright, so just forget about your ego.” I glanced up and gave him a bit of a look. Cheeky bastard, I thought.

“Simon,” Shayne said, dead pan, “is entirely without ego.”

I realised, too, that who was in the class was not entirely up to me. There was a certain amount of vetting and selecting going on up on the wings. When Steve first came to philosophy he sat there, quietly taking us in. He had come down from the lifer wing with Jason and I suppose that the guys had auditioned, and then recruited him for the class. They were pretty choosy about who came into philosophy and made short work of anyone who wasn’t up to their high standards. It was nice of them, I think, to be as delicate as they were about my feelings, leaving intact, for me and for the management, the illusion that I was in charge. Out in the corridor at tea break I heard Steve telling his pal: “Yeah, its philosophy, man, we were talking about Spider shit.” (No, don’t ask.).

Simon grabbed him. “Just keep your fucking trap shut about this, alright? Best kept secret in the prison, this class. We don’t want the fuckin riff-raff coming in.” It was the most enormous compliment and I still cling to it. Even so he could be a bit trying.

I think that my classes in the prison took me back to being the innocent working class kid stumbling into the unreal glamour of philosophy. Prison is, after all, an overwhelmingly working class environment, and perhaps this is why I felt so at home there. It is also a place where men who cannot read or write can argue the toss about Aristotle or Sartre with men who are halfway through an OU degree. As Beefy once remarked: “There’s no place like jail.”

Alan Smith teaches at the University of Northampton and, until recently, in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons. He has recently completed a prison memoir for which he is seeking a publisher.

Deep thinking in graphic novels

Posted by on February 28, 2013 4 comments

Jeff McLaughlin on philosophy and the graphic novel. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

Graphic novels have provided their creators with a golden opportunity to express themselves in very adult ways – even if they are doing so by telling stories with talking animals (for example Art Spiegelman’s Maus which deals with the Holocaust). Some of these works can provide philosophy instructors with the opportunity to enhance the learning experience of their students. But what is a graphic novel and how can it provide pedagogical support for philosophy classes?

The term “graphic novel” is not the best term for capturing what they actually are, but like pornography, most people know it when they see it. Graphic novels aren’t typically graphic in the sense of being explicit (one notable exception being Melinda Gebbie and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls) nor are they all novels. You will find many graphic novels that are non-fiction (Joe Sacco’s Palestine), autobiographical (Alison Bechdel’s Funhome), and even governmental reports (Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon’s The 9/11 Report). Indeed, Will Eisner’s The Contract with God, which popularised the term “graphic novel”, is a collection of three short-stories. (There are earlier works that we would now describe as graphic novels, and strictly speaking the term was already in limited use before Eisner’s work appeared.) Graphic novels are really just comic books without the negative connotations.

Comic books themselves look more like magazines than books, and to think of them as being comical is to dismiss the vast majority of them. Some people like to say graphic novels are thought of quite differently, because unlike comics they are complete stories with a beginning, middle and end. This however does not take into account so-called “one-shots” or “mini-series” and even self-contained story arcs within comic book series. Sometimes these self-contained stories or limited series are published as a collection – but these are rightly called trade paperbacks and not graphic novels. Hence, an acclaimed work such as Watchmen by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore is rightly called a trade paperback and not a graphic novel, because it was originally printed as ten separate comic book issues. Anyway, other popular art forms including movies, plays and dances, all have beginnings, middles and ends.

Although many graphic novels have been turned into movies they should not be perceived as “frozen films”. The action takes place in illustrated panels (i.e., the “movie frames”) as well as in-between the panels. With a film every person in the audience witnesses only what the director (and other members of the film team) wants to show. With a graphic novel the audience actively personalises the experience by, for example, imagining the voice of each character. They can linger over images and revisit any image or text. They can go to the end before they start at the beginning or they can jump from page to page. A movie forces the viewer to sit passively and watch that world unfold, but the graphic novel actively engages the reader/viewer. Such active participation parallels when a student reads a philosophy essay – superficially perhaps – but at least he or she retains control.

It is apparent that the almost universal acceptance of the term “graphic novel” goes hand in hand with the general acceptance of their being worthy of a person’s time and money. Graphic novels are not just illustrated stories or picture books but a series of sequentially organised panels that blend text and image in a way that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts. But if you just want to refer to them as fat comic books that is fine too.

Some individuals just don’t like graphic novels or understand their appeal, while others just have difficulty following them. These are valid perspectives, but if a person is able to spend some time with instructional books such as Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics or Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art, he or she won’t be wasting his or her time. Together these two works help explain what makes comic books and graphic novels distinctive and fascinating.

When it comes to appreciating and accepting graphic novels, we are at the early stage that once was occupied by film theory and criticism in the 1960’s. That is, movies were once rejected as being unworthy of study on the grounds that they were merely entertainment and could not provide sufficient content in two hours of viewing time when compared to a book. Now film studies is a standard program area at many universities. And just as with movies, books and plays, not all graphic novels are going to be good, let alone considered enduring classics in the history of popular culture.

The good ones or, more correctly, the useful ones, can help students learn about a variety of topics in an unintimidating way. By bringing the relevant content to the forefront, the instructor can for instance literally and figuratively show how philosophical ideas that were discussed and debated for centuries are still prevalent and relevant today. Most students are familiar with graphic novels (or perhaps a movie or two based upon them) and making students aware of another level of understand in something that they already are comfortable with is a wonderful way to get them to visit (or re-visit) the material with a new appreciation. Doing so creates a bridge between what is new (and sometimes overwhelming) with something that they already know.

One has to admit that philosophical texts are not the easiest things for students to read. Students have to learn how to approach them differently than reading history or science. However, many students read novels, they play video games, and they watch movies and surf the Internet. As such, they often possess a high level of visual literacy. They (perhaps more so than instructors) are acutely aware of how graphic novels work, so the new challenge is to get students to see beyond what they might have perceived as simple entertainment. If the student is able to “see” beyond the words and pictures then they are open to grasping the philosophy.

The graphic novel can act as a thought experiment on paper. For example, in one of the stories in Concrete: Complete Short Stories by Paul Chadwick, a character imagines what it is like to “think like a mountain”. This famous expression taken from the environmental philosophy of Aldo Leopold is a difficult concept to grasp. Ask students to “think like a mountain”, and they will find the task quite daunting, because obviously it is impossible. However, by showing them imagery where a woman’s body blends into nature; her fingers stretching out and transforming into living roots, students can literally see the sense of biotic connectivity and community that Leopold (and Chadwick) is trying to achieve.

Graphic novels are intended to provide enjoyment, and if they manage to do that then it follows that their creators have achieved their goal. However, some creators also intentionally or unintentionally provide something more, and thus readers/viewers can benefit by returning to look at these works again. Any of the works cited in this short essay fit this description. Nevertheless, although you may find various philosophical messages or themes in graphic novels, they are not university lectures. Accordingly, it is unreasonable to expect any graphic novel to map perfectly onto every topic of philosophical enquiry.

Graphic novels as philosophical texts are first and foremost literary/visual works of art, they are not ‘how to’s, they are not manuals on how to live the good life. They are not tomes regarding existence, or argumentative dissertations. Graphic novels are not going to replace the words of the philosopher or the guiding wisdom of an instructor. For some instructors this may make them too vague and open to broad interpretation. Yet, even a weak graphic novel provides the instructor with another teaching and scholarly opportunity: correcting the mistakes and showing the right way.

Socio-political philosophy seems to be the most common subject that can be found in graphic novels. There are a lot works to work with, ranging from an imaginary fascist London England in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta to the very real Iran during the Islamic revolution in Marjane Satrapi’s memoir Persepolis. Trade paperbacks such as The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn can be seen as treatises about humans in the state of nature, while Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man deals with gender warfare.

Pick up any superhero graphic novel or trade paperback and you are bound to discover matters of justice, power, and moral responsibility. Religion and matters of faith are dealt with in such works as Blankets or Habibi, both by Craig Thompson, and even The Book of Genesis gets the graphic novel treatment by renowned underground comix artist Robert Crumb. Whether it is about epistemology or metaphysics, reading and seeing (and hearing) situations, or characters in graphic novels provide lessons that are outside the confines of a text only book.

There is no philosophical area that cannot potentially be given a graphic novel treatment. For example, you wouldn’t think that logic and the philosophy of mathematics would easily transfer to graphic novels, but they are exceptionally well-treated in Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna.

Doxiadis was intrigued by the quest for secure foundations of mathematics in logic. The fact that many of those involved had spent time in asylums provided the added drama. Since Bertrand Russell not only played a large role in this pursuit but was also an interesting individual in his own right, he became the focal point upon which to pin the Logicomix story. With a strong background in the field (he studied mathematics at New York’s Columbia University at the age of fifteen and then did graduate work at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris) Doxiadis spent hours dissecting the claims and comments that were found in the papers and writings of the very real people that populate the work. His teaching of the subject to other members of the creative team provided the backbone for the self-referential elements that the work is also lauded for. In doing all this, Doxiadis overcomes the potential alienation of the dry university lecture. As he explains the basic concepts to his team, he is therefore also doing the same for the reader/viewer.

Logicomix is neither a history textbook nor a biography, and so some historical alterations were accepted for dramatic purpose. In cinematic terms, Logicomix is “based on” a factual story – the essential truths are maintained. For Doxiadis, who is eager to hear from those who have already used the graphic novel in their courses, the benefit of using Logicomix alongside primary philosophical materials is that students can learn about complex abstract concepts within a dramatic narrative. Indeed, when one uses a graphic novel in a course, students learn that the pursuit for answers does not materialise magically and without any context; rather it is grounded in who we are and what we do. We cannot separate ourselves from our philosophy nor should we.

As I stated earlier, just as with movies and plays and books there are good and bad graphic novels. Logicomix is one of the most successful ones for philosophy classrooms. You can read it and appreciate it as an excellent example of a graphic novel, and you can study it for the philosophy that’s in it. Imagine a class where math and logic students learn about art and art students learn math and logic; and neither group is alienated. That such an initially strange blending of interests can be brought together reveals the breadth, depth, importance and inescapability of philosophy – and this is achieved through the graphic novel.

Most of the artists and writers of graphic novels are not going to possess degrees in philosophy – but they are experts in conveying interesting ideas and concepts through words and images. Any superficial treatment of philosophical materials will be disappointing, but they can be partially forgiven given the nature of the beast. The fact that the Auschwitz Museum and the Anne Frank Foundation publish graphic novels that depict real tragedies during the Holocaust suggests that this form of delivery is becoming accepted as a viable and valuable way to reach people without sacrificing content. Clearly, these institutions would not pursue anything that would be considered inappropriate or wanting in this area. They would also not want not to have the readers/viewers think that The Search or Episodes from Auschwitz: Love in the Shadow of Death is all there is to say. Instead these graphic novels are used in part to reach a broader audience and to elicit in them an interest to learn more. If one of the reasons for teaching philosophy is to get students to become knowledgeable and to seek and to question, then the right graphic novels, when taught and interpreted the right way, can help nudge students in the right direction.

Jeff McLaughlin is professor of philosophy at Thompson Rivers University and editor of Comics as Philosophy (University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

The loss of God

Posted by on February 11, 2013 3 comments

Claire Creffield moves in the direction of a constructive conversation between atheists and believers. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

I didn’t warm to Alain de Botton’s suggestion, in his book Religion for Atheists, that we should start building “atheist temples”, because not far from my house there is already a splendid one. Among its many beautiful features are several columns made of Frosterley marble, crammed with highly polished fossilised corals. The presence of these fossils invites the viewer to see the building (which itself took forty years to complete) in the context of 325 million years of our planet’s history, during most of which we were absent. But if that timescale makes us feel insignificant, the fossils also call to mind a huge cultural achievement – the theory of evolution that enables us to understand our own origins. Being made to reflect on that scientific achievement while admiring the architecture of a building that is rich in art and craftsmanship and history encourages a seamless appreciation of all of our scientific and creative attainments. The building is also a testimony to the labourers who built it. And it houses a memorial to other local labourers, miners who died in accidents. For all these reasons and more it is a celebration of humanity, even though a significant minority of the people who use it are seeking to celebrate God.

The building is Durham Cathedral, a place of Christian worship. And although de Botton is very sensitive to the resources that religious buildings offer to the non-believer, he thinks that for an atheist such a building is a flawed resource. He thinks that atheism requires brand new buildings, which evoke some of the sentiments that a cathedral might evoke, but which explicitly exclude God from their design. The reason for this is that he wants to separate what he regards as religion’s good bits from the taint of belief in supernatural entities. The good bits of religion are the resources it gives us for learning lessons in living: how to be kind, how to honour community ties, how to see ourselves in a light that gives us understanding of and consolation for our suffering, weakness, and failures. These resources, he says, are not essentially religious. They have been “colonised” by religion and we need to take them back. What is essentially religious, according to de Botton, is a belief in the supernatural. Religion cannot abandon that, he implies, and so atheists cannot benefit from the resources religion offers in support of living a good life unless these are explicitly separated from their religious context, by means of a slightly bizarre process of innovating atheist doppelgangers of religious infrastructure.

I want to suggest that this process of separation and innovation is misconceived. Durham Cathedral, and all of the trappings of religion, are fully available to me as an atheist, and I would lose something rather than gain something if I visited one of de Botton’s new atheist temples instead. This is because religion itself, and not only the trappings of religion, can be a resource for atheists.

To see this, we need to start by noticing that the term “atheist” is not as simple as it might appear. Though it appears to consist in a single negative statement (“There is no God”), it actually involves a range of possible claims – about what religious people mean when they say there is a God, about the relevance and nature of supporting evidence or argument for God’s existence, and about how we can assess the meaningfulness (or lack of meaning) of religious language. This means that there is not, in fact, a single atheism, but a range of atheisms, some of which are more hostile to religion than others.

Think first of all about what religious people are trying to say when they claim that there is a God. There is no monolithic consensus here, and since atheism is a negation of whatever that claim about God’s existence might be, we shouldn’t expect atheism to be monolithic either. Many of the most vocal atheists like to focus on a particular sort of claim of God’s existence – the claim that there is a god who created the universe and whose nature and intentions are part of the explanation of the universe. At its most extreme, this sort of belief in God contradicts established scientific theories, notably the theory of evolution. And it is contradicted in turn by an atheism that says that such an assertion of God’s existence can only be established on the basis of experimental evidence that is in fact lacking: all of the available evidence suggests explanations for the world that do not involve God, so the hypothesis of God’s existence is unwarranted and almost certainly false.

But there are also plenty of religious people who are content to look to science alone to explain the way the world is. They accept evolutionary theory without reserve and rely on physicists, not theologians, to unlock the secrets of the universe. For these people, God’s creative contribution is just an initial self-effacing impulse, simultaneously willing the world and delegating it in its entirety to science. Since their assertion of God’s existence does not contradict any scientific accounts, it cannot be judged false on the basis of the truth of those accounts.

A philosophically minded atheist might respond to this version of the assertion that God exists by calling it, not false, but meaningless. A statement is only meaningful if there is some way to determine whether it is true or false, they might say, and there is no set of circumstances that would count towards the truth or the falsity of the claim that such a scientifically redundant sort of god exists.

This sort of atheist is invoking the “verification principle”, which has an origin in Wittgenstein’s early thought. His theory of meaning in the Tractatus makes religious propositions meaningless: the world is the totality of scientific facts, and no proposition is meaningful that does not correspond with a scientific fact. But Wittgenstein was far from sharing the scathing hostility to religion that today’s atheism exhibits, and we can look to his thought to supply a different sort of atheism altogether, one that can foster an allegiance – perhaps even an identity – with some kinds of religious faith. It is worth making a sketch of his thoughts about religion, not so much with the idea that they are a correct or coherent philosophy of religion, but to show the availability, to an atheist philosopher, of a project of seeking value in religion, and even truth, albeit not truth of a profoundly satisfying kind.

Three features of Wittgenstein’s thought come together to suggest that atheism can be deeply at home in religion: he thought that the religious outlook manifested something very important; he thought (eventually) that religious discourse, including discourse about God, was meaningful; and he thought that religious discourse was founded in universal human characteristics, shared by both people of faith and those without faith.

The importance of religion struck Wittgenstein strongly even when he thought of religious utterances as meaningless: “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” When we try to talk of God, we knock up against the limits of language, and our efforts are cognitively fruitless. But that is not to dismiss religion. Philosophy, too, knocks up against the limits of language, and is not thereby destroyed (though it has to be reconceptualised, with a much more modest agenda). In the case of both philosophy and religion our inclination to run up against the limits of language shows us something important.

What does it show us in the case of religion? It shows us something about our status as beings in the world, capable of seeing things only from the midst and not from the outside, much as we cannot see our eye in our visual field. The inarticulable and impossible view from the outside is not available to us, but it is something that we seek: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists …. To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical.”

Science alone tells us “how things are in the world”. In this sense, Wittgenstein is an atheist. But there is a certain – mystical – orientation which seeks to reflect with wonder on the world viewed as a whole, sub specie aeterni, which Wittgenstein does not reject (he merely calls it unsayable).

To try and make sense of this, think for a moment about those religious believers mentioned above for whom God’s role is limited to an initial act of creative delegation, which sets the scientific ball rolling. And remember also that the religious doctrine of free will also sees God as delegating to individuals the whole of their inner lives. A god who so copiously sloughs off all of his agency over matter and persons is infinitely small, in the sense of being nowhere present in an account of how the world is. The difference between such an infinitely small god and no god at all is not in the world. It does not tread on the territory of science by concerning itself with “how things are in the world”. Seeing such a god as present or absent is not a disagreement about facts: it is something more like seeing the world under a different aspect: faith and atheism are like different ways of seeing the same picture, and the disagreement between them is something like an aesthetic difference of opinion – concerning matters to which religious people and some atheists are compellingly drawn.

According to Wittgenstein’s earlier thought, religious discourse, despite its importance, is meaningless. Those for whom the mystical/religious orientation to the world is important could make it manifest in their way of life, but they could not speak of it without uttering nonsense. However, as his thought developed, he gave a new account of language. Instead of having the uniform scientific function of naming objects in the world and asserting facts about the world, he argued, language has meaning by being embedded in diverse human practices – including scientific discourse, but also including the practices of those who share a sense of the importance of a religious/mystical orientation. Language is pluralist, and among several very different possible uses of it are those that meaningfully express, in their “deep grammar”, the unsayable. His atheism remained, in that he denied that propositions involving the word “God” can be interpreted as meaningfully asserting the existence of some entity. But he presents such propositions as meaningful nonetheless, entirely capable of being uttered without error, as the linguistic components of a certain way of life, one which he seems to have admired.

So, religion is both important and meaningful for Wittgenstein. But what did it have to do with him, as an atheist? Wittgenstein was both engaged with and cut off from religion. He did not join in religious practice, and the religious practitioners of his day would not by and large have felt it possible to accept his account of their enterprise. He was an outsider to the religious practices of mid-twentieth century Europe. But does that mean he did not partake at all in the religious “form of life”? It cannot mean that, not only because he was so clearly drawn to religion, but also because on his new account of meaning, meaning is generated within our shared practices: it is our participation in a shared form of life that makes it possible for us to share a language. If a religious practitioner and a non-practitioner did not have a relevant form of life in common then they quite simply wouldn’t be able to talk to one another about religion at all.

In tracing the origins of religious language and ritual, Wittgenstein speaks in terms of fundamental, universal human characteristics. Humankind is, for Wittgenstein, by its very nature ceremonious, given to ritual, so a religious form of life has been persistent throughout human history. And human thought and language, by its nature, is mystical: it draws us to its limits, to the kind of attempted utterances of religion and philosophy that Wittgenstein spent his life seeking to clarify and dissipate. There is, then (underlying the historically specific and transient forms of religiousness that individuals may and may not endorse), a universal religious consciousness, shared by believers and non-believers alike (though more highly motivating for some than for others) – in virtue of which there can be meaningful conversations between believers and non-believers. That religious consciousness, or form of life, does not entail a belief in God: it is the framework within which God’s existence can be meaningfully asserted or denied. When God’s existence is finally denied altogether, as it is in vast swathes of modern society, our religious consciousness becomes a “post-religious consciousness” – godless, but still part of a trajectory determined by the conditions which gave rise to religion in the first place. We don’t entirely escape religion just by negating it: atheism is a stance adopted towards religious questions, rather than a disappearance of the religious form of life.

This is our plight, this loss of God coupled with a continuing participation in the form of life which gives religious discourse its meaning. The mystical, as defined by Wittgenstein, persists, but those who are drawn to it find that there is nothing that can be satisfactorily said of it: religious language, though meaningful, is grounded in nothing other than our human mores. Where do we go from there?

Some of us are quite content to turn attention away from the limits of language back to the scientific. But others will continue to be driven towards those limits, and, perhaps surprisingly, they will find that religion itself gives expression to the loss, the absence of God, and is possibly at its most beautiful when it does precisely that.

Perhaps the most poignant religious expression of the loss of God is that moment within the Christian story when the sense of loss is projected onto God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ crying out “My God, why have you forsaken me?” The same loss is replayed in numberless Christian artworks. The aria “Erbarme dich” in Bach’s St Matthew Passion, for example, speaks of a yearning for God that is so intense that the spirituality is located more squarely in the yearning than in the (nonsensical, non-existent) entity which is superficially its object. One might object that in Christianity as traditionally conceived that loss of God is transient, it is the prelude to a reunification with him. Well, yes. But our religious consciousness evolves with our scientific and philosophical discoveries, and our interpretation of Christian mythology evolves accordingly. A story that was once about our separation from and reunification with God can equally well serve as the expression of a sense of separation that reaches its culmination not only in the death of Christ, but also in the death of the idea of a transcendent God, by means of which death we are acquainted with a painfully less satisfying, but immediately present, divinity, located nowhere other than in our shared religious observances. This would be a form of atheism that is either deeply friendly to religion, or actually religious itself. I’m not sure that it matters much which we call it. This form of atheism would be enriched by a stroll around a cathedral which is empty of God but saturated with the practices by which religious meaning is generated.

Claire Creffield works in academic publishing and is a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

Thomas Nagel’s untutored reaction of incredulity

Posted by on February 4, 2013 13 comments

 Mohan Matthen reviews Thomas Nagel’s new book on Darwinism, and finds that his attack falls flat. This review appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

For some time now, Thomas Nagel has been troubled by the place of Darwinism in public intellectual life. In 2008, he argued in Philosophy and Public Affairs that Intelligent Design Theory has a place in high-school science curricula. More recently, he reviewed Alvin Plantinga’s latest anti-Darwinian book favourably in the New York Review of Books, writing, “When our faculties lead us to beliefs vastly removed from those our ancestors needed to survive ­­– as in the recent production and assessment of evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson – Plantinga’s sceptical argument remains powerful.” Now, in Mind and Cosmos,we have a more systematic treatment, which affords us a better understanding of his view.

Let us begin with the inflammatory sub-title. You might think that Nagel is offering a refutation of a scientific theory, but as far as I can tell, this is not exactly his intention (apart from a strange pronouncement I’ll discuss shortly). And it is certainly not the result of his main argument. Nagel claims that materialist neo-Darwinism (“Darwinism” for short) doesn’t offer us a certain sort of understanding: it doesn’t render the emergence of mind, consciousness, and value intelligible. For reasons I’ll outline, scientific Darwinism doesn’t claim to, and perhaps couldn’t, offer this kind of understanding.

Nagel’s reasons for thinking that Darwinism is incomplete with respect to consciousness are summarised in an argument he gives in chapter three. Suppose we knew (a) why all organisms of material constitution M are conscious and (b) how M-constituted organisms emerged by “purely physical evolution”. (a) and (b) might seem together to imply that we know how and why consciousness evolved, but Nagel thinks they do not.

For though (b) explains event types involving material constitution M, we still lack an explanation of event types involving consciousness. To understand the latter, Nagel claims, we need to know why evolution produced consciousness. Such an explanation must make it “likely” that evolution produced conscious organisms under the description “conscious”, and not merely under the description “M-constituted”. There must be such an explanation, he says, since “organisms such as ourselves do not just happen to be conscious”.

Nagel does not contest the possibility of knowing (a) and (b). (a) is a non-historical reduction of consciousness to material constitution; (b) is an evolutionary account of the emergence of the material properties underlying consciousness. Nagel’s central contention is rather that (a) and (b) together do not suffice to make the emergence of consciousness non-accidental.

Here is one reason, unconnected with materialism or Darwinism, why science would find it very difficult to offer such an explanation. Psychology is an autonomous discipline. The laws of consciousness are investigated independently of those of physics, and as a consequence, psychological concepts are independent of physical concepts. The proposition that M-constituted creatures are conscious thus conjoins independent concepts and appears to be contingent. Along similar lines: we grasp consciousness from the first-person perspective. From this perspective, consciousness is not a brain process. Thus, the proposition that mental acts are physically constituted seems contingent to us.

This conceptual gap between psychology and material science is not why Nagel dismisses Darwinism. He writes, “I suspect that the appearance of contingency in the relation between mind and brain is probably an illusion, and that it is in fact a necessary and nonconceptual connection, concealed from us by the inadequacy of our present concepts … The mind-body problem is difficult enough that we should be suspicious of attempts to solve it with the concepts and methods developed to account for very different kinds of things.” Nagel allows that we might ultimately possess a non-historical understanding of why M-constitutedcreatures are conscious. His point is rather that this still does not afford us a historical understanding of the emergence of consciousness, because the evolution of M doesn’t make consciousness likely.

This is perhaps the moment to come back to the strange pronouncement to which I earlier alluded. Nagel writes, “With regard to evolution, the process of natural selection cannot account for the actual history without an adequate supply of viable mutations, and I believe it remains an open question whether this could have been provided in geological time merely as a result of chemical accident, without the operation of some other factors determining and restricting the forms of genetic variation. It is no longer legitimate simply to imagine a sequence of gradually evolving phenotypes, as if their appearance through mutations in the DNA were unproblematic – as Richard Dawkins does for the evolution of the eye.” (Versions of this claim are repeated at many points in the book.)

Now, this isa scientific challenge to the viability of Darwinian explanation, not just a reflection on its explanatory completeness. The sufficiency of genetic variation to drive natural selection has been a central theme since R A Fisher’s great book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Nagel, a philosopher, tells us there’s not enough. Big result!But it’s completely unsupported by argument. Nagel says that he would “like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to neo-Darwinism … It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection”. This is just irresponsible. It is simply wrong to adjudicate the probability of mutations by an “untutored reaction of incredulity”. Probability assessments notoriously run counter to common sense. If you think you have a scientifically viable argument, give it, or leave it to scientists to deal with this kind of problem!

Returning to the philosophical content: whatever you may think of Nagel’s incompleteness of explanation argument, you still have to take a leap to conclude that this argues for a non-naturalist ontology. Grant him, for the sake of argument that evolutionary theory does not make it probable that conscious creatures will emerge. Call this the Hard Problem of Evolutionary Emergence. However that might be, neuroscientists are certainly hard at work trying to figure out how particular conscious processes are physically realised in humans and other species – call this the Easy Problem of Neurophysiological Correspondence. Solving the Easy Problem will at least enable us to figure out post hocwhat evolutionary path leads to the material substrate of consciousness.

Naturalism posits that the Easy Problem kind of explanation will always be available. This isn’t the mad hope that there is a single materialist explanation for consciousness as such, but the optimistic hope (perhaps a bit wide-eyed, but not mad) that a material account can be given for each realisation of consciousness. So even if there are grounds for pessimism about understanding the emergence of consciousness-as-such in Darwinian terms, this pessimism arises from the fragmentary nature of science and the unavailability of boundary-crossing definitions of consciousness, and not from the exclusion of any material factor.

Nagel thinks that in order to make the emergence of consciousness likely, we have to introduce a new kind of process – one that is teleologically directed toward the emergence of the right kind of genes. He wants, in other words, to supplement naturalistic science with teleological drive. But there is a serious problem with trying to expand our ontology in order to get the kind of intelligibility that Nagel wants. There is no room, given his argument, for additional causes. Recall that under (a) and (b) above, he allowed that evolution might be sufficient to cause consciousness, though not to make it intelligible. (“Explanation, unlike causation, is not just of an event, but of an event under a description.”)The way that evolution produces consciousness is by producing M-constituted creatures, according to (b). Because of (a), this suffices for it to produce conscious creatures.

If evolution by natural selection can produce conscious creatures this way, what work is left for a teleological process or other non-natural cause? It is one thing to argue that the theory of evolution can’t make the emergence of evolution intelligible. It is quite another thing to argue that evolution can’t produce conscious creatures. In fact, Nagel’s argument seems to lead in the opposite direction.

Evolutionary theory treats its outcomes as highly contingent. In Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould famously wrote that “any replay of the tape would take evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken”. (He shouldn’t have said “replay”: what he means is that the situation at any moment of history is compatible with radically different subsequent developments.) Nagel wants to say that this would make the emergence of consciousness, mind, and value unintelligible. The question is this: given that evolution gives causes that are sufficient to the outcome, are we justified in adding causes in order to secure non-contingency and intelligibility? Nagel thinks so.

On the face of it, this is a super-strong version of the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle states that the world is such as to make it possible for humans to exist. Proponents of the Anthropic Principle suggest that this explains why certain fundamental constants of physics take the values they do. Nagel proposes, in effect, that the universe must be such as to make the emergence of consciousness not just actual but intelligible. Since evolution is sufficient only to explain consciousness retrospectively, and not to predict it, it doesn’t make it “likely” before the fact. So he inserts causes – specifically, teleological causes – to secure predictability (hence intelligibility).

To summarise, Nagel attacks contemporary theory of evolution from two sides. He argues, first, that in order to make the emergence of consciousness intelligible, the theory needs to be supplemented by teleology. One might doubt that this is reasonable because there is no reason why the emergence of consciousness should be intelligible in his sense.

Nagel also argues that the biological/genetic variation that is required to generate the emergence of consciousness is unavailable. If correct, this would undermine evolutionary theory from within by showing that it is actually unable to provide even a causal narrative of how consciousness emerged. He does not support this charge by evidence or analysis. Even if it is on the mark, it is unclear why it is within the purview of philosophy to fix the problem or to suggest teleology as an alternative. If a scientific theory fails to do its job, scientists have to come up with a replacement.

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel (Oxford University Press), £15.99/$24.95.

Mohan Matthen is professor of philosophy at the university of Toronto. His areas of research are philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, and ancient philosophy.