In a withered hour glass, the sands of time flow
The shattered pieces of glass cut, shards like daggers
There’s no healing, just the wounds the bleed open
Into the stream of dreams.
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At the end of Gregory Pappas’s John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience, Pappas is drawing a distinction Dewey often made between his experience-centered moral philosophy and non-empirical moral philosophies. These are just too good not to list verbatim, and I have to confess as I am researching the book on Levinas and Scheler, these 9 points have been circulating in my mind in very different ways (The problem is how one might do political theology with Kingian beloved community with a finite God of American proessive naturalism, or if the changes in the Divine somehow effect what is given in the phenomenological ethics of Levinas and related to Pappas’s efforts: If democracy is the ideal of moral community and beloved community is, according to me, the ideal our democratic community should take, then what is the relationship between how Dewey’s democratic ideal relates to the personalist-laden beloved community?). Pappas just states these claims a lot more clearly than even Dewey himself (which is also why this book is so good on Dewey’s ethics). Appearing at the end of the book in Chapter 9 from pages-156-161, the first point is:
- “Many of the debates among ethical theories center on whether it is certain acts, traits of character, rules, goals, motives, feelings, or obligations that provide the basis for distinguishing morality from other aspects of life. For Dewey, all of these elements are integral to moral experience, since they are found in the context of a situation. The basis for distinguishing morality from other dimensions or modes of experience is the subject matter, problems, and pervasive quality of situations. There is no criterion that is antecedent to the sheer having of these experiences. Hence, in principle, anything in experience can be experienced as having moral significance and can also be continuous with other ways of immediately experiencing the world (aesthetically, politically, religiously). The locus of moral experience is a present situation, thought of as a qualitative whole that is susceptible to dramatic structure, that is, one with patterns, rhythms, and phases. Situations are the ultimate context of our problems, inquiries, ideals and resources” (157-158).
It’s here that the Deweyian naturalism and ontological continuity is a problem for phenomenology. It’s not a problem for the immanent processive God. Instead, Levinas’s infinite demand of the Other constitutes the pre-cognitive and pre-theoretical space of the situation prior to and independently of any situation. For this reason, my project is that persons are of infinite value, and it’s that one piece of Levinas and Scheler that ties into and binds this insight into a religious register that Dewey seeks to naturalize here. In this way, there is at least one element of phenomenological givenness that we must treat as logically and transcendentally prior to a philosophy of that qualitative whole. Thus, the infinite value of persons streams forth from them and into the entire whole of what persons can experience, but I disagree that the situation is the ultimate context; it is the recognition of persons’ and their ultimate value that conditions the rhythms and patterns of the immediate whole. The natural side of ethics is the sociality and relations in which its possibility streams forth.
Given that Levinas and Scheler, are nonnaturalists about the phenomenologically given, the Deweyian may object that I’ve simply exaggerated an element of qualitive immediacy and its content to constrain how all other situations should be regarded. The rejoinder to the Deweyian lies in categorizing why Levinas’s insight into the face-to-face encounter works the way he describes. A personalist may say that since persons experience the world as mediated through what they are that life and the immediate whole are already suffused with value, but in agreement with the Deweyian, neither the personalist nor the Levinasian need be a straightforward Quinean ontological naturalist. Instead, we may be Jamesian processive naturalists, which is in line with how I also read Dewey.
The phenomenological facts that are immediately known or regarded as self-evident are the irreducible content of experience, and we need neither reduce phenomenological facts to Quinean naturalist facts, nor do we need to be transcendental phenomenologists and wish naturalism away tout court as some Husserlians are apt to do. Values pop up as part of the pre-theoretic and pre-cognitive life of what it means to be a person “personning”, and it’s here that Scheler helps. Scheler’s phenomenological description can be regarded as a description that elucidates both subjective and intersubjective life as a natural part of the processes of human cognition from within the boundaries of experience and the relationality that experience entails. For it is not the parts of a relation that need explained as either transcendental phenomenological fact of a nonnatural variety anymore than a naturalistic reductionism of a physical fact. What matters most are the qualitative immediacy and content of the relation itself and the two double-barreled terms of the physical-pole of that relation, the mental-pole of that relation, the interpretive act that originates in that relation giving rise to a new relation, and so on.
The fact that the value of persons is inexhaustible is part of how persons exists as embodied subjects that are in constant relation with the world around them. In this way, values are a feature of the natural universe produced by personal existence in embodied subjectivity that first feels the push and pull of the cosmos, society, and situations. Neither the cosmos, society, or situation are completely external and outside that relation anymore than the facts of what a person is feeling and believing can be completely separated from the external to be only internal. Both the subjective life and the life of objects in the world are a product of their constant conjoining. If we permit this infinite value of persons to be continuous with the world as the world itself is a product of a God continually engendering its existence in an Emerson-like immanence, then the God-world relationship is a larger person that, like us, produces values that call out to us, even if we lose sight of the God-World/Divine-World ground relationship. We can be called to them since persons, values, and the divine are ontologically continuous together. In this way, religions as wisdom traditions offer some values that seem to return to us again and again for that in those relations we have with the universe, God, humankind, and natural living animals as non-human persons.
The metaphors of fluidity, water, and mixtures is more appropriate than the traditional God of Augustine and Neoplatonism who is outside space and time, ontologically divided and separated out from that which is made. That’s why the metaphor of artisan is employed to imply the separated, implying an asymmetric relation of Creator higher than created that is reinforced by King on high ruling over that which is not as high. Already one can see the ontological implication of hierarchy, the really-real and unchanging are part of the power stand over and against everything in the sensible world. Paternal metaphors for God imply this asymmetry, not so much of ontological separation, but the power that reinforces that separation. A reality versus appearance distinction is introduced in Greek thought and the Hellenization of Christian thought employs that Platonic-like dualism that sharply divides religion from the truths of science rather than seeking out an empirically-friendly understanding of reality that avoids introducing the damaging effects these binary oppositions introduce into our thinking and acting.
However indirectly, I wish to piggyback off of William James’s famous essay, “The Dilemma of Determinism.” In that work, James reveals to us how one might apply his pragmatic method. For the purposes of brevity, I won’t rehearse an explanation of that method nor the background assumptions surrounding it. I only wish to apply it. James asks what the purpose or conceivable effect a particular idea or concept has for us? In doing so, we know exactly what concepts to keep since they are ultimately bound and maintained by the purposes they serve for action. For James, every concept serves some purpose or effect in my experience and our co-experience of the same concept. In this way, James argued that determinism saddles one to an existence in which choice nor freedom to alter one’s fate are illusions. Such a consequence is one that foregoes the concept of human freedom. By contrast, indeterminism means that there’s an element of chance and an ability that we both can make a difference in the lives of others. Our experiences open us up to a world in which we can make a difference to ourselves and possibly others. At root of James’s philosophy is this belief he called meliorism. Meliorism is the thesis that our agency can impact and improve the world.
So let us start with James and assume meliorism. That seems easy enough. You and I can make a difference in the world, and our agency is not controlled or undermined by causal determinism in order to inaugurate world-changing action. By world-changing, I do not mean something like Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, I simply mean that the world has something new added to it that it did not anticipate before and it is through the exercise of my agency or our combined efforts that some improvement in the state of affairs has occurred, no matter how small or large such change is. Let causal determinism be defined as a cause or series of causes that give rise to an effect and the attendant belief that in giving rise to an effect, the cause(s) and effect relationship could not have happened any other way. Causal determinism, therefore, posits a past that very much causes this and only this effect or set of effects. The universe could not unfold in any other way if causal determinism is assumed to be true. What I want to push is the implication of the level of control and weight causal determinism assumes for the view of the universe.
If causal determinism establishes that this and only this effect follows from a cause and the past controls how the present will unfold, then there is no teasing apart human freedom from the other objects in the universe that are seen as stipulated and therefore controlled by causal determinism. Human action is similar to a billiard ball striking another. Someone can regard scientific laws as determining the present unfolding of the phenomena they describe. Likewise, God can be added to the causal determinism picture as the source of law and order that determines subsequent effects.
A natural law theorist holds that the teleological nature of a thing is an expression of its becoming a good example of its kind through God as a designer and maker of the natural law. The Divine is the source of divine law and included within divine law are the laws of nature, what is sometimes referred to as simply natural laws. Included within the natural laws of the universe are the moral laws of what we ought to do and refrain from doing. The limited freedom of the will in such accounts is the choice for humans to fulfill their expected rational nature or not to conform their wills to the divine law or how reason may add to the natural law. Law and order follow either from God apart from causal determinism, or they can be joined together by positing God as the reason for the regularity of cause and effect. In the former case, the universe is definitively closed. In the latter case, the universe is mostly closed with respect to the moral law. Likewise, a secular version that simply maintains the truth of causal determinism mixed with the causal closure principle in physics would still be closed.
A closed universe is one in which the laws that control how it unfolds are designed or ordered in such a way that no surprises occur in the universe at all. James famously uses the analogy of a “block universe.” It’s as if the principle of sufficient reason robs the universe of novelty to produce something new and it fit together nicely like blocks holding together a wall. Whether not all laws describe how the universe unfolds might invite the speculation that the universe’s design and scientific laws merely await discovery through reason and if they remain yet to be discovered, once we discovered them, we could see how the unfolding universe similar to a movie will unfold. In other words, a closed universe is finished. It is ready-made, maybe by God or Nature. The script has already been written to the manner of its unfolding (or at the very least the major components of it are minus, perhaps, human freedom to obey those moral laws), and the universe will never combine into something new since it’s ordered all the way down.
When God is involved in a closed universe, there is no becoming of the moral law. The usage of God in a closed universe is that the concept of God is both the authority of what is and ought to be. Authority flows from God having been the moral laws’ author. In addition, the material universe is set in its own ways. All that can be discovered is finished. The meaning of the universe is a movie playing itself out that no unscripted parts or surprises. In this way, all things are determined and if we wish to improve upon the world, we are asked only to conform our will to the source of the moral laws. There’s nothing we could do to experiment and test the moral laws as they are already sanctioned by God as the source of their authority. God doesn’t need our help to improve the world. What will be will be. This is especially true for the God of ontotheology, the Augustinian God who is extended outside space and time and knows what will happen in the past, present, and future simultaneously. Every moment of the unfolding script offers no surprise to either us (if we were in God’s epistemic position) or God.
Now, I asked us to start by assuming meliorism true. In the immediacy of experience, I have the intuition that I can make a difference. I can begin something anew; I can add to the universe a possibility that never was before and maybe I can change something for the better. Let me introduce a dilemma now.
EITHER humans live in and exercise agency in a closed universe (with God or not) OR humans live in and exercise agency in an open universe. Before characterizing what my response is, let’s talk about and define an open universe.
An open universe is one in which the possible extant laws do not control how the universe unfolds and built into the unfolding is a bit of freedom for chance and growth. This is not to say that there is not an enduring structure through these changes, but that even with enduring structures and individuals, an open universe is looser in its organization. The metaphors appropriate to it seem Taoistic like streams and rivers or the ebbing of tides. These elements may be designed or ordered in such a way that surprises occur in the future. The full weight of the causal past is contained in the present unfolding of relations. Though the past is contained in the full actualization of some event, the weight of the causal past influences the present, but it does not control the present such that what will be will be. The future is, therefore, open. The course of river is not set, nor is the future. Instead, what will be is what might be. Such a universe has a bit of indeterminacy in it based on the part of the becoming of a thing’s own structure and the relations that emanate outward from it in relation to all other things.
In such a universe, the God of ontotheology is not present. Instead, one may invoke the God of process theism (often called panentheism) or open theism. I do not have time to get into these conceptions of God in a full defense, but I will only say that by making God the world-ground of reality in panentheism and adopting that God is the ground of that bit of creative novelty in the universe, such a God requires my help in improving the world. Thus, the immanent presence of God and the ability to engage in world-changing activity by realizing possibilities and purposes into the world are possible. In other words, the belief in meliorism is reconciled with the divine since in this universe the script involves us deciding how best to finish a scene, but the overall arch has yet to be written. In this way, our relationship to God is more like guided improv coach inviting us to act with Him/Her/It than the author of a script with no surprises. This is the first consequence of an open universe–a God that respects human freedom and invites us into relation with it as the source of values it wants us to emulate, but it does not seek to control us from on high. Instead, the process-oriented God of an open universe is with us by being in tandem with us and through us. It is not coercive as a Lord, but alluring, a spontaneity that constantly calls out to us like leaving a New Orleans bar only to hear beautiful jazz music.
The second upshot need not revise a conception of God as we might just describe the universe as open but without the Divine. The second benefit of an open universe is that it takes evolution and contemporary science more seriously than sequestering science away from ever challenging metaphysical views of the closed universe. More accurately, the universe evolves and changes and thus an open universe is one in which possibilities are being generated and the scientific understanding of observational cosmology is undergirded by the primacy of change, growth, and temporality. The universe is expanding. We don’t know what it is expanding into, but the fact that the observable universe is changing means that it’s at least possible that such change requires metaphysical primacy and so rather than thinking the universe itself or God as immutable, an open universe reflects a greater possible synergy with the natural and social sciences. What’s more, if the universe suddenly changed, then being open to the possibility that creation/the universe itself is being created at every moment such that what comes before influences, but does not weigh or control the outcome as much as causal determinism states.
Hopefully, now, we can see that there are two immediate pragmatic benefits of affirming one side of the dilemma. In accepting that “humans live in and exercise agency in an open universe,” we affirm the datum of freedom we feel in the very marrow of our agency. A closed universe cuts us off from realizing possibilities that are new, experimental, and shocking. An open universe is more consistent with how I sense my own agency and it’s in an open universe where the self-determination of my own actions adds meaning and value to the world (or at the very least possesses the slightest probability of doing so). An open universe is one where I can make a difference and add to its possibility and the possibility is publicly available for assessment in how we are sharing in the co-responsibility of realizing values into the world. For this reason, when presented with the dilemma of a closed universe or an open universe and we are committed to our ability to act freely in improving the world, the only sensible choice pragmatically is an open universe over against a world where our actions make no difference.
I am editing my chapter in the new upcoming Scheler volume. It’s on King and Scheler. Some tangential insights are now evident. The shortcoming of personalism (either Catholic or liberal-Protestant American versions) is in it never having developed a political philosophy on its own, but King certainly is the example of how one might be ethical-in-the-political as a personalist. King stands alongside other personalists like Dorothy Day and being ethical in the political just is religiously motivated activism. William James thought that religion motivated us to do the morally strenuous work that morality called for. Day and King got political because of their ethical commitments; it doesn’t go the other way. Personalists are not ethical because of the political. In this way, whatever the relation between ethics and politics, the personalist maintains no separation but privileges the ethical in all they do.
There’s a sense of an Aristotelian systematicity built into personalism. I usually define personalism as a metaphysical and ethical system in which persons are of infinite dignity and exist in a relational ontology that grounds the same inexhaustible dignity characteristic of its ethics. The central feature of personalist commitment is one shared by Levinas, the fact that a person is unique, singular, and incapable of being treated fairly if we transgress that unique singularity in any way, but respecting it. In this way, the person can never be exhausted by exchange values or regarded as an instrumental means to some other end wherein the person becomes a thing. Persons are no things. Of course, I am rare in the sense that while I started in phenomenological personalism with a dissertation on Scheler, it was largely the study of King’s writings and his connection to Edgar S. Brightman (and a few who attended Boston University that were present at Crozers Theological Seminary where King attended and was introduced to Brightman) that I fully opened more to the the side of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mysticism and personalism as way to see the concrete effects of such a philosophy.
By contrast, I have been thinking long and hard about how unsatisfying Levinas leaves the relation of ethics and politics separate and he purposefully separates Palestinians as an other in his 1982 radio interview. I don’t know if this amounts to what Judith Butler charges as the Palestinians having no face at all for Levinas (though I am sympathetic to her criticism echoed by many) and certainly philosophies can be more beautiful and complete than those who authored them. For example, we can read Levinas’s ethical philosophy against his own failure to see the Palestinian as an other (it’s this current blindness in the world that goes both ways that started the book project now ratified under contract officially today; I just signed the contract with Palgrave Macmillan for Levinas, Scheler, and the Infinite Value of Persons).
Given the dearth of political philosophy in personalism, I just think that if personalists are going to be political, then the question of community in Scheler, beloved community in King, and the laws of ideal community that Deats, DeWolf and Muelder formulate are a response to the individualistic focus that Brightman articulated. An analogy might be helpful. Consider the weakness of James’s ethics. The weakness of James’s commitment to individualism exists despite the apparent relational ontology that could be pushed to do more for James than he opted to employ. One needs Dewey for a complete picture of the individual-in-community for a fleshed out pragmatist political philosophy in much the same way that personalists need to read some other stuff that answered these tensions in their own tradition by examining philosophies of community. Of course, the problem of religious thinkers is how to negotiate the traditions they navigate with living alongside others in a pluralistic society, the exact question on which Levinas is more blind than helpful. There’s a sense that Levinas knew his failure of his own thought in relation to politics.
At some point, these ramblings will become a book. Thanks for listening…
I use Facebook to journal philosophy and to offer thoughts about what I am currently thinking. I often cut and paste them here, but now I am telling people that these are just a list of those fragments since Levinas has been occupying a lot of my thoughts recently. I want to see if there’s something emerging here. Like many of the posts here, this is not a coherent essay. Just a way of exploring what may be emerging.
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While both Levinas and Scheler are against formalism in ethics regarding moral theory, what analytic metaethicists might call “anti-theory,” I think their insights are compatible with Brightman’s moral law system. In any renunciation of systematicity in philosophy is the potential for that thinker to be read systematically. I think this despite the opening line of Totality and Infinity is Levinas hoping we are not “duped by morality.”
Moral theories are often complicit with justifying the objectification of persons. Levinas’s opening asks us to reject everything we think regarding morality, its content, and the principles that shape deliberation of our reasoning about its content. All that is needed is the experience of another and here’s the phenomenological description as to why—that’s how I read Totality and Infinity.
Elevating the face of the other matters precisely because of his critique of any system of thought or theory that understands philosophy as an attempt to represent and conceptualize reality already involves transforming the target of that theoretical gaze into an object of thought. The theoretical capture idea of philosophy renders all into an order of objects for thought. I take this is also the basis of his critique of any moral theory, a theory of agency, or a theory of moral obligations. All of these efforts are counter to first and foremost letting the infinity of the other in the face be before us. So I may be claiming that the rejection of moral theory and a theory of norms follows from his larger critique of thinking metaphysics as first philosophy and why Levinas thinks (wrongly or rightly) that ethics is first philosophy. Ethics is first philosophy phenomenologically because it’s the only orientation that let’s the infinite givenness of persons actually matter. (I actually don’t know if that is reasonable or true, but I do think that’s what Levinas is doing). It does seem that Levinas is committed to either an ethics without ontology other than what admits of phenomenological description or that maybe Levinas’s philosophy inadequately approaches ethical ontology in the wrong way. The latter is still committed to a phenomenological approach, but I’d argue that Scheler’s phenomenological ontology should be incorporated for reasons to lengthy to list here.
I’ve been thinking about a book proposal. It ends ends on Beloved Community as the praxis for democratic life and culmination of a book on ethical personalism invites further reflection. Simply gesturing to Beloved Community as a concrete expression of infinite value of persons will require that I think more thoroughly about this philosophical vision as an aspect of democracy in a work after it. So, I am thinking of a backwards, quasi-transcendental argument in which the relations beyond personalism and abolitionist thought find expression not only in Bowne’s parents being Methodist abolitionists, but some enduring aspect of this vision in theology that incorporated the infinite value of persons in ways that I cannot anticipate (at the very least worthy of exploration). All meaningful abolitionist thought in New England might have been duly influenced by this idea in ways that should be brought to bear in a work on political theology that must be a book I write after the Levinas-Scheler-Brightman-Thurman-King one. Part of the historic argument must be that Goldwater’s embrace of segrationism, Nixon’s Southern strategy, Reagan’s courting of radicals, the Republican parties lack of any mention of race in their 2016 platform, the attack on DEI in higher education, critical race theory, and affirmative action, and Trump’s animosity and allegiance with Proudboys are all an explicit attack on the potential for Beloved Community from ever being achieved. I know this is the book that must come from me…eventually. If you know of a good historian that nobody has heard of doing this type of work, I will certainly welcome the invitation to read them, especially if you know good works on the intellectual history of abolitionist thought and authors in New England.
A few weeks ago, I free wrote about ten pages on Levinas with ink and paper. Part of what I am doing with Levinas is criticizing the tensions between the ethical and political and opening up the ways that the ethical should be reconciled with politics through personalism. Personalists don’t have solid ways of approaching the political because their ethical values are their approach to politics. There should not be a separation of I and other contrary to the asymmetric description of the other in his ethics and so keeping the infinite value of the other into politics, even if utopian, should inaugurate interrogating the ways we conceive of politics to honor that ideal in more reciprocal terms. King and Muelder are the correction to Levinas.
The Levinasian redefines ethics to be one of relation without fully embracing the accurate intuition that the relational character goes wholly all the way down in human life. There are some metaphysical gestures that never transgress the infinite value of persons, never rising to the level of “totalization”, and these gestures help us see Levinas’s ethical vision. In other words, the Levinasian mistake is to be so uncritical about metaphysical moves we make about any one person’s singularity that we resist conceptualizing the character of community that is needed to foster the very assymetry he sees at the heart of the ethical relation that sustains the radical singularity and infinite value of the person in question.Elevating the face of the other matters precisely because of his critique of any system of thought or theory that understands philosophy as an attempt to represent and conceptualize reality already involves transforming the target of that theoretical gaze into an object of thought. The theoretical capture idea of philosophy renders all into an order of objects for thought. I take this is also the basis of his critique of any moral theory, a theory of agency, or a theory of moral obligations. All of these efforts are counter to first and foremost letting the infinity of the other in the face be before us. So I am not sure I am actually disagreeing with you other than maybe claiming that the rejection of moral theory and a theory of norms follows from his larger critique of thinking metaphysics as first philosophy and why Levinas thinks (wrongly or rightly) that ethics is first philosophy. Ethics is first philosophy phenomenologically because it’s the only orientation that let’s the infinite givenness of persons actually matter. (I actually don’t know if that is reasonable or true, but I do think that’s what Levinas is doing). It does seem that Levinas is committed to either an ethics without ontology other than what admits of phenomenological description or that maybe Levinas’s philosophy inadequately approaches ethical ontology in the wrong way. The latter is still committed to a phenomenological approach, but I’d argue that Scheler’s phenomenological ontology should be incorporated for reasons to lengthy to list here.
I’ve been thinking about a book proposal. It ends ends on Beloved Community as the praxis for democratic life and culmination of a book on ethical personalism invites further reflection. Simply gesturing to Beloved Community as a concrete expression of infinite value of persons will require that I think more thoroughly about this philosophical vision as an aspect of democracy in a work after it. So, I am thinking of a backwards, quasi-transcendental argument in which the relations beyond personalism and abolitionist thought find expression not only in Bowne’s parents being Methodist abolitionists, but some enduring aspect of this vision in theology that incorporated the infinite value of persons in ways that I cannot anticipate (at the very least worthy of exploration). All meaningful abolitionist thought in New England might have been duly influenced by this idea in ways that should be brought to bear in a work on political theology that must be a book I write after the Levinas-Scheler-Brightman-Thurman-King one. Part of the historic argument must be that Goldwater’s embrace of segrationism, Nixon’s Southern strategy, Reagan’s courting of radicals, the Republican parties lack of any mention of race in their 2016 platform, the attack on DEI in higher education, critical race theory, and affirmative action, and Trump’s animosity and allegiance with Proudboys are all an explicit attack on the potential for Beloved Community from ever being achieved. I know this is the book that must come from me…eventually. If you know of a good historian that nobody has heard of doing this type of work, I will certainly welcome the invitation to read them, especially if you know good works on the intellectual history of abolitionist thought and authors in New England.
A few weeks ago, I free wrote about ten pages on Levinas with ink and paper. Part of what I am doing with Levinas is criticizing the tensions between the ethical and political and opening up the ways that the ethical should be reconciled with politics through personalism. Personalists don’t have solid ways of approaching the political because their ethical values are their approach to politics. There should not be a separation of I and other contrary to the asymmetric description of the other in his ethics and so keeping the infinite value of the other into politics, even if utopian, should inaugurate interrogating the ways we conceive of politics to honor that ideal in more reciprocal terms. King and Muelder are the correction to Levinas.
The Levinasian redefines ethics to be one of relation without fully embracing the accurate intuition that the relational character goes wholly all the way down in human life. There are some metaphysical gestures that never transgress the infinite value of persons, never rising to the level of “totalization”, and these gestures help us see Levinas’s ethical vision. In other words, the Levinasian mistake is to be so uncritical about metaphysical moves we make about any one person’s singularity that we resist conceptualizing the character of community that is needed to foster the very assymetry he sees at the heart of the ethical relation that sustains the radical singularity and infinite value of the person in question. Levinas’s is very aware this problem and his attempt to correct it via the contemporeity of the third with the other. As he says, “the third comes to me in the eyes of the other,” which means that the asymmetry of ethics is always already mitigated by the demands of justice.
I got into Scheler only after I was told to read the Kaizo lectures Husserl delivered and my grad seminar on Levinas. Like many, I was enthralled with the idea that there was a way to cash out ethics that didn’t rely on the formalism of Kant and ethical theory more generally (consider Railton’s sophisticated consequentialism as another example etc.). This set me up for Scheler’s non-formalistic ethics. Only now, I’m backsliding. Humans need shortcuts to be ethical; we need explicitly formulated moral principles to apply for action-guidance. Action-guidance is the desideratum of ethical theory (and perhaps the preserving element of pragmatism in theorizing). So now, the pragmatist in me is seeing the role various normative theories play is to supply us with principles of deliberation given how atrocious our public discourse is about values and what matters morally.
So if Scheler and Levinas are useful, then what does their anti-theory help with and how me we regard what’s useful in their thought as a way to supply or synthesize a principle or principles for action-guidance? The quick answer is Scheler and Levinas give us the ontological scaffolding to experience the infinite value of persons. However, there’s no concrete way offered on how to translate this idea into practice. I will argue that Brightman’s moral law system is a way to translate the infinite value of persons thesis. The irony is that pragmatically we need ethical theory to make sense of those philosophers who avoided it since the heuristic ethical theories supply to everyday thinking is a difference that makes a difference.
Respecting the coherent integrity of another’s experience amounts to respecting another’s dignity. For me, this is the direct implication of thinking along Jamesian lines that embraces the pluralism under the banner of an infinite possible plurality. There may be lots of room for variation in that coherent integrity, but insofar as the coherent integrity of another person’s experience does not harm another, then let it be. Respect trans folks. Respect blackness. Respect women’s bodies.
Lots of people like to claim that lived-experience is at best subjective and not a desirable datum for ethics, but most subjective things are corroborated when we look to if other people have also experienced similar phenomena. By similar, I don’t know if any experience is exactly repeatable, but they can involve common factors LIKE institutional and social habits, embodiment, values, and intentionality that make them closely resemble each other in structure. That’s why a good friend of mine can formulate an experience-based approach to the ontology of blackness in his work. These are the tools in pragmatism and phenomenology to explain why lived-experience is for this reason “intersubjective”.
Once we’re open to the ontological scaffolding and methods of listening to how others experience their relation with others, then there’s no reason to be skeptical about what they report as far as the content insofar as those people are willing to put those descriptions of lived-experience into the world. For me, the variety of interpretations of that content is where much of the impetus to do philosophy comes from and where a lot of reasonable disagreement occurs. Apart from that, the problems in philosophy that antagonize me occur mostly when someone ignores the social reality of these relations and dismisses the importance of experienced content for some higher abstract reasoning that James warned us about. Substituting a concept for an experienced particular kills the opportunity for us to understand each other. James warned us against this so wisely that when I first encountered these words, they never left my soul and they are behind everything I do as they should be part of you too. It’s that important to remind people about from time to time.
Transcendental phenomenology will always fail.
Failure #1: Imagine for a minute a low threshold of Marvin Farber’s criticism of phenomenology and that he is right about 10-30% of the following. Farber held that phenomenologists described rare and peak experiences that most take as representative of human experience more than we should. Somehow our ordinary experiences might not confirm a great deal of what is claimed in phenomenology and if this low threshold is still true, then aspects of any phenomenologist are suspect in the same way that some results in psychology are suspect in the reproduction crisis except in this case the rarity of those peak experiences means that there’s not much in the ways of verifying those rare peak experiences versus the times and frequency of more ordinary experiences.
Failure #2: Then, some phenomenologists pass off those descriptions as if they are “transcendental” and that the descriptions discern essences. These essences are something like non-natural kinds that we must admit ontologically as creating the preconditions of a candidate experience in a quasi-Kantian transcendental way.
The transcendental part of phenomenology simply ensures that nonnaturalistic elements are still the purview of phenomenology (and therefore philosophy more generally). In this way, phenomenology is appropriated by some for how it aids non-naturalistic conceptions of what is real. It allows for philosophy to analyze, describe, and arrive at the content of an experience as if it will be the same structure always for all time and all places because the structures of experience are always apodictically necessary, but never caused by contingent factors in the world. And yet, that’s just dumb. In this way, the social, the historical, and the contingent are kept at bay from phenomenology just as much as the natural sciences and the world it describes.
I find this is crazy. Why not be a radical empiricist and admit phenomenological descriptions and content of the world as part of philosophy but see these phenomenological descriptions with being on par with the same world of the natural sciences? Why do transcendental phenomenologists shy away from the contingent forces and processes of nature as if human experience is somehow extolled and beyond the very contingency that gives rise to it? The answer lies in what people prejudge essences to be rather than being open to all the stunning ways that our relations with the natural world may mesh in new and often generative ways of being that science has yet to discover.
Conclusion: The only hope for phenomenology is a relational ontology and a liberal naturalism (as the analytics call it)/ processive naturalism (my term) that can do justice to accurate descriptions of human subjectivity and embodiment, but at the same time not deny ontological parity of the relationality of human experience that transacts with the world in new and interesting ways.
Restated Conclusion: Transcendental phenomenology should become radical empiricism.
I have been dealing with uncritical and badly argued rationalizations for why Continental philosophy is unclear all my professional life. See Stephen Law’s post here. This is no different. Let’s get into it.
First, Law claims that there is a “post modern defense of unclarity in philosophy” I’m unsure if he means postmodernism as the term is spelled here, but for clarity’s sake, we’ll take it to mean “postmodernism” as outlined in William Richardson’s Continental Philosophy: An Introduction (a book I very much suggest Law reads by the end of this commentary and one that I’ve used to teach survey courses in Continental philosophy with primary texts supplementing the various chapters).
Second, in most clear arguments, evidence is provided for the conclusion. Here, it’s just playing or insinuating the conclusion with no clear example to provide premises to the conclusion. Clear philosophy would at least give context and evidence for why someone out to think postmodernism is committed to opacity. This second point is also mired by the fact that since you give no referent for the object of your criticism (as you supply no premises for a point you take to be obvious with your audience on social media), it’s unclear whether you mean Husserl’s description of transcendental phenomenology, Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world in Being and Time, or any number of interesting claims you could actually take the time to understand.
Third, you introduce an analogy. It’s not as sustained as an argument by analogy, but one could be charitable and represent your position in the best argumentative light. I would think that’s it.
1. A pixelated image has the property of being a simplification of how things really are
2. Postmodernism (CP more generally?) has the property of being a simplification about the complexity of the subject matter
3. In both cases, the simplification is a distortion.
4. Conclusion: Preferring the simplification of the subject matter cannot understand things as they are as one needs to value clarity as a norm even to understand how the pixelated image is or the subject matter of postmodern philosophy.
The problem with even an argument by analogy is that the analogy is just bad because of the ambiguity to no exact definable criticism. There’s always a purpose to why some philosophy is written as it is. Take any example in phenomenology. The purpose of phenomenological description is to get at some element or content of our experience that previous frameworks overlook or conceal. This isn’t done in analytic philosophy to the extent that Continentals do. Who writes about the experience of despair and anxiety towards death apart from Kierkegaard and Heidegger? Nobody. (Maybe Nishitani in the Kyoto school).
Fourth, the better inference is that shit like this gets said to rationalize the bias of philosophers who intended to never read anything by Heidegger or Kierkegaard. It’s said in an environment where someone will be praised for the bias they share with others. That’s fine. We don’t need to read everything together, but it’s a rather stupid thing to say when Law doesn’t have evidence.
So here’s a challenge, Professor Law. Pick any one text in phenomenology. Fly me over to the UK. I’ll stand in the room and we can do that classic Oxbridge debate style in London where the audience votes. You maintain this clarity of language policing for what you’re comfortable with and I can show in ten minutes what any phenomenological text is attempting to achieve within the bounds of hermeneutic charitability. I can show that your claims amount to strictly policing what philosophy is and I’ll show why this whole argument is a strawman, an uncharitable bias, and I suspect I will win every time someone like you says this exact same thing. CP is not that opaque.
On the contrary, CP tends to get clear on matters like power in discourse, class, gender, race, the experience of embodiment in ways that classically trained analytic philosophers don’t think matter.
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Why I Hate Richard Rorty
I went back to Rorty’s the Consequences of Pragmatism this morning and re-read “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendental Culture”. As a philosopher in an English department, it’s good therapy. However, I am confronted again and again by why I hate Rorty’s work. In this essay, like so many others, Rorty makes interpretive leaps by situating him between the history of literary criticism in the 18th and 19th centuries and being an analytic philosopher turned eclectic. It does seem that Rorty has read widely, but he also has a bit of egotistical flare. He never justifies these interpretive leaps. There are no footnotes when he speaks of Keats praising Shakespeare in the four claims mentioned below.
“This transcendentalist point of view is the mark of the highbrow. It is the attitude that there is no point in raising questions of truth, goodness, or beauty because between ourselves and the thing judged there always intervenes mind, language, a perspective chosen among dozens, one description chosen out of thousands. On one side, it is the lack of seriousness which Plato attributed to the poets, the negative capabilities for which Keats praised Shakespeare” (CoP, 67).
Now, I think the highbrow, or the rise of the highbrow, may be contested as there is no reference to the history of criticism in this piece nor are examples offered about criticism that exemplifies what he says emerges. Instead, Rorty name drops on the previous page Vaihinger and Valery, Marlowe and Hobbes as he does here. Left undefended are a host of implicit claims. 1. There is some attitude and standpoint called the highbrow, to which I think is also a comment about self-description). He merely claims the existence of this standpoint in the history of the academy. He cites no examples consistent with this claim. 2. Somehow the rise of this thing called highbrow culture “sees no point in raising questions of truth, goodness, or beauty.” He does not see them as worthwhile to answer with the demand I am claiming about support since there’s no one “fact of the matter” to be decided. He never supports this claim with examples or footnotes of highbrow figures that do not care for these things. That’s a sweeping claim, it seems. 3. He says that mind, language, perspective and the contingency of life do not ground any attempt at making sense of texts and culture. This is at least consistent with his claims that there are no final vocabularies. Unlike Arendt, all of it seems ephemeral, but at least with Arendt deep footnotes and competency with English, German, French, Latin and Greek all come together in a way that Rorty can never achieve. Instead, he floats on the ether of his own story.
It’s 4 that bothers me. 4. Keats praises Shakespeare because of an implied lack of seriousness Plato attributed to the poets. This claim is so ephemeral, and maybe it’s true. Maybe it is not, but my academic brain wants a footnote, some textual support to defend the set of claims made. The strange thing is Rorty, like me, is also an academic. When does Keats praise Shakespeare for a lack of seriousness that exemplifies Plato’s attribution of the poets? Does Rorty mean the negative capabilities of poets in the Republic? If so where? How does Rorty understand Plato’s critique of the poets at all?
The strange irony is if Rorty sees himself as exemplifying the highbrow standpoint then he need not see my demand as anything serious. I am just one person in a sea of shifting concepts and contexts making demands for an argument because I am accepting in this critique of his sloppy scholarship the “Platonic conception of truth as accuracy of representation” (CoP 67). However, it’s entirely possible that a genteel mind could paint eloquent pictures and hide in plain sight because no matter what room he entered in his life, his erudition meant that most people are not as well-read as he was in both literature and philosophy. It’s possible to hide one’s badly defended claims in plain sight with the rhetoric and superficial engagement of authors. And the fact that many recognize this, it becomes impossible to tell if Rorty is swindling with historical claims when he speaks about literature. So when he says, “Novels and poems [in the nineteenth century] are now the principal means by which a bright youth gains a self-image” with no evidence whatsoever, how can he then use this as evidence to say that “nineteenth century imaginative literature took the place of both religion and philosophy in forming and solacing the agonized conscience of the young” (CoP, 66). Is there a who or set of examples that inform this claim?
Everything Rorty writes is underdetermined in this way and probably on purpose.
There’s something that happens to undergrads when I introduce them to some variety of idealism. Let idealism be any philosophy that regards the ideas of consciousness as fundamentally most real. For example, I might make the claim that ‘1. The eternality of mathematical truths resides in the mind of God’ when teaching Neoplatonism. Students have never thought why math always works and when they hear this, their minds start racing. What else might be objectively as true as math?! What abstractions may be present eternally in the same way as math? My moral values!? It’s just a short skip to moral values. It’s always so tight, so neat when seen for the first time; it doesn’t matter the age. Still, you have to think this way when you’re younger. Then, you’re open to all sorts of magic in the world. The reason why many philosophers, I think, still do metaphysics is to see just how much magic remains, but I differ by temperament. Some of us feel deceived by the lack of magic we were told was there and we spend the rest of our lives seeing if there was anything like it to begin with. Some of us even write about magick and wizards to get a glimpse of a world that never was. We have to see the world as it is experienced. Experience is our guide to building better knowledge.
Through empiricism, I do metaphysics to see how much magic there is present in the material world described by science that I may experience. When you even understand an inkling of how much complexity there is experienced, you’ll discover there never was any such thing as “reductive materialism.” Physical monism is not a threat to the beauty and reverence of what is. It’s only the fundamentalists that see science as a threat to the beauty of nature and the expressive order that emerges in nature’s becoming. It becomes in relations as felt and possibly divine. I say possibly since “at bottom” this is an aesthetic orientation to what is and the only positions that make sense require this aesthetic orientation to see it. This is what I take the “original relation” to be that Emerson spends a lifetime articulating and maybe what Buddhists spend a lifetime trying to feel (or in my case reading Emerson’s poetry and spending a Friday night at the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist temple here in town).
Since I am heading in this direction and that some variety of naturalism is likely true, then whatever metaphysical statement uttered about God must be compatible and not contradict the best scientific descriptions we have of nature. So three candidates for me are found possible, if God exists. These are A. Panpsychism, B. Panentheism, C. Pantheism, and D. the Death of God.
These options are further compatible with the commitments of what it means to be what I call a processive naturalist.
1. The universe consists of relations, both those that hold relatively stable while they endure and others of varying degrees of temporal duration that are unfolding independently of me and some that are in relation in and through human beings.
2. Any object or essence, as it is given phenomenologically, is so woven with other relations that any phenomenological description is bound up to describe these relations.
3. Part of being bound up with relations is that an object, essence, concept, or idea are bound up within time’s flux, so no rigidity and timelessness should be presupposed in any description, understanding, or treatment of them, but instead description, understanding and treatment are understood as interpretations of an object, essence, concept, or idea.
4. An interpretation is found to be pragmatically true insofar as the interpretation terminates in the object, essence, concept, or idea.
Assume P1 and that our best science supports an analysis of nature that is becoming.
P1: If processive naturalism is true, then God is best described by A. Panpsychism, B. Panentheism, C. Pantheism or D. Death of God.
P2: Processive naturalism is true
P3: God is best described by [A v (B v C)] v D
P4: Which disjuncts should be eliminated?
It’s at this point that some reasons must be given that eliminate two of the disjuncts, and that’s the point where I am at in my own metaphysical speculations. In other words, I don’t know how to finish the argument. A, B, and C. as traditionally understood give you something divine whereas D. Being the death of God removes the possibility completely. What options should be eliminated so I can affirm one of the conclusions of A, B, C or D? In addition, there are ways that one might contrive these options in ways that combine them, and so I am not confident that a panpsychist interpretation of reality might not also yield either a panentheism or a pantheism. In my metaphysical speculations, I am looking for what my eliminating reasons are so as to affirm the existence of some interpretation of reality.
The Horizon and The Fringe 