ISSUE 129 DECEMBER 2018/JANUARY 2019

PhilosophyNow
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Ain’t You Got No

Holmes To Go To?

Philosophy in
Tolstoy and
Umberto Eco

Hegel and
History

What is Art For?

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ARTS & LETTERS
and philosophy on pages 6-22
Hegel’s History
Two clashing perspectives, p.28
Philosophy?
Two differing views, p.36
ISSUE 129 Dec 18/Jan 19
EDITORIAL & NEWS
4 The Functions of Art by Grant Bartley
5 News
26 Obituary: Mary Midgley by Carol Nicholson
ARTS & LETTERS
6 A Forgiving Reason: The Secret of Holmes’ Success
Tim Weldon makes some observations and deductions
11 Ockham’s Rose
Carol Nicholson on the philosophy in The Name of the Rose
14 Can Art Fight Fascism?
Justin Kaushall tells us why Adorno thought so
17 The Case Against Conceptual Art
Trevor Pateman critiques the concept of conceptual art
18 Creating the Beautiful Society
Francis Akpata on why Schiller thought art improves us
20 Should We Pursue Happiness?
Vincent Kavaloski on Tolstoy’s long search for contentment
GENERAL ARTICLES
28 Hegel on History
Lawrence Evans distills history’s grandest narrative for us
31 The Trouble with Hegel
Chris Christensen says he just stopped in the wrong place
34 Putting Animals & Humans To Sleep
John Shand has a new argument for allowing euthanasia
36 Philosophy: A Call To Action
Calvin H. Warner says it must stand up for truth & happiness
37 I Hate Philosophy!
Gray Kochhar-Lindgren shares a guilty secret
REVIEWS
44 Book: From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel C. Dennett
reviewed by Peter Stone
46 Book: I Am Not A Brain by Markus Gabriel
reviewed by Stephen Anderson
48 Film: Santa Claus, The Movie
Chris Vaughan peels away the festive veneer!
REGULARS
23 Brief Lives: Hermann von Helmholtz
Dylan Daniel on the philosopher behind a great scientist
38 A Moral Education: Ethics of Education in the Secular State
Andrew Copson draws some boundaries
39 Philosophical Haiku: Iris Murdoch by Terence Green
40 Letters to the Editor
43 Philosophy Then: Philosophy for the Young, Medieval Style
Peter Adamson plays trivium pursuits
52 Tallis In Wonderland: Brains, Minds, Selves
Raymond Tallis contends that all three exist
54 Question of the Month: Is The World An Illusion?
See if our readers’ answers are delusions
FICTION
57 The Light From Our Eyes
Stephen Brewer’s trio try to make sense of perception
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 3
 © PAUL GREGORY 2016
GRANT AT TATE MODERN
Editorial The Functions of Art
W
hat is art for? The question of art’s function is
prominent in this issue. Can it be used to challenge
tyranny, or to make us better citizens? Plato
certainly thought that contemplation of beauty could lead
you closer to seeing ultimate truth. Could art similarily lead
you to see moral truth, between individuals or for society?
Schiller thought so, as Francis Akpata explains. And Justin
Kaushall tells us how Adorno thought radical art could
seismically shift awareness, and so fight fascism (and, for
Adorno, capitalism too).
Among other things, Immanuel Kant’s 1790 book the Critique
of Judgement is concerned with beauty in art. Kant is consid-
ering how we make judgements, and one of the big questions
in art used to be why and how we judge a work of art to be
beautiful. But nowadays beauty is no longer art’s chief focus.
This is at least in part because the function of art has changed.
You can track art’s function, very basically, by looking at
who pays for it. In the medieval West, the artistic depiction of
religious ideas was paid for by the Catholic Church – so the
function of art was to exalt the divine and educate the mostly
illiterate faithful. Later the aristocracy started paying artists to
display their wealth, status and learning in their portraits.
Then the rich bourgeois merchant classes brought art for a
decorative display, again of taste and status.
Nowadays, what’s at the leading edge of art is decided by
galleries, and the functions of this art include investment,
prestige, and virtue signalling. The primary concern about the
art with which the high-end dealers currently deal, is its
marketing. In our info-overloaded world, the publicising and
selling of creative work is often a bigger problem than its
creation. High art has been evolving for decades to accom-
modate this need. This is one reason why so much new art we
see in galleries is concerned with provocation or shock:
whether it’s dead sheep, or dirty unmade beds, or stacks of
oranges you can eat (all real artworks). Shock is what’s
perceived to be necessary to gain attention in the modern
market, and indeed that may be the case. Also, art now
increasingly attracts artists who like doing that sort of thing.
Away from such artful dodgers, talented artists of all kinds pour
their souls into less shocking work but you won’t have seen most
of it. In this postmodern age, beauty is just one ideal among
many pursued by artists, and is also seen as being a bit
Eighteenth Century. Since the art sellers and curators are
competing among themselves to display their fashionability, the
need for high art to be ‘in the lead’ has eclipsed other artistic
values. In this way, the primary point of an artwork is now not
its aesthetics (aisthetikos is Greek for ‘sensation’) or how pleasing
it is to the senses – what used to be called ‘taste’ – nor is it
necessarily how profound the ideas being communicated are: it
4 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
is its novelty. So perhaps we can’t really blame the art world
for rewarding shock not talent. It’s required to make a living.
Many leading galleries seem to agree that as technical
brilliance has been amply demonstrated throughout art’s long
history, it’s unnecessary to see it demonstrated again just for its
own sake. What is still interesting about art, however, is the
concepts it can explore. So let’s just concentrate on the
concept, says the most fashionable thinking about art. This
has led us to conceptual art – art where the concept behind it,
rather than the artist’s technique or a pleasurable effect, is
prominent. A work needn’t be beautiful, nor conspicuously well
made; it just needs to be clever. Trevor Pateman’s article pertly
critiques this conceptual approach to art.
Well, the most precise medium for conveying concepts is
probably language. This would make novels the ultimate form
of conceptual art.
Fiction is often said to be telling lies to convey a deeper
truth or to explore deeper questions. We consider some of
these deeper questions in this issue, including one of the most
foundational: What is happiness and how can we achieve it?
Vincent Kavaloski looks at the way this question is asked in
the novels of Leo Tolstoy. Indeed, novelists often explore
ethical ideas through the crises and dilemmas their characters
endure, and Tolstoy’s exploration of happiness evidently falls
into this category. But fiction can make philosophical connec-
tions in other ways too. Here we look at intuition versus
reason in Sherlock Holmes, and at various philosophical
themes in The Name of the Rose, including William of
Ockham’s famous metaphysical shaving kit.
Profundity and self-reflection are two of the defining
qualities of great art, so really it can hardly help exploring
philosophical themes. Many of the articles in this issue show
how some past thinking about art can be reapplied to contem-
porary problems: not only finding happiness, but fighting
regrettable social trends and building a better world. In this
issue I think you’ll find much that philosophy has to say about
literature and other arts is useful for life in our overstuffed yet
underfiltered information age.
Let me also mention the two articles taking different
perspectives on Hegel’s theory of history. I find Hegel an
interesting philosopher not because I think he was right about
how history works, but just because he has a systematic theory
of human history. To me this is just the sort of ambitious and
fundamental topic philosophers should be interested in.
There is also a ‘perception versus reality’ theme scattered
throughout this issue – about which fundamental topic the
great Kant again had a lot to say. Indeed, you might want to
play a game of ‘Where’s Kant?’ as you read this issue. Award
yourself a point every time you spot him. Grant Bartley
• Berggruen Prize given to Martha Nussbaum
• Confusion over approval of dog experiments
• Roger Scruton to chair housing design body
News reports by Anja Steinbauer
Nussbaum Wins Berggruen Prize
The 2018 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy
& Culture has been awarded to philoso-
pher Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum,
whose approach is inspired by her back-
ground in classical Greek philosophy, is
widely known for her work on the
emotions, on ethics and aspects of politi-
cal philosophy. Her development of the
‘capabilities approach’ as a conceptual
alternative to other models of human
well-being in economics has been influen-
tial and much debated. She is a prolific
writer, author of 25 books and over 500
articles. The 2018 Berggruen Prize deci-
sion marks the second year in a row that
the prize, which has only existed for three
years, has been awarded to a woman.
Onora O’Neill, last year’s recipient, is a
famous moral philosopher who has made
important contributions to the philosoph-
ical discussion of ‘trust’, and who has
served as chair of the UK’s Equality and
Human Rights Commission.
Joel Kraemer dies
Joel Kraemer died on 11 October 2018.
He was the John Henry Barrows Profes-
sor of Islamic and Jewish philosophy at
the University of Chicago, and also held
appointments at the Jewish Theological
Seminary, Yale University and Tel Aviv
University in Israel. He was a fellow of the
American Academy for Jewish Research.
As you will have gathered, he was a
prominent scholar of Islamic and Jewish
philosophy. Kraemer was famous for his
work on the cultural transmission of clas-
sical Greek ideas to the Islamic world. He
is best known for his biography of the
12th-century philosopher Maimonides.
Scrutonising Design of Homes?
The British Government has appointed an
official commission to raise the debate
about the importance of beauty and good
design in new housing development.
According to a press release, the Building
Better, Building Beautiful Commission is
intended to “tackle the challenge of poor
quality design and build of homes and
places.” It will suggest policy solutions so
that new developments meet the needs
and expectations of members of the
community, to “help grow a sense of
community and place, not undermine it”.
It will be chaired by conservative philoso-
pher Professor Sir Roger Scruton, known
for his writings on innumerable philo-
sophical issues, especially aesthetics,
ethics and the philosophy of Kant. He is
also a defender of traditional architecture
and a critic of some contemporary styles
in architecture, such as those of Norman
Foster and Zaha Hadid. Communities
Secretary James Brokenshire said Scruton
was uniquely qualified because he was a
world-leading authority on aesthetics, but
opposition MPs swiftly called for Scru-
ton’s dismissal because of past remarks
about sexuality, religion and other
matters.
Vets Dept Resumes Vivisection
Vivisection, or medical experimentation
on live animals, remains a crucial issue in
applied ethics with important real life
relevance. A spokesman for the United
States Department of Veterans Affairs
(VA) has announced that former VA
Secretary David Shulkin gave verbal
approval for restarting experiments on
dogs, on the very day he was fired by
Donald Trump in March. Shulkin
himself denies having done so. The
department argues that the testing was
approved because it will help doctors find
new ways to treat wounded soldiers.
Researchers running the experiments will
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 5
News
remove sections of the dogs’ brains that
control breathing, sever spinal cords to
test cough reflexes and implant pacemak-
ers before triggering abnormal heart
rhythms. Critics in Congress and animal
welfare campaigners argue that the exper-
iments are cruel and unnecessary.
New Research on Moral Identities
In new research at Northwestern Univer-
sity Professor Touré-Tillery, whose
research is at the intersection of motiva-
tion and self-perception, has identified a
crucial issue in moral behaviour. The
research was reported in the journal Orga-
nizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes. As people perceive themselves
differently in the different roles they fulfil
in their lives, e.g. a parent, a manager, a
friend etc., these self images make a differ-
ence to their moral choices. “We all have
different identities that we label ourselves
with,” Touré-Tillery says. “What we were
looking at in our study is not so much
what those labels are or how many there
are, but whether people think of them-
selves the same way across those identi-
ties.” The researchers found that people
who perceive their personalities as
constant across their roles are more likely
to behave ethically than those who think
of themselves as different in each role.
Being moral matters more to this first
group because if they behave immorally, it
affects how they see themselves in general,
Touré-Tillery explains. Wanting to avoid
that negative self-image can motivate
people to behave better.
Arts & Letters
A Forgiving
Reason
The Secret of
Sherlock Holmes’
Success
Tim Weldon detects links between
Sherlock Holmes and Blaise Pascal
in the operation of intuition.
H
ow did the most famous fictional detective in history
triumph over evil in over fifty celebrated cases? To
what – or to whom – might we attribute his success?
Holmes’ creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle self-admittedly
modelled Holmes’ manner and methods on the man for whom
he was once a clerk, the eminent Scottish surgeon Joseph Bell
(1837-1911). Of course we should give full credit to Bell’s
extraordinary powers of observation and deduction. However,
a careful reading of Sherlock Holmes’ adventures reveals that
there is more to his case-solving than can be explained by Bell’s
inspiration alone.
Holmes’ Schooling
Rightfully, much has been made of the cognitive prowess of Sher-
lock Holmes: his command of common sense, minutiae-driven
observation, dogged focus, summary appraisals, and power to
synthesize. From what philosophical school (if any), to what
system (if applicable), and to whom, among the great thinkers
of history, is he indebted? Given Holmes’ citizenship and envi-
rons, one could reasonably start with the philosophical tradition
known as British Empiricism, and link Holmes with, say, the
thought of John Locke (1632-1704) or David Hume (1711-
1776). The above habits of thought are certainly characteristic
6 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
SHERLOCK HOLMES BY DARREN MCANDREW 2018
of Empiricism, as are Holmes’ interest in science and reliance
on experimental evidence. Or perhaps we should look a little fur-
ther away, in space and time? Perhaps Holmes’ careful system-
atic skepticism springs from the skeptic René Descartes (1596-
1650)? Also, given the times, we mustn’t forget religion. That
Holmes was familiar with Scripture is as established as is his use
of logical reasoning and his ironclad morality. Do his methods
then reveal a kinship with the medieval metaphysical realist,
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1275)? Or one could head south and
back through more than two millennia, to link Holmes to Aris-
totle himself, since both men demonstrated proficiency in the
natural sciences and in metaphysics. Or, given Holmes’ temper-
ament, choice of cases, and dramatic flair, is it more accurate to
say that he belonged to the Romantic school?
It is my contention that Holmes and his methods defy easy
association with any school of thought or thinker; yet in the end
they come to side most closely with the philosophy (although
not necessarily the theology) of one thinker – someone closer
to Holmes’ French ancestry than British, and more in line with
his artistic side than scientific: Blaise Pascal. Using support from
the stories, I hope to demonstrate the philosophical kinship
between Holmes and Pascal, and in so doing pinpoint the cog-
nitive source of Holmes’ unbridled success.

Intuitive Bloodlines
In the story ‘The Adventure of The Greek Interpreter’ (1893),
Holmes and Watson can be found discussing “how far any sin-
gular gift in an individual was due to his ancestry and how far to
his own early training.” To which Holmes responds: “My ances-
tors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same
life as is natural for their class. But nonetheless, my turn that
way was in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother,
who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood
is liable to take the strangest forms.” So it is in the French her-
itage of Sherlock Holmes that we discover his greatest inheri-
tance, and much like his great uncle, even a certain artistic genius,
although not as a painter (or a violinist, for that matter).
Sherlock Holmes, French? Artistic genius? How can this
be? In popular culture, Holmes personifies a stereotypical asso-
ciation of the modern British mind with empiricism: wholly
observant, properly dispassionate, ever rational and quantita-
tive; in other words, the true scientist. Such characteristics truly
carry the day for the mathematician, the microbiologist, the
actuary, and the accountant. Even in the area of detection, some
of Holmes’ cases were seemingly solved by what could be
gleaned from a magnifying glass or microscope rather than
musings produced from an armchair (and Holmes is the only
fictional inductee into Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry).
With modern achievements in forensic science and, for exam-
ple, forensic ballistics, solving crime today has become a matter
for the laboratory.
Yet given the complexity of crime and its origination from
human flaws, and taking into account the presence of evil (as
Holmes would admit), there is more to crime-solving than
simple empirical assessment. And like any good detective,
Holmes was a moralist. Good and evil colored his world as
they defined his métier. Evil is as mysterious as it is manifest,
and in figuring out how goodness is to prevail, one needs more
than a tally of physical evidence. In reality as in literary fic-
tion, detectives are famous for pivoting from a hunch, or on
instinct or gut feeling – all synonymous with intuition. In fact,
a detective’s hunch is nothing more or less than a hypothesis
Arts & Letters
alone, as by it he re-opened (and left open) a door to a question
that dates back to antiquity: Is reason the sole source of and
vehicle for truth? Can anything give me knowledge apart from
or in addition to calculation, deduction, and inference?
Few in history have been able to make such a statement about
going beyond reason from such credible foundations, with such
an impressive resumé. Reported to have discovered for himself
the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid at the age of twelve,
Pascal published his first mathematical work at seventeen, went
on to invent a calculating machine, and was heralded for his
experimentation with vacuums, atmospheric pressure, and prob-
ability theory. He even designed a public transport system, by
horse carriage [see Brief Lives, Issue 125, Ed]. The majority of
Pascal’s writings were not on philosophy or theology, but on
mathematics, science and technology. (Small wonder then that
a programming language was named after him.) But just as
Pascal understood the inestimable value of mathematical and
scientific reasoning, he understood its limits. Towards the end
of his short life, scientific matters bothered him little, whilst
philosophy and theology concerned him greatly.
“Things should be made as simple as possible, but not sim-
pler,” said Albert Einstein. And unlike those famous thinkers
whose work is defined by expansive thought in prolix tomes,
Pascal’s genius is found in his simplicity. On the origin of human-
ity’s existential discontent (and this may be equally applicable to
our criminal inclination) Pascal writes: “I have often said that the
sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to
stay quietly in his room.” (Pensées §136, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer).
In outlining the way we think, Pascal proposed that the
mind is two-tiered and operates along two tracks, though not

HOLMES STRAND ILLUSTRATIONS © SIDNEY PAGET 1891

as yet unconfirmed. So Holmes’ methods at once include and
transcend measurements, diagrams and graphs, numbers, and
formulae.
From the Latin intueri, ‘to look at’, intuition is ultimately a
mystery in origin and operation. However, I suggest that detec-
tives use intuition to solve cases, and would be at a disadvan-
tage if they did not. In its capacity to point the way, intuition
can break a case wide open and prove a stepping stone for its
solution. No one knew this more than Sherlock Holmes, with
his ability to reason through the material evidence of a crime
and intuit beyond it. But to best understand this, we must turn
to the genius of his philosophical soul-mate, Blaise Pascal.

A Philosopher of Finesse
“We know the truth not only through our reason but also
through our heart,” begins the French mathematician and
philosopher Pascal (1623-1662) in Section One (Chapter Six)
of his greatest work, Pensées (Thoughts, 1670). The influence of
Pascal on modern philosophy is invaluable for this proposition

December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 7

Arts & Letters
without the necessary intersection:
“We know the truth not only through our reason but also through
our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and
reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them.
The skeptics have no other object than that, and they work at it to
no purpose… For knowledge of first principles, like space, time,
motion, numbers, is as solid as any derived through reason, and it is
on such knowledge, coming from the heart and instinct, that reason
has to depend and base all its argument. The heart feels that there
are three spatial dimensions and that there is an infinite series of
numbers... Principles are felt, propositions are proved, and both with
certainty though by different means.” (§110)
Furthermore, for Pascal, the course of mathematical think-
ing (ésprit de geometrie), with its logic and calculation, travels
along the rational track, while what we intuit or judge (esprit de
finesse) advances by way of summary evaluative supposition ema-
nating from our hearts (or as we might say in more modern ter-
minology, from our unconscious). The effects of the former are
more credible owing to their transparency to the data. How-
ever, the latter, ever mysterious in both source and operation,
is capable of judgment by preceding and transcending data.
Whether in matters of beauty – why does the painter choose
one color over another, this scene or setting rather than that?;
or of good and evil – why would anyone, how could anyone
commit murder? – intuition is exercised for the sake of a quali-
tative or evaluative understanding. As Pascal scholar and trans-
lator A.J. Krailsheimer explains:
“Just as lines, squares and cubes (or x, x2, and x3) cannot be added
together as being of different orders, so in the realm of human knowl-
edge that which is proper to the body (the senses), to the mind (the
reason), and to the heart are of different orders and must be care-
fully distinguished if error is to be avoided. The heart, in Pascal’s
scheme, is the appropriate channel for intuitive knowledge, for appre-
hending pre-rational first principles and assenting to supra-rational
HOLMES STRAND ILLUSTRATIONS © SIDNEY PAGET 1891
8 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
propositions, as well as for emotional and aesthetic experiences.”
(p.22, Pensées, Penguin Edition, 1966.)
How difficult it must have been for Pascal, the eminent
mathematician, so dependent upon logical demonstration, to
advance the theory of an alternative and in the end, superior
faculty of judgment! And intuition is judgment. Pascal writes,
“Intuition falls to the lot of judgment, mathematics to that of
the mind” (§513. Note that here, as was his habit, Pascal uses
what has been translated as ‘mind’ – la raison – interchange-
ably with mathematical reasoning – ésprit de geometrie). How
true this is for the detective, for whom so much is at stake. In
the solving of a criminal case, hypotheses must be made and
attended to, and ultimately judgments must be offered and
acted upon, with every subtlety accounted for in between. In
his heart, Holmes understood this as he exercised his intuition
with unparalleled success.
The Heart of a Detective
Holmes’ interests were as varied as his clientele, ranging from
bee-keeping to Baritsu (or Bartitsu, an eclectic martial art). They
inspired exhaustive research and attention, especially when con-
nected with a pressing case. The diligence and intensity with
which Holmes pursued the truth was often mistaken for aloof-
ness, even officiousness. “Holmes is a little too scientific for my
tastes – it approaches to cold-bloodedness,” observes Young
Samford in A Study in Scarlet (1887). Even Dr Watson
reproached his old friend, saying “You are really an automaton
– a calculating machine” (The Sign of Four, 1890). But in truth
Holmes was anything but cold-blooded, and his manner any-
thing but machine-like. In disposition he was every bit the
bohemian: unconventional in profession, hours and habits (some
unhealthy), temperamental, ever-inclined to drama (“Some
touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a
well staged performance,” Holmes reminds us in The Valley of
Fear, 1915), and drawn to the outré – hellhounds, vampires, etc.
He was capable of love (of the woman) – but only of the courtly
type. This reveals the thoroughly romantic disposition of a
medieval knight errant – or of a Victorian-era detective who lives
to right wrongs. In method, Holmes’ stock-in-trade empiricism
is literary legend: “You know my method. It is founded upon
the observation of trifles” (‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’
1891). But once the evidence was gathered, through observa-
tion and the collection of clues, the greater difficulty lay ahead:
divining motive, character analysis, moral implications – all that
exceeds the grasp of any data-driven scientific analysis. As
Holmes was to say: “Like all other arts, the Science of Deduc-
tion and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and
patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain
the highest possible perfection in it. Before turning to those
moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the great-
est difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elemen-
tary problems” (A Study in Scarlet).
Holmes’ labelling of Deduction and Analysis (note the capi-
tals) as both science and art places him squarely in Pascal’s philo-
sophical backyard, as does his theory of the moral and mental
aspects of a crime. At the scene of a crime, Holmes could no
 Arts & Letters
more intuit the origin and type of a footprint than he could
identify tobacco ashes by intuition; but data doesn’t commit
crimes. Holmes must also reckon with what transcends the
immediate data – the human factors, such as love, hate, avarice,
lust, ambition, jealousy, and other nefarious motives that inspire
wrongdoing – and ultimately this will provide the conduit to by Melissa Felder
solving the crime. He must also reckon on how virtues and vices

© MELISSA FELDER 2018 PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM

are revealed in or concealed by the subtleties of human behav-
ior, from furtive glances to pregnant pauses. This is all the work
of intuition.
Holmes professed such intuitive ability from the beginning.
He admitted as much to Watson when the latter wondered just
what a consulting detective does in the first Sherlock Holmes
story, A Study in Scarlet. Holmes answers that his clients “are
all people who are in trouble about something, and want a little
enlightening. I listen to their story, they listen to my comments,
and then I pocket a fee.”
“But do you mean to say… that without leaving your room
you can unravel some knot which other men can make nothing
of, although they have seen every little detail for themselves?”
“Quite so. I have a kind of intuition that way.”
Holmes’ achievements derive from his uncanny ability to
balance the physical evidence of a case – the objective data –
with its often more challenging subjective truths, into a single
coherent judgment. Specifically, he was able to account for both
what can be reasoned to and what can’t be, with gimlet preci-
sion. ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ (1892) highlights
as much, as we shall now see.

A Season of Forgiveness
“I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second
morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the
compliments of the season.”

‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ is Holmes’ only Christ-

mas case. The setting, introduced by Watson, is noteworthy.
The virtues and sentiments of the season provide the backdrop
for the story: discussions of love and demonstrations of forgive-
ness, conversion, charity and reverence, however implicit, give
the adventure its uniqueness among the canon. So too does
Holmes’ mindfulness of the season and his manifest understand-
ing of what Christmas means with its capacity to transform lives.
Given its existential import then, the Christmas theme provides
the best milieu for Holmes to exercise his intuition about the
human psyche.
The plot begins with the curious presence of an unloved hat.
“The matter is a perfectly trivial one,” Holmes challenges
Watson, “Here is my lens. You know my methods.” “I can see There is far more to the hat than meets Watson’s eye, then.
nothing,” Watson’s replies, as he studies the hat. Holmes From an easy rendering of the appearance of the hat, including
responds, “That the man was highly intellectual is of course Holmes’ then-fashionable dabbling in the pseudoscience of
obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to- phrenology (that it is obvious that the man was highly intellec-
do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon tual is because the hat was quite large), the great detective moves
evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, from analysis to judgment: ‘evil days’, ‘moral retrogression’,
pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the ‘evil influence’, and an unloving wife are pronouncements ema-
decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, nating from intuitive understanding. Although each of these
probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for judgments is supported by physical evidence – for example, that
the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.” the hat has “a week’s accumulation of dust” translates into the

December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 9

Arts & Letters
loss of a wife’s affection – implicit in Holmes’ judgment is an
understanding of good and evil, of moral and immoral, and of
love which necessarily transcends the evidence. If this case is to
be solved, Holmes has to depend upon his intuition.
When the owner of the hat returns, Holmes’ judgments are
confirmed, giving the cogency and credibility necessary for him
to evaluate additional clues: a bungling commissionaire and a
Christmas goose – the latter producing the priceless gem of a bur-
gled Countess. But although ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbun-
cle’ is named for that royal swag, Holmes is able to judge the stone
in its proper context: “Who would think that so pretty a toy would
be purveyor to the gallows and prison?” Balancing every nuance,
his understanding of contrast unfailing, Holmes then reveals the
true implications of the case with all its moral weight: “Remem-
ber Watson, that though we have so homely a thing as a goose at
one end of this chain, we have at the other a man who will cer-
tainly get seven years’ penal servitude unless we can establish his
innocence. It is possible that our inquiry may but confirm his guilt;
but in any case we have a line of investigation which has been
missed by the police, and which a singular chance has placed in
our hands. Let us follow it out to the bitter end.”
As winding as it is wintry, Holmes’ line of investigation
means, on the one hand, attending to every place where evi-
dence is to be had, and on the other, interacting with every
person involved. His perceptive finesse – the ability to size up
straightaway the personality or psychological profile of anyone
10 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
connected with the case – proves indispensable to the freeing
an innocent man.
Holmes’ encounter with the primary suspect is the story’s
best example of his people skills. Tracking the trail of the gem-
filled goose back to its irascible seller, Holmes and Watson come
face-to-face with their primary suspect, “a little rat-faced
fellow.” To expedite the inevitable, Holmes hails a cab for the
trio and proceeds to lead the thief to confession by degrees:
“But pray tell me, before we go farther, who is it that I have
the pleasure of assisting?” The man hesitated for an instant.
“My name is John Robinson,” he answered with a sidelong
glance. “No, no; the real name,” said Holmes sweetly. “It is
always awkward doing business with an alias.” A flush sprang
to the cheeks of the stranger. “Well then,” said he, “my real
name is James Ryder.”
Holmes stokes the tension with a silent half-hour ride to
Baker Street, wherein, before the home fireplace, he produces
Ryder’s glistening, erstwhile booty: “The game’s up, Ryder,”
said Holmes quietly, “Hold up, man, or you’ll be in the fire!
Give him an arm into his chair, Watson. He’s not got blood
enough to go in for felony with impunity.”
Ryder’s subsequent confession of the burglary, replete with
the details and name of an accomplice, is only punctuated by
kneeling contrition: “For God’s sake, have mercy… think of
my father! Of my mother! It would break their hearts. I never
went wrong before! I never will again. I swear it. I’ll swear on a
Bible. Oh, don’t bring it into court! For Christ’s sake, don’t.”
Holmes considers the penitent Ryder, lecturing and listen-
ing and eliciting more information about the crime, before unex-
pectedly saying: “Get out!”
“What sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!”
Holmes’ admittedly curious rationale for releasing the thief is
due to a shift in focus – again emanating from his intuition. With
the framed man guaranteed his freedom, Holmes’ mind, and
heart, turned to the plight of Ryder. Holmes’ decision is a hunch-
inspired bet that Ryder will henceforth be guided by penitence.
The wager is no whim. Steeped in the spirit of Christmas,
Holmes’ decision was inspired. Ryder’s genuine plea for mercy,
in Christ’s name, has to be met with forgiveness: Ryder’s future
life, even his very soul (not to mention the soul of Holmes)
depends upon it. As Holmes explains to Watson, “This fellow
will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him
to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is
the season of forgiveness.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “The test of a first-rate
intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind
at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” The
sentence could have been written for Holmes. For in ‘The
Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, the world’s greatest detec-
tive displays the brilliant, albeit paradoxical, mind of one who
is able to exercise reason capable of forgiveness, and forgive-
ness that is reasonable. Surely, this is the mark of a mind, and
of a man, who is as endearing as he is noble.
© DR TIM WELDON 2018
Tim Weldon currently serves as Chair of the Department of
Philosophy and Theology at the University of St Francis in Joliet,
Illinois. He can be reached at tweldon@stfrancis.edu.

Ockham’s Rose
Carol Nicholson looks at philosophical themes in The Name Of The Rose.
(WARNING: CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS.)
U
mberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1980) was
an international bestseller that sold fifty million
copies “which puts it in the league of Harry Potter,
and ahead of Gone with the Wind, Roget’s Thesaurus,
and To Kill a Mockingbird” (Ted Gioia, postmodernmystery.com).
Combining elements of detective fiction, the historical novel,
the philosophical quest and the father-son initiation tale, the
novel has appeal for many different kinds of readers. In the blurb
on the first Italian edition, Eco wrote that he wanted to reach
three different audiences – “the largest market, the mass of rela-
tively unsophisticated readers who concentrated on plot; a second
public, readers who examined historical novels to find connec-
tions or analogies between the present and the past; and a third
and even smaller elite audience, postmodern readers who enjoyed
ironic references to other literary works and who assumed that
a good work of fiction would produce a ‘whodunit’ of quota-
Rose
© PAUL GREGORY
by Paul Gregory
Arts & Letters
tions.” Most academic critics interpret it as a ‘postmodern’ novel,
but Eco didn’t entirely approve of the label. He had distanced
himself from postmodernist theories of interpretation, arguing
that in the last few decades, ‘the rights of the interpreters’ have
been overstressed at the expense of ‘the rights of the text’. He
wrote, “I have the impression that [the term ‘postmodern’] is
applied today to anything the user of the term happens to like.”
Indeed, so much scholarly attention has focused on the post-
modern aspects of The Name of the Rose that other themes have
been neglected, although they are likely to be of more interest
to the general reader. So fear not, gentle reader, in this article I
will not talk about postmodern theory. Instead I will explore the
philosophy of William of Ockham as a key to understanding the
philosophical dimensions of the novel.
Two Williams
Eco’s detective, William of Baskerville, is a Franciscan monk who
at first appears to be a medieval version of Sherlock Holmes. His
name even echoes The Hound of the Baskervilles. His disciple and
scribe, a young Benedictine novice, is named Adso, which sounds
a little like Watson. In appearance too Baskerville resembles
Holmes – he is tall and thin with sharp, penetrating eyes and a
somewhat beaky nose – except that Baskerville has fair hair and
freckles. Like Holmes, who used cocaine to alleviate boredom
between cases, Baskerville occasionally takes drugs, chewing on
mysterious herbs that he learned about from Arab scholars. “A
good Christian can sometimes learn also from the infidels,” he
tells Adso, “but herbs that are good for an old Franciscan are not
good for a young Benedictine.”
At the beginning of the story, Baskerville astonishes a group
of monks with a dazzling display of Holmesian methods when he
figures out that they are searching for the Abbot’s runaway horse
and also correctly identifies the location, size, and even the name
of the missing horse, based on his observations of minute details
and his knowledge of texts describing medieval equestrian ideals.
However, when Baskerville investigates a series of murders in an
Italian monastery, it becomes clear that he is not a Holmes clone.
For one thing, he is less sure of himself and more skeptical about
his own methods. Holmes rather arrogantly says, “I never guess.
It is a shocking habit – destructive to the logical faculty” (The Sign
of the Four). Baskerville, on the other hand, says that guessing is
the essence of his method. In the case of the horse, he tells Adso,
“When I saw the clues I guessed many complementary and con-
tradictory hypotheses.” His method of detection is neither deduc-
tion nor induction, but what the American pragmatist philoso-
pher C.S. Peirce called ‘abduction’ – a process of making conjec-
tures and eliminating those which are impossible or unnecessary.
Another way in which Baskerville differs from Holmes is in
his attitude toward women. In The Sign of Four, Holmes noto-
riously announces, “Women are never to be entirely trusted –
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 11
Arts & Letters
not the best of them” – which Watson rightly dismisses as an
atrocious statement. Baskerville, on the other hand, is portrayed William of Ockham
as a proto-feminist with liberal ideas about women and sexual- by Stephen Lahey
ity that contrast sharply with the traditionalist views of Adso,
who refers to “that sink of vice that is the female body”, and the
elderly monk Ubertino, who believes that “it is through woman
that the Devil penetrates men’s hearts!” Baskerville retorts, “I
cannot convince myself that God chose to introduce such a foul
being into creation without also endowing it with some virtues.”
Baskerville’s differences from Holmes are due to the influ-
ence of his (non-fictional) friend, William of Ockham (1288-
1347), whose radical philosophy laid the groundwork for the
modern era and was partly responsible for bringing about the
end of the medieval worldview. (Eco initially considered
Ockham for his detective, but gave up the idea because he didn’t
find him a very attractive person.)
While he was still a student at Oxford, Ockham’s brilliant lec-
tures transformed philosophy, but he never completed his degree
because he was summoned by Pope John XXII to Avignon for
questioning. In 1327, the year in which The Name of the Rose is
set, Ockham faced fifty-six charges of heresy, and was excommu-
nicated after escaping to the protection of Emperor Louis of
Bavaria. This put an end to his academic career, and he spent the
rest of his life as a political activist advocating freedom of speech,
the separation of church and state, and arguing against the infal-
libility of the Pope. Ockham found the Pope’s pronouncements
opposing poverty in monastic orders “heretical, erroneous, stupid,

ridiculous, fantastic, insane and defamatory. They are patently
perverse and equally contrary to orthodox faith, good morals,
natural reason, certain experience, and brotherly love.” The Pope
(who was the richest man in the world at the time) responded by
threatening that “he was prepared to burn a town down to smoke
Ockham out.” Ockham probably died of the same outbreak of
the plague that kills William of Baskerville at the end of the novel.
If he hadn’t, he might have met a more fiery fate.
Ockham’s Sharp Thinking
William of Ockham is best known for his famous ‘razor’, which
is simply the principle of simplicity or parsimony in making
judgements. As Baskerville expresses the principle, “Dear Adso,
one should not multiply explanations and causes unless it is
strictly necessary.” In The First Deadly Sin (1973), Lawrence
Sanders gives the most succinct summary of the principle: “Cut
out the crap.” In Ockham’s time there was a lot of scholastic
crap to be cut. This small tool made a big difference in slicing
away the elaborate ideas of essential forms, hierarchies and tele-
ologies that was the intellectual foundation of the Medieval
European world.
Ockham himself used his principle of simplicity of explana-
tion to make a strong case for nominalism, the idea that the world
consists entirely of individual things, with no so-called ‘univer-
sals’ existing outside the mind (such as, for example, an essential
‘blueness’ in which all blue things partook). Nominalism pro-
vided the foundation for Ockham’s belief in free will, which he
thought could not be limited by pre-existing essences, inviolable
laws of nature, or even an omnipotent God. In Art and Beauty in
the Middle Ages (1987) Eco sums up the implications of Ockham’s
philosophy by saying, “If man no longer sees a given order in
© STEPHEN LAHEY
things, if his world is no longer encompassed by fixed and defi-
nite meanings, relations, species and genera, anything then is pos-
sible. He finds that he is free, and by definition a creator.”
Ockham was also skeptical of Aristotle’s definition of man
as ‘the rational animal’, and he suggested that we might as well
define human beings as ‘the risible animals’ – those animals who
are capable of laughter. This idea is important in The Name of
the Rose, because Jorge, the blind librarian, despises laughter for
its power to undermine fear of authority, and because the only
surviving copy of Aristotle’s lost work On Comedy plays a major
role in the solution of the mystery.
It follows from Ockham’s nominalism that if there is no
essence of man, then there is no essence of woman either.
Rather, there are only individual men and women and the ideas
in our minds about them (which are fallible and subject to
change). Ockham did not write much about women, but we do
know that he questioned the natural supremacy of men and
argued for a greater role for women in the church. Baskerville
understands the gender implications of Ockham’s nominalism,
and he is the only character in The Name of the Rose who is able
to see women as individuals rather than versions of the archetype
of either the Blessed Virgin or the diabolical temptress.
A House of Desires
There is much talk about sex in the novel, but little actual sex,
because the monks in the abbey have no contact with women,

12 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019


and their desires for each other are necessarily hidden. In the one
explicit sex scene Adso loses his virginity in the kitchen one night
to the only woman in the novel. She’s a beautiful young peasant,
and the novice monk falls in love with her. When Adso confesses
his sin, Baskerville responds with kindness, “You must not do it
again, of course, but it is not so monstrous that you were tempted
to do it… For a monk to have, at least once in his life, experience
of carnal passion, so that he can one day be indulgent and under-
standing with the sinners he will counsel and console… is not
something to vituperate too much once it has happened.” After
learning that his lover had snuck into the monastery to trade
sexual favors with the ugly old cellarer for a few scraps of food,
Adso is horrified and exclaims, “A harlot!” Baskerville gently cor-
rects him: “A poor peasant girl, Adso. Probably with smaller
brothers to feed.” Adso is heartbroken when she is burned as a
witch, though he does not even know her name. The nameless
girl is significant in the story as a symbol of innocent suffering,
and her fate teaches Adso a hard lesson about the injustice of the
world, foreshadowing Baskerville’s own conclusions at the end.
Baskerville sees even his enemies as individuals, understanding
how in each of them their sexual desire has been differently twisted
into fanatical lust for money, power, or knowledge. He explains
to Adso that there are many kinds of lust that are not only of the
flesh and can be far more dangerous. The Pope lusts for riches;
and Bernard Gui, the overly zealous Inquisitor, has “a distorted
lust for justice that becomes identified with a lust for power.”
Baskerville says that those who truly love knowledge understand
that “The good of a book lies in its being read”; but lust simply
for books, “like all lusts… is sterile and has nothing to do with
love, not even carnal love.” The monastery’s library “was perhaps
born to save the books it houses, but now it lives to bury them.”
Baskerville concludes that Jorge’s lust for power, disguised as love
of God, has turned the library, whose purpose should be to share
knowledge rather than hoard it, into a ‘sink of iniquity’.
The novel can be read as a study of the seven deadly sins as
different forms of lust, each illustrated by one of the characters.
Even Baskerville realizes at the end that he has fallen into the
sin of intellectual pride, and he laughs at his folly. He had imag-
ined that the murders followed a pattern based on the Book of
Revelation, but this conceit led him astray and prevented him
from solving the mystery in time to save the library from burn-
ing down. He asks, “Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved
stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have
known well that there is no order in the universe.” Adso is con-
fused so Baskerville says, “It’s hard to accept the idea that there
cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the
free will of God and his omnipotence. So the freedom of God
is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.”
Thus the most devastating implications of Ockham’s method
become clear to Baskerville when he sees from this that the razor
is double-edged – it destroys certainty in God as well as certainty
in the order that science tries to impose on the world. Baskerville
adds, “Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make
people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only
truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion
for the truth.” Baskerville’s laughter at himself frees him from
the most dangerous form of lust, then – his certainty of having
found the truth.
Arts & Letters
Medieval Modernism
The burning of the library is symbolic of the destruction of the
Medieval worldview, for which some historians give Ockham the
credit (or the blame). Afterwards, in giving Adso his spare pair of
glasses, Baskerville symbolically passes on his knowledge and
curiosity. By showing that the books are destroyed but the love of
learning lives on, Eco confounds common prejudices concerning
the Medieval period. He writes that “everyone has his own idea,
usually corrupt, of the Middle Ages” (Rose, postscript, p.535), which
was saddled with a bad name by the Renaissance that followed.
Rather than the apparent dogmatism and immobility of the period,
it was actually a time of “incredible intellectual vitality” and “cul-
tural revolution.” It is astonishing to realize that the separation of
church and state and the equality of women are not modern ideas,
but originated in the Middle Ages. And many centuries before
David Hume, Ockham criticized the idea of a necessary connec-
tion between cause and effect; and even more centuries before
Karl Popper, Ockham understood the scientific method as a pro-
cess of conjecture and refutation. Ironically, contemporary schol-
ars have claimed to discover in The Name of the Rose ‘postmodern’
ideas about knowledge and truth that are at least eight hundred
years old. Unlike the traditional detective novel, The Name of the
Rose does not offer comfortable reassurance of the triumph of good
over evil and order over chaos. It also makes readers uncomfort-
able by showing us a picture of fourteenth century Europe, in all
of its brilliance and horror, as a mirror of our own age.
Eco writes, “The fundamental question of philosophy… is the
same as the question of the detective novel: Who is guilty? And
any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party” (Ibid).
I don’t claim to understand this cryptic statement, but I’m guess-
ing that it may be intended to accuse modern readers of not being
honest about the darkness of our own era. In The Name of the Rose,
Jorge deliberately destroys Aristotle’s book on comedy - at the
cost of his own life - to stop others from reading it. In a 1996
interview with Theodore Beale, Eco said, “Even our times have
been full of dictatorships that have burned books. What does it
mean, the Salman Rushdie persecution, if not to try to destroy a
book? Even today we have this continual struggle between people
that believe certain texts are dangerous and must be eliminated.
So my story is not so outdated, even though it takes place in the
Middle Ages. We are not better” (umbertoeco.com).
I suspect that few readers will agree with Eco that our civi-
lization has made no moral progress in the past millennium, but
I think he is right that his story is not outdated. The seven deadly
sins are still alive and well, as are the pompous intellectuals,
greedy politicians, and lustful priests. We guard our libraries
with laws and pay walls that prohibit public access to knowl-
edge, and persecute those who leak information. We don’t burn
people at the stake any more, but we have our own methods of
torturing heretics. Eco’s novel pokes fun at our arrogant modern
(or postmodern) sense of superiority, and challenges us to look
with the skeptical and compassionate eye of William of
Baskerville, the humble Holmes with a heart, at the cruelty and
hypocrisy of the world we have made, and to laugh at ourselves.
© DR CAROL NICHOLSON 2018
Carol Nicholson teaches philosophy at Rider University in Lawrenceville,
NJ. Her article, ‘Rorty's Romantic Polytheism’ will be published in the
Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Richard Rorty. nicholson@rider.edu
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 13
Arts & Letters
Can Art Fight Fascism?
Justin Kaushall considers Adorno’s argument that radical art
radically changes consciousness.

A
t a time when populist movements are on the march
throughout the world, why should we pay attention
to art? Isn’t it self-indulgent to concern oneself with
art, music, or literature when the foundations of soci-
ety and of the international order are being shaken? Or can art
itself really change the world?
Art Protests
Let’s look at what art can and can’t do in terms of politics. An
example: in 2016, the artists Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman,
Louise Lawler, Joan Jonas, and Julie Mehretu argued that it was
appropriate to protest President Trump’s inauguration by sym-
bolically closing art museums and galleries across the United
States. The artists stated that the protest would not be “a strike
against art, theater or any other cultural form. It is an invitation
to motivate these activities anew, to reimagine these spaces as
places where resistant forms of thinking, seeing, feeling and
acting can be produced.” The proposition caused controversy.
In the Guardian newspaper (9th January 2017), Jonathan Jones
argued that the protest merely demonstrated “shallow radical
posturing by some very well-heeled and comfortable members
of a cultural elite.” In other words, since the artists are not taking
modernist artists such as James Joyce, Arnold Schoenberg,
Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan and Pablo Picasso were able to indi-
rectly resist society’s unethical practices through reconfiguring
the individual’s experience, and showing us how our capacity for
rational thought has been subverted by society into irrationality.
He argued that commercial art (pop music, Hollywood films,
TV shows, popular novels, etc.) fails to challenge social and his-
torical norms because it merely follows public demand. It is often
infantile and formulaic. It fails to articulate any distance from
society, and so is incapable of changing individual consciousness.
For example, popular folk music strives to reinforce national and
cultural identity through repeating narratives with which most
listeners already identify (In America, for instance, these narra-
tives might involve strength, independence, freedom, self-
reliance: generally speaking, individualism).
Radical art must resist assimilation into the status quo. Accord-
ing to Adorno, its purpose is to incite an experience of otherness
– of that which falls outside the audience’s social-cultural norms.
While living in exile from the Nazis in the 1940s, Adorno wrote:
“there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling
on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of

© WOODROW COWHER 2018 PLEASE VISIT WOODRAWSPICTURES.COM

a personal risk, their political protest fails. Jones continues: “Let’s
face it: art and serious culture are completely marginal to Amer-
ican life. Closing museums is not likely to have any effect on
those who support [Trump].” Jones ends by stating: “The real George Orwell by
reason art strikes and fine words at the Golden Globes are futile Woodrow Cowher
is that they cannot do justice to the danger the world is in.” 2018
According to Jones, then, art cannot express the horrors of the
world adequately. He implies that any artwork that claims to be
radical merely sidesteps the concrete danger faced for instance
by those who protest on the streets against nuclear war, social
prejudice, or police violence, risking arrest, prison time, harass-
ment, or death. At worst, artists face immaterial danger – for
instance, by creating artworks that experiment with colour or
line; or a work that inspires an emotional response but little else;
or by developing new artistic techniques that may challenge
audiences, but which only a tiny minority actually experience.
In light of all this, why don’t we just accept that art is powerless
in the social and political sphere? Why don’t artists just accept
that they will always remain on the sidelines of radical politics?
The German critical theorist (and music critic) Theodor W.
Adorno would have rejected Jones’ argument. Adorno (1903-
1969) defended art’s capacity to make us aware of violence (as it
appeared in capitalism and fascism), and its power to express suf-
fering and hope which cannot be fully communicated in lan-
guage. Art may resist injustice; not through directly achieving
practical change, but by forcing the audience to become aware
of the violence that governs their own history and the social order
within which they and we are trapped. Art’s unique mode of resis- George Orwell, who literally fought fascism as a volunteer in the
tance involves provoking thought rather than action. For Adorno, Spanish civil war before writing Animal Farm and 1984.

14 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019


negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better” (Minima
Moralia, 1951, p.25). He meant that the traditional idea of beauty
should no longer govern artists’ production of artworks. Such
beauty claims to promote peace and harmony and to allow tran-
scendence from the everyday. In reality, however, it passes over
the violence that circulates beneath the surface of polite society.
One might think here of those airbrushed ads on billboards that
seek to cover over the reality of institutionalized misogyny or
sexual violence. Instead, true art should attempt to (nonviolently)
imitate the violence of society in order to express it. Such an
attempt can be seen in the dissonance of Schoenberg's music.
Schoenberg, in order to express historical violence through aes-
thetic form, produces a new formal technique for composing
music: the twelve-tone system. This system works by rejecting
harmony. Instead, dissonant works express the difference - the
qualitative uniqueness - of their constituent tones. The opposi-
tion between the particular tones expresses social violence. For
Adorno, true artworks – those that do not shy away from express-
ing suffering – are dissonant, enigmatic and difficult to under-
stand. When we reflect on a Beckett play, for example, we real-
ize that what ordinarily passes for rationality in capitalist society
(the practical desire to gain as much as possible for as little effort
as possible, for instance) is but a distorted version of true ratio-
nality, which is not governed by practical-instrumental impera-
tives, but which instead enables philosophical reflection and the
experience of otherness and difference.
Art Challenges
So how can art fight fascism?
First, although radical, challenging art is somewhat marginal
to Western life, it does not need a large audience in order to
have some destabilizing effect. In his article doubting art’s polit-
ical usefulness, Jones implied that the only experiences that
count culturally or politically are ones that can be measured on
a mass scale. Yet even if a single individual feels shock and horror
when looking at, say, Picasso’s Guernica, the painting can be
said to have achieved its effect.
Adorno’s philosophy is explicitly formulated to resist prag-
matism. Rather, “only what does not fit into this world is true”
(Aesthetic Theory, 1970, p.76). Adorno is saying that truth is in
fact a moral category. This allows a true artwork to avoid con-
formity and express individuality, difference, or possibility.
When it adheres blindly to social categories, the work may
achieve a measure of apparent popularity, but it loses something
too. Adorno argues that ethical action requires independence
of mind and critical thought as well as the experience of partic-
ularity (that is, of a thing’s qualitative or material uniqueness).
How is art able to reach or enable this concept of moral truth?
This brings me to the second reason why art is capable of
resistance: artworks do not communicate ideas through con-
cepts that have already become the well-worn currency of every-
day speech. Rather, artworks express truth through poetic or
artistic language which must keep a distance from ideology or
from conventions that have been simply accepted rather than
critically examined. So Adorno thinks that the best modern art-
works express dissonance: that is, horror and suffering. As he
observes: “Celan’s poems want to speak of the most extreme
horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes neg-
Arts & Letters
ative” (Aesthetic Theory p.405). In this way art may indeed ‘do
justice’ to the damaged state of the world.
Adorno would further argue that since capitalism strongly
compels individuals to value objects in monetary terms regard-
less of their intrinsic value or usefulness, true works of modern
art should construct objects that are useless, and yet which have
intrinsic (and non-quantifiable) value. So he argues against making
artworks explicitly political because that would mean that they’ve
become instruments instead of autonomous constructions. For
instance, although Percy Bysshe Shelley is a great poet, some of
his best known works (England in 1819, Masque of Anarchy…) to
some extent use poetry to communicate a political point of view.
By contrast, John Keats’ work uses themes that are part of tradi-
tion in order to criticize tradition without turning the artwork
into a political tool (see for instance, To Autumn, and the famous
Ode to a Grecian Urn). For the same reasons, Bob Dylan is less
effective an artist than Beethoven. The latter challenges our expe-
rience more than the former because he is less overtly political.
This argument may appear elitist, yet for Adorno that’s beside
the point. An artwork’s autonomy from society enables it to cri-
tique society – specifically, through allowing a subject to realize
what an object not determined by instrumental reason (or hege-
monic exchange-value) would look like. Thus any work that is
not sufficiently autonomous – for instance, commercial TV
shows, which rely on corporate sponsors and formulaic story-
lines, or most popular music, which again uses melodies that can
be easily digested and recalled without much effort – must fail
as art. Similarily, overtly political art tells the subject what to
think, through providing a blueprint to which her experience
must conform. Autonomous art, on the contrary, allows the sub-
ject to experience otherness on its own terms. It opens, rather
than closes, critical thought.
Art Opens
A universal concept is incapable of completely encompassing
all the particular features of an actual object. Adorno calls this
the non-identity of concept and object (Minima Moralia p.127).
We encounter this when we realize that our experience has cer-
tain conceptual blind spots – that for example, we cannot always
adequately describe the material features of objects in language.
Similarly, certain artworks have a significance that may be expe-
rienced but which cannot be described conceptually. Concepts
obscure particularity rather than expressing it.
Art can open us up to experiences of otherness. But such
experiences are precisely what fascism wants to shut down and
deny. How does non-identity appear aesthetically? It might
show up in the art gallery when we stand baffled before an appar-
ently impossible, strange, or puzzling work – such as Méret
Oppenheim’s Object, constructed in 1936: a teacup, saucer, and
spoon, all covered in fur.
Modern art provides an experience of otherness that cannot
be determined by conventional categories. For another exam-
ple, take the first stanza of the well-known poem Death Fugue
by Paul Celan (probably written in 1945):
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 15
Arts & Letters
we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling he
whistles his hounds to stay close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us play up for the dance.
Can this poem be easily put in an aesthetic category such as
beautiful, sublime, ugly, nasty, nice, weird, or cute? First, let
me note that since all of those categories are very highly speci-
fied in normal cultural use, they must be revised so that they
are not mere cultural fantasies or projections. Second, on
Adorno’s account, aesthetic categories should not be consid-
ered to be subjective emotional responses. Instead they must
be considered to be features of the object itself. Only from this
perspective may we progress towards an understanding of the
artwork’s inner constitution, its capacity for expression and
truth-production, and its illusory surface.
Méret Oppenheim’s
Object
1936
Art Inspires
Now let us move on to the fourth way that art may resist fas-
cism. Artworks may inspire us to experience hope and possibility
at a time when despair and hopelessness seem inevitable.
Adorno provides a rare glimpse of positivity when he writes:
“Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and,
out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming
under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars”
(Minima Moralia p.156). Fascism and capitalism both attempt
to control nature (‘the conquest of strange stars’) – to harness
otherness so that it may be easily identified, assimilated, and
controlled. Through its radical form, art pushes back against
this drive to dominate the world. For example, Paul Celan’s
work breaks many of the rules that govern traditional poetry:
he sometimes coins new words, and rather than giving us a
straightforward message, he challenges us to manufacture a mes-
sage to take away from the poem. His poetry resembles a code
more than a narrative – moreover, it’s a code that cannot be
broken. As Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory (unfinished at his
death in 1969): “A cryptogram of the new is the image of col-
lapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of the collapse
does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia” (p.41). Art may indi-
cate utopia – that is, the possibility of another world in which
there is no longer a need for radical social critique – through
developing new forms or techniques that individuals have never
16 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
experienced before. Only by negating the existing forms –
through art, for instance – might utopia begin to be visible.
Wait a second, you might reply: Why should I care about
utopia? Well, Adorno’s concept of utopia is strictly negative: it
is a limiting concept which reminds us that every act of criti-
cism logically entails a case in which the negated elements do
not exist. In other words, the possibility of criticism implies the
possibility of progress.
This brings me to the final reason why art may resist fascism.
Art is able to critically think about society, and so indicate a
better one, because it is partially autonomous from society and
history. Artworks potentially provide a means of or refuge for
independent social critique. Such a critique may not bring about
practical change – for instance, it cannot reverse a President’s
executive orders. However, a critique involves thinking, which
pushes against the blind acceptance of pervasive values. So
although they may seem impotent compared to mass protest
movements, radical works of art are important precisely because
they do not use the same power or force that rules society. The
fact that artworks cannot bring about change is in fact one of
their virtues, because it means that they lie outside the logic of
society. Instead certain artworks may help us see beyond the
utilitarian structures that govern everyday experience. “Every
work of art is an uncommitted crime,” mused Adorno (Minima
Moralia p.111). In other words, an artwork is potentially an act
of sabotage against an intolerable social order. Yet since such
an artwork is autonomous from those rules and norms that
govern the social order, it cannot change reality. The work’s
truth is expressed aesthetically, not practically.
For Adorno, thinking is implicitly a form of resistance, and all
practical activity requires thought and judgment if it is to avoid
blindness. Of course, not all artworks are progressive or part of
the avant-garde. Adorno argues that many Soviet realist paintings
remain mere propaganda: they fail to develop a formal technique
that remains autonomous from society. Some Surrealist paintings
or poems remain sexist or misogynist because they objectify the
female body, or repress the undeniable influence of women artists,
writers, and intellectuals. And remember that the genius Richard
Wagner was also a notorious anti-Semite, and his operas express
the fascist desire to return to a mythical Aryan past.
Art Abides
Human beings, like artworks, inhabit two worlds at the same
time: the actual and the possible. What compass should we use
to direct our course in such turbulent times? Samuel Beckett
indicates a directionless direction:
“You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me,
until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps
it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they
have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that
opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it
will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the
silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
(Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, 1959, p.418).
© JUSTIN NEVILLE KAUSHALL 2018
Justin Neville Kaushall is completing his PhD at the University of
Warwick. He lives in Edinburgh.

The Case Against Conceptual Art
Trevor Pateman makes the case for the prosecution.
S
ara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking (2017) is an
impressive piece of recent autobiographical fiction. In it,
the narrator repeatedly sets herself the task of identify-
ing a work of art – usually a work of conceptual art –
which relates to whatever topic she’s currently thinking about.
Some of the works are well-known, such as Tracey Emin’s My
Bed (1998) and Richard Long’s A Line Made By Walking (1967),
but most are more obscure. Though at the end of her book
Baume urges us to go to the works ourselves, she has accidentally
illustrated the main weakness of conceptual art: you don’t have to
see it (or otherwise experience it) in order to respond to it. You
just need a description spelling out the idea – the thought – that
the actual artwork itself was created to illustrate.
Conceptual art is basically illustration, and that is its weakness
and banality as art. That is to say, the realisation of the idea may
often be elaborate and costly, and sometimes fleeting, but it is usu-
ally pretty much irrelevant. We can debate the concept all night
with only a nod to the work which illustrated it. There is really no
need for us to confront the work itself (if indeed it still exists to be
confronted). Baume says as much herself, through her protagonist
Frankie: “Works about Time, I test myself: Christian Marclay,
The Clock, 2010. A 24-hour film, a collage of extracts… Each
extract represents a minute of the day… I have never seen it for
real. Right the way through from beginning to end. I don’t imag-
ine many people have. Nevertheless, I love this piece. I love the
idea” (p.181). How can you love the piece if you haven’t seen it?
All you can love is the idea of it. That’s almost certainly enough;
if you already love it, it would almost certainly be a waste of your
time to watch it. And you certainly don’t need twenty four hours
to get the idea.
Back in 1997, as part of the Turner Prize show, London’s
Tate Gallery showed Gillian Wearing’s Sixty Minutes on a large
screen. This is a video in which a group of people are lined up
and asked to stand stock still for sixty minutes while they are
filmed by a static camera. It would have caused a log-jam in the
gallery if visitors had paused for sixty minutes to watch it. The
gallery correctly assumed that everyone would give it at most a
few minutes, to get the general idea, and then move on. I sat cross-
legged on the floor (no seats provided) for nineteen minutes,
outlasting every other visitor in that period by at least seventeen
minutes. What would we say about a cinema film which could
not hold its audience for more than a few minutes, after which
they would all leave because they had got the general idea? Put
differently, Baume could simply have made up the majority of the
many conceptual art pieces to which she refers in her novel; and
in a work of fiction, who could object to that? There would have
been no loss of idea. But we would simply laugh at someone who
said of her novel, “I have never actually read it from beginning
to end. But I love this work. I love the idea.”
Art is something you have to experience at first hand to
respond to it appropriately. You would make a fool of yourself
Arts & Letters
Toffee Apple
by Da Luigi, 2018
if you started to talk about a painting or a film or a play by saying,
“I haven’t seen it but my wife has, and she says…” A picture in a
book isn’t enough, either, because for visual artworks there are, at
the very least, problems of scale and natural light. So conceptual
art fails as art because it invites us to respond to it without expe-
riencing it.
Not so long ago I wrote a critical piece about a painting by a
Dutch portrait painter, Simon Maris (1875-1959), which had been
re-titled by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: they had changed its
title from Young Negro Girl to Young Girl with a Fan. From the
museum’s online images I was able to argue that both titles missed
the fact that the ‘girl’ was wearing a gold band on her ring finger.
Surely she was a married woman? Though re-titled with much
attendant publicity, no one appeared to have looked at the painting.
Then I travelled over to Amsterdam to look at it for myself. As I
entered the room in which it was displayed there was a fairly dra-
matic shock awaiting me. What had looked like a cheerful yellow
bonnet in all the reproductions now suddenly dazzled me as if it
were a golden halo. In consequence, what I had hitherto thought of
as a fairly formal portrait suddenly took me in another direction,
towards the tradition of what are called ‘Black Madonnas’ – por-
traits or statues of the Virgin Mary with a haloed black face.
The sight of the halo in this case also reminded me of my own
conviction: a painting is meant to be seen; and there is really no
other way of seeing it properly than standing in front of it. In
Painting as an Art, Richard Wollheim (1987) said that he was only
going to write about paintings which he had not only seen but
spent time with; he gave a guide figure of three hours per painting.
That bears some thinking about in a world where a sixty minute
video in the Tate Gallery holds the attention of viewers for two
minutes at most, and Sara Baume’s narrator can claim to love a
work she has never even seen.
© TREVOR PATEMAN 2018
Trevor Pateman’s essay ‘Young Girl With A Fan?’ is in his book
The Best I Can Do (2016). He develops materialist ideas about art
in Materials and Medium: An Aesthetics (2016).
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 17
Arts & Letters
Creating the Beautiful Society
Francis Akpata explains how Schiller saw art as a path to utopia.
T
he Athenian soldier and statesman Themistocles
(523-458 BC) once said, “I cannot fiddle but I can
build a great state out of a little city.” How do we
build, better than a great state, a beautiful society?
When one hears the term ‘beautiful society’ it may conjure
images of a well-designed city, highly educated people dressed in
elegant garments, or somewhere people glamorously affirm their
higher social status. This was not, however, the vision of the
German Romantic philosopher Johann Christoph Friedrich von
Schiller (1759-1805). Friedrich Schiller’s beautiful society is one
where humanity has progressed from a state where people are pri-
marily motivated by their natural needs – he calls this the sensuous
will – to a higher state where their primary incentive is the moral
will – that is, where citizens behave in a harmonious, unified
manner out of a natural inclination. More specifically, in the beau-
tiful society, people no longer experience the conflict between the
sensuous will and the moral will. The absence of this conflict
makes them stand apart from people in other societies because
they now possess what Schiller describes as a ‘beautiful soul’. And
18 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
An Architectural Fantasy
by Dirck van Delen, 1634
they are able to develop beautiful souls by being exposed to great
works of art, since great art sets them free from their sensuous
wills and enables them to embrace the rational and moral will.
The Artist Recreation of Character
This was a new idea about the function of art. Schiller’s prede-
cessor Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) described art very differently,
arguing that a beautiful work of art produces pleasure in a disin-
terested observer. Kant argued that a great work of art objectively
stimulates this pleasurable feeling. That is to say, for us to see that
an object is beautiful is not just to give in to our personal inclina-
tion; rather, the pleasure we feel is something anyone will expe-
rience if they approach the work of art in the right fashion.
If like Kant we come to see art primarily as a source of plea-
sure, we need to ask, “What’s so special about that? How do we
distinguish art from football, cricket, bird-watching or eating a
good meal? Why is art different from other pleasurable endeav-
ours? To put it bluntly, why should we care about art?”
Schiller's answer is that continual exposure to art has a signifi-

cant effect on the individual. It brings about a balance between
our two fundamental drives – between our desire for sensation and
our desire to reason as manifest in the moral will. Anyone able to
achieve this harmonious balance is a beautiful person. A beautiful
person has developed the capacity both to act morally and
to enjoy the pleasures the world has to offer. This inter-
nal equilibrium sets them free because they are not
dominated either by strife or by puritanical moral
rectitude. According to Schiller, a person who
has achieved this balance is complete. So Schiller
had moved away from Kant’s experiential
account of beauty to a functional one, although
he had chosen a function we would not normally
associate with art. And unlike Kant, who in his
Critique of Judgement (1790) concentrated on the
beauty of natural objects, Schiller was more inter-
Schiller
ested in the inner beauty of the human soul.
Schiller recommended this exposure to the arts in his most
substantial philosophical work, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of
Man (1794), where it is part of a developed political theory. In
every person there is a ratio of the sensuous will to the moral/ratio-
nal will, and it is detrimental for either will to dominate the psyche.
Yet governments seem either to tolerate or enhance this imbal-
ance. To Schiller, most societies do not have true political and
economic freedom, and this absence of true freedom prevents
people developing the rational/moral will. Political regimes either
directly or indirectly encourage their citizens to live in an overly
sensuous manner that corrupts their moral growth. Exposure to
aesthetic experience brings the balance about. Exposure to art
brings about the good person because during our artistic experi-
ence we are shielded from the deleterious pressures of society.
When we look at a painting or listen to music, for example, we go
through a period of non-practical engagement with the world, and
in this way can improve the equilibrium of our character.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) reinforced this view, argu-
ing that the aesthetic experience is one way we can achieve a
hiatus from the harsh realities of existence. Every day we strug-
gle and compete, we experience loss and have to live with dis-
satisfaction. Schopenhauer believed that when we read a poem
or contemplate a wonderful painting we experience a break from
the continual strife which dominates life.
Why Art Works Work
Schiller stressed that we are not merely physical objects, nor ani-
mals whose primary objective is survival. Rather, we are self-con-
scious beings who describe ourselves through our experiences, and
we can express self-consciousness only by achieving some balance
among the varied multitude of experiences with which our envi-
ronments confront us. As human beings we function by adopting
ideals, which to different degrees focus the drives to sense or to
reason. The expressions of different ideals may oppose each other.
Some ideals might demand absolute practicality, whilst others
demand contemplation. We are able to achieve a good sense of
self only by attaining a sense of harmony. As Schiller wrote, we
aim to “bring harmony to the variety of appearances and to affirm
[our] person amid all the changes of [our] condition.” I would add
that human beings have the unique ability to imagine or visualise:
we look at the world around us and contemplate how to bring new
Arts & Letters
things into existence. Art encourages that ability: the poet achieves
it using words, the director through film, and the sculptor by bring-
ing figures to life from stone. This ability to imagine, facilitated
by art, is beneficial to society. Through art, the artist expresses
better ways that humanity can exist. A reflection on art leads
to an internal discussion through which we re-exam-
ine our society and its values. After watching Arthur
Miller's play The Crucible, we are compelled to
reconsider the way in which we typecast people.
When we read Wilfred Owen's poetry, we sym-
pathise with soldiers and the victims of war. Bob
Marley's music encourages us to disregard our
differences and unite. During an artistic expe-
rience, we are able to utilise the breadth of our
imaginative capacity. The experience of a work of
art (especially I think in fiction or drama) brings to
life the notion that other people are as real as ourselves,
and so we are able to better identify with other individuals.
Works of art enable us to see the world from the perspective of
others. The world no longer revolves around us: we can hold a
balance between achieving our own goals, acknowledging the
struggles of others, and contributing to society.
Because neither fundamental human drive – to the senses or
to reason – dominates the beautiful person, he or she is self-
determining. He or she can decide when to strive for (say) wealth,
and when to be virtuous. It is art that enables anyone to achieve
this control. During an artistic experience we change our
response to things in the world. Therefore it is the job of the
artist to present improving ideas in a manner attractive to the
perceiver who, in turn, must develop sensitivity to what is placed
before them. When we read a well-written novel or poem, or
really look carefully at some beautiful painting or sculpture, it
may open us towards new and positive social ideals, which we
will recognise and internalise.
Schiller’s goal in encouraging exposure to art was always the
aesthetic state that can lead to the formation of the beautiful soci-
ety. The beautiful society is a place where people are moved by
love, virtue, benevolence, honour and chivalry. He said the “aes-
thetic state makes society possible because it satisfies the will of
all through the nature of the individual”. Through exposure to
art, individuals are no longer simply self-regarding; they become
capable of internalising other people’s realities. Schiller also
thought that we must achieve an aesthetic state before we can
achieve a moral state. It is the imaginative leaps taken in the aes-
thetic state that allow us to reach the freedom of the moral state.
People are free in the moral state because their wills are domi-
nated neither by their sense nor by mere arid calculation. A whole
society of such people would strive for social improvement.
If Schiller is correct both in his goals and in the means to them,
then the way forward is clear. To achieve the beautiful society we
need to recognise the importance of our artistic experience. We
must not be obsessed solely with mundane or political or eco-
nomic issues. Instead we must achieve a balance between our
desire to succeed in worldly affairs and the desire to engage with
works of art that enables us to develop beautiful souls.
© FRANCIS AKPATA 2018
Francis Akpata is Chief Executive Officer of Majlis Energy. He
studied philosophy and theology at King’s College London.
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 19
Arts & Letters
Should We Pursue Happiness?
Vincent Kavaloski reviews both Tolstoy’s insights and his oversight.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”
(United States Declaration of Independence, 1776)
D
o we all pursue happiness? Should we? And what
would it even mean? Is happiness something that
can be chased and sometimes captured? What does
it mean to pursue happiness? The phrase ‘the pur-
suit of happiness’ (as featured for example in the U.S. Declara-
tion of Independence) contains at least two major assumptions:
(1) that happiness lies outside of us, out there in the world; and
(2) it is elusive, requiring intention and effort to capture it. Are
those accurate assumptions?
The Paradox of Personal Happiness
The novels of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) explore these assump-
tions in great and instructive depth. His books are filled with
characters in feverish pursuit of happiness in many different
ways. Yet few, if any, manage to attain it in any substantial fash-
ion. Indeed his stories often portray seductive yet deceptive path-
ways that promise happiness but culminate in dead-ends or dis-
asters: soldiers seeking the euphoric glory of battle; young men
and women plunging into the rapturous insanity of romantic
love; greed addicts pursuing wealth, power, or status. They often
experience a temporary bliss, which then fades away, leaving
behind emptiness, if not despair. True sustainable happiness, as
opposed to transient pleasure, is a state of well-being and the
self-disciplined harmony of all aspects of one’s life – especially
in relationships. But the more manically Tolstoy’s characters
pursue happiness, the more it eludes them. Hence the paradox:
the pursuit of happiness seems to result in deep unhappiness.
What goes wrong?
The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, and long before him,
Plato, explained the paradox in the following way. The single-
minded pursuit of one’s own happiness is intrinsically selfish
and emotionally chaotic – a reduction of life to a narrow, sti-
fling obsession with the immediate gratification of self. This
narcissism destroys our ethical connection with other people
and with nature by (1) isolating each person in the lonely prison
of the self; and (2) subjecting our reason to vacillating desires
and emotions. For example, according to Tolstoy, to pursue
happiness through social status opens one to constant anxiety,
envy of those above you, contempt for those below, and fear of
falling. No inner serenity in sight. Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich realizes
this, but only on his death-bed. His obsessive careerism caused
him to disastrously neglect his family and his soul. More gen-
erally, Tolstoy seems to be saying that directly pursuing hap-
piness is futile because it culminates in narcissism, and narcis-
sism fatally constricts the vast and numinous universe to the
narrow bounds of the ego.
Tolstoy’s response to this paradox throughout virtually all
his works is that happiness consists in living for others, and that
20 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
our great error and the source of our misery is assuming that
happiness is attained by satisfying our own desires – desires for
pleasure, wealth, and status.
In an early story, ‘Family Happiness’ (1859), Tolstoy vividly
portrays the euphoria of romantic love, which arouses such pow-
erful emotions of lust, jealousy, and resentment that it quickly
degenerates into destructive (including self-destructive) behav-
ior. Romantic love is inherently unstable, and emotionally chaotic.
But it need not be so if it evolves beyond its self-obsession into
‘family love’ – that is, love of each other as (potential) co-parents.
Apparently millions of people experience something like this,
developing from a hyper-passionate love-obsession to a more
sober and mature family affection, which brings some stability to
society and helps guarantee the safe upbringing of children.
However, in his later life and works Tolstoy grew gradually dis-
illusioned even with family happiness. At the end of War and Peace
(1867) we can see the beginning of this corrosive disillusionment.
The central families of the book are gathered together in intimate
common life in the longed-for peace after the Napoleonic wars;
but there are quarrels, conflicts, and jealousies that disrupt har-
mony. Is Tolstoy suggesting that normal family happiness includes
extreme periods of strife and unhappiness? Perhaps he’s express-
ing Nietzsche’s idea that happiness and unhappiness are sisters
who always travel together. Tolstoy’s own family life was itself
then beginning a downward arc toward eventual mutual misery.
And even the ‘excellent marriage’ of Nikoley and Marya is
described this way: “Sometimes, particularly just after their hap-
piest periods, they had a sudden feeling of estrangement and antag-
onism.” Even at her moment of highest family happiness, Marya
is aware of “another happiness unattainable in this life.”
This vision of an unattainable spiritual happiness is pursued
in Tolstoy’s next book, Anna Karenina (1877), the story of a
compassionate and complex women who follows her grand pas-
sion, abandoning a cold marriage and a beloved son for the
immediate gratification of enthralling romantic love. Socially
ostracized, her passion gradually becomes permeated with jeal-
ousy and desolation, leading ultimately to her suicide under the
wheels of a steam train.
A Narrow Way
The book has a contrasting story of relatively healthy love and
happiness. Kitty and Levin surmount misunderstandings, jeal-
ousy, illness, dejection, the death of family members, and go on
to attain a beautiful marriage. By the end of the book they have
everything they ever wanted. Yet Levin – Tolstoy’s alter ego –
is still tormented: “happy in his family life, a healthy man, Levin
was so close to suicide.” Like Tolstoy himself in his mid-fifties,
ropes and guns had to be hidden away. Why? “Without know-
ing what I am and why I’m here it is impossible to live.”
Through Levin’s existential anguish, Tolstoy seems to be cri-
tiquing even family happiness as a goal: Is it myopic to constrict
the good even to the good of one’s own family and friends? Rais-
ing children while navigating the complexity of marital love can
Leo Tolstoy
by Woodrow Cowher

HAPPY TOLSTOY © WOODROW COWHER 2018

PLEASE VISIT WOODRAWSPICTURES.COM

December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 21

Arts & Letters
be all-consuming. But eventually Levin’s torment is transformed
into joy – not by a new philosophy, but by a peasant reminding
him of “what he already knew: not to live to satisfy his own
desires”, but to live for the “life of the soul”.
This ‘life of the soul’ that redeems Levin from suicidal despair
can’t be fully disclosed by reason or words, he says; but as a lived
principle it rejects greed, warfare, luxury, hypocrisy, hate, and
power-mongering – all the things that Tolstoy saw as corrupt-
ing human life. Instead it promotes generosity, love, simplicity,
peace, and forgiveness. Tolstoy later summarized this thinking
thus: “the happiness of life is to be attained, not by the striving
of each being toward his own personal happiness, but by a united
striving of each creature for the good of all the rest.” This, he
thinks, entails the renouncing of a demand for individual hap-
piness, especially our animal desires for physical pleasure: “Love
is love only when it is the sacrifice of self.” J.S. Mill summed
the situation up thus: “those are only happy who have their
minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.”
To do this is to follow the ‘law of the good’ disclosed by all
world religions. This kind of altruism may not bring happiness
as such directly; but it can bring moral meaning to one’s exis-
tence, demonstrating that life is not empty but rather filled with
high purpose; and one side effect of this is ‘soul happiness’ – an
abiding gratitude for the gift of life. And current research in
positive psychology supports the idea that those who live to do
good tend to be happier and healthier than those who simply
indulge themselves: see for instance Why Good Things Happen
to Good People by Jill Neimark and Stephen Post (2007).
In his later years Tolstoy boldly tried this radical pathway,
but admitted constant personal failure, partly due to his own
lustful character, and partly due to his being a land-owning
Count. As his long-suffering wife Sophie noted: “My beloved
husband consists entirely of contradictions.”
In his early eighties Tolstoy made a final attempt to escape
his contradictions by abandoning his home and family in the
CARTOON © PHIL WITTE 2018
“I knew he was going to die at the end”
22 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
middle of the night and heading for a monastery. But he sick-
ened and died along the railroad line. His last words were said
to be: “Keep searching, never stop searching.” This principle
he lived without contradiction to the very end.
Tolstoy’s Extremism
In both his life and his writings, Tolstoy explored polar opposites
and their interconnections: war and peace; hedonism and renun-
ciation; poverty and wealth; happiness and despair. This is one
element of his greatness as a novelist. But in his ethical teachings
this dualism frequently results in the fallacy of the false dilemma:
either one lives through one’s degrading animal instincts (lust,
greed, power), or one renounces them altogether for a monastic
austerity. In much of his life he vacillated obsessively between
these two extremes. He seems to have overlooked (at least in his
later life) the ‘middle way’ taught by Aristotle, Confucius, Buddha,
and many other wise teachers. Plato, for example, teaches neither
egoism nor altruism but rather the harmonizing of our desires
through virtue and reason. In his famous metaphor in the dia-
logue Protagoras, the self is a chariot pulled by two horses work-
ing at cross-purposes. The dark horse representing physical desire
pulls against the white horse representing virtue. But both are
necessary to pull the chariot; so the charioteer, representing reason,
guides them to work together in the direction of the good. This
image avoids Tolstoy’s either/or dichotomy by acknowledging
the contradictory elements in the human soul and providing a har-
monizing guide. It assumes that we will continue to have the pow-
erful opposing drives (or pulls) of the desire for food, sex, etc, and
also for social acceptability; but they need not be out-of-control
if guided by a practical reason which can look ahead, distinguish-
ing short-term objectives from long-term goals. Tolstoy, on the
other hand, seems to lack faith in the guiding power of reason and
tortures himself with his vacillation between two strong opposing
human forces, sensuality versus spirituality. “I could be happy if I
were different from what I am,” he writes. A sad insight.
In conclusion, Tolstoy’s accurate insight is that the single-
minded pursuit of one’s own happiness brings narcissism and
enslavement to chaotic desires, which in turn brings dishar-
mony, frustration, conflict with others; in a word, unhappiness.
On the other hand, pursuing a larger moral meaning, such as
peace, kindness, justice, or human betterment, gives us tran-
scendent purpose in life and thus a long-term sense of satisfac-
tion. But Tolstoy’s ultimate oversight is his frequent either/or
assumption which overlooks the middle way between the
extremes of egoism and altruism, incorporating some element
of both. Despite his own lustfulness, Tolstoy gradually begins
condemning sex, eating, and other bodily desires as low ‘animal’
activities. This radical mind-body ethical dualism is another
example of the false dilemma: either live completely in the soul
or completely in the body. Tolstoy’s torment in later life seems
to flow from his vacillation between these two extremes, with
little or no rest in the middle.
So was Tolstoy finally a victim of his own utopian dualism?
Perhaps. But we need not follow him there.
© VINCENT KAVALOSKI 2018
Vincent Kavaloski is Professor of Philosophy and Integrative Studies
at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. He also facilitates Socrates
Cafés and public discussions on peace, justice and human rights.

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)
Dylan Daniel looks at the philosophical insights of a remarkable scientist.
H
ermann von Helmholtz is a name that is not
uttered frequently enough anymore. But this
remarkable scientist, and philosopher, contributed
to modern thought a veritable treasure trove of
concepts and inventions. His mind had an uncanny way of
attacking a problem at several levels simultaneously, yielding
extraordinary results. He invented and popularized the ophthal-
moscope, participated in describing non-Euclidean geometry,
published across many disciplines, including physiology, psy-
chology, physics, and philosophy, and in 1995 the Helmholtz
Association of German Research Centers was created to com-
memorate his myriad contributions to science. Yet perhaps the
greatest innovation to which Helmholtz contributed is still
being developed in philosophy, psychology, and the neuro-
sciences: a deep understanding of the human mind.
Hermann von Helmholtz was born in Potsdam, Prussia, on
August 31, 1821. As a boy, he was neither particularly wealthy nor
endowed with any particular social standing. His father was a high
school teacher, and so young Hermann had been the beneficiary of
an excellent education despite the modest means which accompa-
Brief Lives
Hermann von Helmholtz
by Hans Schadow, 1891
nied it. He began his academic career in an army medical school,
choosing to practice medicine because of the pay that came with it,
in spite of his significant interest in both physics and mathematics.
His M.D. thesis proved that nerve fibers allowed ganglion [brain]
cells to communicate with one another, earning him both a preco-
cious doctorate and affording him some credibility as a researcher.
In 1843 Helmholtz graduated from medical school and
moved to Potsdam, where he set up a laboratory in the barracks.
He married Olga von Velten at this time, but soon was dis-
charged from the military due to his obvious gift for scientific
enquiry. The couple had children two children, Richard (1852-
1933) and Ellen Ida Elisabeth (1864-1941), who followed their
father’s dedication to science with keen interest.
Family life for von Helmholtz was never top priority, but he
displayed a keen interest in his children and loved to discuss sci-
ence with them (this pattern was apparent in his friendships as
well). According to Helmholtz’ son, Richard, “it was chiefly at
meals and out walking that we saw him… It gave him keen plea-
sure to show us any natural phenomenon…” (Hermann von
Helmholtz, Koenigsberger, p.221). Indeed, Helmholtz was a
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 23
Brief Lives
model citizen and father for his day, even though he focused
upon science to a degree which allowed it to dominate his inter-
actions with his family and his large network of friends.
Although he had more formal training in physiology than in
physics, Helmholtz wrote On the Conservation of Force with help
from the physiologist Emile du Bois-Reymond, and submitted it
to the nascent Academy of Physics in Berlin in 1847. The paper
was well received, proving that the understanding Helmholtz
possessed of physics and mathematics was extremely advanced.
Not yet even thirty, young Helmholtz had already made major
contributions to both physics and physiology.
Helmholtz rose through the ranks of German academia from
his initial position as a Professor of Physiology at Konigsberg
(1849-55) to Bonn (1855-58), to Heidelberg (1858-71). He then
began to focus upon physics, in which field he was a Professor at the
University of Berlin (1871-77), and at the Military Institute for
Medicine and Surgery (1877-1887). In 1887, he became the found-
ing President of the Physicalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin, a
post he held until his death in Berlin in 1894, at the age of 73.
EYEBALL © CHARLES HENRY MAY 1890
Eyeball
in 1890
During his impressive career, Helmholtz held chairs in three
different disciplines – physics, physiology, and anatomy – and pub-
lished papers in these fields as well as in mathematics, philosophy,
music theory, and aesthetics. His understanding of physics made it
simple for him to conduct a measurement of the actual speed of the
transmission of an action potential [an electric pulse] along a nerve
fiber, which was a major contribution to the field of physiology.
Prior to this test, it was believed that the speed of transmission of a
nerve impulse was the speed of light; but instead of 300,000 km per
second, it turned out to only be about 26.4 meters per second!
Interdisciplinary understanding – a motif in his life – is what
led Helmholtz to make advancements in the sciences. And
Helmholtz’ interdisciplinary excellence came from his excep-
tional talent for philosophical questioning and clear-minded rea-
soning, coupled with the means to empirically test hypotheses.
Sight, Sound and Reality
Philosophically, Helmholtz was a rather devout pupil of
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). His most significant break from
Kant came in his investigation of non-Euclidean geometry. Oth-
erwise, like Kant, he believed that space (among other things)
was not a fact of the world beyond the human mind and instead
has to do with our perception.
24 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
One of Kant’s central philosophical conclusions was the inac-
cessibility of the ‘ding-an-sich’, or ‘thing-in-itself’ – what some-
thing (or the world) is like in itself independent of our percep-
tions of it. It was this concept that led Helmholtz to be interested
in the neuroanatomy of perception; and his twin interests in the
mechanics of sight and hearing led to some of his most remark-
able scientific discoveries. Let’s have a quick look at each of
Helmholtz’ major scientific phases in an attempt to learn more
about the workings of the mind behind them.
Helmholtz developed an interest in vision at an early stage in
his career, and he discovered that the living retina of the human
eye is in fact pink. The black of the pupil had puzzled scientists
for a long time, and it was generally accepted that this was due to
the shape of the eye – the pupil, after all, is a focusing device,
designed to let in light rather than let it out. However, getting a
look at the living retina was a difficult proposition for exactly this
reason. A need existed to peer into the eye without damaging it,
and Helmholtz’ invention of the ophthalmoscope advanced
optical care by satisfying this need.
During his research into this, Helmholtz became intrigued by
some related questions to do with our capacity for sight. How did
the retina transmit the information it received to the conscious
mind? The optic nerve was the most obvious answer to this ques-
tion, but upon investigating it, more questions arose. Where did
the nerve impulses go? How did the mind become aware of
them, giving rise to consciousness of a given visual input?
Even now, with all our technological advances, there is not yet
a complete account of the brain’s generation of consciousness.
Yet we know a lot. We know now for example that the fatty
sheath encasing each nerve fiber has breaks in it every so often
which allow potassium and sodium ions to interact, providing a
chemical reaction which propels an electric current along the
fiber until it reaches the end, the synapse of a neuron, where it
causes the release of neurotransmitter chemicals. This either
encourages the next neuron in the sequence to fire a pulse, or
inhibits it from doing so. We also know that the area for the pro-
cessing of visual information is at the back of the brain.
After visual perception, Helmholtz’ next natural subject of
inquiry was auditory perception. Helmholtz studied the cochlea
of the inner ear in great detail, at first fascinated by the ridges
within it. Later, his attention turned to the fine hairs which lined
the interior of the organ. This interest once again had a lasting
impact upon human understanding. Hearing, as we know today,
is caused by vibrations being picked up precisely by these small
hairs. Information concerning these vibrations is then (again)
transmitted by nerves to specific areas in the brain.
However, from a philosophical perspective, perhaps the most
interesting aspect of each of these anatomical accounts of the
acquisition of sense-data is what they lack. None of them
involves anything from the outside world making it into the
brain, or even getting closer to it than mere contact with a nerve
ending. This even Helmholtz knew. And as both Helmholtz’
audio and visual perception research revealed ways to fool the
senses, this further supported a gap between external objects and
the mind perceiving them. Helmholtz was eventually led to
argue that perceptions are signs rather than objective accounts of
the data taken in. Indeed, for him the world had faded away from
immediate access, and what was left in the mind was a mental

model of the world (including a model of the body) which allowed
actions to be taken and consequences to be evaluated. The effect
of prior action as observed via the senses, when incorporated into
our mental model, shaped our future action. And practice at a
musical instrument, for example, allowed the mental model to be
more effectively mapped onto the body, so that playing an
instrument became easier and the music sounded better.
This was a bit of a tough pill to swallow for some philosophers.
It is entirely likely that a fair amount of Helmholtz’ disdain for phi-
losophy came from the skeptical attitude he attracted from
philosophers who preferred to argue about conceptual issues
while neglecting the empirical discoveries he was making. How-
ever, philosophical thought was behind a great deal of the scien-
tific achievement Helmholtz produced during his life, and contin-
ues to play a major role in the field to which his work helped give
rise – that of neuroscience. Indeed, in the light of his deep grasp of
these complex phenomena, it might be fair to call Helmholtz ‘the
father of neuroscience’.
Eyeball
in 2018
EYEBALL © HARIADHI 2017
Helmholtz’ Mental Life
In his book Descartes’ Error (1994), the neuroscientist Antonio
Damasio poked holes in Cartesian Dualism. Descartes’ famous
theory is basically a vision of the physical human body as being
controlled by a non-physical soul or mind which is fundamen-
tally separate from it. He believed the mind interacts with the
body through the brain’s pineal gland, a position long since sci-
entifically invalidated. For Damasio, cognitive neuroscience has
now removed the various elements of thought from the black
box of ‘mind’ and placed them in the body, where a clear and ver-
ifiable account of their workings is easily accessible. We are
familiar with some components of the body, such as muscles,
bones, hearts and lungs and livers, but other parts still mystify us,
particularly the brain. The staggeringly difficult problem of
tracing the functional connectivity in the brain provides little in
the way of yielding elegant verifiable accounts useful for the
details of the inner workings of consciousness. In this situation,
the Kantian insight developed by Helmholtz is still very cutting-
edge. Even Damasio might agree with Helmholtz’ idea that
minds map our bodies and generate mental images of ourselves
and the world around us by constantly recording and comparing
images (percepts) generated by neuronal interactions.
The key to this understanding came from Kant’s distinction
Brief Lives
between appearance and reality. Helmholtz then used his physi-
ological knowledge to update Kant’s thinking to say that
although we have no direct access to the thing-in-itself, we do
receive information about it which allows our brains to update the
model our minds have of it, and so the world. Research into the
workings of the senses and nerve fibers allowed Helmholtz to
construct this theory, just as today cognitive neuroscientists test
and research various ideas related to it. Modern cognitive neuro-
science has so far been unable to improve on his observation that
“Inductive inferences, as acquired by the unconscious work of
memory, play a prominent part in the building up of concepts”
(Koenigsberger, p.428). This seminal idea of the influence of the
unconscious on the brain’s construction of our thought is (again)
the direct offspring of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the
science of Hermann von Helmholtz.
Perhaps Helmholtz’ most remarkable intellectual feat was his
characterisation of the human brain as a ‘prediction machine’. In
modern times, Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson have done
incredible research into the physical mechanisms of human
motivation, looking at dopamine-sensitive neurons which are
involved in predicting a given action’s outcome. These neurons
increase or decrease their activation level in future situations
based upon the accuracy of their latest prediction, thus continu-
ally improving the accuracy with which we can make predictions.
This gives us some empirical evidence affirming Helmholtz’
prediction machine idea.
Philosophy as a Source for Science
For me the most interesting aspect of Hermann von Helmholtz’s
life is the extent to which he borrowed from philosophy to inform
ground-breaking, awe-inspiring scientific studies in a variety of
disciplines. It is as though his gifted mind decided at an early age to
test Kant’s problem-set in any ways possible, and the rest of his
studies were a natural consequence of this interest. From the con-
cept of an unconscious inference of ideas, to the physiological
study which fleshed out his ideas of perception, Helmholtz was an
example of excellence in philosophy as well as science.
Helmholtz seems to have suffered a stroke at the end of his
career, which led to a period of dementia that lasted about two
months until September 8, 1894, when the brilliant man finally
died. “His early death… was felt not merely as an irreparable loss
to science, but as a national misfortune,” wrote his long-term
friend, Emil du Bois-Reymond.
Although his physics has been partly pushed aside by Ein-
stein, Helmholtz’ ideas have shaped and molded modern sci-
ence, and his insights have made profound impressions upon
many of the greatest thinkers of the past hundred and fifty years.
By understanding the philosophy of perception, Helmholtz was
able to gain an unprecedented level of insight into the mind
doing the perceiving, via means both theoretical and empirical.
Now, over a hundred years after his death, science is beginning
to allow researchers to test some of his most brilliant insights.
© DYLAN DANIEL 2018
Philosopher and writer Thomas Dylan Daniel graduated from Texas
State University with an MA in Applied Philosophy and Ethics. His
book Formal Dialectics is available now at
cambridgescholars.com/formal-dialectics. Enter code DIALECTICS20
to receive a special discount!
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 25
 MARY MIDGLEY
(September 13, 1919 – October 10, 2018)
Carol Nicholson on a remarkable ethicist and Philosophy Now contributor.
M
ary Midgley, one of the leading and most illu-
minating moral philosophers of our time, pub-
lished her last book (What is Philosophy For?)
only a couple of weeks before her death on
October 10 at the age of ninety-nine. Raymond Tallis praised
the book as a brilliant, lucid, and witty assault on the dis-
torted world-view of our age and a compelling defence of
philosophy as the discipline that is needed to rescue us. Midg-
ley read widely in the history of philosophy as well as in the
sciences and the humanities, and she was too open-minded
to be affiliated with any particular school of thought. She was
celebrated as having one of the sharpest pens in the West,
pulling no punches in her criticism of the claims that tradi-
tional philosophy is obsolete and that modern science has a
monopoly on the truth.
After raising three sons with her husband Geoffrey Midg-
ley, also a philosophy teacher, Midgley taught at Newcastle
University for many years, and it was not until near the age of
sixty that she began writing the work that would make her
famous. In 1978 she published Beast and Man: The Roots of
Human Nature. This was the first of over a dozen books she
wrote alongside hundreds of articles during the next forty years
on a wide variety of topics including human nature, ethics, sci-
ence, animals, and the environment. Her prose is remarkably
clear and free of jargon, making her work accessible to the gen-
eral reader as well as academic specialists, and she had a gift
for using vivid imagery to illustrate abstract philosophical con-
cepts. Perhaps her most memorable metaphor is the sugges-
tion that philosophy can be understood as a form of plumb-
ing. Our thinking depends on unstated assumptions that we
don’t notice until bad smells come up from below the floor,
and we’re forced to reexamine the deep infrastructure of our
life as a whole to find the central confusions and conflicts that
are causing the serious problems in the pipes. Midgley thought
that this kind of plumbing has always been the main job of phi-
losophy, and it never goes out of date. It’s something that we
all do all the time.
In another apt figure of speech, Midgley described philoso-
phy as “conceptual geography.” She saw mind and matter not
as two kinds of stuff but as two ways of mapping the relations
between various ways of thinking about different kinds of ques-
tions. The relationship between thoughts and brain states is
analogous to the way in which thunder and lightning are differ-
ent ways of perceiving a single reality. We use both sight and
touch to navigate the world, and neither sense is truer than the
other any more than the inside of a teapot is more real than the
outside. These clever metaphors and analogies exemplify a cen-
26 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
tral theme in Midgley’s writings, the need to balance the scien-
tific analysis of things into their parts with the more holistic per-
spective that philosophy can provide. In Are You An Illusion?
(2014) she insightfully discussed Iain McGilchrist’s idea in The
Master and his Emissary that the two hemispheres of the brain
deliver to us different versions of the world. The left brain focuses
attention narrowly and precisely, while the right brain takes a
broader point of view and evaluates the relevance of the parts of
experience in light of the larger context.
Midgley pointed out that scientific reductionism distorts
our experience by rejecting altogether the validity of the per-
spective of the right hemisphere, resulting in a kind of tunnel
vision. The left hemisphere on its own can see only the pieces
that make up the world and therefore insists that physics tells
us the whole truth about reality. But physics, like every partic-
ular science, is in Midgley’s words “a one-sided story, an
abstraction, a view seen through a single window.” In The Soli-
tary Self (2010) she identified another symptom of left-brain
obsession in the reductive individualism of the concept of the
‘selfish gene’. According to Midgley, this is a serious misinter-
pretation of Darwin, who viewed all organisms as interdepen-
dent parts of complex ecosystems rather than isolated atoms
in a mythical Hobbesian state of nature. She argued that we
need to use our entire brain with both halves working together,
so philosophy and the sciences should complement each other
rather than competing for the prize of a one-dimensional ulti-
mate truth. An example of this kind of cooperation between
scientific research and philosophical vision is the Gaia hypoth-
esis that the Earth can be viewed as a living organism, an idea
that Midgley defended as an enormously fruitful suggestion.
Her final answer to the question “What is philosophy for?”
is that its aim is not at all like that of the sciences. Scientists
are specialists who study parts of the world, but philosophy
concerns everybody. It tries to bring together aspects of life
that have previously been unconnected in order to make a more
coherent world-picture, which is not a private luxury but some-
thing absolutely essential for human life. I never met Midgley,
but she spoke powerfully to my condition, and I shall miss her
as if she had been one of my dearest friends. At a time when
philosophy departments in many universities are being drasti-
cally cut or eliminated, her message is urgently important, and
I hope that it will be heard for as long as there is human life on
earth.
© PROFESSOR CAROL NICHOLSON 2018
Carol Nicholson has been teaching at Rider University in New Jersey
for over 40 years. The Rider Philosophy Department has recently been
cut in half from four full-time faculty members to two.
Mary Midgley
by Gail Campbell 2018

December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 27

The History Man
Hegel
on
History
Lawrence Evans rationally interprets
Hegel’s rational interpretation of history.
W
e are often taught that history is nothing but the
record of past events. Yet Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel (1770-1831) thought that world history was
not just a random sequence of happenings but progressed ratio-
nally, according to a specific purpose. This has led some to the
mistaken belief that Hegel thought history followed some pre-
determined path, such that his philosophy could somehow reveal
the future course of events. This misconception has often been
accompanied by the accusation that Hegel sought to impose his
own metaphysical scheme onto the historical facts, to conform
them to his theory. I will argue that these are gravely mistaken
views; and also that Hegel can be exonerated from the idea that
he believed in ‘the end of history’, which is to say, the idea that
history was fulfilled in his own particular historical moment.
How Hegel’s Theory of History Works
Hegel’s philosophy of history is most lucidly set out in his Lec-
tures on the Philosophy of World History, given at the University of
Berlin in 1822, 1828 and 1830. In his introduction to those lec-
tures Hegel said that there is reason in history because ‘reason
rules the world’; hence world history is the progress of reason.
What does Hegel mean by reason in history? He has in mind
a ‘teleological’ account – the idea that history conforms to some
specific purpose or design (this idea is also called ‘historicism’).
He compares this with the Christian notion of providence. His-
torical analysis, from the Christian perspective, reveals God’s
governance of the world and world history is understood as the
execution of His plan. Hegel has a very idiosyncratic idea of God,
which he calls Geist – meaning ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’. A philosophical
understanding of the progression of world history enables us to
know this God, to comprehend the nature and purpose of Geist.
For Hegel, the purpose or goal of history is the progress of the
consciousness of freedom. Progress is rational in so far as it cor-
responds to this development. This rational development is the
28 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
A “world soul on horseback” by
Jacques-Louis David, 1805
evolution of Geist attaining consciousness of itself, since the very
nature of spirit is freedom. Hegel also refers to Geist as the ‘world
spirit’, the spirit of the world as it unveils itself through human con-
sciousness, as manifested through a society’s culture, particularly
its art, religion and philosophy (Hegel calls this triad the expres-
sion of the ‘absolute Spirit’). As Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology
of Spirit (1807), spirit is the “ethical life of a nation.” For Hegel,
then, there is rational progress in history only in so far as there is
progress of the self-consciousness of the spirit of the world through
human culture in terms of the consciousness of freedom.
It is crucial however that Hegel does not mean by ‘freedom’
merely the unrestricted ability to do whatever we like: in the Phi-
losophy of Right (1820) Hegel calls that type of freedom ‘negative
freedom’ and says it’s an intellectually immature way to under-
stand freedom. What Hegel means by freedom is instead closer
to Immanuel Kant’s idea, in which a free subject is someone who
self-consciously makes choices in accordance with universal prin-
ciples and moral laws, and who does not merely pursue personal
desires. Hegel claims that if the individuals of a nation merely
pursue their own gratification, this will lead to the eventual col-
lapse of the nation.
The aim of world history is the development of the self-con-
sciousness of spirit, which is the self-consciousness of freedom.
The crucial point – and this is the key Hegelian twist – is that
the world spirit does not have a conscious aim which it sets out to
achieve; rather, the aim only becomes known through the spirit
achieving its aim. So the purpose of history can only be under-
stood retrospectively. That is to say, to understand historical
development, one has to know the result in order to then trace
back the factors which led to it. As Hegel explains, historical
necessity then emerges through the historical contingency; or as
we might say, the result then gives its cause the appearance of
necessity. For example, let’s say that I catch the 8.30 train to
work. Assuming the train is on time (an unrealistic expectation,

I know), and given that I do arrive at work on time, then it was
necessary that I caught my train; but this does not mean that I
was always going to catch the train... In the same way, the point
is not that for Hegel history is predetermined, but rather that
the purpose of history can be realised retrospectively. What’s
more, the realisation of this purpose is the purpose of the very
process of history!
We can also see from this that Hegel not only intends to explain
how the past has influenced the present, but also the influence
the present has on our interpretation of the past. Hegel points
out that the task of philosophy is not to prophesy or make fore-
casts. Instead, philosophy always arrives too late. As he famously
writes, “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.” In other words,
philosophy (or ‘wisdom’, hence his reference to the Roman god-
dess of wisdom) can only analyse history retrospectively, from
the standpoint of the present. So Hegel does not think that his
philosophy of history should be imposed on the facts. On the
contrary, he stresses that we must examine the facts of history (or
indeed the facts of any other matter) as they present themselves,
that is, empirically and for their own sake. We can then derive
our philosophy (or wisdom) from these facts, without imposing
any metaphysical preconceptions on them. This also means that
although Hegel sees reason in history, this reason can nonethe-
less only be completely understood philosophically when the goal
of history is complete.
Hegel perceives world history to have developed according
to a dialectical process. Hegelian dialectic is often described this
way: “a thesis provokes its opposite idea – its antithesis – and
together they give rise to an idea that combines elements of
both – their synthesis.” But Hegel never used that terminology,
although it does convey some sense of what he had in mind.
Hegel himself called the main feature of the dialectic Aufhe-
bung, a word with meanings including ‘to overcome’ or ‘cancel’
or ‘pick up or preserve’. To try to render several of its mean-
ings, as well as the technical connotation Hegel intended, it’s
often translated as ‘sublation’. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary
defines this as “to negate or eliminate (something) but preserve
as a partial element in a synthesis.” Any imperfect idea, and in
particular, any incomplete concept of freedom, contains within
itself its own contradictions, and sublation is the process
whereby these contradictions come to be unified in a higher
principle. Thus in a Hegelian dialectical process there is a con-
flict between a concept and its external opposite which devel-
ops into an internal contradiction where the concept struggles
with itself, and through this struggle the concept is overcome
and simultaneously preserved in a unification with its contra-
diction at a higher level. Then the new concept produced in
this way undergoes the same process again, and so on, so his-
tory progresses in a sort of spiral.
To understand this, though, it’s best to look at how Hegel
discussed actual history.
What Hegel’s Theory of History Is
To describe the development of the consciousness of freedom,
Hegel divides world history into three major cultures or epochs.
In the tyrannical age, which Hegel thought was characterised
by the pre-Greek ‘Oriental’ world, people know that only one
person, the ruler or despot, is free. Then the Greeks and Romans
The History Man
know that some persons – the citizens – are free. Finally, the Ger-
manic peoples (that is, Western Europe), through the influence
of Christianity, know that all persons, or human beings as such,
are free. It is crucial to understand that Hegel doesn’t merely
want to show that the amount of freedom has increased over the
course of history, but that the concept of freedom itself has fun-
damentally changed. And if there has been development in the
concept of freedom, there will also have been development in
the nature of spirit, since spirit is characterised by freedom.
In more detail, Hegel distinguishes this development into
four particular stages. In the Oriental world, the people knew
that only the ruler is free. Since the spirit of freedom was there-
fore immanent or manifested only within a single individual,
whose freedom was realised by an accident of birth, this free-
dom is thus merely arbitrary. Moreover, people were unaware
of the subjective freedom within themselves; and so Hegel con-
siders this the ‘childhood’ period of the development of spirit.
The consciousness of subjective freedom first appeared in
the Greek world; but even the Greeks did not realise that all
human beings as such are free. The ethical life (or absolute
spirit) of the Greeks was distinguished by an underlying satis-
faction with convention. People lived in relative harmony with
the norms and traditions of society. Yet still this was an inher-
ently self-contradictory way of life, for people did not question
the state’s customs, morals, rights and so on, and so they still
lacked a sufficiently developed self-consciousness. In Greek
society there was therefore an inherent tension between indi-
vidual freedom and the universal principles of the state. Hegel
compares this tension with adolescence. It took the figure of
Socrates to encourage people to reflect on the accepted notions
of ethics, and thus for the spirit to re-awaken itself.
In the subsequent period of the Roman Empire, subjective
freedom was recognised in terms of the introduction of formal
rights for citizens. But this notion of freedom was too abstract,
above the concrete, everyday world of citizens. Hence, spirit
was in a stage of self-alienation. True freedom only emerged
with the rise of Christianity in the Germanic world, when free-
dom was understood as the very essence of humanity. So Chris-
tianity is important for Hegel, since it is only through the figure
of Jesus Christ (whom Hegel calls the ‘God-man’) that human
beings find the essence of spirit within themselves and over-
come their alienation from God (that is, from the world spirit).
For after Christ dies on the cross he is ‘sublated’ into the Holy
(or divine) Spirit (which for Hegel means the community of
believers, or ‘Christendom’ as we might call it).
Christianity was at the fore of intellectual life throughout the
Middle Ages. However, Hegel saw Medieval Christianity as an
archetype of what he called the ‘unhappy consciousness’, due to
what he perceived as the failure of the Church to mediate
between individuals and God. It took a particular world-histori-
cal moment, namely the French Revolution, for spirit to become
truly self-conscious; to escape ‘abstract’ freedom and realise ‘con-
crete’ freedom through the laws as they applied to the people.
Even near the end of his life Hegel remained jubilant about the
French Revolution, describing it as “a glorious mental dawn.”
So the world spirit has developed dialectically throughout his-
tory by a series of struggles with itself. Spirit can only overcome
its stage of alienation from itself through realising this very alien-
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 29
The History Man
ation. Each stage was therefore entirely necessary in the develop- Hegel before
ment of spirit’s self-consciousness, but the necessity of each stage history
can only be realised retrospectively.

The End of History

What drives the world spirit towards a full consciousness of
freedom? And how do individuals become aware of the goal of
history, that is, this fulfilled consciousness?
For Hegel, world history is driven by ‘world-historical indi-
viduals’; so-called ‘great men’ such as Socrates, Julius Caesar,
or Napoleon. They alone are able to influence the tides of his-
tory and drive forward the self-consciousness of freedom. In a
letter written to his friend Friedrich Niethammer in 1806, Hegel
described Napoleon with adulation as ‘a world soul on horse-
back’. However much these world-historical individuals are
inclined to pursue their own interests, they are unknowingly
used by spirit to move towards the realisation of its own self-
consciousness. Hegel refers to this as the ‘cunning of reason’.
But how then can the pursuit of their own interests by world-
historical individuals be a result of the working of reason in his-
tory and so aid the development of freedom? Hegel’s answer is
ingenious. He notes that any individual who actively supports a
historically-prominent cause is not merely a self-interested party
who seeks their own satisfaction; they must also be actively inter-
ested in the cause itself. And this cause, being a manifestation of a
given stage in the progress of reason’s history, must result in
overall progress towards the realisation of human freedom.
Some – notably Francis Fukuyama – have taken Hegel to
mean that, because the goal of history as the self-consciousness importance has yet to be revealed in the ages which lie ahead…”
of human freedom had been achieved in his time, the world had The fact that Hegel mentions ‘the future’ in the specific con-
reached ‘the end of history’. text of world history in these last two quotes is of particular inter-
We must be careful to keep in mind the way Hegel is using est here, for it suggests that this was not merely a gesture but some-
the word ‘history’ here – which is, of course, the unfolding of thing systematic. Hegel does not pretend to have knowledge of
reason in the progress of the consciousness of freedom. For what lies ahead; even if the consciousness of freedom is now fully
Fukuyama, this realisation of freedom actually occurred with the manifested in the world, this does not mean that the future must
collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, signalling the end of Com- therefore be already written. On the contrary, Hegel believes that
munism in Europe and the triumph of liberal democracy over all because history is contingent there are no foregone conclusions
alternative systems of government. Fukuyama’s particular notion concerning the future. And these points surely demonstrate that
is then that liberal democracy is the final form of society embody- Hegel did not believe that liberalism was the ‘end of history’, nor
ing the self-consciousness of freedom. There is, however, noth- that in any conceivable way history ended at his particular his-
ing to suggest that Hegel would have endorsed anything like the torical moment. What Hegel means by an end to history is not
particular kind of liberalism prevalent in modern society. Hegel that there are to be no further developments: instead, the goal of
saw in liberalism - especially in the French liberal government history has been achieved: the world is now conscious of free-
in his own time - a tension between individual rights and social dom, and the world spirit knows itself as the ultimate reality –
unity. It seems that Hegel himself rejected liberalism as an ideol- what Hegel refers to as ‘absolute knowing’.
ogy, because he believed that it would lead people to selfishly put To conclude, I have tried to clear up some common miscon-
their individual interests above the universal principles which ceptions about Hegel’s philosophy of history, particularly about
uphold the state; and so liberalism, at least in his own time, could his idea of historical necessity. I have argued that for Hegel,
not be a stable socio-economic and political system. “This colli- history is not determined and closed, and thereby at an end, but
sion,” Hegel writes in the conclusion of his Lectures on the Philos- is instead both contingent and radically open.
ophy of History, “this problem is that with which history is now The past is preserved in the present to the extent that it has
occupied and whose solution it has to work out in the future.” It shaped the present in the development of the self-conscious-
is also important to note that Hegel does not mean ‘the end of ness of human freedom that we now have. This understanding
history’ in the sense that historical development finishes with his is the Hegelian legacy we need today.
historical moment in Europe. Indeed, with regards to the actual © LAWRENCE EVANS 2018
content of world history, and the recent surge in his own time of Lawrence Evans has a Master’s degree in philosophy from the
American independence, Hegel insightfully remarks that “Amer- London School of Economics, and is currently a research student in
ica is therefore the country of the future, and its world-historical the philosophy department at University College London.

30 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019


The Trouble with Hegel
Chris Christensen thinks Hegel shouldn’t have stopped where he did.
H
egel’s philosophy will always undergo revivals
because he appeals to those with a bent for reason
and a yen for metaphysics, and Hegel dishes that
combo out in spades. This is illustrated by his work
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), parts of which Theodor
Adorno called “literally incomprehensible.” Hegel’s contem-
porary and bitter rival Arthur Schopenhauer called him a char-
latan who purposely wove his words into tangled vines of ver-
biage to mask his philosophical shortcomings. Still, to his admir-
ers who have waded through the Phenomenology it is a meta-
physical masterpiece. My trouble with Hegel lies elsewhere: in
his Philosophy of History, (1837), where Hegel traces the devel-
opment of the ‘consciousness of freedom’ through several coun-
tries over three thousand years.
In the Introduction Hegel boils down his theory to one
famous statement: “The history of the world is none other than
the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” Freedom and
consciousness are absolutely central to Hegel’s philosophy, so
let’s see what he means by those terms. This will require dip-
ping a toe into the Phenomenology to find Hegel’s meaning of
‘consciousness’, and looking into Philosophy of Right to find his
meaning of ‘freedom’. As a guide I will use Peter Singer’s excel-
lent exposition, Hegel (1983). But first I want to provide some
background for Hegel’s motivation.
Much of the difficulty in Hegel’s work stems from his pur-
pose: he sought to dismantle a monumental work of philoso-
phy, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), where
Kant used reason to determine its own limits. Our senses are
bombarded with stimuli – raw data which our minds receive
and shape and organize, creating our perception of reality.
There is an objective reality out there, which Kant called the
‘thing-in-itself’. As we can’t access that reality directly, but only
filtered through our perceptions, the ‘thing-in-itself’ is beyond
the scope of science and even reason, so it will forever be a mys-
tery. Despite this, Kant knew that the mind thirsts for ultimate
reality: “That the human mind will ever give up metaphysical
research is as little to be expected as that we should give up
breathing,” he wrote. Hegel set out to prove Kant wrong. Like
his contemporaries Fichte and Schelling, he felt that philoso-
phy could find and understand Kant’s thing-in-itself.
Hegel viewed philosophical progress from a distance. He
saw competing philosophies, including Kant’s, as each con-
tributing over time to what he called ‘the progressive unfold-
ing of truth’. This is important to understanding Hegel; all the
work produced by him, his predecessors and successors, make
up a whole. He beautifully illustrates this in his metaphor of a
fruit tree: the buds are gone when they burst into blossom; then
the blossoms, as they disappear, produce the fruit, revealing the
truth or purpose of the tree. He sees the progress of history,
similarly, as being a gradual unfolding of the truth through the
interplay of ideas. He believed it has a purpose and an ending:
the liberation of humanity.
The History Man
But before we tackle his philosophy of history, let’s first look
at what he means by consciousness.
The Phenomenology of Spirit
Phenomenology is the study of phenomena or ‘things made man-
ifest’; so the title of this book means the study of how spirit or
consciousness manifests in the world. Hegel’s purpose here was
to examine “the relationship between objective history and the
subjective development of individual consciousness.”
What goes on in the realm of consciousness as it progresses
through history? Consciousness, according to Hegel, began as a
simple form that finds itself inadequate, so must develop into
another form; “and this in turn,” writes Singer, “will also prove
inadequate and develop into something else, and so the process
will continue until we reach true knowledge.” Kant’s thing-in-
itself will then be known. This process involves the emergence
of self-consciousness, which Hegel says cannot exist in isolation;
it needs contrast, something outside of itself – another conscious-
ness. That something is foreign and seen as threatening, so a love-
hate dynamic comes to the surface in the form of desire. As Singer
writes: “To desire something is to wish to possess it and thus not
to destroy it – but also transform it into something that is yours,
and thus strip it of its foreignness.” One therefore seeks recogni-
tion from the Other (consciousness). This leads to strife – hence
Hegel’s Master-Slave dynamic, in which one consciousness con-
tends with the other until the objective (the Other) melds with
the subjective (oneself). Eventually a kind of universal conscious-
ness comes into being where the self realizes that it’s part of a
larger consciousness in a community of others. At this point the
progress of the consciousness of freedom reaches the end, which
Hegel called Absolute Mind or Absolute Spirit.
Now, what does Hegel mean by ‘freedom’?
Philosophy of Right
Hegel begins the Philosophy of Right (1820) by discussing the
classic liberal form of freedom – the absence of restrictions. Here
the individual is free to make choices without interference by
others. Hegel found this form of freedom shallow. He wrote,
“If we hear it said that the definition of freedom is ability to do
what we please, such an idea can only be taken to reveal an utter
immaturity of thought, for it contains not even an inkling of the
absolute free will, of right, ethical life, and so forth.” For Hegel,
the key word in freedom is choice. But what is choice based on?
That is a question unasked by most of freedom’s adherents. But,
as Singer writes, “Hegel does ask, and his answer is that indi-
vidual choice, considered in isolation... is the outcome of arbi-
trary circumstances. Hence it is not genuinely free.” In a phrase,
we are not free when our choices stem from randomly condi-
tioned desires. So when are we truly free? When our choices
are based on “the social ethos of an organic community,” says
Singer, interpreting Hegel. A quote by British philosopher F.H.
Bradley, who adopted Hegel’s idea of an organic community,
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 31
The History Man
best sums up the meaning of choice based on community:
“The child... is born not into a desert but into a living world. ... He
learns... to speak and here he appropriates the common... tongue that
he makes his own... and it carries into his mind the ideas and sentiments
of the race... and stamps them in indelibly. He grows up in an atmo-
sphere of example and general custom... The soul within him is satu-
rated… has built itself up from, it is one and the same life with the uni-
versal life, and if he turns against this he turns against himself.”
(F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, Essay V)
So for Hegel, genuine freedom is connected to the freedom
of others, where the subjective and the objective meld into one.
Now armed with a rough understanding of Hegel’s view of free-
dom and of consciousness, we can proceed to his chronological
and geographical journey through history.
Philosophy of History
Hegel wanted to prove that history is a rational process gov-
erned by an ultimate design. If history is governed by reason,
what then propels it toward the full consciousness of freedom?
According to Hegel it’s driven by strife or conflict, not so much
between armies as between ideologies.
The Philosophy of History was originally a series of lectures at
the University of Berlin ending a year before his death in 1831.
Lawrence Evans in his article describes the different epochs or
stages of history according to Hegel. What is striking is Hegel’s
choice of examples to illuminate the progress of the conscious-
ness of freedom through human history. His book’s title might
as well have been The Philosophy of History through Geography,
because his examples from his earliest epoch are from the East,
later epochs are illustrated by cultures a little further west, and
so he continues until he reaches Prussia, where history appar-
ently ends and freedom reigns.
Hegel’s first epoch he actually calls ‘Oriental Despotism’ and
he takes the prime examples of it as being ancient China and
India. In this historical stage, he says, people had no conscious-
ness of freedom of their own, law and morality being imposed
from above. Only the rulers are free. Scholars might quibble
with his characterisation of entire complex civilisations as
‘despotism’. It’s perhaps fair to say that Hegel isn’t too inter-
ested in details or a balanced exposition of ancient societies -
he just wants to give a broad description of how history unfolds.
Moving further west and forward in time Hegel next comes
to Persia, a theocratic empire where the first stirrings of the
consciousness of freedom can be seen. The sun is worshipped,
and it shines on all; on ruler and subject alike. This is the begin-
ning of ‘true history’, says Hegel, albeit in its infancy.
Then westwards again to classical Greece, which becomes
the first stage in the true consciousness of freedom. Its democ-
racy allows freedom for many, but the social system is based on
slavery. Still, philosophy and independent thought, free of the
state religion, gently nudge humanity along the path of the con-
sciousness of freedom. The reason and individuality cultivated
by the Greeks moves west in history’s next stage, the Roman
Empire. There it brings about tension between the authorities
and the individual. Persons with a penchant for free thought
took refuge in Stoicism, Skepticism, or Epicureanism – schools
32 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
of thought that Hegel regarded as limited, if not negative.
The consciousness of freedom receives a huge boost from
the rise of Christianity, which eventually weakens the Roman
Empire. The Catholic Church taught its members that they
were made in the image of God; that they possessed infinite
value and an eternal destiny. Hegel called this ‘religious self-con-
sciousness’; the feeling that the world is ultimately spiritual, not
material. But the Church grows corrupt, its hierarchy indulges
in greed, lust, and indolence – perversions of the true religious
spirit. The subsequent strife sparks the Reformation, which
Hegel regards as the launch pad to the end of history. Martin
Luther preachs that a person doesn’t need elaborate ceremonies
and trappings, and can develop a personal relationship with God
without the need of the Catholic Church. In this way individ-
ual conscience could determine truth and reason.
The Reformation laid the groundwork for the next stages – the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Reason ruled here,
and Hegel rejoiced: “Never since the sun has stood in the firma-
ment and the planets revolved around it had it been perceived that
a man’s existence centers in his head, i.e. in thought, inspired by
which he builds up the world of reality... not until now had man
advanced to the recognition of the principle that thought ought
to govern spiritual reality. All thinking beings shared in the jubi-
lation of this epoch.”
Then heads began to roll, literally, as the Revolution turned
to terror and the guillotine. Putting Reason on a pedestal iso-
lated from the community had brought about the failure of the
French Revolution, according to Hegel. Freedom was post-
poned while the rule of power took over, embodied in Napoleon.
Nonetheless, some of the Revolution’s beneficent principles
were carried into Germany with Napoleon’s invasion. (But that
is eastwards!) In Hegel’s homeland, Prussia, ordinary citizens
gained certain rights, such as freedom of movement and prop-
erty, and offices of the state were opened to qualified citizens.
But the parliament was weak, most people had little or no say
in government, and the king could impose strict censorship.
Despite these restrictions, Hegel believed that freedom is best
nurtured through a constitutional monarchy. The monarch (in
his case Frederick William III) embodies the spirit and desires
of the governed, who have now become free. Hegel thus declares
his own Prussian society the final stage of the development of
the consciousness of freedom.
The Trouble With Hegel
Considering Hegel’s expansive view of freedom, his deep explo-
ration of consciousness, and the majestic arc of his theory, this
conclusion is disappointing, to say the least. What happened to
the westward movement? Hegel, the great champion of specu-
lative thought, should not mind a bit of speculation from me at
this point.
Recall that Hegel’s purpose is to lift the veil from Kant’s
thing-in-itself. Whether he succeeds or not is irrelevant; he
believes he has. As Bryan Magee writes in Confessions of a Philoso-
pher (1999), “Hegel believed that total reality consists of a single
something, Geist (mind or spirit), which is going through a pro-
cess of change and development towards a goal of self-con-
sciousness.” So let’s assume the thing-in-itself that Kant claimed
would forever be a mystery is none other than the world spirit
© BILL STOTT 2018 PLEASE VISIT WWW.BILLSTOTT.CO.UK.
How great works of art are named.
as the progress of the consciousness of freedom. In Hegel’s
terms, it is objective reality; and its process, and its ending, are
inevitable. Hegel does not create the process; he discovers it.
Indeed, if allowed to follow its course, history could not end in
the Prussian state; it would continue its westward path.
Hegel is aware of this. There is an elephant in his study; the
United States. As he sits in his armchair, he tries to ignore it, but
his own world consciousness – or conscience – will not allow it.
So Hegel attempts to hide it. In the book of his lectures on the
philosophy of history, Hegel does not mention the United States,
or its Constitution, in the main text. In the final pages of the text
he briefly mentions Britain’s constitution and parliament; but he
dismisses Britain as being preoccupied with commerce and indus-
try centered on the spirit of empire “to form connections with
barbarous peoples, to create wants and stimulate industry, and
first and foremost to establish the conditions necessary to com-
merce, viz. the relinquishment of a life of lawless violence, respect
for property, and civility to strangers.” But what about the United
States? Philosophy of History contains a 103-page Introduction.
Tucked in on pages 84-86 of my copy (translated by J. Sidree in
1944), Hegel concedes that the US Constitution explicitly pro-
vides freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of
assembly to express grievances, among other protections and
rights. He even points out that “there is a President... who for
the sake of security against any monarchical ambition, is chosen only
for four years” (my emphasis). This screams out that Hegel’s con-
sciousness of freedom is heading west.
Hegel must find a way to escape this conclusion. He finds it
in Europe’s need for interaction between states due to their close
proximity. True statehood can only be gained through such inter-
action, just as true self-consciousness can only be gained through
interacting with others. Because America has immense room for
expansion, it could not yet develop true statehood. Hegel makes
this explicit: “Only when, as in Europe... the inhabitants, instead
of pressing outwards... press inwards upon each other, will Amer-
ica form a compact system of civil society, and require an orga-
nized state.” He concludes that “America is therefore the land of
the future... and as a land of the future it has no interest for us
here, for as regards History, our concern must be with that which
has been and that which is.” The US declared its independence
in 1776; Hegel lectured on the philosophy of history during the
1820s. It seems that a mere half-century of existence did not qual-
ify the US for the status of “that which has been.” But I quibble.
Hegel missed a more salient argument against fitting the States
into his scheme – slavery in America. Of course Greek democ-
racy was based on slavery; yet Greece was thought by Hegel to
be at the beginning of the march of freedom.
I believe Hegel inserted his commentary on the United States
in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History as a way of pre-
empting considering the US as the next stage of the conscious-
ness of freedom. Hegel knew who buttered his bread (or at least
paid for the butter) – King Frederick William III. So to protect
his privileged status in Prussian society, Hegel declared Prussia
the culmination of the march of freedom.
Nonetheless, I still admire Hegel’s expansive view of free-
dom and his deep exploration of consciousness. He said history
unfolds as the interaction of ideas – and many of the most influ-
ential philosophers ever since have themselves been profoundly
influenced by Hegel’s ideas.
© CHRIS CHRISTENSEN 2018
Chris Christensen is a delivery driver in Portland, Oregon, where he
studies philosophy and takes lessons in algebra from his wife, Bobbie.
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 33
 Putting Animals & Humans To Sleep
John Shand doubts there is a moral difference.
V
eterinarians call it PTS, a sad but sometimes nec-
essary duty. If the practice of having animals put to
sleep when they are in chronic pain or distress is so
right for animals, how can it be so wrong for
humans? Humans are animals, after all. From here on, when I
write ‘animals’, I’ll mean non-human animals.
On seeing certain cases of human suffering, those who
favour allowing human voluntary euthanasia sometimes say,
“You wouldn’t treat an animal like that.” Usually this reac-
tion is waved away as viscerally understandable but not to be
taken seriously. Yet this waving away is accompanied by the
same thought on both sides of the argument – namely, that
there is something special, elevated, or certainly different
about human beings. Should voluntary euthanasia be legal?
The pro-euthanasia side supposes that if you may be treat-
ing an animal well in respect of PTS, then surely you should
want to do the same thing – and more so – in respect to
humans, given our special qualities. The anti-euthanasia side
supposes there is something special about human beings that
means we should not be treated like animals as regards PTS-
like actions towards us.
For it to be true that in the same or similar circumstances
PTS is right in the one, animal, case, and wrong in the other,
human, case, there has to be a relevant moral difference.
Moreover, for it to be so right in one case and so wrong in
another case, there would have to be a substantial, even glar-
ing, moral difference. Without this, the distinction in treat-
ment with respect to PTS and some kind of euthanasia cannot
be morally justified. So, to be clear, for PTS to be wrong in
the case of humans yet right in the case of animals, there has
to be a relevant moral difference and that moral difference
has to be substantial. Here I will argue that there isn’t any-
thing like that.
First we may set aside questions of free will. Claiming that
animals do not have free will is irrelevant, since those who
When does PTS become immoral?
‘EVOLUTION OF HOUSEHOLD ARTICLES, ANIMALS ETC' BY FR. SCHMIDT. WELLCOME COLLECTION. CC BY 4.0
34 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
oppose euthanasia usually contend that the free will argument
for euthanasia (“It’s my choice, I can do what I want with my
life”) is not decisive in commending it. So they already agree
that free choice is not a the morally decisive factor here.
One possible line for the anti-euthanasia side, is to say that
human beings have some special standing among living things
– a bare fact of status which means that their treatment should
not be like that of other creatures, generally, and in respect
of euthanasia in particular. But it is very hard to explain what
that special standing might be in any way that would con-
vince everyone. Someone might argue that human life is
sacred in a way animal life is not. But for that to carry weight,
one would have to accept some kind of divinely-ordained
ordering of values. Many don’t accept that, simply thinking
the divine to be a fantasy. Even if one goes down that road,
this objection to euthanasia becomes an unargued fiat, and
so it no longer constitutes an argument against euthanasia.
Indeed, even if we did engage with such a view, it’s difficult
to see what could make the required difference, making us
sacred while animals are not. A soul? Hardly something
clearly present and agreed-upon that could provide the moral
difference necessary. Free will? This has already been shown
to be irrelevant to the discussion.
So we need to look elsewhere to resolve the dispute. But
what could provide the resolution?
The claim that people might manage to manipulate the
euthanasia system – bumping people off against their wishes,
or without their agreeing to it, or under some other bad cir-
cumstances – raises a practical rather than an ethical problem.
It might lead one to conclude that PTS was in practice alright
for animals but too dangerous to be legalised for humans; but
it could not logically lead one to the conclusion that in princi-
ple PTS is morally right in some circumstances for animals but
euthanasia morally wrong in all circumstances for humans.
One might think euthanasia too difficult to implement in prac-
tice while also thinking that it could be morally desirable in
some circumstances. Furthermore, the practical situation
might change. So practical considerations could not rule out
euthanasia as a moral imperative. So this line does not get the
euthanasia’s firmest opponents what they want: a timeless
moral objection to euthanasia in all cases.
We might be supposed to be responsible for certain animals
in a way we are not for other human beings. Clearly this respon-
sibility has very circumscribed limits, not extending to wild
animals in most cases, nor to nature red in tooth and claw gen-
erally. But a putative responsibility for animals in our care
which might permit us to request PTS for their benefit can
hardly be used as an argument against permitting voluntary
euthanasia for humans. All this argument could imply is that
no-one should be obliged to take part in administering it – and
no-one is arguing that. We might be said to be indifferent to
the kind of considerations that would prompt PTS for our pet
animals when the same considerations apply to humans. But
this is a very odd position when one thinks about it, for it sug-
gests that if euthanasia is in play at all, we should give more
care and consideration to animals requiring euthanasia than to
humans in the same circumstances.
Connected to this ‘responsibility’ line of thought is the idea
that a key difference between human beings and animals is
that humans are capable of a kind and level of thought, reflec-
tion and communication that animals are not. This might
indeed be a key difference between us and other animals in
some ways, without it being a moral difference. And insofar
as it might be considered to be morally relevant, it does not
help the case of those who suppose PTS is morally permissi-
ble for animals but voluntary euthanasia impermissible for
humans. Again, quite the opposite. If anything, the appeal to
human reason and superior cognitive capacity calls into doubt
the right to have animals PTS rather than the moral permis-
sibility of voluntary euthanasia for humans. Our moral justifi-
cation for being allowed to end the lives of sick animals might
be considered weakened precisely because they cannot grant
their reasoned consent to it, whereas humans can consent to
euthanasia.
This moves us on naturally to a consideration of suffering.
But surely in this case all the arguments run heavily in favour
of allowing human PTS.
Suffering takes various forms, but let’s just concentrate on
the main three: pain, self-perceived loss of dignity, and fear of
death. If one were basing an argument for PTS or euthanasia
on a consideration of these three features, then surely it is obvi-
ous that the human capacity for pain is at least equal to the
capacity of other animals, and moreover greater in respect of
at least two of them. This makes the imperative for human
euthanasia greater, indeed far greater, than the imperative for
animal PTS under this argument.
We can’t plausibly suppose that human beings suffer pain
less than animals – say, dogs, cats, horses – and we might argue
that they experience it more, but there is no need to argue that,
even. Equality of suffering would be enough to show that sen-
sitivity to pain cannot provide a relevant moral difference
between humans and animals in disallowing euthanasia while
allowing animal PTS.
We must distinguish
PHOTO BY RAWPIXEL ON UNSPLASH
between the moral and
practical issues involved
in euthanasia.
In respect of the potential for self-perceived indignity,
clearly human beings are streets ahead. We have the capacity
for self-perceived indignity in greater, perhaps, vastly greater
measure than animals, and in any case certainly not less. No
amount of talk (and one often hears it) of palliative care being
done right eliminating such indignity is entirely persuasive.
Since we are talking about self-perception, this is a stagger-
ingly dubious and high-handed claim: the perceived indignity
may be just a matter of having to have such help from others
at all.
This leaves the fear of death. Although it might be quite
convincingly argued that all higher mammals are capable of
such a fear, there is no question that humans with their extended
capacity for imagination and for positioning themselves within
their lives and in a wider world can be much more acutely aware
and fearful of it. The possibility of well-administered legal
euthanasia may allow us to see death as something of our own
timing rather than as an unchosen destination. If suffering
owing to our fear of dying can be reduced in this way by
euthanasia, or indeed just by the availability of it, then the moral
argument runs in favour of offering it. It certainly doesn’t run
the other way.
Often in philosophy looking at a closely related case illumi-
nates a more difficult problem. So I think it proves here. One
has to conclude therefore that if PTS is so right for animals,
then euthanasia must be right at least for some humans.
© DR JOHN SHAND 2018
John Shand is an author and a Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open
University. His books include Philosophy and Philosophers: An
Introduction to Western Philosophy (Routledge, 2002), Argu-
ing Well (Roultledge, 2000), and, as Editor, A Companion to
Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (Blackwell, 2019).
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 35
 Philosophy: A Call to Action
Calvin H. Warner asks if philosophy can improve our lives.
“J
ustice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth
is to systems of thought,” wrote John Rawls in A
Theory of Justice (1971). This simple comparison
elucidates the central task of philosophy rather well.
It seems just as plain to me that happiness is the central value
of human existence. But as with truth and justice, determining
that happiness is good is hardly an accomplishment: the tricky
part is to understand what happiness actually is. Yet knowing
what happiness actually is also falls short of telling us how we can
attain it; and if we can’t do that then we have missed the point
altogether. So what has philosophy to say here?
Philosophy is somehow presently both in a Golden Age and in
a Dark Age. In the Western world, thousands of salaried philoso-
phers write hundreds of books each year, protected by some of
history’s most robust freedoms of speech. Yet many outsiders
lament that much of this prodigious output is commentary on
commentary, and many academics are writing only for a handful
of readers in their own sub-speciality. My diagnosis is that phi-
losophy has disengaged from its most critical subject matter,
largely because of institutional pressures to publish on niche top-
ics rather than on issues that might interest the public. If you
think that esoteric research with an audience approaching zero is
a better use of philosophers’ time than contributing to the pub-
lic’s understanding of their world, then we disagree deeply about
the purpose of philosophy.
I do agree with A.J. Ayer that philosophy is the analysis of con-
cepts; but I have long felt philosophy does itself a disservice by
neglecting some of the most interesting concepts. Mind, self,
language, ethics, and beauty are all deeply fascinating concepts
with a rich philosophical tradition; but love, humor and happi-
ness are just as important. Further, as Ben Franklin (supposedly)
wrote, “well done is better than well said.” Our interpreting the
world, to dance around Marx, is a good start; but if we believe
what we write, the point, surely, is to then engage with the world
and improve it.
Happiness has been variously defined by philosophers. John
Stuart Mill considered happiness the output of an equation: plea-
sure minus pain – with higher-order pleasures (enjoying art or
writing philosophy) to be given a higher weighting than lower-
order ones. Aristotle thought happiness was found in achieving
eudaimonia or ‘good spiritedness’ – an inward state of content-
ment reached, at least in part, by a life of moderation. Thoreau
discovered that happiness could not be caught by pursuing hap-
piness itself, but instead by focusing on reconnecting with our
innate selves, the part lost in our transition to modernity – to
oversimplify, by unplugging ourselves. Aquinas said happiness is
knowing or attaining God. Nietzsche’s views are certainly too
complex to distill into a bumper sticker; but ‘striving toward a
higher level of self-actualization’ would be a good start. Kant, for
his part, does not view happiness as a core value; but if you hap-
36 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
pen to find contentment in the rigor of living a life according to
the harsh dictates of pure rationality and duty, there’s no sin in
that. Jesus and the Buddha have much in common, including a
conception of the good life that includes the rejection of wealth
in favor of a commitment to service and spiritual seeking.
What is absent from all these great thinkers is the cult of con-
spicuous consumption that today has such a grip on the Western
mind. Modern people are drowning in debt, unhealthy,
depressed, anxious over political and economic instability, alien-
ated in their work, stressed by their commutes, their families,
their meager retirement savings, and (whether they know it or
not), longing to reconnect with nature, community, and their
true, passionate selves. The West’s canonical philosophers have
varied cultural backgrounds, but they have all understood that
we cannot consume our way to happiness. It’s not leisure and
convenience, but work or other striving that make us happy. The
key is that the work be aligned with our passions, skills and inter-
ests, so that what we produce is something in which we take pride
and purpose.
Thoreau wrote in Walden (1854) that “the mass of men lead
lives of quiet desperation.” We must acknowledge that, in our
exorbitantly wealthy world, there is still deep poverty and
inequality throughout the globe. But at the same time, we must
realize that so much of our desperation in the Wealthy West is
self-imposed, and it is in an awakening from the dogmatic slum-
ber of consumerism that we will be able to pave the way to our
freedom. It turns out we can live frugally, and instead of a bigger
house or nicer car, we can buy our freedom and take up work in
a craft we enjoy (say, philosophy) or spending more time with
those we care about most. There is something pure and natural
in gardening instead of buying fast food, or walking to work
instead of driving. These pleasures require an investment of
time, an intentional structuring of one’s day; but to borrow from
Pete Adeney, how slothful have we become that we prefer to
scoot about in gasoline powered chairs rather than use the bodies
God or nature has blessed us with?
There is much analysis yet to be done concerning the gap
between our modern surplus and human happiness. But the rad-
ical work of standing in the way of a culture charging in the
wrong direction has always been the role of the philosopher – yet
not in the pages of exclusive journals where we write in highly
technical jargon behind a paywall that only university libraries
can afford. It is up to us philosophers whether we will continue
in our current pattern and become extinct by budget cuts and
underemployment, or if we will reclaim our place in the cultural
discussion by standing up for truth, sanity, and happiness.
© CALVIN H. WARNER 2018
Calvin H. Warner holds an MA in Philosophy from Georgia State
University, where he also taught Introduction to Philosophy. He
currently attends Vanderbilt University Law School.
 I Hate Philosophy
At least Gray Kochhar-Lindgren can be philosophical about it.
B
eing an academic, my hatred of philosophy is, of
course, something that hitherto I have only confided
to the closest of my friends, and even then only after
three glasses of Agiorghitiko at the little beachside tav-
erna on Mykonos after spending the day
beneath the summer’s scorching sun wan-
dering around the ruins on Delos. Intoxi-
cated, I can tell the truth. Sober, I lie. I am
now drunk: I hate philosophy; I despise
philosophy; I loathe philosophy.
You already know why I hate philosophy.
It is all as monotonously predictable as the
fact that x, y, and z follow one another, and
as surely as the sun will rise each morning.
There is, then, no reason to read further.
Go: live your life, experience its beautiful
fullness, and for heaven’s sake leave the
obsessive-compulsive minutiae of philoso-
phy behind. (Why, by the way, do they all
have to write in such an unnecessarily compli-
cated manner? Can’t they just be clear, dis-
tinct, and get to the point?) If you can have the good common sense
and the courage to do it, this would be the sunniest of decisions –
a decision made at noon, and one that will lead you to a new vigor
and health. Thinking makes us ill-tempered and confused; think-
ing riddles us with parasites of ideas. Thinking is a parasite. Philos-
ophy is the essence of sickness. Go. Be happy. Be hale and healthy.
Get outside. It is, to my dismay, far too late for me.
“But why?”, you ask (as if you understood freedom, the form
of questioning, and all that that entails). Why this hatred of phi-
losophy to the very essence, to the very ground and foundation
of my being?
The trap has now been set. Once you step into the labyrinth,
you cannot step out, for the labyrinth is not a maze with an inside
and an outside. The set-up is an immersion, and it will crush us in
its pitiless jaws. This is its cruelty.
Why? A simple question – one small word; but it invites a
response that is not only interminable – there is simply not
enough time and space to set out the response – it is also a ques-
tion which has infinite complexity. There is a fundamental
imbalance between my (and our) capacity and the force of the
question. If in any way I attempt to answer this ‘Why?’ – it looks
so innocent, doesn’t it, so beguiling? – then I am doomed to phi-
losophy. But if I refuse, then I cannot take the next step of freeing
myself, and this time I hope for good, from philosophy…
I hate philosophy because it takes on problems that are too big
for itself, that it can never adequately address, and that exceed its
own self-definitions and methodologies. It is immeasurable, and it
thereby cracks all of our attempts at measuring out our lives
through taking the measure of measurement. I hate philosophy
because it is so repetitious: it continues to take on the same old ques-
tions time-and-time again. It’s like a dog trying to get comfortable,
restlessly circling around on its rumpled fireside rug. The eternal
return grinds us down to dust and ash. Not only is it so boring that
it drives us out of our minds, it’s also completely
useless, producing nothing – nothing at all – of
‘Escaping value. My scientific and business friends simply
Criticism’ shake their heads, with some pity to be sure,
and amiably scoff. The insoluble. The unpro-
gressive. The intractable. The impossible. All
those tiny prefix negations. That’s not the way,
they assure me, that real knowledge works; and
it sure as hell isn’t the way capital works. What,
pray tell, is monetizable about such niggling
around the a priori? “What kind of job do you
want?” they would always ask, eyebrows
slightly raised, ever since I caught the bug:
“What are you going to do with philosophy?”
It’s excessive, repetitious, and useless. I
hate it. Be a philosopher and not only will you
know nothing and produce nothing, but you
will also be poverty-stricken. Philosophy, connected indissol-
ubly as it is with both eros and ethics, is always poor. It wants but
it cannot have what it wants because what it wants recedes as
thinking approaches it. This receding, to be sure, makes room
for more thinking – if ‘more’ is the right word here – but there
is never the satisfaction of possession: never the “I have you and
now, at last, I can use you for my own ends!” Instead, we are pos-
sessed by philosophy – we are stricken; and how embarrassing is
this admission in this age of the blasé? All eros and ethics can do
is open doors and windows, make room for whatever is to
appear, and to greet whatever it is as it appears and goes. There
is no power at work here – of politics or money or media. It’s just
cracking open the window, letting in a little air, a little light.
That’s pitiful; it makes me gnash my teeth and want to weep.
I hate philosophy for many other reasons as well, and I can
give reasons for those reasons, but I am exhausted at the
moment. I do wonder, though, what the ‘at’, the ‘the’, and the
‘moment’ signify in that phrase; how these random sounds in a
historically constrained language operate to indicate a condition
of experience that places time in conjunction with a moodful state
of the body – ‘exhausted’.
I am exhausted, ergo I cannot, at the moment, do more. This
hatred, though, runs deep, and will, I’m sure, incite me at some
point (and who knows, perhaps the point will turn into a line
and the line will learn to fly) to return to the site of the wound
and to touch, again, upon the loathsomeness of that enigma
called ‘philosophy’.
© PROF. GRAY KOCHHAR-LINDGREN 2018
Gray Kochhar-Lindgren is a Professor at Hong Kong University.
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 37
A Moral Education
The Ethics of
Education
in the Secular
State
Andrew Copson considers some
ethical problems for secular education
in a pluralistic world.
D
efinitions of what makes a state ‘secular’ vary, but
three aspects are common. First, a secular state is
one in which there is separation of religious insti-
tutions from the institutions of the state and no
domination of the one by the other. Second, a secular state seeks
to maximise freedom of thought, conscience, and religion for
all, with everyone free to manifest their beliefs within the limits
of public order and the rights of others, and to change their
beliefs. Finally, the state treats everyone equally and does not
discriminate against or privilege individuals on grounds of their
worldview, religious or non-religious. Almost a third of states
in the world are secular in their constitutions according to these
criteria, and many more are in fact secular even if constitution-
ally religious, in practice functioning not through their vesti-
gial religious establishments but through democratic means.
Even more states – over 90% of the world’s states – constitu-
tionally reflect at least one aspect of secularism, in that their
laws espouse a guarantee of freedom of religion or belief. If a
state is going to take its constitutional secularism seriously, what
might that mean for its education system?
Controversies about education have been a feature of secular-
ism since its beginning. The rise in official state secularism coin-
cided with the construction of many state school systems. Edu-
cation moved from being the preserve of parents and informal
communities (often religious) to being the concern of a class of
trained specialists funded by public taxes. In many states today
there are mixed systems, with some schools being secular (in that,
for example, they admit children of all backgrounds and do not
discriminate on religious grounds) and some not. Given the first
aspect of secularism I outlined – the separation of state institu-
tions from religious ones – it is obvious that the educational sys-
tems are non-secular in countries as diverse as Iran and Ireland.
One particular favoured religious organisation has active involve-
ment in state schools, and, whatever else it may be, the curricu-
lum is a tool of religious instruction. In many other states too, it
is the unsecularised part of the curriculum that seeks to deal with
moral development, often taught through a religious framework.
Some secularists believe that some models of state-provided
religion-based moral development are legitimate. For example,
what if all religious organisations are given equal rights to par-
38 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
ticipate in state schools? If religious organisations are allowed to
run separate confessional classes in state schools, as they do in
Belgium, or even run separate state schools, as in England, isn’t
this equal treatment consistent with secularism? To make it fair,
provision could be made in proportion to the number of parents
in the schools that followed each religion. In this way, no one
religion would dominate the institution unfairly, and everyone
would be treated equally without discrimination. An obvious
objection is that many parents have non-religious worldviews.
But to cater for them, humanist organisations could also be
involved, as they are in the Netherlands and parts of Germany.
Some secularists would defend such a system. Still, there may
be good reasons to think that it would still not be compatible
with secularism. The first is that it does not allow for real-time
changing patterns of belief and affiliation. It could not react
promptly to such changes, and so would privilege those reli-
gions or beliefs that are strong at the time the system is initi-
ated or updated. This would provide some groups with recog-
nition and resources whilst protecting them from the effects of
waning popularity. At the same time, new worldviews would
find it difficult to grow and gain recognition or equal treatment.
So, in its attempt to maximise freedom, this system could actu-
ally inhibit freedom of belief.
Second, no state would be able to run such a system fairly.
There are so many denominations of Christianity alone that
providing a whole school for every one of them, or even a reg-
ular class in a shared school wherever a denomination is repre-
sented by a parent, would be completely unfeasible. Even more
challenging, although some people think of religions as homoge-
nous (‘Catholics believe this...’, ‘Buddhists believe that...’), the
reality is that individuals are not so simple. One person may
identify as a Catholic but believe in reincarnation and not think
that contraception is sinful. She may be married to someone
who identifies as a Muslim but in some of his beliefs sympathises
with aspects of pantheism and at home keeps Christmas because
of his upbringing. Belief and practice are so individual that to
provide a school that catered for each parental situation with-
out discrimination would be absolutely impossible.
Third, it is not right to focus solely on parents: children’s inter-
ests are as much the concern of secularism. The right of children
to freedom of religion or belief (at least in line with their devel-
oping capacity) would at a minimum suggest that the education
system provided by the state should be free of religious assump-
tions on contested questions such as the basis of morality or the
purpose of life, and certainly that it should not enforce specific
beliefs or practices. Going further, if secularism really seeks to
protect freedom of conscience, we could argue that the state’s
educational system should equip children with the ability and the
experience to choose. This means that the school should teach
about religions and non-religious worldviews in a fair and bal-
anced way, allowing no confessional instruction, and actively
seeking to equip children with the critical skills needed to make
up their own minds about what they’re being taught.
This is the thinking behind the Convention on the Rights of the
Child, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in
1989. Article 13 declares: “The child shall have the right to free-
dom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek,
receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regard-
less of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form
of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice”; while
Article 14 says that states “shall respect the right of the child to
freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.” The Convention
also says that parents can “provide direction to the child in the
exercise of his or her right in a manner consistent with the evolv-
ing capacities of the child.” But it does not say that the state has
an obligation to provide this direction on the parents’ behalf.
Finally, we come to the interests of the state itself. Secular-
ism accepts that it may be necessary to limit individual freedom
of action or belief to protect the rights of others or in the inter-
ests of public order, and also to educate children for the same
reason. The state’s interest in social cohesion and equal citizen-
ship comes into play here. The state can be argued to have a
legitimate interest in ensuring that children who will become
citizens together learn with and from each other from an early
age so as to develop the skills, habits and attitudes of living
together in a democratic society. In light of this, the secular
state is justified in doing two things. First, in its own interests
to secure social peace, it may legitimately inculcate certain min-
imum basic moral values necessary for life in society, such as
peaceful co-operation. Second, it may teach about a range of
religious and non-religious approaches to life in a fair and bal-
anced way. There are good secular reasons for this: religions
and humanism have had significant impact on human society
and culture, and so constitute a necessary part of a full educa-
tion. As traditions, they contain insights from which young
people may learn; and they do constitute the actual worldviews
of a child’s fellow citizens, of whom each child should acquire
some knowledge, in order to improve mutual understanding.
There will always be parents who plead their conscience to
say that their children should not receive education, particu-
larly religious or moral education, divergent from that in the
home. But in states that take seriously the principles of fairness
and freedom – for children no less than for anyone else – limit-
ing this parental control is amply justified.
© ANDREW COPSON 2018
Andrew Copson is Chief Executive of Humanists UK. His book
Secularism: Politics, Religion, and Freedom was published by
Oxford University Press in 2017.
Philosophical Haiku
IRIS MURDOCH
(1919–1999)
Perceive but not touch
An abstract reality:
God become the Good
P
erhaps better known as a philosophical novelist than as a philoso-
pher, in her novels Iris Murdoch explored in intense depth the inner
lives of her vast panoply of characters. In this she was an heir to
the literary tradition that includes Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Proust. Mur-
doch also spent fifteen years teaching philosophy at Oxford University.
She was born in Phibsborough, Dublin, moving to London with her
family when just a few weeks old. As a student at Oxford, she met Ludwig
Wittgenstein, discovered Plato, and did what many people did back then
– joined the Communist Party. This proved problematic when in 1946
she won a scholarship to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York:
sensing in her a potential commie agitator, the Americans denied her a
visa. She was later to visit the United States on numerous occasions,
but always had to obtain a waiver from the authorities – once a commie,
always a commie, as they liked to say. In fact, in later life, Murdoch’s phi-
losophy was underpinned by a commitment to Plato rather than Marx,
and to Plato’s belief in the existence of ideal Forms – abstract perfect
archetypes of every flawed entity we perceive in the world. Murdoch
believed that Goodness, or the Good, had an actual existence as one of
these Forms, and that we are to live life as pilgrims who seek to move
ever closer to it. As we do so, like Plato’s cave-dwellers emerging blink-
ing into the sunlight, we move steadily away from a life of illusion, to a
life of reality or truth. To Murdoch’s mind, this journey brings us not only
nearer to the Good, but nearer also to God, since for her, goodness was
best understood as a manifestation of God in the world.
Having epitomised the life of the mind, and having believed that we
ultimately come to know reality through the mind, Murdoch suffered the
ignominy of having her mind taken from her: in her mid-70s, Alzheimer’s
began its pitiless work of erasure. She died just a few years later.
© TERENCE GREEN 2018
Terence is a writer, historian, and lecturer, and lives with his wife
and their dog in Paekakariki, NZ. hardlysurprised.blogspot.co.nz
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 39

Dogmatic Demands
DEAR EDITOR: Sandy Grant’s article on
‘Dogmas’ in Issue 127 reminded me of a
comment a senior colleague made to me
when I was a somewhat naïve and per-
haps arrogant young lecturer. He said,
“You would do well to remember,
Colin, that there is a difference between
being an authority and being authoritar-
ian. The former knows what they are
talking about, the latter is merely throw-
ing their weight around.”
I was suitably admonished and subse-
quently grateful for this remark. I believe
its force stayed with me, for on reflection
I had recognised his ‘authority’. The use-
fulness of the distinction could helpfully
add to those made by Sandy Grant in her
article because it seemed to me that ‘an
authority’ and ‘being in authority’ do not
have necessarily to be linked to dogma,
whereas being ‘authoritarian’ does.
Furthermore, whilst paying an author-
ity ‘too much attention’ (p.26) can be
problematic, seeking out an authority on a
topic one is researching is a valuable strat-
egy. It is a good starting point to ask,
“Whom should I trust on this subject?”
This question can be pursued typically by
consulting bibliographies, references and
footnotes. Of course one should attempt
to read critically, but this takes a familiar-
ity with a subject, practice and patience
and, to begin with at least, reliance on an
authority is no bad thing. And, in time,
having learnt to read critically, it becomes
possible to see how and why an author has
become an authority, or just authoritarian.
COLIN BROOKES
LEICESTERSHIRE
Brought to Book
DEAR EDITOR: Siobhan Lyons’ article
‘What Makes A Philosopher?’ in Issue
128 shows the role overlapping other
chosen pursuits, e.g. for a comic to cre-
ate fresh humour some serious thinking
is required, just as philosophers appar-
ently require wisdom and foolishness.
40 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up.
Email me at rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
The latter group may well claim to grasp
forces that impinge on members of a
society, but so might politicians, town
planners, economists and sociologists.
Something of a contradiction arises
when philosophers are advised to (some-
how!) ‘read everything’ and also to not
depend on an excess of knowledge.
Well, avoiding an excess of knowledge is
reasonable, but only in the sense that
many excesses – water, alcohol, debt,
pasta, money – are harmful.
Dr Lyons’ inclusion of concepts
sharpens this article; but perhaps key
features of philosophical concepts
should have been introduced, so distin-
guishing them from our everyday,
taken-for-granted concepts, like schools
and health centres. Professional philoso-
phers may live for their theories, but
what shapes the future of these ideas –
applause from friends or tough criticism
from folk keen to establish a patch?
Maybe the general population will
demand inclusion: how will the process
of concept-design and application be
done in a user-friendly way?
NEIL RICHARDSON
KIRKHEATON
Many Reasons For Worlds
DEAR EDITOR: With regard to ‘Why is
There a World?’ in Issue 128: If there is a
God, questions about God’s motives will
inevitably be speculative because our per-
spective is narrow. And answers must
accommodate everything for which God
is purportedly responsible, directly or
indirectly. So if God exists he must be
‘necessary being’. He must also have cer-
tain other absolute qualities: infinity,
unity, free will, unified purpose, and so
on. Speculation must also accommodate
human experience; the physical universe
of time and space; that we are made out of
physical stuff; that we have minds, have an
apparent free will; and are in a vague way
aware of values such as truth, beauty,
goodness, love and so forth. From neces-
sity, infinity, and unity, we get Leibniz’s
deduction that God must create the ‘best
possible universe’ – something that we
have certainly not got on Earth. If we can
imagine better – a hate-free world, for
example – then so can God. I have written
books and essays on the subject of why
God created this universe, or indeed, any-
thing at all. A quick summary:
1. ‘Best possible universe’ must be taken
diachronically: It isn’t the best possible
now (we are in time), but it will become so.
2. A physical universe of purposeless
mechanism conjoined with limited, pur-
poseful, value-sensitive free will must
have something to do with the process of
achieving the best possible universe.
3. This works when people freely use
their will to instantiate values into the
world: when they choose to revere truth,
produce beauty, behave lovingly...
4. God created this particular universe to
have partners in the achievement. Only
thus will there come to be, eventually, the
best possible universe as God conceives it
– and nobody thinks bigger than God. If
there were a better way to get there, God
would have chosen it.
MATTHEW RAPAPORT
SAN FRANCISCO
(author of Why This Universe?: God,
Cosmology, Consciousness, and Free-Will)
DEAR EDITOR: In his article in Issue 128,
Carlo Filice admirably lays out many of
the elements involved in trying to answer
the question ‘Why is There a World?’,
and he puts forward a possible ‘penulti-
mate’ answer. I would like to draw read-
ers’ attention to my psychological the-
ory, which provides a possibly ‘ultimate’
explanation for the co-existence of the
physical universe of limitations and a
state of fundamental, unlimited being.
I was not considering universe-level
states of being when I undertook the
research that led to my developing the
theory: I was researching the state of
mind (in myself and in people generally)

that compulsively and unconsciously
denies awareness of its true state of
being. I was motivated to research this
because as a nonviolent activist I was
constantly confronted with self-destruc-
tive behaviour (and not just by the
Trumps of the world) without any ade-
quate explanation for it. Like any good
philosopher, I took my time (see Siob-
han Lyons’ article in the same issue); but
I was finally able to apply what I had
learned in studying the individual and
social self to the universe as a whole in a
way that felt genuinely insightful.
It was only when I thought to explain
the universe in terms of insanity that
everything finally began to make sense.
Shocking though it may seem to both
atheists and theists, the physical universe
was created by an insane mind. This
mind exists ‘without reason’ and there-
fore has no genuine cause, but blindly
follows its own internal logic of compul-
sive self-contradiction.
If you’d like to read more about my
theory you can do so at:
anitamckone.wordpress.com/articles-
2/the-unbelievable-truth. I’d love to
hear from anyone who would like to
comment on it.
ANITA MCKONE
DAYLESFORD, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA
Shades of Gray
DEAR EDITOR: In his column in Philoso-
phy Now 127, Raymond Tallis exquisitely
skewers John Gray’s Straw Dogs. I con-
sider both works to be polemics; but
Tallis’s is the better one, due to the con-
straints of writing a column. His argu-
mentation has to be tighter, whereas
Gray’s is comparatively thin because he
had to fill a whole book. Nevertheless, I
cannot agree with Tallis in the end.
Gray’s central contention is that
humanism, in the sense of a belief in the
special nature of humanity, is both false
and dangerous, or at least futile. Tallis
refutes this logically and empirically.
First he points out that Gray is contra-
dicting himself by basing his assertions
on human scientific accomplishments
which, by Gray’s own reasoning, must
be a hill of beans. Then Tallis seals the
deal by reference to a new book by Hans
Rosling which details the undeniably
impressive progress humanity has made
on so many fronts in recent times.
One problem I see with Tallis’s brief
is that it relies on quantifiable measures
to make the latter case. I see two liabili-
ties here. Firstly, this ignores the relative
relevance of various quantities, and it
may amount to cherry-picking. For
example, where are the statistics about
any improvement in happiness or the
perceived value of life? Maybe far fewer
humans die in childbirth or infancy, and
average life expectancy has increased
dramatically: but has human misery
thereby been reduced? Perhaps more
people are more miserable than ever,
and for longer than ever. Secondly, the
numbers themselves can be misleading.
For example, Tallis cites the statistic that
“In the last twenty years, the proportion
of the world population living in extreme
poverty has dropped from 29% to 9%.”
But that is 9% of a substantially
increased population, so the comparison
isn’t quite as favorable as at first glance.
Even more telling is that the number of
people in extreme poverty is still 687
million souls, which is equivalent to the
entire human population when Voltaire
wrote Candide back in 1759. Do we now
live in a better real world? Numbers
alone will not answer this.
My main gripe with Tallis, however,
is one he and I have grappled over
before: his belief that non-human ani-
mals do not measure up to human beings
in the cosmic scheme of things. If one
wants to talk about humanistic progress
in the contemporary era, how can the
exponential increase in animal suffering
and death at human hands during this
period be ignored? Sentient life as a
whole is much worse off since the ascen-
dancy of humanity, and it’s a trend that
shows no sign of changing for the better.
Nevertheless, I agree with Tallis that
we should not therefore succumb to pes-
simistic quietism. I rather favor the
advice of the Bhagavad Gita, which (on a
benign interpretation) counsels carrying
on with conscientious action without
regard to the prospects. There are even
good instrumental grounds for doing so,
since sometimes efforts do pay off
against seemingly insurmountable odds.
But this ethics can be pursued even in
the face of genuine hopelessness.
JOEL MARKS
PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHILOSOPHY,
UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAVEN
DEAR EDITOR: I found Raymond Tallis’s
item on Hans Rosling and John Gray in
Issue 127 thought-provoking and engag-
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 41
Letters
ing. But having worked for several years
in researching, producing, and publiciz-
ing statistics, my response is cautious,
because I am aware how easy it is to use
them to bend them to one’s own mes-
sage. For example, free-marketeers use
such figures as Rosling used to assert
how well capitalism benefits humanity to
justify unfettered capitalism, markets and
economic growth, and reject interven-
tion to improve the lot of the many who
remain in poverty. Reality is always more
complex than statistics can ever fully
encompass, and it is the real people
behind the statistics, their lives and rela-
tionships, that matter. I suspect that
Rosling was aware of this and not a naïve
believer in automatic progress, his work
showing that there is room for both
optimism and pessimism, and therefore
much for humanity to play for.
I read John Gray’s Straw Dogs (2007)
some years ago. Rather than ‘malign’,
Gray seemed to me to be arguing that,
without the Jewish/Christian assumption
that human beings are created in God’s
image, there is no reason to give Homo
sapiens a privileged position amongst ani-
mals, or expect any particular behaviour
from them as a species. Like all animals,
they simply behave as they have evolved
to behave. One could also conclude that
this supports a broadly Nietzschean view
that there can be no privileged position
for any morality, intellectual system, or
worldview (including secular humanism).
It is also not self-evident why we must
give a preferential place to human beings,
care about others and further the com-
mon good of humanity. All of this
requires reasoned consideration. In Straw
Dogs, Gray claimed that there is no point
in trying to do so, and he recommended
particularly the ancient work of
Zhuangzi, focussing on wu wei – a life of
unattached, natural spontaneity within
the natural flow of life. I do not believe
that this is enough to enable us to pro-
vide a cogent and convincing response to
meet the significant challenges that now
face us. However, I have great respect for
the long tradition of Chinese thought,
including that of Zhuangzi, and it is sig-
nificant that the Chinese have always
used several philosophical approaches in
tension, balancing the Daoist with the
Confucian, Legalist, Mohist, various
strands of Buddhist, and latterly, West-
ern, thought. It is desirable, and possible,
similarly to develop a humanistic consen-
Letters
sus which can unite all committed to the
progress of humanity, whether they be
secular humanist, theistic, Buddhist, etc.,
and from varied philosophical traditions.
This is increasingly urgent.
TOM BERRIE
LEICESTERSHIRE
DEAR EDITOR: It seems to me that Ray-
mond Tallis fails to appreciate the true
root of John Gray’s work. Yes, much
good has been realized in the last two
hundred years or so, particularly in
medicine, poverty alleviation, and the
general provision of the necessities of
life, much of which is due to technologi-
cal development. What Tallis fails to
mention is that these things have come
at considerable cost to the natural envi-
ronment. He says population trends are
‘reassuring’; but we cannot be happy that
the mass of humanity together with the
animals we have domesticated far out-
weigh the mass of the wild animal king-
dom – completely overturning the posi-
tion ten thousand years ago.
This state of affairs is at the root of
John Gray’s worldview. Moreover, Gray
believes (as do many environmentally
concerned people) that we are not doing
anything like enough to turn the tide:
even worse,we are unlikely to do so until
it is too late. We have sown the seeds of
our own destruction and are too con-
cerned with ‘making life better’ by eco-
nomic growth and technological advance
to do anything about it. The end result
of this neglect will be enormous loss of
human life by starvation, disease, and
conflict. Gray may have gone too far by
referring to humanity as ‘slime’; but if it
helps to awaken our will to do some-
thing, his pessimism will not be in vain.
JOHN GAMLIN
COLCHESTER
Taking the Moral High Ground
DEAR EDITOR: Does anyone own the
moral high ground now? Gerald Jones’
article ‘Moral Blind Spots’ in Issue 128
nails everyone’s self-justified ‘moral fab-
ric’ as hypocritical: the centuries of sacri-
fices and slavery, murders for circus
‘entertainment’, torture of prisoners,
genocide of ‘witches’, animal slaughter,
unfettered consumerism, child labour,
environmental destruction, and the
smug minority of the very rich. But is
our problem really our moral myopia,
complacency, cognitive dissonance or
42 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
ignorance; or is it the shattering truth
that humans committed the Holocaust,
and, as a murderous species, we exist
knowing of smaller genocides all the
time? As Arthur Koestler commented,
“If the past were admitted to weigh on
its conscience, every nation would be
compelled to commit hara-kiri.”
MIKE BOR
LONDON
Derrida True Reader
DEAR EDITOR: It is flattering to be
quoted. So I was gratified when Mike Sut-
ton, in his article on Derrida in Issue 127,
referred back to my essay in Issue 100.
Nevertheless, I can’t agree with every-
thing Sutton says about Derrida. In par-
ticular, his claim that Derrida thinks (this
time quoting Hilary Lawson) that “there
is no single meaning of the sentence ‘the
chair is black’... And we will each conceive
the meaning of the statement differently.”
This leaves me wondering how human
communication and collaboration would
ever be possible. But I don’t accept that
Derrida ever made such an assertion. If he
did, I would need to know where and
when; and I would require a quotation
from Derrida, not Lawson. Derrida’s Of
Grammatology uncovers the limitations of
various theories about language, rather
than showing any supposed limitations
inherent to language itself. The book
deconstructs the theories of Rousseau and
Saussure; but one cannot ‘deconstruct’ a
simple statement like ‘the chair is black’,
nor has Derrida ever sought to do so.
Margaret White in Letters, PN 128,
asks for “a demonstration of deconstruc-
tion as Derrida would do it, with philo-
sophical texts.” Happily, this request is
easy to satisfy. Nearly all of Derrida’s
essays are exactly that: analyses of partic-
ular philosophical texts through a decon-
structive approach. So there are literally
dozens to choose from. Good examples
include: Plato’s Pharmacy which deals
with Plato’s Phaedrus; the discussion of
Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Lan-
guage in Of Grammatology; the discussion
of J.L. Austin’s theories in Signature,
Event, Context; and there are many more.
You should always prepare yourself by
first reading the texts he is talking about;
and then hours of fascination await you!
Derrida’s work is always engrossing, and
is never as difficult as people pretend.
PETER BENSON
LONDON
On Celebrity
DEAR EDITOR: This was inspired by the
article about Heidegger on Celebrity in
Philosophy Now Issue 125:
Look at me! I’m on TV,
Plain to view, for all to see.
What you get is what you want.
Paint by numbers, fill the gaps.
Go to worship on an app.
Buttons pushed. Adulation. Endorphin
rush.
Discernment, logic, truth, good taste;
All crushed.
Suspended critique floats in the air,
Out the window, down the stairs.
Insect queen she draws you in.
Pheremone mediated, anything goes,
Nothing’s a sin.
Adored and adoring manacled, shackled.
It’s the tally that counts, as the game
becomes tactical.
Numbers, degrees of being, equate to
fame.
Clicks, likes, tweets,
Magazines, booked seats.
It’s all the same.
While the river of fame and celebrity
gently seeps
Into a God-shaped empty hollow within.
Media fans the flames of fame,
Dispensing glowing cinders of contagious
fallacy.
The question is, and we ask you now,
Will you ever return to reality?
Who can resist the Medusa’s call
That holds all who see her tight in thrall?
The poor, the sick, the dispossessed,
Give not a rat for Selena’s dress.
As for the rest, we fear them thus.
With nothing to lose, next stop it’s us.
Hyperactive, self obsessed.
Tap dancing. Eighteen.
Got long legs and sexy hips,
Her name is formed by a thousand lips.
But they know me not,
Not who I am.
Celebrity is such a sham.
DR MIKE BUCK
CARDIFF
IMAGE BY CAROL BELANGER GRAFTON
Philosophy for the Young,
Peter Adamson on battles over the trivium and quadrivium.
A
round the world, teenagers are
taking philosophy classes. For
instance, French students take a
philosophy exam at the end of
their secondary education, and in 2008,
Federal law in Brazil made the discipline
compulsory for high school students. For-
ward thinking though such measures may
be, they are also quite literally medieval.
The forerunners of today’s French stu-
dents at the early University of Paris, as
well as their contemporaries in cities such
as Bologna and Oxford, studied the ‘liberal
arts’. You might know that these arts
included three linguistic disciplines – the
trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic
(logical discussion) – and four mathemati-
cal topics called the quadrivium, namely
arithmetic, geometry, music, and astron-
omy. But you’ll probably be surprised to
learn how young students at these Univer-
sities were. The beginning scholars were
all of fourteen years old.
Most of these kids had no intention of
becoming philosophers. Many just wanted
a basic education in literacy and numeracy
which would allow them to find work as
clerks. Those who stayed on for higher
studies would specialize in law, medicine,
or theology. Yet a lot of philosophical
material was covered in the medieval uni-
versity curriculum. The trivium involved
studying logic, philosophy of language,
and epistemology, because their textbook
for dialectic was the Organon (‘Instrument’)
of Aristotle – so called because the works
he devoted to these subjects were together
seen as the indispensable tool for pursuit
of philosophy and the sciences. In these
‘logical’ works Aristotle covered a wide
range of issues, including the nature of
knowledge and the way that language cap-
tures the world.
Questions about language arose espe-
cially in the discipline of grammar. Here
the basic goal was to get the young schol-
ars reading and writing Latin; but at Paris
a group of masters initiated the school of
thought known as ‘speculative grammar’,
which posited that the metaphysical struc-
ture of the world mirrors language: in
Philosophy Then
Medieval Style
other words, grammatical distinctions
reflect ‘modes of being’ possessed by
things in the world. A simple example
might be that nouns pick out substances,
and adjectives pick out accidental proper-
ties of those substances.
But it was dialectic, or logic, that most
obviously led to philosophical reflection,
albeit sometimes in surprising ways. In the
fourteenth century a group at Oxford
known as the Calculators began to model
motion and other physical processes using
mathematics. This was often in the con-
text of writing about logic, because such
models could be used to resolve paradoxi-
cal or sophistical arguments about change
and motion (such as Zeno’s), and the
schoolmen were deeply interested in para-
doxes and sophisms, since the study of
good argument technique among other
things involved analyzing bad arguments
to see where they have gone wrong. Logi-
cians also devoted great energy to resolv-
ing the Liar Paradox: seen in a phrase like
‘What I am saying now is false’, which
seems to be true if it is false and false if it is
true. The art of avoiding self-contradic-
tion reached its highest level of sophistica-
tion in a university activity called ‘Obliga-
tions’ – a question and answer game in
which one player laid logical traps to trick
the other into refuting himself.
The masters and their students did not
restrict their attention to logic and lan-
guage, though. A wide range of Aristotle’s
works were taught, including his writings
on ethics and, most contentiously, his nat-
ural philosophy. Contentious, because
Aristotle embraced the thesis that the uni-
verse is eternal, which was an unacceptable
doctrine for medieval Christians. Here the
masters were in a bind. By profession they
were exegetes of Aristotle, but their faith
required them to assert that the universe
was created in time. One solution was to
admit that natural philosophy has intrinsic
limits. Since, as the name implies, it con-
siders only natural causes, it takes no
account of the possibility of divine, super-
natural causation, which is what was
involved in the creation of the world.
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 43
It’s a clever solution, as it would allow
the masters to continue teaching and
studying Aristotle while admitting that his
conclusions were provisional and could be
revised from a theological standpoint. But
that stance was anathema to the Aris-
totelian theologian Thomas Aquinas, who
wanted a perfect fit between philosophy
and theology. Aquinas therefore insisted
that (following the Jewish thinker Mai-
monides) there are no decisive rational
arguments either for or against the eternal
existence of the universe.
When we remember how young and
impressionable the students were, we may
more easily understand the decision of
church authorities in 1277 to condemn a
range of doctrines being discussed at the
University of Paris: it was akin to modern-
day political influence being brought to
bear on high school curricula. But the con-
demnation sought to eliminate even dis-
cussion of the condemned theses, never
mind their endorsement. The fear was in
part that these young students would not
appreciate the subtle distinction between
entertaining a notion found in Aristotle for
the sake of interpretive work, and actually
embracing dangerous Aristotelian teach-
ings as true.
It’s pleasing to note that today’s French
school system gives teenagers more credit.
After all, the study of philosophy encour-
ages an appreciation of exactly this sort of
subtle distinction, and calls for flexibility
of mind and a willingness to evaluate an
opponent’s thesis fairly rather than insist-
ing dogmatically on one’s own views.
These habits of mind don’t seem to be in
abundant supply among the adults of 2018.
So maybe we should take our cue from the
medievals and invest our hopes in the next
generation, by giving them the chance to
study philosophy.
And by the way, teaching them Latin
wouldn’t hurt either.
© PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2018
Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1, 2
& 3, available from OUP. They’re based on his
popular History of Philosophy podcast.

Books
From Bacteria to Bach
and Back
by Daniel Dennett
IN 1997 THE ITALIAN
newspaper Corriere della
Sera interviewed Tufts
philosophy professor Daniel Dennett about
his work. The paper published the interview
under the title ‘Si, abbiamo un anima. Ma é
fatta di tanti piccoli robot!’: ‘Yes, we have a
soul. But it’s made of lots of tiny robots!’
Dennett quotes this title in From Bacteria to
Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017),
and with good reason, for it perfectly encap-
sulates both the argument of the book and
the spirit in which it is offered. In From Bacte-
ria to Bach and Back Dennett tells you a story
about the human mind. It might not be the
story you were expecting, and you may not
like it, but Dennett hopes to convince you
of it nonetheless. And it’s definitely a story
worth hearing.
The book attempts to explain how our
minds work, and how they came into exis-
tence. For Dennett, these two questions are
intimately related. “Many,” he writes, “of
the puzzles (or ‘mysteries’ or ‘paradoxes’) of
human consciousness evaporate once you
ask how they could possibly have arisen – and
actually try to answer the question” (p.9). He
says philosophers waste their time trying to
answer questions like these without a deep
understanding of what science has taught us
about the human brain. He does not claim
to be a scientist himself, just a ‘well-
informed amateur’. Nor does he claim to
have a fully worked-out theory of the human
mind. What he offers instead in this book is
“the sketch, the backbone, of the best scien-
tific theory to date of how our minds came
into existence, how our brains work all their
wonders, and, especially, how to think about
minds and brains without falling into allur-
ing philosophical traps” (p.xiv). The last part
turns out to be especially important, as we
will see. Dennett is all-too-aware of the
intellectual obstacles that can obstruct seri-
ous work on this topic.
Comprehension is Advantageous
Dennett’s starting point is that humans are
the products of natural selection. Our earli-
44 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
We delve into the brain to look for the mind this issue as
Peter Stone agrees with Daniel Dennett that we don’t
know our own minds (or brains), and Stephen Anderson
agrees with Marcus Gabriel that our minds aren’t brains.
est ancestors lacked consciousness, but they
clearly possessed various forms of competence.
If they couldn’t perform many survival-
related tasks, they wouldn’t have survived
long enough to evolve consciousness. People
sometimes forget this, thinking that compe-
tence requires comprehension. But most
organisms do just fine without anything like
the human ability to understand what they
are doing. This point applies to machines as
well as organisms: “IN ORDER TO BE A
PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL
COMPUTING MACHINE, IT IS NOT
REQUISITE TO KNOW WHAT
ARITHMETIC IS” (capitals in original;
p.55). Dennett dubs this ‘Turing’s strange
inversion’. But Turing’s strange inversion
creates an interesting question: “If compe-
tence without comprehension is so wonder-
fully fecund… why do we need comprehen-
sion…? Why and how did human-style
comprehension arrive on the scene?” (p.59).
“Comprehension,” Dennett contends, “is
only made possible by the arrival on the
scene quite recently of a new kind of evolu-
tionary replicator – culturally transmitted
informational entities: memes” (p.175).
Memes – units of cultural information – like
genes – units of genetic information – evolve
by natural selection. Words are perhaps the
best examples of memes. Language consti-
tutes a form of software that got installed
upon the hardware in our brains. The instal-
lation itself may have been a happy accident;
but once installed, words proved incredibly
empowering for their users, for language is
“the launching pad of human cognition and
thinking” (p.260). Without memes in
general, and language in particular, our
brains lack the tools necessary for our
distinctive human achievements. Dennett
quotes a line from Bo Dahlbom on this
point: “You can’t do much carpentry with
your bare hands, and you can’t do much
thinking with your bare brain” (p.282).
Language may have helped launch
human cognition, but the launch was not
guaranteed. Just as software can be installed
upon mindless computers, so can much
culture-borne information be “installed in
brains without being understood” (p.213); and
as noted, our brains can do a lot without
comprehension. But they can do more with
it. Comprehension provides “the ability to
treat whatever topic is under consideration
as itself a thing to be examined, analysed,
inventoried, thanks to our capacity to repre-
sent it explicitly via words, diagrams, and
other tools of self-stimulation” (p.300). So
unsurprisingly, Dennett thinks that evolu-
tionary pressures played a critical role in the
development of comprehension, as they do
with all our abilities.
Comprehension also allows us to
rehearse our thoughts before we express
them. This is critically important to us. All
of us think things we don’t want to make
known to others; but only comprehension
permits us to engage in self-monitoring,
allowing us to decide what information we
share and with whom. “Communication,”
Dennett argues, “requires a central clearing
house of sorts in order to buffer the organ-
ism from revealing too much about its
current state to competitive organisms”
(p.342). And once enabled, the capacity for
self-monitoring lets us do much more with
our ideas: we can critically scrutinize them,
make deliberate efforts to improve them,
and so on. All of this requires memes – espe-
cially words – without which we simply
would not have complex ideas to examine.
“That,” Dennett writes, “is the triumph of
the memes invasion: it has turned our brains
into minds – our minds – capable of accept-
ing and rejecting the ideas we encounter,
discarding or developing them” (p.315).
“Our thinking,” he concludes, “is
enabled by the installation of a virtual
machine made of virtual machines made by
virtual machines” (p.341). That is to say, our
intelligent minds are complex systems
constructed out of less intelligent, less
complex subsystems, each of which is
constructed out of even less intelligent, less
complex sub-subsystems, and so on; with
the ultimate components being small simple
automatons (neurons et al) – tiny robots. It
is these tiny robots that together make up
whatever souls we have. We can now see,
Dennett concludes, that “all the brilliance
and comprehension in the world arises ulti-
mately out of uncomprehending compe-
tences compounded over time into ever
more competent – and hence comprehend-
ing – systems” (p.57).
Book Reviews
 Books
The Gravity of the Situation
The Mystery of Ourselves
Dennett has made this point about
by Cameron Gray, 2018
the origins of mind many times PLEASE VISIT PARABLEVISIONS.COM
before, and people react to it in very AND FACEBOOK.COM/CAMERONGRAYTHEARTIST
different ways. Many resist his
approach, but I find this resistance
hard to understand. Suppose you
want to explain how the human mind
works. Dennett tries to do this by
figuring out how a bunch of things
without minds could work together
to function as a mind. If you don’t like
this strategy, what’s the alternative?
There are only two that I can see. The
first is to treat the mind as some kind
of irreducible substance that does not
depend upon any mindless thing –
something like a spirit or a soul that
enters what would otherwise be a
mindless human body. But this does-
n’t explain the mind so much as push
the problem one step back. Where
does this spirit come from? How does
it work? And how does it interact with
the body it inhabits? (These are clas-
sic problems for Cartesian dualism.)
The second alternative is to throw up
one’s hands and give up on explaining
the mind at all. This isn’t so much a
solution to the problem as an aban-
donment of the search for one.
Sadly, many people – including
some philosophers – prefer to take
the latter route, proclaiming mind
an unfathomable mystery and stub-
bornly resisting any effort to explain
it. As Dennett points out, “people
care so deeply what the answers are
[about consciousness] that they have
a very hard time making themselves
actually consider the candidate
answers objectively” (p.11).
At the heart of this resistance is a
distorting force which Dennett dubs
‘Cartesian gravity’ (p.17) – the pull
of the first-person perspective. We
can examine most things from the
third-person perspective (“look at
that pigeon chasing that sparrow”),
but we naturally adopt the first-
person perspective when thinking
about ourselves (“I feel hungry right
now”) – yet any scientific (that is,
empirical) effort to explain how our
minds work is bound by its third-
person perspective, and therefore
inevitably seems to leave something
out. This is the line of thinking into
which Cartesian gravity tries to drag

Book Reviews December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 45

 Books
us, and Dennett urges us to resist its pull. We
do not have a privileged or infallible window
into our own souls, he says; it is therefore
hardly surprising that we do not see the
robots at work: “Our access to our own
thinking… is really no better than our access
to our digestive processes” (p.346). The first-
person perspective is simply the ‘user inter-
face’ for a particular app in the brain; and like
any good app, it “exists in order to make the
competence accessible to users – people –
who can’t know, and don’t need to know, the
intricate details of how it works” (p.341). We
shouldn’t be surprised that the mind’s work-
ings are a little mysterious to us; the evolu-
tionary process operates on a ‘need-to-know’
basis, and our first-person perspective,
limited and fallible as it is, is all that we need
in order to take advantage of the amazing
capacities our brains make possible. Science
can tell us more about how our brains work
and why; but only if we resist the Cartesian
gravity that tells us we already know all we
can know about who we are.
Here, I think, Dennett is getting at some-
thing important. Philosophers rely heavily
upon intuition to generate their arguments.
As a result, they sometimes find it hard to
accept the fallibility of those intuitions –
especially the strongest ones. And what intu-
ition could possibly be stronger than the one
telling us that our first-person perspective –
what it is like to be us – is unlike anything
else? But philosophers would do well to
remember all the other intuitions people
have had that, however understandable at
the time, proved to be faulty – for instance,
that the Earth is flat. We have no choice but
to make use of our intuition; but science can
help us make proper use of it, recognizing
its limitations and correcting it when it leads
us astray. This is precisely the recommen-
dation Dennett makes to us concerning
consciousness, and it’s a useful corrective.
It’s difficult to do justice to Dennett’s
book in so short a space, and if you’re skep-
tical, it’s difficult to make his argument
sound convincing. What would it take to
convince you that your mind is made of tiny
robots? Skeptical or not, anyone interested
in how our minds work would do well to
grapple with this rich and complex book.
This is contemporary philosophy at its best.
© PETER STONE 2018
Peter Stone is an associate professor of political
science at Trinity College Dublin.
• From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution
of Minds, by Daniel C. Dennett, Allen Lane, 2017.
476 pages. $10, 978-0-241-00356-5
46 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
I Am Not A Brain
by Marcus Gabriel
WHEN THE PHILOSOPHER
Thomas Nagel published his
book Mind and Cosmos back in
2012 it was not particularly well received by
many of his colleagues. Part of that reaction
may have been occasioned by his subtitle,
which was, ‘Why the Materialist Neo-
Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost
Certainly False’. Many feared that by criti-
cizing materialism and Darwinism, Nagel
would automatically reopen the field to
theism, which a great many of them seemed
quite anxious to prevent at any cost.
A similar kind of anxiety can emerge
whenever we get deeply into the philosophy
of mind. It immediately precipitates us out
of the realm of the securely physical, the
stuff of popular science, and into a broader
realm inhabited by supposedly spooky enti-
ties such as ‘selves’, ‘souls’, ‘values’, ‘voli-
tion’, ‘autonomy’, ‘consciousness’, and
‘perceptions’. A materialist might immedi-
ately feel as if they’re surrounded by ghosts:
we’re no longer sure what anything really is:
we cannot get a ‘self’ into a beaker, heat up
our ‘values’ with a Bunsen burner, or pinch
a ‘volition’ with Vernier callipers. So the
tendency is for us to dismiss non-physical
concepts outright. To study the brain, well,
that’s real science; to speak of all this other
stuff, well, that’s some kind of necromancy,
or at best, mere metaphysics.
Unfortunately for this reaction, we don’t
live long at all without running into these
spooky entities. All the time we rationalize,
we use concepts, we refer to values, we
consult our own volitions, and we routinely
speak of ourselves as real selves. Even those
who continue to deny the ultimate reality of
all such conceptions do so. It seems the non-
physicalist philosophers of mind are onto
something, then: the fact that we just can’t
get a complete picture of human existence
by confining our thinking merely to material
entities. We need something more.
Nothing-Buttery & Neurocentrism
Materialists generally argue that even appar-
ently non-material entities and processes can
all be reduced, in the end, to simple physical
interactions. The kind of materialist reduc-
tionism that infects and inhibits the philoso-
phy of mind at present is of a kind that has
been affectionately dubbed ‘nothing-buttery’.
You can detect nothing-buttery all over
the place. You will hear in the press or on
YouTube that the European Union is ‘noth-
ing but’ closet totalitarianism; or on the other
side, that public concerns over border
integrity are ‘nothing but’ xenophobia; or that
Hillary Clinton is ‘nothing but’ Bill’s cuckold;
or that Donald Trump is ‘nothing but’ a new
Hitler; that people are ‘nothing but’ the sum
of their genetic and cultural background; or
that all charity is ‘nothing but’ disguised
egotism. Such simple-minded characteriza-
tions are the stock-in-trade of the news media,
but one might hope that thoughtful types
such as philosophers and scientists would not
be so easily misdirected. However, in a few
cases, they have proved little more skeptical
about this abuse of language than the general
public. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident
than in the philosophy of mind. There,
discussions over the nature of mental activi-
ties have often followed a text dictated by
neurocentrism. Neurocentrism is a material-
ist dogma that says that the human mind and
everything that exists in relation to it must
ultimately be explained in ‘nothing but’ mate-
rial terms. The mind? It’s ‘nothing but’ the
brain, we are told. A thought? It’s ‘nothing
but’ electricity. The self? ‘Nothing but’ an
illusion accidentally generated by neural
activity… and so on. The conclusion of this
discourse is instantly assumed: the mind and
its contents are bound, at the end of the day,
to turn out to be completely describable in
terms of the material features of the brain
itself. You are your brain.
“No, I am not!” responds University of
Bonn philosopher Markus Gabriel – and
neither, by implication, is anyone else. In I Am
Not A Brain (2017) Gabriel rejects neurocen-
trism, and sketches out what he calls ‘a philos-
ophy of mind for the twenty-first century’.
First, we must dispense with our illusions.
What invites us to the neurocentric view, he
says, is the fact that there is a scientifically
undeniable coordination between the mate-
rial features of the human brain and the
mental stuff it produces. For example, we
know that certain patterns of mental atten-
tion will induce predictable electrical
patterns in the cranium, or that perceptions
of reality can be altered through the inges-
tion of chemicals. This argues for some high
degree of coordination between the activity
of the materials from which the brain is
composed and our various mental phenom-
ena. Yet we must also recall that correspon-
dence is not causation: or, as Gabriel says,
that the activity of the brain stuff may be
merely a necessary but not sufficient condition
for the production of the mind stuff.
Gabriel insists that this last postulate has
not been taken seriously enough yet. The
Book Reviews

PLEASE VISIT WORLDOFBOFY.COM
IMAGE © BOFY 2018
result is evident: our explanations for the
human mind are badly afflicted with materi-
alistic nothing-buttery. It may be theoreti-
cally satisfying for some people to believe
that, say, their own intellect is nothing but a
neurochemical crapshoot; but which one of
us would feel satisfied to hear (or to offer) a
profession of love that ran something like
“Honey, I really hormone you”? Hormones
may indeed be involved in what we call ‘love’;
but to take them as the sum total of human
affection is surely obviously too reductionist.
It is the same with the mind and the brain.
Negating Neurocentrism
Toward this end of the book, Gabriel talks
about four major mind phenomena in which
the holes in neurocentrism are most
painfully obvious: consciousness, self-
consciousness, the self, and freedom.
Freedom is particularly interesting to
Gabriel. One very unsavoury implication of
neurocentrism is the idea that human deci-
Book Reviews
sions are ‘nothing but’ the deterministic
products of physical activities in the brain. As
such, our thoughts and actions are not expres-
sions of a real self who is making actual
choices, or of any autonomous entity prefer-
ring or selecting among options, but only the
inevitable end of a complex chain of material
causes and effects that in principle stretch
back to the dawn of time. So neurocentrism,
if true, would eliminate from the universe not
just freedom, but identity, rationality, values,
and all such related manifestations of what
many philosophers would regard as essential
features of personhood. It would ultimately
describe us as nothing but material accidents.
As he picks among the four major topics
of his concern, Gabriel intersperses enter-
taining subtopics, such as ‘Is the self a USB
stick?’, ‘Are faith, hope and love just illu-
sions?’, and ‘What is altruism?’ There is a
lot of good philosophical investigation here,
and he’s well worth the read.
One mildly irritating feature of Gabriel’s
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 47
Books
writing is his propensity for dropping fairly
irrelevant opinions into his text, and without
justifying them. For instance, he tells us we all
‘must know’ that Brexit and Trump are bad,
gender theory is flawed (but maybe can be
salvaged), climate change is man-made, and
there is no afterlife. He also ends up taking
certain of his own essential key concepts
concerning the present discussion for granted
– in particular, his conceptions of justice and
morality, which he really does nothing to
intellectually ground. In fact, Gabriel appears
entirely uninterested in the question of how
morality might be legitimately grounded.
Those are significant oversights.
However, Gabriel’s thesis, as his title
suggests, is essentially negative. He is not so
much telling us what the right way to view
the self, or consciousness, or values might
be, as he is making the case that a materialist,
neo-Darwinist, neurocentric view of human
beings is not going to provide us with all the
answers in relation to the mind. He is more
skilled at negating neurocentrism than at
establishing exactly what the right alterna-
tive to it might be. There are, he insists, glar-
ing holes in any such accounts; and, like
Nagel before him, he is more eager to point
them out than to supply the means to close
the gaps. But that’s fair. The science of mind
is still in its infancy. While the intense brain-
mapping research of recent years has taught
us a great deal about the material conditions
and correlations of consciousness, it has
opened up a vast array of new questions
about how it all interacts with the immaterial
consciousness. Everybody admits that.
However those philosophers and scientists
who are called ‘eliminative materialists’
continue to hope that eventually, materials
will count for everything.
Gabriel’s book renders that hope faint. In
fact, it really argues that it’s a basic category
error even to imagine that everything could
be expressed in materialist terms. When
answers to the mysteries of human
consciousness are found, they will have to be
located at least in large part beyond the
merely material. What that part is, Gabriel
doesn’t spell out in any satisfactory way. But
if chipping away at a mind-numbing fallacy
is a good step toward an answer, then
Gabriel has provided us with that.
© DR STEPHEN L. ANDERSON 2018
Stephen Anderson is a philosophy teacher in
London, Ontario.
• I am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the
21st Century, by Markus Gabriel, Polity Press, 2017.
240 pages, $24, IBSEN: 978-0-300-22146-6

Film
S
anta Claus: The Movie (1985) is
without doubt, and intentionally or
not, a bold statement about how
capitalism hijacked Christmas. It
did so at some point during the Twentieth
Century and in much the same way that
early Christians absorbed the Roman festi-
val of dies natalis solis invicti (‘The Birthday
of the Invincible Sun’) on 25th December
into their own ideas of divine birth in order
to appease the party-going Roman public.
Had Eric Fromm (German sociologist
and philosopher, 1900-1980) lived just five
more years, no doubt he would have seen
this movie and shouted, “I know where they
are coming fromm!” For Santa Claus: The
Movie essentially embodies the central argu-
ments of his 1955 book The Sane Society.
Like other Frankfurt School philosophers
such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert
Marcuse, Fromm’s main concern was the
alienation of humanity through the rise of
consumerism. He expands on Marx’s
description of a steadily growing dissocia-
tion of the worker from their work in indus-
trial society, presenting a detailed story of
how consumer culture causes widespread
human alienation from life. He blames the
totally profit-centred goals of big business
in the 1950s. Add to this the arguments of
Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) and
Adorno’s essays collected in The Culture
Industry (1991) and The Stars Down to Earth
FILM IMAGES © TRISTAR PICTURES 1985
48 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
Santa Claus: The Movie
Chris Vaughan says “Bah humbug” to consumer society.
(2001), and the reasons behind the unstop-
pable spread of a consumer-orientated
world in which ‘economic man’ is the domi-
nant species, become devastatingly clear.
The difference between the Twentieth
Century’s ‘Super Capitalism’, as Fromm
calls it, and the normal capitalism of the
Seventeenth-to-Nineteenth Centuries, is
that in the Twentieth Century West the
market became the human raison d’être.
Previously money had been a means to
satisfy human ends; now it had become its
own end, and the employee no more than an
appendage to the economy. In Super Capi-
talism, people exist to serve abstract market
forces. Fromm puts it neatly, saying that the
faith society once put in God, it now invests
in the market.
Modernisation of the Means of
Christmas Toy Production
So, what does the less-than-festive Frank-
furt School have to do with Santa Claus: The
Movie? The School’s arguments are repeat-
edly illustrated by aspects of the movie. It’s
not much of a stretch to say John Lithgow’s
character B.Z. is the absolute personifica-
tion of Fromm’s dehumanising Super Capi-
talist. Cigar munching, evil-cackling B.Z.
puts profit before all other concerns. In
B.Z.’s set up, both worker and consumer are
merely one-dimensional tools, abstractions
in the bigger acquisitive picture. Not only is
Grotto or toystore?
he less concerned with the quality of his
products than his sales figures, he is even
willing to put potentially lethal toys on the
market – provided he has a fall guy.
His patsy takes the form of the unwitting
elf Patch (Dudley Moore). Patch enters
B.Z.’s scene already a convert to industrial-
isation. He has come to New York from the
William Morris-esque Arts & Crafts-type
workshop community of Santa’s Grotto.
Santa is played by John Huddlestone – note
his uncanny resemblance to a certain
bearded Victorian radical. Patch had tried
to introduce Fordism into the Grotto – that
is, the automated mass production of toys
rather than their craft production – with
predictably shoddy results. Patch’s products
literally fell apart, leaving kids with that
familiar sinking feeling that there’s nothing
in life of any real quality that’s free or magi-
cally comes down chimneys. But as Patch
himself says when his complex machine
starts wheeling and conveying toys at
incredible speed: “This is the Twentieth
Century!” Indeed, before Twentieth
Century Super Capitalism, the competition
ushered into the Grotto by Santa pitting
Patch against the traditionalist Puffy for the
position of chief helper didn’t exist in the
same way. The precise questions of hierar-
chy and position, promotion and career
progression that their competition
explores, are tied to the Grotto’s potential
place in the Twentieth Century that
belongs to B.Z. and the Super Capitalists.
Santa is short-sighted when he chooses
Patch over Puffy based on the quantity of
toys produced.
By and large Santa remains medieval.
From the hourglass indicating the passing
centuries at the beginning of the film, it
seems that Santa starts out in the Four-
teenth Century and feels no need to update
his manufacturing methods or infrastruc-
ture for six hundred years. In fact, the only
change before Patch’s effort at industriali-
sation has been the addition of a merit
system at the behest of Mrs Claus, which
awards good children and punishes naughty
children. This kicked in roughly around the
Nineteenth Century because of a brat who
liked torturing cats.

William Morris
A Christmas Advert
Leaving aside the anachronism of the
Grotto, back in the big city we’re intro-
duced to a homeless kid, Joe. Street-smart
Joe has literally been left out in the cold; but
he’s taken under Santa’s wing, and later
befriended by B.Z.’s young niece Cynthia.
In a pivotal scene, Joe peers through a
window of a McDonald’s at middle-class
families munching Big Macs. This evokes
the traditional orphan peering-through-
window-in-the-snow-at-warm-festive-
household scene; only here it is McDonald’s
which frames the ideal Christmas desire. Joe
does not yearn for the warmth of belonging
to a family in festive spirits; it’s through
brand affiliation that he can (momentarily)
Santa Claus
escape the bitter cold. Bringing Joe in to a
safe and warm environment is only a matter
of his acquiring the right appetites and
desires. And when Cynthia leaves a plate of
food and a can of Coca Cola outside for Joe,
there’s nothing ambiguous about the label –
as an emblem of Christmas, it infers
warmth. (McDonald’s and Coca Cola both
had promotional tie-ins with the movie.)
The idea of a lack of any liveable life
outside this system is reinforced by using
New York to represent late Twentieth
Century society. Outside of New York (or
consumer Super Capitalist society), all we
see are wastes of snow or depopulated
mountain regions; or frozen Lapland itself,
where Santa, Joe, Cynthia, and Patch even-
Film
tually retreat from the devouring self-
centred city.
Our last view of B.Z. is of him hurtling
into space, elevated by his latest product,
candy that can make you fly. If we take the
Twenty-First Century Christmas industry
as any indicator, it’s safe to say B.Z. eventu-
ally returned down to Earth and went on to
conquer Christmas. Santa may have saved
Patch, Joe, and Cynthia by retreating with
them into the pre-industrial William
Morris hinterland of medieval Lapland. But
the real sequel to this unsung socialist classic
is B.Z.’s fantasy of ‘Christmas II’ come true:
Black Friday.
© CHRIS VAUGHAN 2018
Chris Vaughan is a writer currently living
and working in Gibraltar. His fiction can be
found at Ambit, The Lifted Brow and some
other places. He writes reviews for The
Rumpus, and has seen Santa Claus: The
Movie at least twenty times.

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December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 51

 T allis
in
Wonderland
Brains, Minds, Selves
Raymond Tallis uses all three to show that he has all three.

I
t is over a decade since your columnist
challenged the claim, made by several
philosophers, that the self does not

GRAPHIC © AMY BAKER 2018 PLEASE VISIT INSTAGRAM.COM/AMY_LOUISEBAKER

really exist (‘Saving the Self’, Philosophy
Now Issue 63). Among them, Tor Norre-
tranders called the self a ‘user illusion’ (The
User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to
Size, 1999). To press home his message,
Norretranders asserted that “the epoch of
the ‘I’ is drawing to a close.” As usual, my
arguments seem to have had little impact;
the autocidal industry has gone from
strength to strength. The claim that selves
are constructs fabricated by people who are
not selves is now almost mainstream in
philosophy and psychology. Time, there-
fore, to resume the good fight to save the self
from the autocides.

Diagnosis
Last time round, I pointed out that the self-
deniers are usually contradicting themselves
(or non-selves). I began with the most
famous autocide of them all, David Hume.
In his Treatise of Human Nature (1.4.6.3), he
argued as follows:
“For my part, when I enter most intimately
into what I call myself, I always stumble on
some particular perception or other, of heat,
or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain
or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any
time without a perception and can never
observe but the perception.”
David Hume concludes from this that
‘David Hume’ is nothing more than a
succession of perceptions; a mere ‘bundle’ of
experiences associated with one another.
If this really were the case, then it would
be difficult to know what meaning to give to
the ‘I’ that appears four times in the passage
just quoted, or to the ‘my’ and ‘self’ that he
refers to as myself. A bundle or train of
perceptions would not seem to have the
capacity to rise above itself to proclaim that
its selfhood is no more than the bundle or
train of perceptions.
That this charge of pragmatic self-refuta-
tion does not seem to cut much ice with
autocides suggests that what is needed is not
a counter-argument but a diagnosis to
explain the otherwise inexplicable popular-
ity of a view that cannot be stated without
contradiction. Behind many autocides is a
phobia – a fear that accepting the reality of
the self means subscribing to Cartesian
dualism or to the view that one is or has a
soul, or at least its secular equivalent.
This is, of course, nonsense. It is entirely
possible, without invoking immaterial spir-
its, to acknowledge that the Raymond Tallis
who was a junior doctor in 1973 and who is
a retired physician in 2018 refers to the same
self when he says ‘I’. Memory, the connect-
edness of experience, the continuity of char-
acters traits, a distinctive body of knowledge
and a repertoire of skills, supported by the
cladding that comes from the world that
acknowledges him as the same person,
along with the ‘address’ (in the widest sense)
that he has in that world, the offices he occu-
pies, the audit trail of his responsibility, and
so on – these are sufficient to underpin a
non-illusory, enduring self. What’s more,
the connectedness is often self-affirming –
most notably when RT takes justified
ownership of his past experiences and the
world in which they took place, and of his
behaviour in that world.
All of which is pretty obvious. So why
does the idea of the self as an illusion have
such a hold? It may be because the rejection
of the notion that we are ghosts in a machine
has created space for the idea that we are just
a machine. The machine in question is the
brain and the brain, being a material object,
cannot host an immaterial self. More
precisely, the self is an illusion created by
the brain.
Psychologist Nick Chater’s recent book,
The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth
and the Improvised Mind (2018) is devoted to
this very idea. Indeed, more radically, he
claims that even ‘mental depth’ is an illu-

52 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019

sion: the surface is all that there is: “To
believe that we have constructed a ‘picture’
of the visual world in our minds is to fall for
the illusion of mental depth, hook, line, and
sinker” (p.82). His idea of the mind is of
something entirely ‘in-the-moment’, and
indeed, without breadth: the mind is a pin-
point. If we disagree with this, it is because
“almost everything we know about our
minds is a hoax, played on us by our brains”
(p.15). A hoax that Chater’s brain has myste-
riously unmasked.
The grounds for this extraordinary claim
are worth examining. Take visual experience.
Our visual focus is sharply concentrated in a
minute area of each retina. You may feel that
you are currently looking at a page of print,
but what you are seeing is one word at a time,
with everything else being ignored. Your
sense that you have a visual field – corre-
sponding, for example, to a view of a room or
a landscape – is an illusion. The feeling that
we are simultaneously grasping a ‘whole’ is
the result of being fooled by our brain into
thinking “that we ‘see’ the stable, rich,
colourful world before us in a single visual
gulp, whereas the truth is that our visual
connection with the world is no more than a
series of localized ‘nibbles’.”(p.54) And what
applies to perception applies even more
strongly to thought, feelings, to the exercise
of our will, and to our sense of being unified
or coherent selves. To imagine that our mind
is more than fleeting fragments and to think
of ourselves as having inner depths is there-
fore to fall victim to a Grand Illusion.
The Illusion of an Illusion
Illusion? Hardly. After all, the richness of
the world that we see is clearly not an illu-
sion. The seething vista of events and
objects that is the moment-to-moment
appearance of the world around us clearly
corresponds to reality; and so to see a rich
world is not to be the victim of any illusion.
I see a room or a landscape, as opposed to
pin-pricks of sense data, because there is a
room or a landscape to see. If there is an illu-
sion, it is a little one, about the processes
underlying visual consciousness, not about
the objects of consciousness. But rather than
even an illusion, since most of us are not up
to speed with the latest research in the
psychology and physiology of perception, it
is merely an unawareness of those processes.
Indeed, if we were aware of those processes
as we looked around us, we would be
distracted to the point of being blind.
Anyway, all that psychology shows us is that
at least one version of the representational
theory of experience is bankrupt – and that
our visual experiences are not realist
pictures in the head, mirror images of our
surroundings. Psychology does not show us
that our having an experience of a complex
world is an illusion. In fact, if the mind were
a succession of moments, and the idea of
enduring mental phenomena, such as
beliefs, were untrue, it is difficult to see how
Chater could have become sufficiently
together in order to write a book (which was
presumably planned, researched, and writ-
ten over many years) in support of those
beliefs. In short, the existence of The Mind is
Flat is itself the most decisive refutation of
the thesis contained between its covers.
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued
that his method was to “pass from a piece of
disguised nonsense to something that is
patent nonsense” – thereby undermining daft
ideas that may have seemed like serious philo-
sophical positions. We are indebted to Chater
for doing something like this, albeit inadver-
tently. More importantly, he illustrates the
absurdity of taking empirical science as having
the capacity to overturn our fundamental
intuitions about our own nature.
The Mind is Flat also illustrates how reduc-
ing persons or selves to their brains – what we
may call ‘brainifying’ the person – invariably
involves personifying the brain and treating
it as if it were, after all, a kind of self. The
brain, Chater tells us, perpetrates “hoaxes”,
“solves problems”, “is continuously scram-
bling to link together scraps of sensory infor-
mation”, trying to organize and interpret
them. All of this is, “in a very real sense mind-
less” – although (with a characteristic
wobble) Chater asserts that we (italics mine)
are “relentless improvisers, powered by a
mental engine, perpetually creating meaning
from sensory input.” How very like a self!
At any rate, for Chater, the sense that we
are extended in time is simply a report of
“the brain’s interpretation” (p.176). There-
fore: “talk of being conscious of one’s self is
incoherent nonsense – ‘selves’, after all,
aren’t part of the sensory world. And all
‘higher’ forms of consciousness (being
conscious of being self-conscious), though
beloved of some philosophers, are nonsense
on stilts” (p.183).
“There is the bit where you say it and the
bit where you take it back” JL Austin once
said caustically about philosophers who
claimed to adhere to counterintuitive views.
And Chater takes it back in spades. For
example: “what makes each of us unique is
our individual and particular history – our
own specific trail of precedents in thought
and action. We are each unique, in short,
because of the endless variety of our layered
December 2018/January 2019
T allis
in
Wonderland
history of thoughts and actions” (p.202).
Layered? In a mind without mental depth?
Time for the Self
We do not need psychologists to tell us that
we won’t find the self by examining the brain
and that brains are fundamentally different
from selves. For example, the state of the
brain at given time is confined to what it is
at that time. It cannot reach out to its own
past, not even to those past events that have
shaped it, or to its future, or to the timeless
zone of general meanings and facts that we
take account of to make sense of our lives.
The self, by contrast, is not temporally
confined in this way. RT in 2018 is open to,
aware of, RT in 1973 in the way that his body
or brain is not open to its past. It is clear then
that the brain does not have the wherewithal
to hoax us and to coin the ‘illusion’ of the self
with its various modes of self-consciousness.
The brain is as temporally flat, as temporally
depthless, as the mind according to Chater.
Brains could fool us into believing that we
are or have selves only, per impossibile, by
borrowing the capacities that actual minds
(persons, selves) have.
That I am a self is hardly something I can
be mistaken about. As Dan Zahavi has
pointed out, we cannot take the subjective
dimension of our experiential lives seriously
without ascribing our experiences to a self as
a “built-in feature of experiential life”
(‘Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Self-
hood: A Reply to some Critics’ 2018). This
seems unassailable. But, he adds, we mustn’t
think of that self as something present in
experience – either “as additional experien-
tial object or as an extra experiential ingre-
dient.” To do so would be to fall foul of
Hume’s critique. Selfhood, Zahavi
concludes, is inseparable from the quality
that experience has of being first-personal,
of being mine.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2018
Raymond Tallis’ new book, Logos: The
Mystery of How We Make Sense of the
World has recently been published by Agenda.
G Philosophy Now 53

Q uestion of the Month
Is The World An Illusion?
Each answer below receives a book. Apologies to the many entrants not included.
O f course the world is an illusion! We see only a tiny part of
the electromagnetic spectrum, which is divided into colours
that exist only in our brains. We hear only a limited range of vibra-
tions, onto which we impose meanings the vibrations do not
themselves contain. We have no idea what dogs and bees find so
interesting, and vice versa. We feel as soft or solid what is nearly
all empty space, apart from a few fundamental particles in differ-
ent arrangements. We can grasp directly only scales from around
one millimetre to one kilometre. We think that the present is
now, when we’re actually experiencing what happened half a sec-
ond ago. Our personal, political, and ideological hang-ups and
squabbles are blind to natural ecology and history – including the
cells and DNA of our own bodies. Our heads are full of phantoms
we impose on a world that is fundamentally indifferent to them.
And yet that very indifference proves that the world is real!
On the basis that once the impossible is eliminated what
remains must be the truth, the most convincing current hypoth-
esis is that the world is made of information. This is abstract,
spaceless, timeless, but can be consciously expressed only and nec-
essarily in viewpoints of a physical world. This world emerges in
a rational sequence of steps, its properties at each level depending
on those of the level below. In a sense every emergent geometry
and substance is illusory, yet it is also deeply real.
DR NICHOLAS B. TAYLOR, LITTLE SANDHURST
A n illusion is a false sense-impression of something. This defi-
nition is a good starting point, since I will argue that the world
exists, but that the sense-impressions we have of it are an illusion.
John Locke (1632-1704) held that objects have what he called
primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are those he con-
sidered to be intrinsic to the object: its size, solidity, shape, num-
ber and position. Secondary qualities are not intrinsic but the
result of “a power in the object” to create a sense-impression: to
create colours, sounds, tastes, smells, feels in our minds.
We can update Locke. What do exist independently of our
minds are objects consisting of molecules, particles, waves, forces.
These are devoid of colour, sound or any of the other secondary
qualities: the external world is dark, silent and colourless. Our sen-
sory apparatus – our sense organs, sensory nervous system and sen-
sory cortices – creates the illusion that the world is bright and
colourful by transforming the raw data provided by our senses into
colours, sounds, tastes, smells, sensations of hot and cold (and
pain). These secondary qualities didn’t exist until they were
invented by evolution. They evolved over time because those
organisms that had the most informative senses had an evolution-
ary advantage.
Some idealists may disagree with these ideas and maintain, as
George Berkeley (1685-1753) did, that just as colours, sounds and
54 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
?
?
?
so on, are in the mind so physical objects are in the mind, as these
objects just are their perceived properties. However, the exis-
tence even of our senses refutes Berkeley’s argument. Our senses
(and those of other living creatures) evolved because they enabled
us to compete, survive and procreate in a challenging environ-
ment that already existed. This process could not work in Berke-
ley’s world. A belief in evolution entails necessarily a belief in the
existence of a mind-independent physical world. So the physical
world exists, but we don’t see it as it really is, but according to
an illusion created by our senses.
MICHAEL BRAKE, EPSOM, SURREY
I n answering this question it is helpful to distinguish between
ontology – what exists – and epistemology – how we know what
we know. The question has an ontological part, ‘Is there some-
thing called the world?’, and an epistemological part, ‘Is my expe-
rience of this world false?’ The temptation is to conflate the two
aspects of the question into either a naïve realist position – “The
world exists and I experience it accurately” – or a naïve idealist
“Everything is an illusion” position. But it seems perfectly pos-
sible to believe that an external world exists and at the same time
believe that my experience of that world could be misinformative.
To briefly expand: I seem to have experiences of something.
I can break this something down, first into the different senses –
sight, sound, smell, touch and taste – through which I experience
my body and other bodies that appear to be like mine. Further,
I experience the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and
science in making coherent, consistent, correspondent and prag-
matic predictions about my experiences. This leads me to guess
that something outside of me – call it ‘the world’ – really does
exist. However, I cannot help but also note that I only appreciate
this as a subjective being! However, no matter what the nature
of the world actually is, I only experience it through my senses
and therefore can only know the world in these terms. I simply
have no idea whether this is a good representation of what the
mind-independent world actually is. Furthermore, there will be
other equally appropriate ways of experiencing the world using
different senses of which I know nothing: to paraphrase Thomas
Nagel, I can never know what the world is like from the perspec-
tive of a bat. Finally, I don’t even have a sure way of knowing
whether others, who seem like me, experience the world in the
same way. So, to summarise: No, that there is a world is probably
not an illusion, but my experience of it could well be one.
SIMON KOLSTOE, UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH
I s the world an illusion? I will first examine what is meant by
‘world’, and subsequently what is meant by ‘illusion’. People
typically do not differentiate between ‘the world’ and its percep-
Is The World An Illusion?
 ? ?
tion. This is called ‘naïve realism’. But in the domain of philos-
ophy it is essential to distinguish between Immanuel Kant’s
noumenon (mind-independent reality) and the phenomenon (the
sensory appearance of the world). All that is perceived is the phe-
nomenon; the noumenon is an hypothesis used to explain the
existence of the phenomenon. The sum total of the perceptions
of the world constitute a model of the world; all that one knows
of the world is a model. The logical processes by which percep-
tions can be combined to create this model are based upon pat-
tern identification of the sense-data. (I discuss these processes in
detail in my book The Pattern Paradigm.)
So when one refers to ‘the world’ one is really referring to
one’s model of the world. And while this model is only a model,
it does enable one to interact effectively with the world (or model
of the world) in order to meet one’s basic needs (and also, one’s
not-so-basic needs). In this way the model of the world can be
considered to be ‘real’ [Kant’s term for this is ‘empirically real’,
Ed]. While everyone’s model of the world is different from
everyone else’s, there is enough commonality for meaningful
communication to take place.
An illusion is created through having a temporary fault with
the sense organs resulting in faulty sense-data, or by utilising a
pattern from the sense-data that is significantly less than opti-
mum. Such an illusion would not allow for effective interaction
with the world, and hence not enable one's needs to be met. This
is how it can be identified as an illusion and be distinguished
from one's useful model of the world. So there is a qualitative
difference between a model of the world and an illusion that is
sufficient to conclude that the world, or at least one’s model of
the world, is not an illusion.
BRUCE ROBERTSON, WESTMERE, AUCKLAND, N.Z.
T he idea that although we may not be able to perceive reality
directly we can at least make meaningful statements about
it, was enough to spark David Hume’s doubts. Hume’s skepti-
cism forged Hume’s fork. In this fork, Hume points out, first,
that empiricism cannot deliver necessary truths: “Experience can
teach us that something is the case but it cannot teach us that it
must be the case.” According to Hume, reason is also ineffectual
for delivering necessary truths about the world, as it only analyses
definitions. Therefore, we cannot discover the way the world is
through reason alone.
Then Kant proposes his Transcendental Idealism to prove
that we can know ultimate reality through reason. He suggests
our reason can transcend direct observation to get behind the
phenomena and also understand the necessary conditions of
experience. Kant argues that if we analyze our experience of an
object, we can conclude for example that an object is always pre-
sented as occupying space. In fact, it is necessarily true, because
we cannot imagine any object without that object occupying
space. Also, all our experiences occur in time Kant also agrees
with Hume that we cannot derive the necessity of causal relations
from experience alone, but we can know its necessity through
reason. (Therefore, Kant’s answer to Hume is that there is a pure
knowledge which is independent of experience, which he calls
synthetic a priori truth.) Kant showed that space, time and causal-
ity, the very texture of existence, are not fully mind-independent
realities, as Newton supposed, nor are they mere figments of our
imagination, as Hume claimed. Rather the entire phenomenal
world is an intermediary between that which exists only in the
Is The World An Illusion?
?
mind, and reality as it exists in itself, independent of the mind.
Using Hume’s own metaphors, I would say, that the world is
real and that its representation is not “a bastard of imagination,
impregnated by experience…” but a legitimate child of Reason, and
this child is delivered by our experience as an objective necessity.
NELLA LEONTIEVA, SYDNEY, N.S.W.
W hen considering whether the world is an illusion, the first
question that comes to mind is what we mean by ‘world’.
Is it the material part – the molecules and atoms that make up
our universe? Or is it the part that makes up human existence –
our sense of self, our emotions, thoughts, and feelings? Let’s
examine both aspects.
Starting with the material world: consider first the fact that
an atom is almost empty space. But the illusion gets deeper: quan-
tum scientists are now strongly suggesting that all matter is made
up of wavelike entities. If so, then our perception of reality is a
major illusion.
Now let’s examine human existence, starting with what seems
like an unshakeable notion – the idea of ‘I’. Yet in the late 6th
century B.C.E., Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, argued that
there is no ‘I’ and the self is an illusion. Thanks to neuroscience
and MRI scans, some scientists are now suggesting that the Bud-
dha may have been right, since they have been unable to find in
our brain a single entity that controls our decisions and analyses
our thoughts and emotions. In fact those who practise meditation
would confirm that your desires, thoughts and emotions cannot
be considered a fixed ‘you’ since they come and go, replaced by
a new wave of them every few seconds.
What about free will? The debate around whether we have it
may be endless, but many neuroscientists agree that our subcon-
scious makes our decisions for us, while the conscious part of our
brain creates a narrative for why we have made these decisions
without us knowing the true reasons behind them; a fiction which
has the purpose of explaining to the outside world our decisions
and actions.
So is the world an illusion? It seems the answer is yes, since
both the material and immaterial aspects of our life are deceiving
us on a daily basis. But aren’t we all fond of tricks?
ALEX CLACKSON, BIRKENHEAD
A dvaita Vedanta is a school of Hindu philosophy. Its idea of
Maya is that perception is illusion. We humans are in tem-
poral bondage, as our sensory perceptions and experiences of our
body, and the consequential bodily attachments confound and
obfuscate our true self. Self-realisation and liberation is possible
by a method of Vedic self-enquiry requiring deep self contem-
plation through analytical negation – considering Neti Neti – that
things are neither this, nor that; or, as Ramana Maharishi said,
by repeatedly asking oneself the question ‘Who Am I?’ until the
nature of Atma (our true self) is revealed and realized.
This self-scrutiny (or Atma Vichara) is not to be done merely
at an intellectual level, but is meaningful and beneficial at the
experiential level too. True, a discriminating mind and intellect
(Buddhi) is essential for achieving self realisation. Upon attaining
this self-realised state, where the boundary between one’s self
and the universe disappears, one becomes an enlightened Jnani
– one who has perceived the Para Brahman, the supreme reality
of the universe, which is devoid of Maya.
Advaita Vedanta does not preach renunciation of the empirical
December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 55
 ? ?
world, but leads us to an understanding and acceptance of the
reality of Maya along with its natural ability to bind us to the
material world. This understanding and acceptance then natu-
rally leads us to Vairagya (detachment). So, without denying the
existence of the illusory Maya, it is essential for one to understand
and experience, through self contemplation, the impermanence
(Anitya) of our body, our mind, and the objects and fruits of our
attachments on the one hand and the enduring permanence of
our true self on the other.
DR AJAY KR. SHARMA, DELHI UNIVERSITY
T he question of whether the world is an illusion resolves itself
into this: Is there a world which we perceive, however inac-
curately, which continues to exist when it is not perceived?
One possibility is that the world is an idea in the mind, ulti-
mately, of God (the Bishop Berkeley theory). In this case, God
would be the additional (and theologians would say ultimate)
reality. However, if God is real, he/she is real in so different a
sense of the word that we would be justified in arguing that the
illusion created by God is actually the reality as we understand
the concept.
Maybe I am the only reality and I created the world as an illu-
sion (the solipsism theory). If I did so, I made a fine mess of it
(consciously or unconsciously); and anyway, if I am real and noth-
ing else is, what am I?
Maybe the world which I experience is an illusion I encounter
in dreams (the Zhuangzi/butterfly theory). But my dreams
change, whereas the illusion is consistent. This suggests that the
dreams are the illusion.
Maybe I am the subject of an experiment in which other beings
impose an illusion on my awareness (the Matrix theory). This is
an untestable theory, but it seems improbable that such an exper-
iment could be carried out without something going wrong and
either ending the experiment or alerting me to it. The one thing
that reality and illusion have in common is that something always
breaks down!
So, all theories that the world is an illusion carry difficulties
with them. We cannot prove that the world is real; but, applying
Ockham’s razor, we can show that this is the theory with the
fewest (if any) difficulties.
MARTIN JENKINS, LONDON
T he following argument bears some similarity to arguments
of Zeno of Elea, but is not the same. It concludes that the
physical world cannot be real.
If the physical world exists, then, within that world, there are
many distances, all of which are finite. Now, how many times can
a finite length be subdivided into smaller lengths? Either an unlim-
ited number of times, or a limited number of times. But dividing
it an infinite number of times has a strange result. Assuming an
infinite number of subdivisions means that each of the subdivisions
must have zero length. If the length of the divisions were larger
than zero, the original finite length would only have been divided
a finite number of times. But, if the divisions each have zero length,
this means that if all the divisions are added together, the overall
length is zero! So something’s wrong. The idea that length can be
infinitely subdivided can't be right.
This leaves the option that the length can only be subdivided
a finite number of times. That would mean that the smallest pos-
sible divisions would still have some length, however small. But,
56 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
?
this also causes a problem, because something can only have some
length if there are other points between the two ends of that
length. If there are, then it could always be further subdivided.
So a finite number of divisions could always be further divided.
Therefore, the number of possible divisions cannot be limited
and must be unlimited, or infinite, after all.
So first we saw that finite lengths cannot be divided an infinite
number of times; and then we saw that they must be infinitely
divisible! Therefore, the very idea of finite lengths appears to
contradict itself. This means it cannot be correct. So finite
lengths cannot be real – which means the physical world cannot
be real either, since it is composed of numerous features which
have limited sizes. How can a planet with a diameter of roughly
8,000 miles exist, if finite distances are impossible?
PETER SPURRIER, HALSTEAD, ESSEX
T he idea that the world is an illusion tells us nothing. A word,
to mean something, must also not mean something else. We
understand illusion because we understand reality. To call every-
thing an illusion would destroy the very concept of reality needed
to establish what an illusion was in the first place. Therefore, it
is better to ask, what is and is not real?
For people with common sense, the world is about as much
an illusion as there is illusion in the sting of a bellyflop. I remem-
ber my first: it was P.E., and despite my stiff upper lip, the reality
that was radiating pink heat and pain from off my belly was
screaming its testimony for all to see. These two hands of mine
are also self-evidently real. So now we have three real things. If
anyone disagrees, then I would like to offer them, in friendly and
gentlemanly fashion, my hospitality at hearth and home, and then
imprint on their belly a burning bright hand print. Extreme scep-
ticism usually has a shelf-life that is inverse to suffering.
Many might take issue with my brute fact approach. That’s
OK, if we agree that all axioms are undemonstrable. Axioms are
never deduced, they are assumed without proof because of the
problem of infinite regress. To ask justification for an axiom
would force us back to another proposition, and since that would
also require justification, we would be forced to go on ad infini-
tum. Where we take our leave from that infinite train is where
we reveal our biases. That is why I stand with Nietzsche con-
cerning first things – that every great philosophy consists of the
confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and
unconscious autobiography. But unlike Nietzsche, I believe that
God is not dead. And that has made all the difference. Since my
God is the author of reality and history, I have no qualms about
my belief being a confession and an autobiography. How could
it be otherwise? So for all who are wondering what is really real…
well, have I got good news for you!
ENEREE GUNDALAI, HANNOVER, GERMANY
The next question is: Is Philosophy Still The Friend of
Wisdom? (Question suggested by Finn Janning.)
Please give and explain your answer in less than 400 words.
The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain.
Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and
must be received by 11th February 2019. If you want a
chance of getting a book, please include your physical
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Is The World An Illusion?
 The Light From Our Eyes
Stephen Brewer wonders what’s in the (mind’s) eye of the beholder.

M
ax, Freya and Orin are in the café
of a downtown contemporary art
gallery. Freya is sipping a glass of
oolong tea while gazing at a print of brightly
colored circles. Max is reading his newspaper,
drinking his black filter coffee, and eating a
chocolate muffin. He looks over his paper and
winces as Orin drops three teaspoonfuls of sugar
into his espresso and gives it a vigorous stir.
Freya: Just look at that! Even this print –
which is number 16 of 25 – costs $2,500.
Who knows what the original’s worth? Per-
haps ‘Terry Frost RA’ was the first person
to think of painting just circles on a canvas…
Still, it’s so fascinating that I just have to look
at it. I wish I took an art degree.
Freya: Wait Max. Before you dismiss the
idea out of hand, you should listen to what
Orin has to say. Orin, in what sense do
you think our eyes and tongues illumi-
nate the world?
Orin: Well you tell me… Max, does light
itself have color, and is sugar itself actually
sweet?
Max: Well, no: visible light is just electro-
magnetic radiation of different wave-
lengths. That red circle over there is
reflecting light with a wavelength of about
650nm; but the light itself isn’t red. Simi-
larily, sugar is just a chemical with a lot of
readily released energy, but it’s not in itself
sweet without us. The redness or sweet-
ness is just in the way we react to them.
Orin: So we produce the color red and the
sweet taste in our minds, then.
Max: How do we do that, then?
Freya: To know that would mean solv-
ing one of the biggest mysteries of con-
sciousness.

Max: [pointing to an article in the paper]:

Instead of being fascinated by colored
blobs, you professors should be horrified
by this report. It says that fifty per cent of
American college students think you only
see that picture – and everything else –
because a light shines out of your eyes!
How dumb is that?

Orin: In fact, it’s interesting because they’re

supporting Plato’s ancient ‘extramission’

GALLERY VIEW © ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/LORDRUNAR 2013

theory of perception. It is good to hear that
our brightest and best students are still
reaching the same conclusions as the
ancient Greek philosophers and their
Medieval scholastic followers.

Max: Nonsense! It’s listening to you and

the philosophy you teach them that gives
these students such crazy ideas. How can
they be so stupid as to ignore all the scien-
tific progress over the past three centuries?
It’s as if the Enlightenment never occurred
and they still live in the Dark Ages. And the
disproof of the idea is so obvious that even
the dumbest student could test it – simply
close your eyes and you won’t see anything.

Orin: Well, color and taste emanate from us;

so perhaps in that sense our eyes and also
our tongues do in fact illuminate the world
about us.

Max: What utter drivel!

December 2018/January 2019 G Philosophy Now 57

Orin: For the sake of the current argument, it doesn’t really
matter how we do it. All that matters is that somehow qualities
such as redness or sweetness emerge in our minds as a result of
highly complex operations in the brain.
Max: So by some unknown mechanism the light from that pic-
ture produce a particular experience of red that floats around
in my mind…
Orin: Oh Max! Do our sensational experiences ‘float around in
your mind’ as you say? When you see a red color, or taste sweet-
ness, where is that color or taste located?
Max: Well the sweetness is on the tongue, of course; so the red-
ness must similarily be in the eye.
Orin: ‘Of course’? But when you scientists say sweetness is a prop-
erty of the sugar, it’s not really a property of the sugar itself, is
it? It’s better to say that it’s a property generated in your mind
as a result of your tongue being in contact with the sugar. And
to get that sensation requires your brain doing some pretty
sophisticated processing of the information produced by the
interaction of your taste buds with sugar molecules. So what
does it mean to say that the taste is on the tongue?
Freya: That’s all very interesting, because that red circle,
although its redness is produced by my mind, is on the picture
over there. It’s sort of pasted back onto the canvas by my mind
– just like those circles were originally put on the canvas by the
artist.
Orin: Quite right. Somehow the mind projects these qualities
back onto the source of the stimulus… Sweetness goes into my
cup of coffee and red onto that circle over there. Take the pic-
ture or the coffee away and the experience disappears…
Max: I see your point. But if what you say is true, none of it’s
actually out there, is it? It’s in our minds. So, it has the appearance
of being outside us, but let’s face it, it’s not. Instead, our experi-
ence of colour and sweetness and all the rest is an illusion.
Freya: And a pretty damn good one at that…
Orin: I think we should see our minds as being at the intersec-
tion of all these sources of energy, light and chemicals active in
the physical world, adding qualitative value to them by gener-
ating the sensory mental experiences we have. These generated
values are then projected back onto the source of the stimula-
tion. But it’s only our minds that make the world full of color
and taste. By adding such properties to all these different sources
of energy or chemical stimulus our minds fill the world with
objects with different properties. Without these sensory valua-
tions that our minds make, the world would only consist of
boring forms of physical energy and chemistry.
Freya: But for us this means it’s no longer an alien place inhab-
ited by various impersonal forms of energy, but filled with
58 Philosophy Now G December 2018/January 2019
objects that now have value to us.
Orin: Yes, and these valuations are not projected onto a screen
inside our minds, but onto the world itself.
Max: So, now you’re saying we’ve invented the world. Still
nonsense!
Orin: But I’m not saying that Max. Our division of the world
into objects is not an invention, because it requires there to
be the real objects to act as the sources of the various forms
of energy or chemistry that interact with our senses. Now,
whether these mental qualities we impose upon these objects
are invented by our minds or discovered, is a big philosophical
question…
Max: All the same, attaching these mental qualities to things
is not the same as projecting light from our eyes!
Orin: Nevertheless, we are illuminating the world in much
the same way as a manuscript is illuminated by the artist
adding color and form to the plain text.
Freya: It also has the effect of making the world a beautiful
and interesting place. It makes the world fascinating to us so
that we want to explore it. Without this illumination, there
would be no reason to enjoy the world, or even to reach out
for it.
Max: But these college students don’t see it that way. That’s
not what they’re saying. You’re only going to confuse the
issue even more with this sort of talk.
Orin: On the contrary, it is you scientists confusing them, by
claiming that the world is full of inert objects neatly placed
in time and space with us as mere disconnected observers of
them. But the world which you maintain is the real one has
no art or poetry in it, perhaps no reason for us to act on it at
all. Obviously, it is the taste of sugar, not pure physics, which
is causing you to down that muffin! And the artist, not the
scientist, is the one capturing the real world full of beauty,
color and passion.
Max: Huh!
With a noisy rustle Max turns the paper’s page. Licking the tip of
his index finger, he picks up the crumbs from the plate with it and
transfers them to his tongue. Freya, again gazing at the picture,
gets up, crosses the room, and begins to trace out the shapes with a
hovering finger. With a loud grunt Orin adds another spoonful of
sugar to his untouched and by now cold coffee. With much rattling
and clinking he gives it a vigorous stir; but Max makes no further
response.
© DR STEPHEN J. BREWER 2018
Steve Brewer is a retired biochemist and the author of The
Origins of Self (2015), available for free download from
originsofself.com.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Portraits of
Wittgenstein
Edited by F.A. Flowers III
and Ian Ground
“[This] is a wonderful project
- endlessly fascinating for
philosophers, but it will
also appeal to anyone with
the most casual interest in
twentieth-century intellectual
history. This is the work everyone who is
interested in Wittgenstein the man needs.”
– Times Literary Supplement
Paperback / £34.99 / ISBN: 9781350046634
Photos: Ludwig with pupils in Lower Austria © The Stonborough Family Kurt, Paul, Hermine,
Max, Leopoldine, Helene, Ludwig – Neuwaldegg 1917 © The Brenner Archiv
Wittgenstein’s
Family Letters
Edited by Brian McGuinness,
translated by Peter Winslow
“In your last letter, you write
that I am a great philosopher.
Certainly, I am, but I do not
Now want to hear that from you.
available as a Call me a truth-seeker, and
single paperback Publishing
volume at I’ll be content with that.” 29th
£34.99 November
Translated into English
for the first time, the personal letters between
Ludwig Wittgenstein and his siblings deepen our
understanding of his philosophy, revealing a more
intimate side to the man.
Hardback / £20.00 / ISBN: 9781474298131

www.bloomsbury.com

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