So what happens when we try to take our reasons all the way down? When we continue asking why we should do anything? We begin to get to a complex meta-ethical question: what constitutes a reason for action? What is it to have a reason to do something? (Warning: this will be an abstract and theoretical post, but it is important to fundamental questions like why we should do anything at all.)

There are at least three things that this last question could mean, three things we could be saying when we speak of having reasons. I like to distinguish the different kinds of reasons in terms of grammar: it’s so far the most precise way I’ve found of spelling them out. There is on one hand a difference of case, between ablative and dative reasons; and on the other a difference of person, between third-person and first-person reasons. English has the second of these distinctions but not the first.

I know the distinction between ablative and dative from my study of Sanskrit and Pali (and to a lesser extent Latin) grammar; the same distinction, I believe, is there in Greek. (It’s not there in German, which has only a dative and no ablative.) In Sanskrit, ablative and dative case endings can both be used to express what we would normally call reasons; but they are very different kinds of reasons. The ablative case describes a cause; it describes the reason why we did something (or why we’re doing it or will do it). The dative case describes a purpose; it describes our reason to do something. The ablative in this sense is translated with “because”; the dative, with “in order to.”

So when we speak of reasons, it can be helpful to specify whether we’re speaking of reasons in the sense expressed by the dative, or only by the ablative. Ablative reasons are the reasons that natural scientists are best at expressing; they’re the only kinds of reasons discovered by chemistry or physics. Everything in the universe acts according to ablative reasons: the rock fell because it had been dropped (and because of gravity). Essentially, they are causes; the “why” in an ablative reason can be replaced with a “how.” In Aristotle’s scheme of four explanations, they are efficient explanations.

Dative reasons, by contrast, are final explanations; they have to do with purpose, aims, teleology. On Aristotle’s understanding, everything had a dative reason; for a modern scientific understanding, this is not the case. There is no purpose to rocks falling or the sun shining. There is, however, some sort of purpose in the biological action of lifeforms, even on a purely scientific explanation. We cannot explain the movements of, say, blood clotting in a wound entirely on the basis of chemical and physical movement; we explain the blood clotting much more effectively if we can talk about what it’s for, namely to protect the wound and stop bleeding. Purpose is such a central part of biological explanation that, until Darwin, it was the most obvious and preferred proof for the existence of God. Everything biological, from the cell to the ecosystem, acts with some purpose to the preservation and reproduction of life; how could this have happened without the action of a God? Nobody had a good answer to that question until Darwin; ever since then, evolution replaced God in explanations, and people have made attempts to base ethics on evolution (usually failing miserably).

It’s dative and not ablative reasons that are of interest to me here. Ablative reasons help us explain the action of the universe; but they tell us less of interest for ethics. To ask “why should we do something?” we need to ask about purpose.

Some – especially Kant – would step in and require a further distinction among dative reasons. The best way I’ve found of putting this distinction is also grammatical: third-person versus first-person reasons. (My grad-school colleague Drew Schroeder used this distinction to help explain Kant to me, though I don’t think Kant himself puts it in those terms.) When a biologist explains blood clotting in terms of its purpose, Kant would say, that explanation too has nothing to do with what actions we should actually take. The purpose of our action has to come from within us.

Sociologists and psychologists can easily explain actions in dative terms. This is clearest in the case of functionalists like Talcott Parsons, for whom basically every social phenomenon can be explained in terms of its purpose for society at large, but pretty much every social scientist will explain actions in terms of some sort of purpose, including individual self-interest or evolutionary fitness. But they’re still explaining action causally, looking at the social or biological variables that cause one course of action to be taken rather than not taken. In the end these third-person dative reasons still turn out to be efficient explanations: we ask what something is for only in order to explain what caused it. First-person reasons are different: they’re the reasons that we use for choice and deliberation in an action.

On the internalist view, I think, these distinctions look a bit less important. If our reasons for action come down to our existing desires or other motivations, then it may well be sufficient to say that we want X because it gives us pleasure, and it gives us pleasure because our upbringing predisposes us that way. But I think it’s that very way of phrasing the question that looks suspicious to the externalist. Should we really take a view that’s that conservative – that just leaves the preferences formed by genes and upbringing as they are? Don’t we want to have better reasons than just being slaves of our pasts? It’s the sorts of judgements implied in those questions – the idea that it is better to make a free and rational choice – that Kant appeals to, and I don’t think it’s too hard to see the appeal in his view.

So far I’ve explored two major perennial questions: ascent versus descent and intimacy versus integrity. I have taken these as two different axes along which philosophies can be classified – in their ethics and soteriology as well as their metaphysics and epistemology.

But why should we treat these as exhausting the perennial questions? I think there’s value in limiting the number of questions we treat as perennial – in being prepared to say “those are different aspects of the same question” or “those are different ways of asking the same question” rather than allowing the questions to proliferate randomly. But that’s not to say the number of questions should be limited to merely two – though it’s certainly interesting to consider the two as axes on a single graph.

For there are other questions which are similarly widespread and have similar ramifications. A little while ago I pointed to Mou Zongsan’s distinction between “perfect” and “separation” theories; these map onto the distinction I discussed earlier between ātmanism and encounter, but Mou effectively tries to show that ātmanism-encounter is its own perennial question, distinct from the integrity-ascent and intimacy-descent positions they might seem to map onto.

Other perennial questions are significantly better known than the debates I have discussed above. One of these is human nature: the question that finds its most classic expression in the ancient Confucian debates between Mencius and Xunzi, but is also well expressed in the West in Rousseau and Augustine, among others. So too, I suspect it is at the heart of the changes in Buddhism as it moved from India to Mencian China. At its heart, this is a metaphysical question about what human beings are and what makes them so – a question which is also open to at least some empirical verification or falsification. But it is also an ethical question. If human beings are naturally good, they need far less ethical correction, need to watch themselves or be watched far less, than if they are systematically prone to error and wrongness. It extends into soteriology: a good human nature makes sudden liberation more plausible. And at several points the recent debates over “common sense” extended this question into epistemology. To what extent are human reasoning processes naturally good enough to lead us to the truth, and to what extent are they so prone to error that they need regular and systematic correction?

Then there is the similarly metaphysical question of free will – much less subject to empirical verification. The empirical methods of natural science assume that the world is made of causal processes whose workings can be ascertained; this very assumption begs the metaphysical question at issue. But it too has significant ramifications in ethics and politics. Free will is a fundamental assumption behind the characteristic organizing concepts of modern liberalism: rights, respect, autonomy. The idea that individual choices are to be respected qua choices – as opposed to their being instrumental to other goods like happiness – implies that something about these choices gives them a different status from other phenomena in the universe. So you can’t get even close to a Kantian ethics without free will – but consequentialist ethics can do fine without it. I’m told that Fyodor Dostoevsky even saw this point as the fundamental difference between the worldviews of Protestantism and Catholicism: Protestants sacralize individual autonomous choice even if it leads to overall misery; Catholics want an order that produces general happiness even if it leads to tyranny over individual choice. (Whether his characterization was accurate, let alone whether Eastern Orthodox churches provide the appropriate synthesis he thinks they do, is a separate topic.)

The idea of free will has been particularly important in the West, but it has not been limited to that context. It is important enough to Śāntideva that he spends several difficult verses refuting it. Very much like Nietzsche, Śāntideva believes that the idea of free will is harmful and dangerous because it leads us to blame others: their actions have causes just like a stomach upset does, so we should not get angry at them any more than we get angry at our stomach bile. And I think points of view like Śāntideva’s tend to frame the left-right axis in Canadian politics, and in other countries where God is not a serious political issue. The right believes criminals make free choices, and so deserve their punishment, while the left seeks to reduce the causes of crime; and if people’s fates in society largely come down to their free choices, then the government has less of a duty to help those whose fates turned out poorly.

The questions I’ve listed – ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, ātmanism/encounter, free will, human nature – hardly exhaust the list of perennial questions either. In future weeks I’m hoping to examine others. But I’m returning to the idea of perennial questions now because I suspect that it may form part of a highly fruitful method in cross-cultural philosophy. Too much cross-cultural philosophy so far has been dominated by the idea of a philosophia perennis, a single universal philosophy shared across cultures. That idea is usually taken to refer to some sort of Advaitic mystical monism, a single cosmic truth that can be known through mystical experience. And while ideas of that sort are indeed present in many cultures, they’re rarely all that widespread. Most people do not believe this so-called perennial philosophy. Moreover, there’s an odd parallel between that sort of perennialism and the view of “common sense” recently advocated on this blog by Thill Raghunath and others. Though Thill describes “common sense” as excluding “religious” ideas (which I suspect includes the “perennial” mystical monism), he shares with the perennialists a common view of human access to truth: all humans, across cultures, share an innate faculty which allows them access to truth, but most humans access this faculty so little that they are enmeshed in delusion. (As I noted above, epistemologically this seems to put both Thill and the perennialists on the side of the human nature debate that stresses our natural goodness.)

What is truly universal to me in philosophy, it seems, are not the answers but the questions; and that is why I think the cross-cultural study of philosophy should devote more time to these questions. To the extent that the answers are universal as well, it seems to me that multiple and contradictory answers are universal: both mystical Ascent and a “common sense” Descent are found across cultures. The student of cross-cultural philosophy should pay attention to both sides.

In August I will be taking some vacation time with my wife and my friends. So there will be no blog post next week; posts may be sporadic for the rest of the month as well.

Not agreeing with Feser’s Augustinian presuppositions, I also don’t agree with his conclusions. I do think that some unambiguous lies can be right because of their consequences, at the very least in extreme cases like the murderer at the door who asks you whether you’re sheltering his next victim (to which Feser refers, as did Kant). But that’s not what’s interesting about Feser’s post, nor is it his point (at least, not directly). Rather, he’s asking what a lie actually is. For him this question is vital because it directly implies which behaviours with respect to the truth are ever permitted and which are not. But it’s still an essential question for those of us who believe that there is something merely bad about all lying, even if that badness can on occasion be outweighed by other factors. Which speech acts possess that intrinsic badness?

Feser says many profound and interesting things in response to this question, but I was particularly struck by one of the first, on pleasantries, and I’m going to spend today’s post riffing on that point. According to Feser, it is not a lie to say “I’m fine, thanks” in reply to “how are you?” when you are not feeling fine, for in such a context “I’m fine, thanks” does not actually mean that you are feeling fine or doing well.

Only in such a context can one make sense of what I have found perhaps the most annoying behaviour of Massachusetts natives: the habit of responding to the phrase “Hi, how are you doing?” with another “Hi, how are you doing?” Such a response would never be uttered by an Ontarian in response to another Ontarian, any more than they would say “Can you tell me how to get to the bank?” in response to “Can you tell me how to get to the bank?” (In my experience, this has also been true of most of the rest of the English-speaking world.) I have always believed that “How are you doing?” is an actual question, and therefore merits an actual response. So, in recent years when I have been convinced of the vital importance of truth-telling, if I am not feeling well I have tried to respond to this question with a shrug and a “meh” – or a similar response that implies that, while I am not feeling particularly well at the moment, it’s not a particularly big deal and the questioner should feel no obligation to distract herself with concern about it.

Feser’s approach, while intended to explain away a pleasantry that is in some sense false, also helps explain pleasantries like the Massachusetts greeting that are literally nonsensical. In Massachusetts, the phrase “how are you?” does not mean anything more than “hello,” and people are occasionally startled when the question receives an answer. The words themselves have no semantic meaning at all.

I’m reminded here of Frits Staal‘s study of Vedic sacrifices and recitation. It has long been noted that many Indians in history (including some still alive) have been able to recite all the words of the Vedas without knowing a single word of the Sanskrit language in which they were composed. Staal used his study of Vedic practitioners to argue against those who searched for an intellectual meaning to every ritual, especially to ritual words like mantras, magic spells. He would claim that many rituals are “rules without meaning” – comparing them and the words spoken in them, instructively, to birdsong. (Insert a joke about Twitter here if you wish.)

If we think of pleasantries as analogous to birdsong, I think we learn something important about them – and we do not necessarily diminish these activities for doing so. Since Aristotle it has been a commonplace that human beings are rational animals – and the “animal” is often just as important as the “rational.” We have a need for wordless reassurance, just like our pets.

One might even apply the term more generally to all the kinds of human behaviours that Confucians call “rites” (li 禮) – patterns of interpersonal behaviour sanctioned by tradition, from solemn ceremonies like weddings and funerals to polite gestures like pleasantries. If we think of pleasantries and other speech rites like birdsong in this way, we return to something like the performance theory of ritual that I had criticized in this post: analyzing spoken words in terms of what they do rather than what they mean. But as I later noted, my earlier criticism was too harsh: many rites should be thought of in terms of what they do rather than what they mean, but we should be clear to include our own rites among these. And here it’s worth noting that this applies to rites that consist solely of words, such as “How are you doing?”. Sometimes, we mean what we say. Sometimes, we just chirp it.

Speaking of rites, I don’t expect to post on Sunday, because I’ll likely be busy with festivities for American Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers!

The attempt to identify such universal categories, I think, is central to the work of analytic philosophy. It drives the characteristically analytic attempt to classify Buddhist ethics according to the categories of 20th-century ethics: is Buddhist ethics consequentialism or virtue ethics? For that matter, is Śāntideva a determinist or a compatibilist? The problem with such attempts, in my book, is that they take it for granted that the questions of 20th-century ethics (consequentialism, deontology or virtue?) are the most important ones to ask. Such an approach, it seems to me, strongly limits one’s ability to learn anything of substance from other traditions. Foreign traditions (and this includes the Greeks and the medieval Christians as much as the Confucians or Vedāntins) can teach us different questions to ask, not merely different answers to those questions. That’s why it’s important to me that when we do think in more universal categories, we try to involve categories (like ascent-descent) that are derived from the study of multiple traditions.

Part of the point of thinking across traditions in this way, to me, is that metaphilosophy shouldn’t only be about universals, but about particulars – specifically, historical particulars. I have no problem in saying that philosophy aims at universal truth; but it does so only through the eyes of individual philosophers, who are all finite, particular and historically limited human beings, shaped greatly by their historical context. And for any given philosophy – including one’s own – that context is an essential reason why it is the way it is.

For me, what makes any kind of history exciting is the window it opens on the present, the ability to see why things are the way they are because one can see when they became the way they are. For this reason, Canadian history became a lot more interesting to me in the past year after I learned about the Seven Years’ War, which created the English-dominated bilingual society that is contemporary Canada. (Schools in Québec and Massachusetts both teach this as a fundamental event in the creation of their worlds, which it was; schools in Ontario do not teach it, though it was just as important. Our history classes began with 1867, when Canada had long already had more or less the shape it has now; and so it’s no wonder I learned to regard Canadian history as really, really boring.) I generally didn’t care about history at all until, sometime during my undergraduate degree, I would start to see past philosophers appear in the present – and not just present philosophers. I would hear other students argue moral issues – outside of philosophy classes – and I would think “they’re getting this from Kant, whether they realize it or not.” Perhaps more fundamentally, I looked at the epistemological empiricism I myself held at the time, and realized that it came from David Hume. My own philosophy, even though it aspired to a universal truth, was still rooted in a particular time and place.

Philosophy is always instantiated in the views of particular philosophers – and I had come to see just how much those views, including my own, were historically conditioned. This point, I think, is central to Martin Heidegger‘s philosophical activity: he wanted to get us over what he saw as the mistakes of the Western philosophical tradition, but he knew that we would keep repeating those mistakes unless we knew that tradition very well. Thus he kept turning back to the first Western philosophers, the pre-Socratics.

Now it is crucial here not to make a mere circumstantial ad hominem fallacy: to say that a given philosophical view is wrong because it can be explained by its historical context. Such a view leads past relativism to nihilism, since one could make such explanations of any philosophy, and therefore “refute” all of them. That’s not what Heidegger is up to, of course; he is trying to get at a real truth of some sort, he’s just convinced that most of the Western tradition has missed it, and that he has missed it as well insofar as he is still under the influence of that tradition.

I think that this attention to the history of philosophy is generally shared in some such respect by those on the “continental” side of the contemporary divide. It certainly seems true of postmodernists like Jacques Derrida who, following Heidegger, seek to overthrow the Western philosophical tradition. But it is also true of those who value that tradition and seek to sustain and advance it – among whom the key figure is G.W.F. Hegel.

I have kept returning to Hegel throughout my philosophical career, not merely for this blog, because of his powerful attempt to blend these two approaches to metaphilosophy: to link the search for universal truths and the understanding of historical particularity, put them all together. Hegel’s own discussion of the history of philosophy is manifestly inadequate, for he treats South and East Asian philosophies as being without any inner development, merely the starting point for Western tradition. One can refute him on that score with a relatively cursory knowledge of those traditions. Yet for those who see the power and truth behind both kinds of metaphilosophy – recognizing that one needs to look for universal truth, but also recognizing that historical particularity is a part of every philosophy at a very deep level – Hegel’s project remains an essential starting point.

LARPing for me is genuinely a hobby. It’s not an avocation, a “neither career nor hobby” passion like I intend this blog to be; it’s just for fun. Still, lately I’ve been noticing its philosophical implications, largely because of a splendid game I play called Seven Virtues. The obvious inspiration (or at least analogy) for Seven Virtues is the Harry Potter series, as it’s set in a school, training heroes to fight beings of evil and destruction. But in this fantasy world, what makes the heroes powerful and able to fight their evil foes is their devotion to virtue, to becoming better people. Their goodness has direct effects on the supernatural physical world, and there are plausible reasons within the game’s cosmology why it does so (and one of the characters’ tasks is to find out how). To Plato or Augustine it seemed obvious that truth and goodness were the same thing; in a modern world that explains life by evolution and not divine design it is much harder to step into their worldview, but it’s much easier to do so in such a fantasy world. The game’s premise is bait for philosophers, especially those like me who could be classified as virtue ethicists. And it’s made me think a bit more about the philosophical implications of LARPing more generally.

I did a little bit of theatre in high school, but LARPing is by far the closest I’ve come to method acting. For that reason, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about David Haberman’s Acting as a Way of Salvation, a study of the sixteenth-century Indian thinker Rūpa Gosvāmi. Rūpa Gosvāmi urges his followers to become closer to the god Krishna through dramatic play – acting out the life of Krishna in their own lives, sometimes taking a vow never to leave the area of Vraj (where Krishna was supposedly born). To help make sense of Rūpa Gosvāmi and his followers, Haberman’s book turns to the works of Russian philosopher-director Constantin Stanislavski, the father of method acting. For Stanislavski, the true actor fuses his identity with that of his characters, cheering “Live your part!”: “It may not last long but while it does last you will be incapable of distinguishing between yourself and the person you are portraying.” And according to Haberman, this is exactly what Rūpa and his followers aim to achieve: by acting like the characters in Krishna’s life, they hope in some sense to become the characters in Krishna’s life.

Now most LARPers, myself included, are not great actors or method actors; we don’t get the kind of change in identity that Stanislavski advocates. But that is in some sense the ideal that LARPs increasingly aim for, especially the “Accelerant” games I play in. As I understand it, the first LARPs simulated fighting with rock-paper-scissors (if you win at rock-paper-scissors you win the fight); whereas in the Accelerant games, people build foam weapons to simulate actually hitting each other. In older games, a staff member would explain to players the things that their characters saw, like a gamemaster in Dungeons & Dragons; in Accelerant games, staff produce low-budget costumes and special effects to simulate actually seeing it. (Games almost always take place at private camps in secluded rural areas so that curious strangers do not happen to wander in.) And because the game typically lasts a whole weekend, one effectively eats and sleeps in character. During that weekend one tries to become the character one plays, to fully live the part.

The question I wonder about is: is this a good and virtuous thing for our real-life selves, to live a part? For Rūpa Gosvāmi the answer would have been easy: by acting out Krishna’s life one is entering into his divine perfection, so of course it makes one better to do so. But LARPers, like Stanislavski’s method actors, are acting for entertainment and pleasure, whether their own or that of an audience. Perhaps more importantly, unlike the Gosvāmi devotees, the character that one plays is usually not an ideal, but a flawed human (or humanlike) being with imperfections and vices that one does not have oneself – perhaps even a true villain. Might the process of merging one’s identity with such a person not make oneself worse? Such a troubling problem is brought to mind by the Muharram passion plays, in which Shi’a Muslims reenact the lives of the martyrs Hasan and Husayn, as Rūpa’s devotees reenact Krishna’s. In a class session on the subject, Ali Asani noted that at Muharram the actors playing the bad guys, the ones who killed Hasan and Husayn, are paid very highly because they are in danger of being mobbed to death by others caught up in the emotions of the drama. One can see reasons why Plato might have banished the playwrights from his ideal state – they took people’s focus away from the things that are truly good.

In Seven Virtues, my character does act in ways that I might think wrong. He has a strict quasi-Kantian moral code that I do not share, and indeed find troubling. And yet by living inside his head I can see what is admirable about his worldview, remind myself why it appeals to many people: the unflinching honesty and moral courage that it allows. I can appreciate someone very different from myself, in a way more personal and immediate than watching such a person as a character onscreen or in a novel. The same might even be true of getting inside the head of a genuine villain, as troubling as it might be. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Der Untergang (The Downfall) attracted controversy because it portrayed Adolf Hitler as genuinely human, in a way that could arouse some modest sympathy with him. (The film’s impact may have been lessened somewhat by the strange and often hilarious parody videos made of its final scene, but that’s not something the director could have imagined.) But it seems to me that this too is a good thing. Everyone has some potentially admirable qualities, even Hitler or Pol Pot; without such qualities, the wicked world leaders could not have attained the following they did. And it seems to me that an understanding of those admirable qualities, while potentially quite dangerous, is nevertheless a good thing.

People describing Grandin often reach first for words like “extraordinary,” “fascinating,” “remarkable.” These are not the words that come to my mind. I say this not because I find her accomplishments limited – they are major – but because I find her story very familiar. I don’t know if I would be diagnosed with Asperger’s myself; but I do know that Asperger’s is part of a spectrum, with full-blown autism on one end. At the other end, I think, one finds the behaviour of typical science-fiction geeks and absent-minded professors, in whose company I unquestionably fall.

The central features of Asperger’s syndrome are a difficulty with social cues and a narrowness of interest; one falls far outside the normal realms of human interest and interaction. (My interests are almost opposite Grandin’s, yet this makes me sympathize with her more. Where Grandin has been obsessed with animals since her youth, my mother recalls that I was the only child to be completely uninterested when a bunny rabbit was brought into our classroom.) The subtle interplay and social niceties that come so naturally to most people, must be learned deliberately and consciously, as one learns mathematics – and learning these is often far more difficult than learning math.

There are a number of philosophical implications that the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome might have. In today’s post, I want to focus on its implications for the history of philosophy.

I’ve recently been noticing a repeated pattern in Indo-European philosophy: one great philosopher posits a realm of pure reason, absolute abstraction, an abstract Good set above and beyond the particulars of the everyday world; and then that abstract philosopher gains a disciple (whether known personally or hundreds of years later) who takes the first philosopher’s abstract ideas and embeds a modified version of them in the concrete everyday world. The first philosopher is to some extent an Ascent thinker, trying to transcend the material and social world, and the second is more of a Descender, trying to embrace it.

The classic version of this pattern is in Plato and Aristotle. Raphael’s The School of Athens immortalizes their differences – Plato pointing up vertically to a transcendent world of Ideas and Aristotle emphasizing the horizontal world of matter – but Aristotle nevertheless embraces much of Plato’s worldview, agreeing the Ideas exist but situating them in matter instead of in their own outer realm.

I see at least three places the pattern repeats itself. In Christianity, Augustine points to a transcendent God, sublime in infinite majesty compared to a world of darkly fallen, sinful humans, hoping that through God’s grace we can ascend to something better than our worldly fallen state. Much later, Thomas Aquinas works God much more deeply into the world of human interaction, seeing it as the working out of God-given natural laws. Here the repeated pattern is explicit, with Augustine drawing deeply from Plato and Aquinas from Aristotle.

No such influence is present in Vedāntic India. Yet I think the same pattern appears. Śaṅkara, clearly influenced by Buddhists, sees the world as full of suffering and produced by ignorance, and advises us to transcend it to realize our nature as a single entity of pure knowledge and consciousness. Then Rāmānuja draws on Śaṅkara’s account of cosmic oneness, but sees it as manifested in the physical world.

Finally, one can see a similar pattern among the great thinkers of modern Germany. Consciously attempting to move away from the supernatural transcendent worlds proposed by Plato and Augustine, Kant nevertheless identifies a realm of pure reason that would exist even in the absence of anything concrete; and tells us our moral goodness lies in following this reason, as opposed to the natural inclinations of the physical and social world. Soon enough, Hegel tries to take Kant’s pure reason and show how it underlies the physical and social world of desire and inclination. (An acquaintance once proposed to me the analogy “Kant is to Hegel as Plato is to Aristotle”; I would now add “as Augustine is to Aquinas as Śaṅkara is to Rāmānuja.”)

So to return to the earlier concerns of the post, I can’t help but wonder whether the first philosopher in each pairing had Asperger’s syndrome, while the second did not (or had it more mildly). I imagine that the same sense of being outside the normal world, which drove Temple Grandin’s animal research, also drove Plato and Augustine and Śaṅkara and Kant – but then in each case someone more normal and well-adjusted then sat down and tried to adapt their theories so they could fit into the everyday world. This seems to be confirmed in the case of Kant and Hegel, where we have the most reliable information about their personal lives. Kant never married, and was said to have been so obsessive about punctuality that the citizens of Königsberg set their clocks by his daily walk; Hegel, meanwhile, had a wife and children and seemed to live a relatively normal personal life by the standards of nineteenth-century Prussia.

I seem to recall Graham Harman noting a while back (I can’t find the reference) that most great philosophers today begin by making an extreme and exaggerated claim that draws attention, and then gradually pull back to a more moderate position. I wonder if the same thing may occur interpersonally: a weird outsider with an autism-spectrum disorder is needed to get the philosophical world to pay attention and shake things up, and then someone more socially well adjusted is required to give those theories wider acceptance. Grandin suggests that Asperger’s may be one of the world’s great wellsprings of creativity: “if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay. It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses…. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.” (quoted in Sacks 292) Perhaps one needs a maladjusted, socially inept genius to create a great idea and then an “accountant” to make it stick. (Sacks’s piece mentions Wittgenstein as someone who might have had Asperger’s, and there is a certain transcendent aspiration in some of his work; it may have been the whole 20th-century school of analytic philosophy that brought his work down to earth.)

At least, that seems like it may be the Indo-European pattern. I don’t see anything parallel in East Asia, perhaps because East Asian thought has so much stronger of an intimacy orientation. (At the SACP two years ago, I said to an East Asianist colleague that I thought explicit argument and disagreement were essential to the progress of philosophy. He said he thought that I was being Eurocentric; when I noted how much explicit argument there is in India, he modified it to “Indo-Eurocentric.”) For better or for worse, people with Asperger’s tendencies seem to have found much less of a home in East Asian thought. Perhaps that should be no surprise: after all, Aspergians make terrible Confucians. A philosophical climate that stresses etiquette and social relationships is about as uncongenial an environment as can be imagined for someone like Temple Grandin. The thought of such a person might have had a much harder time getting a foothold there.

In the prologue to The Sources of Normativity, probably her most important and influential work, Korsgaard provides what she calls a “very concise history” (her emphasis) of the connections between metaphysics and ethics in Western philosophy. I noted recently that the concept of obligation is central to Korsgaard’s philosophy, as it is to Lévinas’s; this prologue provides us with historical reasons why an obligation-centred philosophy might be a worthwhile project.

Plato and Aristotle, Korsgaard notes, had a philosophy focused on excellence (aretē, often translated “virtue”) rather than obligation, as do most of those who today reject Kantian and utilitarian ethics and are therefore usually lumped into the catch-all category of “virtue ethics.” Their ethics had much more to do more with what is good, what we should care about, than with what others oblige us to do. But, Korsgaard adds, in Plato and Aristotle this account depends on metaphysics, on a view of the way things really are. For them, a thing’s highest perfection and potential – its form – was in some sense more real than the existing particular thing as it actually is.

Korsgaard correctly notes that Christianity changed Western philosophy’s emphasis, away from excellence and toward obligation and law, with God as the lawgiver. But what if we no longer assume that God is the source of ethics? What we cannot do, she says, is go back to Plato and Aristotle’s world of excellence. “Because for us, the world is no longer first and foremost form. It is matter.” (4) By identifying ultimate reality with matter, we have separated the real from the good; we no longer look at actual things as reflecting a higher and better potential. And this means that a Platonic or Aristotelian ethics of excellence is no longer available to us.

What Korsgaard does not say, however, is that this new, hard, scientific world is entirely bereft of value. Indeed, she sees that it cannot be. (Although she does not put it in these terms, science’s claims to truth are themselves grounded in value.) She says:

If the real and the good are no longer one, value must find its way into the world somehow. Form must be imposed on the world of matter. This is the work of art, the work of obligation, and it brings us back to Kant. And this is what we should expect. For it was Kant who completed the revolution, when he said that reason — which is form — isn’t in the world, but is something that we impose upon it. The ethics of autonomy is the only one consistent with the metaphysics of the modern world, and the ethics of autonomy is an ethics of obligation. (5)

Now I think there is something very wrong with this paragraph. Korsgaard has accepted that value has a real place in the world, even the world of a modern scientific metaphysics; and she then claims that value’s place in the world is one of obligation (as opposed, by implication, to excellence). The next parts of the book flesh out her account of the ethics of obligation, but let us leave that aside for the moment. Let us assume for now that Korsgaard, in the rest of the book, succeeds in founding ethics on obligation. Isn’t there still something missing?

Korsgaard’s account of value, as provided here, derives that value only from obligation. If her account in the rest of the book were correct, it might be the case that all moral value comes from obligation. But is that the only kind of value in the world? Korsgaard never tries to argue that, and it’s hard to see how she could. She opens the prologue by saying: “It is the most striking fact about human life that we have values. We think of ways that things could be better, more perfect, and so of course different, than they are; and of ways that we ourselves could be better, more perfect, and so of course different, than we are.” (1) But things are not obliged to do or be anything, certainly not on any Kantian account of morality. Indeed if one were to imagine obligation being applied to things, it would likely have to be on something like the Greek teleological metaphysics that Korsgaard explicitly rejects: it is the purpose of a knife to cut well, therefore it is that knife’s duty to cut well.

There is, then, a yawning gap in Korsgaard’s historical account of value, even if we take her account of morality and obligation to be true. At a minimum, this ethics must be accompanied by an aesthetics. Some accounts of ethics – including those I’m most sympathetic with – do not restrict their concern to morality in the strict sense, and might therefore include aesthetics, but this appears not to be the case with Korsgaard’s. And while Korsgaard’s quote above tantalizingly lists “the work of art” along with “the work of obligation” above, suggesting the importance of aesthetics, it seems on a fuller reading that this is only apparent: when she uses the word “art” elsewhere in this passage, she contrasts it with what is natural, and so appears to mean only “artifice,” the Xunzian point that we are not naturally good but need to work on it.

And so it seems that aesthetics, at least, is missing from Korsgaard’s account. Just as we need an account of how people’s actions can be right and wrong, so we need an account of how things can be beautiful and ugly. Kant did not have this problem since he had a highly developed aesthetics, but it is not clear whether Korsgaard buys it. But it would seem, on Korsgaard’s account, that one must either adopt something very much like Kant’s aesthetics (as she does with his ethics) or return in some respect to a semi-premodern metaphysical account that sees value in the world while still taking science into consideration – as Hegel tried to do, for example. If one takes this latter route with aesthetics, however, it would seem that one is compelled to do so with ethics too.

I recently noted the strong similarities between Korsgaard’s philosophy of obligation and that of Emmanuel Lévinas. Lévinas, in one of his better-known essays, tells us that “ethics is first philosophy” – and by “ethics” he means obligation. But, I’m told, Speculative Realist Graham Harman retorts that “aesthetics is first philosophy.” I’m wondering if issues like this are what Harman has in mind: we don’t just need an account of moral value, we need an account of value as such.

In his excellent post which quotes Harman to this effect, Skholiast adds a quote from Wittgenstein that “Ethics and aesthetics are one.” I’m not sure I would go that far; but it seems to me that there must be some sort of connection between the two, a connection that Korsgaard implies only to ignore. We could, I suppose, say that axiology is first philosophy – “axiology” meaning the study of value – though that phrase doesn’t sound nearly as cutting as either Lévinas’s or Harman’s.

Sandel, however, claims that Kant’s position is not quite as counterintuitive as it seems. Sandel regularly makes this claim in his Justice course, which I taught for as a teaching fellow, and which Sandel has now made available to the public as a course as well as in a book. While Kant brooks no lies, Sandel says, he is quite happy with misleading truths. As evidence Sandel points to Kant’s own life:

Kant found himself in trouble with King Friedrich Wilhelm II. The king and his censors considered Kant’s writings on religion disparaging to Christianity, and demanded that he pledge to refrain from any further pronouncements on the topic. Kant responded with a carefully worded statement: ‘As your Majesty’s faithful subject, I shall in the future completely desist from all public lectures or papers concerning religion.’ Kant was aware, when he made his statement, that the king was not likely to live much longer. When the king died a few years later, Kant considered himself absolved of the promise, which bound him only ‘as your Majesty’s faithful subject.’ Kant later explained that he had chosen his words ‘most carefully, so that I should not be deprived of my freedom… forever, but only so long as His Majesty was alive.’ By this clever evasion, the paragon of Prussian probity succeeded in misleading the censors without lying to them. (Sandel, Justice, p. 134)

I was reminded of Sandel’s position recently while leafing through Śaṅkara‘s commentary on the Yoga Sūtras – specifically sūtra II.30, which speaks of the “restraints” (yama) that a yogin must practise, similar to the Buddhist Five Precepts and identical to the five Jain precepts. On both of these lists is satya, truthfulness. And in expounding the concept of truthfulness, Śaṅkara specifically warns us against the kind of misleading truths that Sandel describes.

Śaṅkara refers to a famous episode in the great Mahābhārata epic, an episode I greatly enjoy. The Pāṇḍavas – the Mahābhārata’s “good guys” – are at a stalemate against their Kaurava foes, because the Kauravas are led by the great general Drona. As long as Drona commands the Kaurava forces, the Pāṇḍavas cannot win. But the Pāṇḍavas have a plan, hatched by Krishna (Kṛṣṇa), that great trickster of a god. Drona cares more than anything for his son Aśvatthāman, and if he thinks Aśvatthāman is dead, he will lose the will to fight. But the Pāṇḍavas have no way to kill Aśvatthāman. What they can do is make Drona think Aśvatthāman is dead. Drona will believe Aśvatthāman is dead, Krishna notes, if he hears news to that effect from Yudhiṣṭhira, the leader of the Pāṇḍavas. For Yudhiṣṭhira, Kantian before the fact in his unswerving regard for the moral law, never tells a lie.

The problem, of course, is just that Yudhiṣṭhira never tells a lie! So he refuses to tell Drona that Aśvatthāman is dead – until Krishna comes up with a different plan. The Pāṇḍavas will kill an elephant named Aśvatthāman, and then it will no longer be a lie to say that Aśvatthāman is dead. It will merely be a misleading truth.

Yudhiṣṭhira agrees. The poor beast’s head is smashed in with a mace, and once Yudhiṣṭhira is within earshot of Drona the Pāṇḍavas call out “Aśvatthāman is dead!” Drona turns to Yudhiṣṭhira and asks, “Is this true?” And Yudhiṣṭhira calls out “Yes, it is true! Aśvatthāman _{the elephant} is dead” – adding the words “the elephant” in a voice too soft and hasty for Drona to have any chance of hearing it. Sure enough, Drona loses the will to fight, and the Pāṇḍavas begin to triumph.

Śaṅkara calls this story to mind in order to rule it out as an option for the yogin. The author of the Yoga Bhāṣya commentary says “The speech spoken to convey one’s own experience to others should not be deceitful”; to the end of this sentence Śaṅkara adds: “as when one states what one knows to be a fact, but this very truth is being spoken with the aim of tricking some other person. So Yudhiṣṭhira said ‘Aśvatthāman is killed – _{I mean the elephant.}‘” Even though it was for a good end, what Yudhiṣṭhira did was wrong; one should not do it.

Śaṅkara, then, explicitly rules out “misleading truths” as an option. Does Kant? I’m not sure. I didn’t buy the account when Sandel made it in class; it seemed to me that Kant was merely being a bad Kantian. But in his book Sandel explains in more detail. “A carefully crafted evasion pays homage to the duty of truth-telling in a way that an outright lie does not. Anyone who goes to the bother of concocting a misleading but technically true statement when a simple lie would do expresses, however obliquely, respect for the moral law.” More importantly, the misleading truth can be universalized. One would not be able to lie to the murderer if everyone told lies in such situations, for the claim could never be believed. But one could tell misleading truths if that’s what everyone did; it’s not that the claims would not be believed, but that people would have learned “to listen like lawyers and parse such statements with an eye to their literal meaning.” (Justice, p. 137) And because it can be universalized, one is treating one’s interlocutor as an end and not merely as a means; the misleading true statement “does not coerce or manipulate the listener in the same way as an outright lie. It’s always possible that a careful listener could figure it out.” (pp. 137-8) I’m still a little skeptical of the point, but Sandel might just be right. With these arguments, he’s managed to do what I thought was impossible: to defend Kant’s actions on Kantian grounds.

The most widely read response to Harris (and the one that Harris himself responded to at length) is one by Sean Carroll. I find the Harris-Carroll debate instructive because both seem to miss the most important point; and that, in turn, would seem to be because both fall prey to an unfortunate empiricism.

At the heart of the debate is the supposed dichotomy between “facts” and “values,” or “is” and “ought.” (I would rather say “should” than “ought,” because “ought” sounds increasingly rare and archaic in contemporary North American English, but that’s a quibble.) Harris insists that values are a kind of fact, even objective fact, so that “should” or “ought” statements have a meaning grounded in reality, not entirely relative to or dependent upon the subjects making the claim. “Should” statements, on this view, are a kind of “is” statement. In this, I think, Harris is entirely right.

Where Harris slips up is in missing the elision of “fact” with “empirical fact.” It’s this point that lends plausibility to Carroll’s criticism: Carroll is right to reply that we get “off on the wrong foot by insisting that values are simply a particular version of empirical facts.” Harris’s reply, however, misses this elision, not challenging it, and that’s why he’s vulnerable to Carroll’s counter-claim: “there exist real moral questions that no amount of empirical research alone will help us solve.” (his emphasis)

On Harris’s example of corporal punishment, for example, let us assume that Harris is right that corporal punishment negatively affects the well-being of children and of society in general. Does that give us sufficient reason to say that corporal punishment is wrong? Not if we buy Kant’s theory of punishment, according to which punishment is an obligation owed to those punished, irrespective of its consequences. For Kant, as is well known, does not take the well-being of conscious creatures as the primary measure of goodness or rightness. Is Kant wrong? I think he is; but I also think there’s something wrong with a viewpoint that takes happiness, or even more broadly defined consequences like “well-being”, as the sole standard for ethics. I think Harris is right to say well-being should be a standard by which we judge actions, but as far as I can tell he’s got no ground whatever to say it should be the standard.

But to get back to Carroll, the next question to ask here is: just what kind of question am I arguing with Harris about here? Harris, I think, is right to say that they are questions of fact. And to some extent even of objective fact: claims about good and bad do not depend entirely or even primarily on the subject making those claims. Even Kant would agree: lying is wrong whether or not you think it’s wrong, whether or not you want it to be. It’s just that, contra Harris, it’s not an empirical fact; establishing it relies on procedures of dialectical and demonstrative argument that can, but do not necessarily, involve reference to empirical states.

For Kant, knowledge of moral principles is surer than knowledge of the empirical world, because empirical facts change, but moral principles – like mathematical principles – are derived from a priori principles which are true no matter what happens to the physical world. We can imagine ourselves waking up in The Matrix and finding that the laws of physics in this new reality are completely different from what we thought they were. We cannot really imagine 2+2 being 5, even in the Matrix. That’s why Plato looked to mathematics, not empirical science, as a source of certainty; Kant saw moral truths as being like mathematical truths.

Now is Kant right about that? Not wholly. He is right to move the question beyond the realm of the entirely empirical; some ethical claims, especially those at the foundations, must involve the a priori. In his counterargument, Carroll starts to show that he gets this point: “The crucial point is that the difference between sets of incompatible moral assumptions is not analogous to the difference between believing in the Big Bang vs. believing in the Steady State model; but it is analogous to believing in science vs. being a radical epistemological skeptic who claims not to trust their sense data.” Indeed. What Carroll doesn’t get here, though, is that the disagreement between the scientist and the skeptic is itself a disagreement about facts, about the way that the universe is. It can in principle be resolved through argument, just as Carroll tries to resolve his own debate with Harris through argument, while still acknowledging that the debate does not rest on empirical evidence.

And so, while the analogy stands up very well, what doesn’t stand up is the way Carroll resolves the analogy: “In the cosmological-models case, we trust that we agree on the underlying norms of science and together we form a functioning community; in the epistemological case, we don’t agree on the underlying assumptions, and we have to hope to agree to disagree and work out social structures that let us live together in peace.” The assumption here seems to be that scientists can reach agreement because they share underlying assumptions, but that no agreement can be reached with those who don’t share those underlying assumptions. But if that’s so, science is wrong – or at least it’s no more right than Christianity, the Taliban, or any other belief system that Carroll might otherwise wish to condemn. Because of course the Taliban agree on underlying norms and form a functioning community – much more so, I dare say, than scientists do. The hard part, and the place where the norms of ethics are to be established, is arguing across the boundaries of those communities, finding truth between people whose assumptions are radically different. This is exactly what advocates of science like Carroll need to do, not just on questions of ethics, but on the value of science itself. For Carroll – unlike Harris – is saying here that science, like ethics, is itself true only relative to the assumptions of the scientific community. But the whole point of science is to do better than that – to say something about how the physical universe actually works, not just about how we think it works. (In other posts Carroll speaks of wanting to “convert” Catholics to atheism or naturalism or skepticism, which suggests that he does indeed think science’s views are not just different but better; for him to really claim that his views were simply equivalent to Christianity would, I think, be disingenuous.) Ethics is much the same here. Science and ethics both try to establish matters of fact; both rest on assumptions that are always disputed. But we do ourselves no favours in either arena by throwing up our hands and saying there is no truth that crosses communities.

While I think I’ve established the importance of truth as an end in itself, I don’t think I’ve at all established that truth as an end overrides other ends, especially beneficial consequences. I am not convinced of Kant’s or Augustine’s view that lies are always unconditionally wrong – that one should tell the truth even to a murderer whose victim you’re sheltering. In Rawls’s terms, I don’t think that there is a “lexical order” of priority between truth and good consequences, such that the latter matters only when the former isn’t an issue. Far from it.

Indeed I’m concerned about an overemphasis on truth per se. In an earlier post I thought about this question in the context of children and happiness: suppose that one’s children make one less happy, as some psychological research suggests is often the case. If one keeps this truth firmly in mind at all times, one is likely going to become a significantly worse parent. Even supposing that one should recognize this truth, one is likely better off ignoring it.

Here the relevant distinction may be between truth and importance, significance. It is true (in this supposed case) that one’s children make one less happy; but it is also true that one should love one’s children as wholeheartedly as possible. And the second truth is more important than the latter, it matters more. (Even if beneficial consequences are not the issue; Kant himself would have to say that it is a duty to love one’s children.) And so perhaps in other cases I have recently considered: the truth that Mañju?r? doesn’t exist matters less than the truth that praying to Mañju?r? helps one in dark times; the truths seen by pessimists matter less than the truth that optimism makes one happier.

I begin to wonder whether the concept of importance needs to get more philosophical investigation than it so far has. The biggest divide in contemporary Western thought, between analytic and “continental” philosophy, has seemed to me to rest at least in part on exactly this distinction: analytic philosophy typically looks for truth without importance, continental philosophy for importance without truth.