LANDS END
(A Wittgenstein & Daisy BLOG)
"Everything has been thought of before; the task is to think of it again."
--Goethe
(1) I Remember You
As I begin this blog, Wittgenstein has been dead for half a century. He claimed to be unoriginal. I find new ideas in Wittgenstein's writings, but often he was engaged in seeking a fresh way to look at things so familiar they get taken for granted.
This is in no sense a scholarly work. I will be using Wittgenstein's formulations here without attribution.
***
Daisy is my granddaughter. Now three, she's experimenting with words, learning how to employ them correctly. Recently she was taken by her mother to a King Tut exhibit. Later that day, when asked what happy thoughts she might have, Daisy said, "Mummies, rabbits, and crocodiles."
If the meaning of a word is, in most cases, the same thing as its use, then Daisy's grasp of how to employ the term "mummy" is incomplete. How can a mummy be a happy thought? Perhaps she meant she had enjoyed the exhibit. She later asked her mother for a cat mummy and seemed to expect that a cat mummy would be able to talk. (Eventually someone gave her a book about ten happy mummies.)
Her mother and others will eventually nudge Daisy into standard grammatical usages.
We can learn about the nature and impact of language by watching how language is acquired. For example, Daisy used "crocodiles" in a sentence without grasping the nature of a crocodile. You can witness the same phenomenon in an adult fundamentalist who preaches on freedom. (The fundamentalist might do better talking about obedience.)
***
When I was a little older than Daisy is now, I spent occasional nights with my mother's grandparents (Daisy's great-great-great-grandparents), Mary Berry Strickland and Sylvester Streeter Strickland. I remember them.
Mary Berry's Irish Catholic parents had moved to Scotland so her father could work in the mines; Mary had been born in Scotland. When my father suggested that her birthplace made her Scottish, Mary snapped, "And if the dog had pups in the oven, would you call them biscuits?"
Mary was tiny, ancient, flinty and not self-aware. My father asked her once why the American Irish were tall. Mary, who stood less than five feet, answered: "We left the runts at home." Vet, Mary's American husband, was a six-four iron monger who enjoyed travel. He would fan a deck with one hand and play card tricks for the children. Somewhere in his journey he'd fiddled while Bojangles danced.
An iron monger made a living by pounding on hot metal, a hammer in each hand.
My father had asked Vet how he'd managed to travel so widely when he had a wife and daughters to support. "Well," Vet had explained fully, "I'd be in a bar with my pay check, and a friend would drop by and say, 'Let's go to Houston.'"
Once the police chased Vet out of Los Angeles for trying to start a union.
FDR's reforms treated old Mary to a set of false teeth, and when Vet saw how white they were, he grew envious. He went into the garage with a pair of pliers to make himself eligible for his own set of handsome new choppers. My father found him there. Vet had managed to wrestle two molars from his gums. My father suggested that he stop, and Vet finally agreed, on the grounds that jerking your own teeth wasn't as easy as it looked.
Mary and Vet were old. Now that I'm old, I'd like to compare notes on aging with them, but half my family has disappeared: great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, mother, father and my much-younger sister. They're gone for good, along with key friends and so on. I feel the thinness in the landscape--and so, I suppose, do most people my age. Yet these absences are normal, nothing to remark on.
What doesn't kill you will break your heart.
***
I've sketched in Mary and Vet so Daisy can consider where she comes from. She will have to do more to learn the rest of her ancestry, which, on our side, includes Italians, Scotch-Irish, Jews, an aunt of John Adams, a close friend of Lincoln named Fell and a Dezarn who came over on the boat with Lafayette. Her background includes border state Scotch-Irish (as they are called here), fiddlers, peddlers, horse traders, teamsters, drillers, a woman circus bareback rider and so on. Her father's side of the family, Assyrians and Italians and others, is more respectable.
Learning about family is a starting point.
This week Daisy watered the nasturtiums she and her grandmother had planted in a narrow dirt margin beside a cement patio. The plants had flowered out over the concrete, so Daisy watered the concrete, not understanding the function of the soil in which the plants grew. She does not yet grasp what it is, at bottom, that plants require.
Science, theology, psychology and philosophy are histories of searches for a starting point.
I don't know how well you, Daisy, will remember me, but I remember you.
(2) Lands End
Daisy currently lives near Lands End in San Francisco, the southwestern tip of the Golden Gate. At the entrance to the harbor, across the water from Hawk Hill, I saw a falcon take a crow in midair: an explosion of black feathers. I did not want to see this or many other things I've seen.
During my first year in high school, we rode horses down to Torrance Beach, near Los Angeles. In fact, we rode into the saltwater, which is hard on saddle leather. My gelding Mac, a placid bay, had cost my father, a machinist, a few day's wages. The horse fed himself most of the year on volunteer grasses around our house in the open hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. At that time the area had not yet been heavily settled or forested. The settled part was wealthy--we were almost the only working class family up there.
Lands End--where exactly does the land end? We know more or less where the land ends, but we can't pin it down to a damp space between two grains of sand, and we don't need to.
People have lived near Torrance Beach for ten thousand years. Los Angeles is older than London.
Some months ago a damp string of ill-dressed people, some wearing masks (protection against swine flu), holding up signs, splashing in puddles, dancing, behaving like extras in a Fellini movie, marched in the rain for several miles. I limped along, wearing my father's stout blackthorn stick. We walked ahead of the Hubbub street band from Sebastopol, a volunteer brass and drum group, trombones blaring. We were asking that Latinos be treated fairly.
Whether you see people as the same or different depends on your purpose. If you gather orders from a crowd for ice cream cones, people will ask for chocolate or vanilla. People are different.
For my purpose in this paragraph, people are the same, in the sense that wolves are the same. Wolves constitute a species, although there are many kinds of wolves and each wolf is different.
When my daughters were three, we had a wolf with us. The wolf loved us. (If you ask me what love is, I will point to something I love.)
Life comes in different forms.
A daisy is a form of life.
A wolf is a form of life.
We are a form of life. Language grows out of a form of life (Wittgenstein). That's why we are able to translate from one human language to another--the different languages come from the same form of life--and why we understand, to a degree, wolves--their form of life has things in common with our own. Like us they live in families. That might explain why wolves were the first animals we domesticated. We taught wolf cubs to join our family (then we ate them when times were hard ).
A form of life changes so slowly that it feels constant. From my perspective, I am sitting in a chair. My great-grandparents--as near as I can tell--had the same basic perspective: they sat in chairs.
We are domesticated animals with an inescapable perspective. What we see, we see with eyes of a certain kind. What we say about what we hear or smell doesn't float like tule fog three feet off the ground. It's anchored in what we are.
In the 1950s my friends and I set out from the beach cities. We were, at best, crude shapes, uncarved & rough, searching for well-founded guidelines to follow that would make us into responsible men. We sought permanent rules for temporary beings. Meanwhile, life clattered alongside the four of us (Mowry, Jack, Tim and me) on our journey inland to the heart of the world, life buoyant and percussive, shaking a ring of keys in diminished arpeggios, minor-seventh scales, glissandos. We had no idea, really, what was happening.
One died on the way. Long Jack winked and left, and the rest of us now look as bleached as driftwood, carved into fixed, conventional shapes like poles along the North Pacific Rim. My shape includes the paunch.
In the early days, two of us took on guidance from universal military training. Tim joined the California National Guard. I mustered with the Army Reserve's 4216th Mess Kit Repair Unit, where my service included two weeks as a clerk at the now vanished Presidio of San Francisco.
The farther we drifted, the tighter the world model gripped us.
When lean women gather to hike in Armstrong Woods and find a 310 foot redwood in their path, they tramp around the tree, not over it. As I limp the three miles of dirt path and sidewalk to the Healdsburg plaza, I walk in a way that relates to what--from my perspective--exists. I avoid cars and seek shade on summer days. At The Goat I order hot chocolate with whipped cream and talk in a way that relates to what exists (whipped cream)--or, better, I talk in a way that relates to what I do not doubt exists (I do not doubt the existence of whipped cream).
Our species acts from a perspective that includes a basic model of the world (Wittgenstein's world picture); this basic model has roots going back to time immemorial and before that and so on. I don't doubt that I am surrounded by objects, that things fall down, etc. I am certain that I exist. Daisy doesn't doubt that she exists. The two of us don't talk much about our basic models of the world because Daisy and I and Wittgenstein share the same model. We take it as given. You can see that in the ways we act.
Imagine four shiny uncut shapes in the 1950s--Long Jack, Tim, Mowry and me, pale tan in color, with Jack the darkest--being shipped to four sites to take introductory courses in advanced human practices. We referred to the sites as Berkeley, Claremont, Occidental and Westwood, characteristic place names employed in accord with a grammar absorbed as children.
UCLA cost $30 a semester in those days, before our national leaders began a series of expensive wars of choice.
In college the four of us drank cheap bourbon and talked about how to make things. By 1960 we were smoking dope and eating peyote & morning-glory seeds.
About 40 years later, from the deck of a small fishing boat, I watched Long Jack's two good children, with children of their own, pour his ashes into the Pacific. In salt water the ashes took on a milky glow and formed a cloud, just below the glittering pacific surface, about ten feet long and five feet wide. This big loose object slowly floated off toward the peninsula where Jack, Tim, Mowry and I had lived as boys with oiled crewcuts.
"We don't know why we were born, why we're here or why we must die," Zhuangzi wrote. "Take it as fate that things change."
(6) Everyone Else Laughed
Jack once observed that in the course of their lives people lose so much that they have no way to cope with the loss, so they don't deal with it. Instead, as I see it, they eat pasta at The Bear Republic, where a red 'bent hangs from the ceiling. Later they stand in the rain at a peace vigil mounted to oppose the second war against Iraq, leaders of nothing but examples of choices.
The existentialists brought an emphasis on the individual and her choices back into philosophy--at the expense of other things.
Dick Weed, Stu Padasle and Seymour Buttz roar by the peace vigil in a pickup with a bumper strip that reads: "My Other Ride Is Your Mom." They shout at us: "Fuck you!"
"Enlist," we shout back.
Mighty Joan Didion mentioned "the particular vanity of perceiving social life as a problem to be solved by the good will of individuals." Perhaps some protesters embodied that vanity in the 1960s, when our country attacked Vietnam. But today, as I write this, with President Walking Eagle attacking Iraq, we don't expect to solve a problem. We stand in the street.
A walking eagle is too full of shit to fly.
During the 1960s, the antiwar protesters I liked best were sober. I walked behind serious people through the nation's capitol. We were tear-gassed several times (I'd had tear-gas training in the army). But in today's Second War against Iraq, the protesters I like best wear pointed hats, beat homemade drums and skip and hop as they dance west. In 2003 I waved a black bandara that Susan had sewed for me in 1968 that read "Tolstoy." A large blue San Francisco cop nodded to me. "Nice flag," he said. He smiled.
In San Francisco we marched uselessly down Market Street. And then an Akkadian in a dark suit stepped out and stood blocking my brother's path forward--Tim was holding one end of a street-wide banner. The Akkadian, gripping a can of pepper spray, was attempting to stop a 200,000 person peace demonstration. I raised my empty frame into a lumber, the best I could do, jogged forward and rammed into the Akkadian with my shoulder, bouncing him aside. He showered me with pepper spray, but I didn't feel it until four hours later when I forgot and rubbed my eyes. At that point I realized that it was a damned good thing that Susan had insisted on driving us back to the wine country while I rode shotgun. I was blind for five minutes.
A few weeks later a teenager in a Hummer revved alongside our small Healdsburg peace demonstration, his scabby elbow out the window, raised one finger to an 85-year-old war veteran, screamed, "Fuck you, hippie" and then, for some reason, "Go back to France." His girlfriend, beside him, stared straight ahead. I replied, "Your mother called. She needs her car." The driver didn't laugh. The girlfriend laughed. Everyone else laughed.
Jack, Mowry, Tim and I grew up near Redondo, where Irish-Hawaiian George Freeth (1883--1918) had introduced surfing to the mainland, using a 200 pound board. Like George Freeth, Albert Camus had lived near beaches. In college we read Camus on our own, almost by accident. He wasn't well known.
Camus had been born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913, two years after my father. Camus grew up poor and tubercular. His mother was Spanish, which might help explain his dislike of Franco and totalitarian governments. I wasn't ill or destitute growing up, although food became scarce once during a long strike that broke the CIO union my father had joined. The oil workers, who had gone without a raise throughout World War Two, asked for a raise once the war ended and the country was awash with prosperity. Instead of a raise, they got fired. That would not have surprised Camus.
Getting fired was to be expected. It's how the system works.
My father made things at a metal lathe in a lab in an oil refinery. Mowry's father worked for a time at his own wood lathe carving period furniture for the movies and constructing small boats. Jack's male parent, a big rough guy who smoothed his long son by pounding him on every surface with industrial fists, owned a small business in a nearby hamlet that ground glass lenses for the visually impaired.
Jack, a college water polo player, didn't tell me he'd been battered as a child until he was 60 years old.
Today I sit on the wooden porch of a craftsman-style cottage in Healdsburg, about 65 miles north of San Francisco, in the heart of America's wine country. I will lose the house soon. Two Republican recessions and a bubble in eight years have shrunk my pension. On a nearby table I keep a tumbler of sun tea, a pen, and a pad of paper. My partner of 45 years, Susan, is out with two friends, walking precincts for the Peace Project. I intend to write something for Daisy about my search for a starting point.
I've set up a study group on ethics at the local senior center. We will be discussing Camus, Zhuangzi, Hume, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, James, Sartre and Wittgenstein.
About 50 years ago I took an undergraduate course on the French novel in translation, taught at UCLA by a brightly rouged, slender young dude whose name I don't recall. He taught well. Back then I loved fiction of any stripe, and the narrow French stripe shone brightly.
For that course I read THE STRANGER by Albert Camus, while sitting in the one soft chair in my parents' small concrete block home, which we had constructed with our hands, acting like Wittgenstein's tribe of builders. "Block," my father would say, and I would hand him a cement block.
In the early 1950s, Camus' novel was new to UCLA and new, in a sense, to secondary schools in France, where it was being taught for the first time.
When I mentioned Camus to a closeted gay professor, a Fitzgerald specialist, which made him a quarter mile beyond unsound on a 1950s English faculty, the scholar had not heard of Camus or, probably, of any living French novelist. Living authors were not objects of study at UCLA in that era. Even Fitzgerald hadn't been dead long enough to become respectable.
The commitment to literature as a research project, on which university departments are founded, is an example of scientism, in this case the inapt modeling of an aesthetic discussion on chemistry or physics projects. There was no shortage of scientism elsewhere. When Sartre mentioned the abstract schemes of Freudian psychoanalysis, he claimed that "they will possess simply the always increasing probability of scientific hypotheses." Good luck with that.
Despite the published warnings of Nelson Algren, a novelist who had visited France, my friends and I, during that period, repeatedly attempted to date women more neurotic than we were. Some of us succeeded, although such women proved hard to find.
I passed Camus' novel on to a darkly shining if somewhat suicidal working class undergraduate majoring in the composition of classical music. Her ancestry was French. She had scars on her wrists. Blue eyes, black hair. The scars ran across her wrists, an ineffective direction, but who knew that at the time? She was bright, with an IQ score of 174.
It was this young woman who called me a "tough," although she soon proved tougher, shaking free of natural attachments to marry a rich young lad for a while. Her blond husband embodied old money and an older name, known to close students of the American Revolution, the name of a middling liberal arts college. In contrast, my financial future promised the famous hour of cold that sucks out months of heat. After her marriage we continued to visit. That was a bad time. She wanted to remain married but bear my child. I said no. We were green, mad with youth, but it occurred to me that daughter of mine might need a father of similar temperament in the house she grew up in.
That was one of many experiences I (like everyone else) did not recover from.
About nine years later I noticed an attractive, generous looking person staring at me during a political meeting. She was a young woman who brought extras to the party. That was Susan, Jewish and middle class, and she got a job, put me through graduate school and will sleep beside me tonight. She's Daisy's grandmother and so on. Our marriage has had ups and downs, which are inevitable and circumstantial--for example, I no longer share her lifelong interest in ignoring me. But we're doing all right, I say, an optimist. She disagrees.
In college I'd noticed, as others had, that life appeared to have no intrinsic meaning. I'd then walked with friends to the Fox Theater in Westwood, where film actress Sandra Dee was making a personal appearance with her mother, who wore a gleaming metallic blouse that brought out the red in her neck. The two of them went everywhere together, hopeful calculation shining from their large brown peepers.
We'd read in class that life lacked intrinsic purpose, but my friends and I were not among those who experienced radical doubt as a liberation. In fact, we did not really experience radical doubt. Who does?
For Nietzsche our knowledge of the world is uncertain and so must be a fiction, according to one analysis I studied. (Analysts apparently read Nietzsche differently, finding different positions.) Anyway, a more careful angryhead might say, instead, that our knowledge is not absolutely certain but that doesn't make it fiction. (In current English the term "fiction" does not mean "not absolutely certain." The grammars of "fiction" and "uncertainty" differ.)
Camus seemed to imply that a meaningless life is its own value. That is, if you only live once, take care of what you've got. As Ronald Dworkin argued recently, each of us is responsible for finding value in life and deciding what kind of life to lead.
In Nietzsche's imaginary world, brutality might be an illusion. If objects don't really exist, cruelty is bearable--and what Nietzsche sees as objects might be only fictions (he hopes), thrown up on a blank screen we call the world. He attempts to get through each day, seeing things he'd rather not see.
Nietzsche had claimed that God, the supposed Source and Enforcer of Western morals and essences, was dead.
If you judge philosophers by the influence they've had, Nietzsche ranks with the best. In a recent poll of western academics he finished, with Wittgenstein, Kant, Aristotle and Plato, in the top five.
According to Nietzsche (and others), human reality is only how reality happens to appear to us. The roses we smell, we smell through limited human nostrils.
There is no arguing with that: we experience what we experience. Next, according to Nietzsche, we subscribe to absurd metaphysical ontologies. Other philosophers have said something similar, Hume for one. We claim a permanent stability in the world and face patterns of change. Or claim that everything changes while things stay the same.
Subscribing to false explanations is not a minor matter. It determines much of our behavior and leads to a willful stupidity among our leaders that may yet kill us all, but I doubt it.
Nietzsche separated humanity into two classes: noble predators and natural slaves. The most cogent critique of this approach was provided by Robert Benchley, who wrote that humanity is divided into two kinds of people: those who divide people into two kinds and those who do not.
Someday Daisy may ask, "Does God exist?"
In fact, we know next to nothing about the Creator of the Universe, if there is one. Nietzsche knew nothing. Churches know nothing. If a Creator exists, we do have a body of evidence to examine, the world the Creator possibly made. We can watch an osprey dive on a steelhead or visit a cancer ward.
About 84% of Americans, in a recent poll, stated that they believed in God. A much smaller majority of Europeans agreed. What died in Europe for many people in the late 1800s--and this might be what Nietzsche noticed--wasn't the plain belief in an unknown Creator. What died was a belief in the made-up stories, the sacred texts and paradoxical explanations of churchmen.
Nietzsche attended Schulpforta, a legendary secondary school, and the University of Leipzig. He was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel University at 24, before he'd earned his doctorate. During the Franco-Prussian war he served as a medical orderly, as did Wittgenstein in England in the Second World War (Wittgenstein saw combat for Austria in the First World War). Nietzsche wrote many books. In 1879 he became ill; during a period of wandering in Europe his health grew worse, ending in a final mental collapse when he saw a man beat a horse. Nietzsche died insane in 1900.
Camus read Nietzsche.
When we started college in California, the death of God felt fresh. We'd been properly churched and so on, but we hadn't thought much about God beyond noting His apparent absence.
Camus had grown up in Algeria, and by the time of the Second World War, in that thin North African edge of the plump part of the world that called itself the West, many French Algerian intellectuals had stopped believing the Christian creation myth. Instead they believed, with Nietzsche, that the killing of God was the greatest achievement of humanity.
We didn't know it at the time, but Anaximander of Miletos--to whom is attributed the invention of the sundial--had proclaimed the entire stable of Greek gods dead more than 500 years before the birth of Christ. Anaximander held that the first principle was the Infinite, that there were an infinite number of worlds, that the earth was a heavenly body, and that humans had evolved from another animal. He was the pencil-necked Greek who theorized that humans had evolved from fish. Theories are judged by the number of facts they explain, and Anaximander's theory explained, better than most, the Bush family.
Many historians regard Anaximander as the first western philosopher, other than the philosophers who preceded him, whose names have been forgotten.
Nietzsche maintained that Christians had invented an omniscient God so that there would be a witness to each fragment of our (his) pain.
I was the first to serve a volleyball overhand at Avenue C in Redondo Beach in 1951, except for unknown servers who came before me. Back in those spring days I competed on the Ridgemont High tennis team, served hard, bought Big Jay McNeely records and wondered, now that God is dead, who will die next? The author?
I wondered if I could serve a volleyball the same way I served a tennis ball. It turned out that I could, using the heel of my palm as a racket. The serve had not been seen before, and I scored many points with it.
Anaximander, I learned later, was the first philosopher to publish a book on the nature of things. He invented the western model for metaphysical discourse. The Greeks have a lot to answer for.
From the perspective of Anaximander any object that existed--rock or lion--represented a punishable exception to non-Being that would be followed by atonement and a return to non-Being. For example, fir trees die and rot. Nietzsche, in a footnote to Anaximander, wrote, "Whatever comes into being must be ready for its painful dissolution."
My father died at home in discomfort.
Nietzsche, Shendao, Zhuangzi, Kant and Wittgenstein saw that people share a perspective or framework that shapes their view of the world, much as stretch jeans shape a round bottom. Unlike Zhuangzi, Kant, or Wittgenstein, more like Shendao, Nietzsche attempted to reject the human perspective of the masses of women or "herd" or randy young misters. Like Socrates, Nietzsche thought that ordinary people lacked the virtue and knowledge needed for self-government. Nietzsche wanted noble people to find a new basic perspective on the universe, which is not possible unless you give up your form of life.
If, as Nietzsche claimed, the world is a formless void onto which humans have projected horses and trees, then there are no moral facts. There is nothing to be moral about. Nietzsche wrote: "The moral judgment . . . believes in a reality which does not exist" (see: "The 'Improvers' of Mankind" in THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS,). Any action is permitted. No well founded moral guidelines, according to Nietzsche, are possible. Yet he lived a moral life, rejecting, for example, the anti-Semitism of his sister. Why did he do that?
Why did Nietzsche reject cruel people if moral judgments express only personal attitudes and feelings? Moral judgments make sense only if they are based on facts--I reject that man (a subjective decision) because I saw him beating a horse (that's a fact).
Ayn Rand, an intellectual hooker, copied a few thoughts from Nietzsche and turned them into a career of writing books for suckers.
Times change, but the basic perspective shared by our form of life cannot easily be changed because, as Nietzsche said disapprovingly, "Our whole humanity depends upon it."
I've been watching Daisy, about three, accepting a perspective and absorbing a language, which she will need to survive. We are bred to conform; the undomesticated get culled.
As a young man I experimented with minor shifts in perspective, employing wine, weed, peyote, Thai sticks, tabs of acid, hash, morning-glory seeds, Jim Beam, whatever. In high school we bought cheap whiskey illegally and drove to a cove at Portuguese Bend on the Palos Verdes peninsula to drink under the stars, to hold long jump contests and to fall face down on the sand. Mighty Joan Didion lived somewhere up the hill, but we first learned that decades later.
The four of us were not particularly skeptical, although in Western thought radical skepticism goes back a long way. In the 1300s Nicholas of Autrecourt, a heretic whose books were burned by Pope Clement VI, questioned whether we can know if the physical world exists when, perhaps, our perceptions of the world might be caused directly by God and not by the world itself.
Skepticism moves us forward if we understand the point at which doubt becomes a pretense.
Radical skepticism, the doubt that anything exists, reemerges regularly in our culture. In English we use nouns to name objects, but perhaps, some will claim, the objects aren't real. In that case nouns refer to nothing, which makes a first language difficult to learn. To get past that bump, you can assume that people are born with English innate in their brains, which is logical, but can you explain how the English got there? By natural selection?
Caught in what they consider the trap of a false & noun-based language, some 20th century followers of Nietzsche attempted to rebel against grammar, twisting the uses of key signs in an attempt to express something they couldn't articulate, exaggerating for effect, inflating words until they popped like spit bubbles, etc. That happens when you try to say more than you know.
We can only express what a limited vocabulary lets us say. The demand that we say more than we know is at the bottom of many 2,500-year-old problems in philosophy. A rule of thumb--if we can't answer a philosophical question after 2,500 years of thought, there might be something wrong with the question.
Remember Nietzsche. If objects around us don't really exist (being products of our perspective or language), then there is nothing to be moral about. But does it make sense to doubt if objects exist? Radical doubt depends on language. Without language you cannot formulate a radical doubt. Does it make sense, then, to doubt the existence of the mother who taught me English?
In Camus' imaginary world all men are honest, and middle-aged mothers look forward to hemorrhoidectomies.
In 1954, more or less, my friends and I began to reach the starting point shared by doubters like Anaximander, Cicero, Zhuangzi, John Adams, Nietzsche, Camus and others.
Doubt is not immediate. Certainty comes naturally--a baby reaches for a rattle--and later on she learns how to doubt.
I responded by feel to the flat opening of Camus' THE STRANGER long before I could have told you that the novel was about a nihilistic uncut shape estranged from himself. Self-estrangement was a concept that a young, UCLA-educated cab driver, drinking tumblers of jug wine--Gallo Red Mountain--and piping weak 1950s weed, had difficulty pinning down. After chawing away on peyote buttons and sunflower seeds, it meant less. Today, of course--and I speak as an E6 emeritus--I have no idea what "self-estrangement" means. Maybe.
I do understand what mighty Joan Didion was talking about when she wrote of her mother's fixed and settled principles as "a barricade against some deep apprehension of meaninglessness." When you get old, you know too many dead people.
We have no good way to determine if the universe has a purpose.
We learn to doubt, and then, if lucky, we doubt doubt. That's a tenet of Wittgenstein and, later, Hilary Putnam: a genuine doubt can be justified.
At about the time Wittgenstein died, in the 1950s, Tim, Jack, Mowry and I were reading THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS. I managed to see CALIGULA on a New York stage. Camus liked to work in sets of three: a novel, a long essay and a play. Why he worked in threes I can not say. He had ten fingers.
Lee Van Cleef had nine.
Joe Woods, Marxist nephew of Richard Nixon's infamous secretary Rose Mary Woods, befriended Susan and me and our children when we moved to Eatons Neck on Long Island. He told me that philosophy was the most serious conversation one could have. Yet this serious conversation changes little. A nor'easter advances, and no matter what you say about it, the wind blows snow in your face.
When I first read Camus, I had not heard of Nicolai Hartmann, who took the position that all fundamental philosophical problems are ontological in nature. I opened THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS and read: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."
Suicide caught my attention--I found suicidal girlfriends as fascinating as bobcats--but I had trouble understanding Camus without a philosophical context. I knew nothing. Commentary about Camus lay thin on the ground at UCLA in 1954, or perhaps I didn't know how to search for it. I had no clear notion of how or why academic research was conducted. I'd been taught the form of a humanities research paper but none of the purpose, which turned out, often, to be tiny. As somebody once wrote, "Gods give small things to the small."
The formulation of a well-founded set of absolute and timeless ethical commandments was an ancient quest but new to me. I was starting from Confusion Hill, where a downhill road seems to climb, and for me the quest began with Camus' writings because that was where I first saw the foundations of ethics questioned.
Camus had a strong early impact on the four of us, and we could have chosen worse. He wrote gracefully, and he was of the Left but wary of the Left's nonsense.
Recently a friend in the Healdsburg Peace Project sat in a butterfly chair on my porch and helped me look at our cul-de-sac. In winter the neighborhood trees vibrated with slick wet bareness. A coarse gray sky drooped over the wooden houses across from us. No one at home--Susan and I were the only retired couple in the block. The other property owners had left for work.
My friend said he thought that the worst problem the Left has is that it believes its own bullshit.
As a courtesy to a good and often wise man, I did not bring up the temporary political alliance we had forged recently with some dimly lit twenty-first century Stalinoids.
Camus--and at first I missed this, along with much else--asked what might come next. The next step if our values were ungrounded (or poststructural, as they say today) was nihilism. Camus was not a nihilist (nor were many poststructuralists) but he looked at the huge gap between his actions and his philosophy of the absurd and concluded that nihilism ended in the murder of strangers: people could not live in peace without a value system.
Camus considered two things. (1) Many French Algerians had a powerful need for a well founded (in words) belief system that made explicit a purpose for life. In the past God had supplied good workers with the fundamentals, a purpose and a goal (earning eternal life in Heaven); in His absence, some people were apt to search for new faiths. (2) God and His spokespersons had given the West (as the Confucian tradition had given the East) what passed for constant rules to guide human behavior. With God, His Virgin Bride, His Son and the Holy Ghost gone missing, could Camus justify a guiding discourse? On what arguments could the rules be erected?
We read on. It seems that Albert Camus, a tubercular provincial whose father had died in a world war when Camus was one year old, set out to construct and justify a code of behavior for himself. The quantity of life struck him as a major factor. His father's life had lacked quantity. Perhaps this led Camus to behave with reasonable caution, as opposed to the impetuous behavior of a tubercular dentist like Doc Holliday.
Extra years are valuable--they have a price; the price is the difference between being rich and poor. In California, at the moment, the rich live, on average, six years longer than the poor. My sister died in her fifties because she was poor.
I had not seen the quantity of life stressed by other philosophers, but when Jack learned he was to die before reaching 70, he said, "I'm very angry." By then his voice was down to a nearly inaudible whisper.
He had a right to be angry. Perhaps because of the beatings he'd taken from his father, Long Jack had lived a nonviolent if stubborn life. He deserved more time. But what he deserved changed nothing.
There's a story told in Death Valley about a gigantic tortoise who lived in the desert near the edge of a sparsely forested mountain. The tortoise was known for her critique of mountain lions in which she pointed out the big cats' strengths and weaknesses. One cool evening a desert fox asked the tortoise how she had become competent in evaluating a mammal that was braver, more intelligent, more graceful and more beautiful than herself. The tortoise replied, "For every year the lion lives, I live six."
On another occasion, the same relativistic tortoise caught a snail making his way home from work. She stomped him to a pulp and stole his credit cards. When the sheriff arrived and asked the snail what had occurred, he could only shake his battered head. "I can't really tell you," the snail said. "It happened so fast."
Daisy, at three, doesn't want to hurt people. Yesterday she was throwing some colored plastic disks down a short flight of stairs, one disk at a time. Each time a disk landed, I said, "Ouch! Ouch!" She laughed and laughed. Finally, she said to me, "You can't hurt disks. They aren't people!" It occurred to me to ask her if we could hurt a cat. "No," she told me. "Cats aren't people."
Daisy is in the process of learning logic and also the grammar of "pain." Here is an oddity--Descartes, the father of modern western philosophy, agreed with her. He did not believe that animals suffered pain, although he noted that they acted as if they did. Animals, like clocks, were pain-free mechanisms. (I'm not sure why he followed the logic of a three-year-old in this case; perhaps it was because of how difficult it would have been to explain why God had created animal suffering.)
For Descartes (1596--1650) God had created man's essence. The project Descartes set for himself was to find something foundational for knowledge. He attempted to doubt each thing that he knew until he located a belief that he could not doubt. That would be his foundation.
Descartes wrote that he doubted all else but could not doubt that he was thinking, and so he formulated "I think: therefore, I exist." (Counters to this approach can be found in C. S. Peirce or in Wittgenstein's ON CERTAINTY.) I won't say more, except that I would like to sit down with Descartes in front of a warm fire and ask him, "Do you doubt that language exists?" and wait on his answer.
For 20th century phenomenologists and existentialists, including Sartre, God was dead. Man's essence died with God, but Sartre wrote, "There can be no other truth to take off from than this: I think; therefore, I exist." The foundational starting point for existentialism was unconceptualized individuality (existence). After 300 years, the philosopher was still trapped in Descartes' first person, still struggling against solipsism.
Sartre believed that he existed, then, without an essence provided by God. The philosopher would have to create an essence for himself. Sartre did this by making a commitment. The choice of commitment had to be subjective to be free. He wrote: "I have to realize the meaning of the world and of my essence: I decide it, alone, unjustifiably, and without excuse."
Existentialists, then, escaped from nihilism by committing themselves to religion, politics, economics or psychology. They claimed, somebody once wrote, to "see God's world through the rags of this." Poised to topple in a pit of despair, they hopped over it, making what Kierkegaard had called "a leap of faith."
Nietzsche saw this sort of thing as a "weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds."
Sartre held that people lived in situations in the world, surrounded by others. He believed that this situation could lead people to make positive and humane commitments. He rejected the claim that ethical choices were arbitrary, a position he attributed to Gide. But following the logic of Sartre's position, where every choice is unjustified, one is free to choose nihilism: Heidegger joined the Nazi party. For years Sartre supported Stalin, a murderous dictator. (Camus opposed the killing people in order to build a perfect future, whether it was done in the name of Heaven or of the working class.)
Albert Camus agreed with Sartre that life had no intrinsic meaning, but Camus argued that to give it a meaning was intellectual suicide. Camus then realized that he had claimed a nihilistic world view but had acted dutifully in real life. That was the gap he saw between theory and practice.
Camus concluded that most people behaved ethically, that people had to have value systems to survive and that people had an essence. As far as I know, he didn't write about the source of the human essence. Instead he explained how people experienced their essence and came to understand it. He argued that in the course of rebellion inside a culture, people discover within themselves something that they identify as human nature. A woman does not create herself, as existentialism suggests, out of nothing.
For Camus existence did not precede essence (except, no doubt, in the sense that A. J. Ayers suggested, which was that a man could not have an essence if he didn't exist.)
Science, of course, had an answer to the question about the origins of essences in animal species: natural selection. A wolf defended her cubs--some species have a capacity for what people might call moral behavior built into them. That helps the species survive. But science is devoted to empirical investigation, and it presupposes the existence of the world. That presupposition was what skeptics continued to call into question. Do wolf cubs really exist or are they merely mental constructs? Biological or psychological explanations open the door to determinism, which Sartre's existentialism attempted to deny.
Answers to skepticism came from G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein, not that many college students cared. Skepticism was too much verbal fun to give up.
Camus saw that some people need a well-founded, systematic, complete and permanent explanation of everything, a goal that can not be met except by making up an answer. For example, an American President attempted to believe that the metaphysics of his grim religious sect had always been true everywhere in the universe and always would be.
What Camus came up with 70 years ago was this: we should accept the situation and live with the tension of wanting what cannot be had. "Anyone who despairs because of events is a coward," Camus wrote.
Later I came to Wittgenstein's position, which is that if you are looking for something that doesn't exist, you don't grasp what the following phrase means: "looking for something."
At the start of last winter, I searched the back seat of the Camry for my collapsible black umbrella, which no longer folded properly. I felt around in the sticky fluff under the front seat and emptied the back shelf and so on. I found nothing, searched again, and finally it occurred to me to check with Susan. "I left the umbrella in the car," I told her. "That must have been last March."
"I threw it out last June," she replied.
I immediately returned to the car and began to search the back seat again. Or not, whichever made more sense.
Some goals that we set we are unlikely to achieve. In politics I support progressive causes, many of which lose. They lose because these causes represent only the humane aspects of human nature, but I keep trying. This is Camus' Sysiphean sense of things: you struggle on in the face of failure. The next generation might succeed in part.
Recently Susan said, "Why are my glasses always in the last place I look?" I said, "Because when you find them, you stop looking."
In philosophy when you find a convincing answer, you're satisfied. You move to the next question.
For Charles Darwin one of the most important traits natural selection developed in humans was "intellectual powers." He also believed that animals "possess some power of reasoning."
How did Darwin learn that people and dogs think? He observed children like Daisy who appeared to be thinking, deciding and acting, and then he observed family dogs behaving in a similar way. Of course, we don't understand exactly what it means to think like a dog. It must be nonverbal--we do know that some people report thinking in images and then translating the images into language--Einstein once said that the translating was the hard part.
Intellectual powers contribute to our survival, but they have a down side. We sometimes use intellectual powers to create conspiracy theories, for example, or to convince people that they will live a second life in a higher realm. We argue that some races are inferior to others. We are pattern-seeking mammals, and we occasionally see patterns where none exist.
Darwin wrote that all people are descended from the same African ancestors and that the so-called races are not separate species. We are Africans, and we are kin to other forms of life.
Several schools of philosophy have attempted to apply Darwin to specific theories. Pragmatism has defined inquiry as one way in which an organism can come to terms with its environment.
"As man possesses the same senses as the lower animals," Darwin wrote, "his fundamental intuitions must be the same." Like a cat I am certain that mice exist.
We became interested in how small children learn. Camus, as a child, learned to point in the following way (I follow Vygotsky's explanation). As a baby he attempted to grasp an item too far away to touch. His mother saw him and handed him the item. A series of related attempts turned the infant's self-centered grasping into a social gesture--events trained him to communicate by stretching out his hand. He began to look to his mother when he reached for distant things. Albert was the last person in the room to apprehend the meaning of his own vaguely pointing gesture, but in time the child internalized a social concept. He learned to point, and then he learned to ask for things, to point with words, as he picked up French from the family surrounding him.
By reaching for close items and picking them up, the toddler learned cause and effect. Deeds became words. The outside moved inside. He began to incorporate community verbal practices into how he did things. This world picture began to influence his perceptions.
To some extent we considered Camus a guide, although I believe today that he wrote to clarify things for himself more than to instruct others. From Nietzsche Camus took the fact that ethics are (in philosophical jargon) unfounded--not based on proofs. For the most part, here on the Pacific Rim, we don't attempt to derive morality from a proved argument. We leave that sort of thing to preachers from Texas, where reason long ago bent and deformed while defending slavery as a boon to all, especially for the Blacks. Deformed reason has been a hallmark of Southern politics since slavery was instituted. We know why. (In Northern politics, discourse was warped by the need to justify a system built on greed.)
In my lifetime a silly discourse captivated the American English department thinkers, a bag of post-structuralist heads that the long-dead Nietzsche would be forced to drag behind him for twenty years like a sled dog in the Iditarod. In her lifetime, Daisy will encounter new versions of this metaphysical rubbish--each generation invents its own. All anyone can do to counter this is to teach people how to detect nonsense.
Camus held that whatever guiding discourse people followed, it was a choice they had made. Or did he blame habit rather than choice? His thinking evolved.
As an undergraduate I had hoped to find a book somewhere in the 1950s UCLA library stacks that would contain a rational justification for the ethical system I already followed some of the time. In those days you could enter a university library and walk between a block-long array of moldy forgotten texts and pluck from a shelf whatever looked most eccentric. That's the truth.
Nietzsche attempted, without success, to displace the correspondence theory of truth. Let's say that I make a claim: "Over there you see a live oak." That statement is true if it corresponds to the facts--several biologists examine the tree and pronounce it a live oak. That is one way humans employ the term "truth" to this day.
But Nietzsche--and later others--tried to change the meaning of truth, taking Hume's path that whatever we see is seen from a human perspective. We don't see things the way they actually are, he guessed. (Or do we? How can we find out?)
What, then, is truth? What does the term mean?
It might sound odd to start by saying truth is a word, but it is. The meaning of a word, Wittgenstein wrote, is, in most cases, the same thing as its use. For example, I use the term "Daisy" to refer to my grandchild. The meaning is the usage--her parents might have given the child a different name, one not reminiscent of Daisy Miller and Daisy Buchanan.
The meaning of horse is not derived from the equine object. It comes from the use--we employ "horse" to refer to an equine object. (We also use horse to refer to a certain basketball game, a type of poker, etc. Horse has many different uses or meanings.)
For Ludwig Wittgenstein there was nothing mysterious about what words mean.
Daisy--I am guessing--will end up with a vocabulary of 30,000 words to describe a universe with more than 30,000 parts. Her sense of what we call reality will be cognitively opaque. Some one will say to her that because the world is not totally knowable, truth is opinion. Yet the words "opinion" and "truth" will still have different grammars.
A traveler who claims not to know that wings exist will fly in a jet to Punta Gorda. A Healdsburg wine tourist reading a menu at the Madrona Manor will say that she believes human reality is an illusion, but if she orders quail eggs and a server brings her a chocolate sundae, she'll call him a name he'll remember two days after he's dead.
We assume that the world exists and is knowable (up to a point). That's built in; it's genetics, not metaphysics.
Here in Healdsburg they used to hold an annual festival for artisan makers of fine guitars. The most expert guitar makers in the world would attend; musicians would come to play music for this audience.
At the last of the Healdsburg meetings, a final musician stumbled out onto the stage, limping on two thin legs. He wore a catsup-stained T-shirt, ragged Levis and old brown shoes with no socks. He held no guitar. Timidly he managed to borrow some other fellow's Les Paul and then turned his back to the audience, revealing that his unbelted pants had fallen part way down, exposing the top quarter of his butt crack. He paused to gather himself, then, with two shaking hands, suddenly filled the entire theater with sound. And it was awful.
We shared Hume's distrust of grand explanatory theories, which he called "obscure and uncertain speculations." We preferred philosophers who described experiences.
Starting from a few points, "self-evident truths," a Grand Theorist sets out to construct a systematic explanation of our place in the universe. I found it easier to believe that our basic beliefs were innumerable, not just a few.
We valued Francis Bacon's remark that a dream of the imagination should not be mistaken for "a pattern of the world."
Camus thought that if you believed that the world was meaningless, you had options: committing suicide (he noted that people don't kill themselves for metaphysical reasons), hoping (inventing a meaning for the world is the most common solution) or accepting the absurdity of life but taking a positive view (as a kind of liberation).
He asked us to examine our assumptions.
A human perspective is inevitably based on unfounded assumptions (for example, I assume that language exists). Our social system in the West grew in part from Greek and Hebrew assumptions (or unproved beliefs) that God is timeless and doesn't change, that truth is absolute and doesn't change, and that genuine knowledge is true in a timeless, absolute and changeless way. One of the West's old philosophical goals, then, was to acquire and to justify genuine, unchanging absolute knowledge. Yet what we know is doubtful.
After being Susan's partner for 45 years I can't be absolutely certain that she has brown eyes, because she may have been wearing corrective lenses without telling me.
However, I know she has brown eyes, and I can prove it. (A claim to knowledge requires something to back it up, in this case eye witnesses, and eye witnesses are fallible.)
I don't doubt that the external world (the world around me) exists. I can't prove that the world exists, because I have no unbiased witnesses, so I am not claiming to know that the world exists, only to be without doubt that it does. (When I say I am certain, I am saying that I do not doubt something, not that I know it and can prove it.)
Anyway, after quite a few centuries of living with a belief in timeless & absolute mental objects, during which inertia slowed social adjustments, some Europeans began to doubt parts of the old system. The rise of Protestantism, Descartes, science, technology, etc., began to alter the general outlook, I reckon.
Times change.
There is a conservative side in us that wants most things not to change much. The Spartans, admired by Plato and the writers of the United States Constitution, reflected this; the Spartans, as much as anyone, realized their static potential. They remained the same for so long that they rotted apart, and the town of Sparta exists today as a tattered cultural curiosity.
An enduring society needs stability and change, certainty and doubt.
In America organized religion endures. Americans seem unable to give up a system of symbols, beliefs and rites that walls in a safe psychic fort while obscuring the brute reality outside.
Camus lived during the peak of existentialism. For the existentialist, reason is useless for solving the problem of meaninglessness, but he finds something beyond reason and jumps its dry white bones until they splinter.
What made existentialism hum in the 1950s was that it returned philosophy to a good question: what is it like to exist? But in many cases, instead of providing a useful description of what it means to be human, existentialists presented explanations, metaphysical speculations of little value.
Camus saw that reason can't locate a purpose for life. For Camus, rational thought is helpful in sorting through our experiences, even if it cannot, in a final sense, explain them. Giving in to the irrational or deifying the irrational is like collapsing on a hot beach. Accepting a Grand Explanation is intellectual death.
In the 1840s, Americans who lived Back East discovered in themselves a terrible urge to reach the gold fields of California. Many seekers had to haul small wagons or even push wheelbarrows across the great American desert. Travelers asked in forts for maps although no trustworthy maps existed. The westward movers kept asking until some sun-addled trapper, squint-eyed from crunching intoxicating grasses, would nod slowly, accept a small bag of copper coins and then sketch a route in the dirt with a stick, sending them into Death Valley, although ignorant of the Kern River, which eventually Merle Haggard would describe in a song.
We seek explanations--see Plato--where no sound explanation is possible. (If you try to evaluate Plato's philosophy, you will find it hard to assign a monetary value to something so worthless.)
In the 1950s I hadn't yet heard of Plato's love of the Spartan totalitarians or of Heidegger's membership in the Nazi Party. From Camus I learned that the goal was to pause at the place where one can make a leap of faith and then not to jump. "Being able to remain on that dizzying crest--that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge."
Certainties are, by definition, matters we don't doubt. That's all they are. Camus first held that the only certainty is that nothing is certain. Later he mentioned other certainties.
A certainty is basic to our species if everyone shares it. "Language exists" is a basic certainty.
"We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have . . . ," C. S. Peirce wrote. "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts."
It's unreasonable to pretend to doubt something if you have no reason to doubt it. (A philosopher asked, "Do you doubt you had a mother?")
Camus' mother happened to be deaf. He knew that. Deafness can be faked, and what he knew was theoretically uncertain. Knowledge is questionable, while certainty is unquestioned. That is a difference between the grammars of "know" and "certain" that Wittgenstein pointed out. ("Certain knowledge" would be "unquestioned questioned," which lacks sense.)
In THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS, we read that defiance gives life its value. But Camus also wrote, "The point is to live."
Let's say that in 2003 you were a Moslem living in San Francisco. You attended a Giants' game, where agents of President Walking Eagle arrested you, blindfolded you, and put you on a jet to Saudi Arabia. You understood that you were to be handed over to Arabs for torture. You knew that you had done nothing wrong but would soon confess to any crime. Would Camus consider suicide a reasonable option?
No. There was a good chance that the Saudi torturers, experienced and expert, unlike American torturers, would not believe your false confessions and would, in a few months, set free your husk. You should hang in there.
A tortoise was sunning her back when a bear said to her, "One day you will die. There's no god who can help you, and the other tortoises can do nothing to change your fate."
The tortoise replied. "Then I'm free from the rules of gods and free from the rules of tortoises." But can she be free from the perspective of tortoises and remain a tortoise?
Camus claimed that integrity has no need of rules. From another perspective, my integrity might be described as my following certain practices, perhaps the rules I absorbed on my mother's lap along with other social practices that in time became intuitive.
"Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged," Camus wrote. When we admit that the world is purposeless, we "silence all the idols." Each of us is left in charge of his or her own life. The struggle is enough to fill your heart. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," Camus concludes.
Philosophy begins with what is given. For Camus, what was given was life itself. His pragmatic conclusion was to live as long as possible and to play many roles. For a while that was enough.
Mary Beard wrote that "Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, composer of the Indian national anthem and compulsive world traveler, is said to have cried at the sheer 'barbarian ugliness' when he first saw the Parthenon."
Tagore's native language carved the carcass of the world at different joints than the Greek language had done. Tagore had grown up in India when its rulers were nasty, British and short. His perspective differed from Beard's.
The problem is not that what I see doesn't justify distinctions like ugly and beautiful. The problem is that what we see justifies many distinctions. There's no single best way of dividing buildings into types. There is no best way to group distinctions together. But there are useful ways, depending on our goals.
"Nothing exists apart from the whole," wrote Nietzsche. (The claim that the best way to divide reality is not to divide it at all is one of ten thousand helpful perspectives.)
Daisy and I adopt a holistic perspective when we need it.
In the Shendao's imaginary world, things follow their own nature. What is natural is what is right. Whatever you do is natural because you are doing it.
The four of us followed the usual practices of our era. Mowry, Jack and Tim found jobs, married and fathered children. I married Susan, who taught in elementary schools to put me through graduate school.
Jobs change. Susan next put herself through a graduate program. She became an acquisitions librarian. I taught writing and literature at Empire State College in New York (a newly invented college dedicated to mentoring working adults one at a time). We raised our children. In the mornings I read old stories about a Chinese admonisher we call Confucius. That was back in the 1970s when nearly everyone was still alive.
Confucianism, of course, had been built on something older, a form of ethical humanism. The early Confucians believed that goodness could be taught and that people would live in harmony if guided by wise maxims and sound rituals. For some Confucians the goal was to perfect a permanent and absolute guiding discourse.
Not everyone agreed. Shendao, a rebel, rejected the final authority of social conventions. The ideographic Chinese writing from his era, 25 centuries ago, supports more than one interpretation, and I've nothing to add to that debate, which seems unlikely to end soon. I leave it to epigraphers. Also Shendao's writings, like those of Anaximander, his Greek contemporary, survive only as fragments in the commentaries of other writers; interpretations of such texts are untrustworthy.
The ancient Chinese rebels against Confucius had no group name for themselves. They lived during a time of pointless carnage.
I thought of Shendao and others as independent rebels in a predominantly Confucian culture. Or as predecessors of Zen Buddhism--but Buddhism had not yet reached China, so perhaps the rebels practiced something like modern Zen but without the religious elements.
Or you might consider the Chinese rebels linguistic philosophers, working with insights that would not be reached in the West for more than 2,000 years.
Perhaps, Jack suggested once, the Chinese rebels became skeptical about the old Confucian search for absolute ethical rules and rites because they saw that language shifted over time, sentences changed meaning in new contexts, and words occasionally required new readings, which were later subject to change.
In my own era of useless slaughters, I began to think about these Chinese rebels. Their ancient views reached me in English translations that had been molded by the slender fingers of much later Buddhist metaphysicians & by the hot tongs of Japanese zennists. Beneath a superimposed modern form lay a discourse that was older, more reasonable and not intuitive. That ancient discourse was Asian in origin, and not Buddhist (Buddhism reflects the Indo-European two-world perspective).
Not much is known about Shendao. He believed that not even a clod of dirt can miss following its own nature. Therefore nothing we do is wrong.
Shendao's guide to behavior offers no guidance.
The ancient Chinese were skeptics about our uses of language but not radical skeptics in the European philosophical sense. They didn't ask pseudo-questions like "Does language exist?"
"If language doesn't exist," Wittgenstein might have said, although he didn't, "how would we find that out?" And he might have answered, "I don't doubt that language exists--doubt doesn't work in that way."
"Do not use worthies and sages," Shendao wrote, predating zen by a thousand years. Following a leader cramped the people, from his perspective. Conforming to social systems deprived us of spontaneity. According to Shendao we already understand how to act, so we can dispense with the Confucian search for rules of behavior. Shendao's slogan was "Abandon knowledge." He also suggested that people "discard self." Without our verbal concept of self, we might leave egoism behind.
Maybe not.
Shendao, I expect, was not advising the Chinese to abandon their knowledge of how to grow peach trees or how to refine sugar. He hoped that people would, in general, follow a less regimented course in the expectation that intuition would free them from mistakes they got pushed into by social conventions and rigid rules of codified ethics.
Sure, Shendao sounds a bit like Nietzsche, and "abandon advice on how to behave" resembles advice on how to behave. Without social conventions we wouldn't be human--no one, including Shendao, would ask us to give up all conventions, not that we could.
In Laozi's imaginary world, we examine a Golden Age of simplicity that never existed.
In the 1960s the four of us scattered around the country to study in formal and informal ways. Outside of Buffalo, New York, I began to read early texts of rebellion in China.
According to an ancient legend, the DAODE JING was jotted down by a scholar, Laozi or Lao Tzu, who, as the story goes, had been required by a guard at a border post to write down a set of guiding principles before being allowed to leave China. Laozi complied with the guard's demand by writing conventional advice turned upside down. For example, in a paternalistic society, Laozi exalted the feminine.
Legends aside, the Daode Jing, compiled about 2,500 years ago, is probably a collection of fragments from several unnamed authors, as is often the case with old texts.
Of course the translations I found in the last century mostly came--I repeat myself--thickly buttered with Indo-European mysticism, which reached China about a thousand years after the deaths of Shendao, Laozi and Zhuangzi. Scrape off the ineffable stuff, and the plain toast is dry and crunchy.
The Confucians argued that our guiding discourse helps to shape us, and Laozi agreed, but this conventional shaping was, for Confucius, necessary; for Laozi, it presented a set of half-truths.
One argument might be that language is an instrument of social control and something to be avoided. From that perspective we should, to the extent possible, discard verbal learning and reject verbal distinctions, names and deliberate actions. Or so they say.
My guess is that Laozi did believe that discourse and names constrain us to obey. He struggled against Confucian guiding discourse. He questioned authority.
I began to wonder if the anti-language approach was meant by the Chinese to apply only to certain aspects of life. In ethical disputes, according to the mainstream ancient Chinese, perhaps, discussion and ritual formed the bedrock of community authority. From that orthodox perspective, if that perspective existed, the question became: was guiding discourse a good or bad thing?
I was, while looking at ancient Chinese philosophy, attending graduate school in Buffalo. It occurred to me that the most frequently quoted line in world literature was "dao ke dao fei chang dao," a sentence found in the DAODE JING.
This is how a Buddhist might translate the most quoted line (from Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 1). "The Tao (Way) that can be told of is not the eternal Tao." The dao, then, is for Buddhists, a mystery. For some Buddhists, that raises a question. If the dao that can be talked about is not the true dao, why write a book about the false dao?
In a different account, a dao was, in Chinese, a merely a mundane guiding principle, perspective, discourse or bit of advice, not something eternally true. In that case the famous line might read something like this: "The maxims (dao) we call the dao aren't constant."
It seemed to me as that two most famous early rebels against Confucian convention, Laozi and Zhuangzi, disagreed in part. For Laozi language and guiding discourses were, in some sense, unnatural, while Zhuangzi considered discourse part of what made us human.
Humans are linguistic mammals. Without language we grin like President Walking Eagle. And keep in mind that meanings are not always supposed to be clear. (A note for Daisy: ambiguity can be a useful tool.)
The ancient Chinese rebels focused on how different communities create different world views, not on the Western insight that each individual has a somewhat different perspective.
How should we behave when two communities argue? Perhaps we can agree that, because we are limited by our own cultural perspectives, we should respect each other's views. Live and let live. We continue to hold our own views, of course. We retain our cultural perspectives and our ability to judge from those perspectives. (When the Taliban threw acid in the faces of Moslem girls because they went to school, I knew how to react, not confused by cultural relativity.)
The opposite of treading cautiously among different cultures can be seen in the delusional rushes of ferocious warriors, something the Chinese endured too often.
In a New Yorker cartoon by BEK, two mice crouch outside a mouse hole in a room. One mouse says, "I'd much prefer to hide inside walls with original moldings." (Linguistic philosophy sketched in a cartoon.)
I prefer original moldings to replacement moldings because as a child I learned the concepts "original" and "replacement," along with which should be valued. Each time we learn a linguistic concept, Vygotsky claims, we learn how to react to that concept "in the right way." Learning a concept is learning how to behave.
An early Chinese rebel might say, "Replacements are better than originals," which would be liberating, in a way. And it might tend to make us skeptical about verbal guidance.
The DAODE JING contains a heap of reversed maxims, many of them delightful and even usable in some contexts. People still love the DAODE JING because they are charmed by the oddly reversed maxims Yet the point of reversing a maxim is to show that no maxim is absolute or permanent. "A penny saved is useless."
Laozi believed that names come in pairs, "born together." To learn a word is to learn its opposite at the same time. Each distinction we make creates two names. "Up" and "down" are a pair, according to Laozi 2500 years ago.
In the 20th century Wittgenstein will make a further point: that language does not consist solely of names. (What does it tell us about philosophy when Wittgenstein has to insist on this?)
The ancient Chinese saw that as children master concepts, they internalize society's preferences. A father says to a daughter, "Please hand me that pretty doll," and the child learns the use of "pretty" (and "ugly," as well).
Laozi played with opposites. He might tell us to value the ugly, for example. He might attempt to undo--or partly undo--some of the attitudes embedded in us by language and culture.
The old Cosby sitcom on television portrayed an educated black family that was warm, loving, clean, well off, supportive, kindly, liberal and decent. Later a rival sitcom, "Married With Children," was developed to mock the Cosby show. In "Married With Children" the Cosby virtues were reversed. The white family members were self-involved, poor, insensitive, uncaring, disloyal, unwashed, conservative, sexist and bawdy. This disgraceful comedy show (a favorite of mine) was a modest success, especially in the prison systems; but well educated people, by and large, either didn't watch it or watched it in secret. Educated tube watchers were strongly committed to humane (Confucian) maxims and could not bear to watch their liberal maxims being turned upside down for comic effect.
The white and black men who created "Married With Children" believed that the Cosby perspective was an inadequate simplification of how we live our lives--so they presented the opposite. Watching both shows you might get something approaching the complexity of the human situation.
Our culture and language help shape our values, help mold the distinctions we make, and help teach us how to act on certain distinctions. None of this, the Chinese rebels suggested, makes a constantly reliable guide to good behavior.
We should not exaggerate the centrality of words--cicadas act on distinctions without language.
The ancient Chinese rebels saw that different languages guide us somewhat differently and that no one could demonstrate that her language or her guiding discourse was absolutely or permanently right. We can't abandon language, either.
We learn language in ordinary social contexts--in the mundane flow of our lives. (Wittgenstein reminds us that language has meaning only in the midst of our activities.)
As children we learn words, enabling us to make the same choices as the adults around us.
I inherited a value system from my culture. (Culture makes us human; destroying a culture is grammatically related to, but not identical with, a genocide.)
Laozi suggested that we value weakness. "When people are born, they're soft; When they die, they end up rigid." My father, a machinist, wore a small gold football on a gold chain around his neck. He'd been a starting guard on an undefeated junior college football team that had won a national championship. He taught me that when I felt ill, I might as well go to work and get paid for my time.
Laozi gave the lesser side equal weight, not because weak is better than strong but to awaken us . There are moments when it's better to bend with the wind. There are times when it's good to be unyielding.
I had a hard time understanding what is meant by "The five tones cause one's ears to go deaf" (from THE DAODE JING, translated by Robert G. Henricks). Apparently there was a convention in ancient China that there existed five and only five tones. The convention made it hard for a Chinese listener to credit the rich gradations of tones found in nature or in another culture's voices.
Rebels sometimes say that they prefer undistorted natural senses to trained & conditioned senses, as if that were an option.
Some early Chinese rebels considered culture unnatural, but what could be more natural for a human child than to absorb a language and a world view? Our genes, Darwin might have said, if he had known about genes, will provide an explanation for how the absorption begins.
We sometimes seem to have a problem differentiating the things that exist in the world (rotting fish) and the things that exist only in language (Iraq's imaginary weapons of mass destruction in 2003). Peter Viereck, a conservative, made the following grammatical remark: "Reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away." He was defining the term "reality." Or Charles Sanders Peirce: "we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be. " Daisy has come up against obstacles that thwart her. As Harry G. Frankfurt put it, Some obstacles "are independent of us. That is the origin of our concept of reality, which is essentially a concept of what limits us, of what we cannot alter or control at will." Mortality will serve as an example.
Most generations have included those who attempt to deny reality. The most recent were the post-structuralists and followers of deconstruction. For them, at the start, no facts existed, only narratives, and all narratives were equally valid. A discourse describing the Holocaust and a discourse denying it were both valid. When the inanity of this position finally dawned on the deconstructionists, they made well-intentioned attempts to find something foundational; none of these attempts worked--they mainly consisted of finding this or that group of badly treated people and claiming that ill-treatment people had direct access to the truth.
Perhaps guiding discourses are as natural as oatmeal.
There are (obviously) many ways to look at one thing. My wife asked recently, "Why are you limping?" I responded, "I've been limping for five years. I have arthritis." She laughed heartily. She has always been (I say this without irony) a lot of fun.
Long ago, Chinese rebels argued that guiding discourses lacked constancy. Some of the rebels, but not all of them, held that Nature needed no guidance. A daisy grows in silence.
Daisy, on the other hand, is three now and seldom silent. She's learning to participate in dinner conversations, for which she has prepared two questions. She asks both of each adult seated at the table. (1) "What do you do at school?" and (2) "How were you born?" I guess she thinks that when adults leave the house, they go to a school (as she does). The second question was explained to me, perhaps, by Sarah, my daughter. Daisy asks how you were born because she was born through a C-section, and she's sorting out the options.
Verbal guidance might require interpretation (or there might be a customary response that everyone follows). Or one example of verbal guidance might contradict another example. The DAODE JING does not tell us that guiding discourses are self-defeating, only that they are not fixed. Verbal advice lacks the near-constancy found in nature where a daisy is a daisy.
The advice we live by relates to the world in changing ways. Conventions change. I responded to army commands in the same manner was those around me. I was guided by custom and a degenerate corporal in interpreting the command of "left face!" The most important thing I learned (from Larry Moss) in the military, however, was that if we were seated in the middle of a full room and an officer entered the room, everyone was supposed to stand at attention; but that if I remained seated (following Larry's example) while everyone else jumped up, no officer could see me. Once I learned that, I remained seated.
People have slowly shifting rules and customs. They have ways to judge rule following.
A Chinese rebel, asked what she is rebelling against, might respond, "Language." Nietzsche might say, "Christian Europe." In THE WILD ONE, when the protagonist is asked what he is rebelling against, he responds, "What have you got?"
In Zhuangzi's fables the large and the small have their uses.
Some of the early Chinese wanted to create an Eden, a place where "correct" was a term that had no use. They hoped to rely on instinct, for the most part, and follow a path like the one that runs from Wright's Beach to Goat Rock.
In the late 1960s I began to read Zhuangzi, "the laughing philosopher," a Chinese cobbler who'd lived about 2,300 years before me. Zhuangzi attributed the following comment on perspectivism to Wang Ni. "The way I see it, the rules of benevolence and righteousness and the paths of right and wrong are all hopelessly snarled and jumbled."
Camus had experienced the loss of belief in unchanging Christian rules as a serious matter. Some ancient Chinese rebels rejected the unchanging Confucian rules. A few rebels attempted to reject or modify the shaping power of language itself. (How do I express an anti-language position?--by turning cartwheels?) Zhuangzi took a different approach. He didn't see the lack of a final moral authority as tragedy. He found it comical.
Reading Zhuangzi in translation I became engaged in developing ordinary ideas rather than in developing accurate histories.
The cicada used to laugh at the giant bird, saying, "When I try hard and fly up, I might get as high as the peach tree. Sometimes I fall short and flutter back to the ground. How is bird going to rise a thousand miles and fly south?"
A giant yak stood by, as big as a storm covering the county. The yak knew how to be big, but it didn't know how to catch mice.
--from FREE AND EASY WANDERING by Zhuangzi
Perhaps we ought not take a specific community's view too seriously.
While Western thinkers weighed the imaginary problem of how to step into the same river twice, Zhuangzi considered something more amusing: we use a constantly shifting language to help partition the stuff we perceive in the world. Each animal in the shoe-repairer's fable talks in a practical way, as you've noticed, making workaday sense. Its guiding discourse emerges from the way it lives, from its form of life. Being big is good, but what if you are too big to catch a mouse? Being small is good, too,
but. . . .
For a time I believed that this Chinese insight negated Camus' search for a viable guiding discourse, but it didn't. Camus looked for useful discourse so he could guide himself, not for a universal point of view from which to grade others. The sort of advice he gave himself--have as many experiences as possible--emerged from his lived perspective.
Zhuangzi observed that the linguistic distinctions we make help to shape our choices and behavior (so that Camus values many experiences over few experiences, for example). Every guiding discourse is a natural. What else could it be? he asked. Zhuangzi was not anti-language.
The cobbler nods in agreement with dogmatists when they claim that their doctrines are natural. Of course they are (for what it's worth).
Where the Daode Jing tells us that all doctrines are wrong, including this one, the Cobbler tells us with a wink that doctrines and chemical reactions are, in an absolute sense, neither right nor wrong.
To know something is to master a conceptual scheme and its discrimination patterns; you master a discourse that you can test in the usual ways. We have systems for evaluating discourses, and our standards remain internal to the system.
"On a soft morning, Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner and Beyonce walked together down to the beach at Monte Rio. People considered Garbo, Gardner and Beyonce beautiful women, but the steelhead trout saw them and dived to the bottom of the river. The western blue birds flew in terror. The black-tailed deer and jackrabbits bolted into the brush. The California quail ran for their lives."
Adapted from a story by Zhuangzi
Someone said that we have an inner guide. Another replied, "If I have an inner guide, why should I follow it?"
If the only choice I have is to follow my inner guide, why discuss it?
According to Zhuangzi, the cobbler, whatever guides me (so that I assent to this but not to that) is for the most part learned. The cobbler is best known for the following short narrative (as translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English). "Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamed I was a butterfly flying happily here and there, enjoying life without knowing who I was. Suddenly I woke up, and I was indeed Zhuangzi. Did Zhuangzi dream he was a butterfly, or did the butterfly dream he was Zhuangzi? There must be some distinction between Zhuangzi and the butterfly."
Imagine a discussion between the cobbler and Descartes with the cobbler pointing out distinctions between Zhuangzi and the butterfly.
The difference between language and wind blowing through a knothole in a fence is that language is about something. The divisions in the world, as we see them, often inform the divisions in language, but the relationships between the two divisions wander, depending on our purposes.
If there were one correct correspondence between language and objects in the world, we would know it by now--or perhaps there is a correct correspondence, but it is not knowable.
This is a little repetitive, but . . . Hume wrote, summing up old problems in philosophy, that if "a controversy has long been kept on foot and remains still undecided, we may presume that there is some ambiguity in the expression and that the disputants affix different ideas to the terms employed in the controversy." Otherwise we would, being fellow humans, one form of life, see things the same way.
Language is about something, but what language is about depends on the context (including climate and age) in which it is used, and not just the verbal context.
It must be obvious that progressives, liberals, conservatives and rich lazy loafers like Walking Eagle employ words differently (in part). They make different distinctions about the world and follow somewhat different guiding discourses. Each believes the discourse of others to be too large or too small. Of course they also share signs and grammar, or they could not understand one another at all.
The realization that talk is natural might make me more tolerant of other views while I continue talking in my own way. I see that there are many perspectives; I use my own.
When we value peace above war, we do it within a discourse system or language game or world view. In one framework, peace is better than war. From another perspective, Fascism, for example, war is better than peace. This does not make war and peace equal from some cosmic neutral viewpoint. From a neutral viewpoint, things are neutral, not equal.
From one perspective (not mine) a serial killer is as natural as a daisy.
Before we had language, there were boundaries, the cobbler tells us. We at times ignore some of those natural boundaries. President Walking Eagle famously ignored the boundaries of Hurricane Katrina.
What we know and can prove is limited. In that sense, reality remains unknown, "the unknown context of our ways of knowing," as one person put it. Is reality what we know added to what we don't know? Or is reality a word we employ in many ways?
Do we know that we know nothing? How would we prove that claim? How would we differentiate between knowledge and ignorance?
Cats know about food. A cat knows how to catch mice, mice know how to find seeds, and I know how to heat up a bowl of split pea soup. Which of us is wrong?
Guiding discourses change. That made the cobbler skeptical--to a point--about guiding discourses.
Does a commitment to Realism change how I spend my day? I eat the same toast as before. Would Antirealism improve my breakfast?
A good softball pitcher throws to the spot indicated by her catcher. While she was learning to pitch, she thought about what she was doing and listened to her coach's corrections. Eventually throwing to the right spot became second nature, as if she were throwing in an unmediated way. Throwing became intuitive, in the same way that talking became immediate and intuitive for Daisy.
When something becomes intuitive, customary, I act without thinking. The voice in my head falls silent. I become absorbed in doing something. I lose self-consciousness.
A softball pitcher can learn something new. The danger is that, once she begins to think, she will think too much. She will steer the new pitch, losing the zip that comes only by abandoning conscious control. She will become a rationalist. (She will exaggerate the role of rational thought.)
Discourse is based on something else, in the sense that language had to emerge from something not linguistic.
Ethical behavior is hard to measure--I do my share of the household chores early in the morning before Susan gets up, so they don't count. Also, I do them wrong.
According to ancient Chinese insights, there was no point in searching for permanent ethical rules. No such rules exist. The meanings of words change, and the meanings of rules change. That was the difference the rebels had with Confucius, who looked for permanent rules to follow. William James wrote much later: "There is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. "
It's reasonable to search for the origins of rules. I once tried to find out why, in baseball, a batter running to first base or home base is allowed to overrun those bases without getting tagged out but not allowed to overrun second or third base.
More than a century ago baseball was sometimes played in the winter by skaters on ice. Skaters can't stop quickly, and they were allowed to overrun all four bases. The skaters wanted to continue to overrun bases in the summer, but they met arguments from the barefoot summer players. Eventually a compromise was reached. Players were allowed to overrun two of the four bases.
Despite the nearly infinite complexity of moral problems, I usually do the right thing. There have been moments when I wasn't sure what was right. I also made mistakes or on occasion chose to do a bad thing and knew it when I did it.
In the 1970s, the Shaw of Iran and his secret police were torturing political opponents, who ranged from the religiously delusional to moderates to progressives to Stalinists.
I was sitting in my office at a college on Long Island one rainy morning, smoking a cigar (which will give you an idea of which century it was), when an administrator knocked on my door. This tall dude, a Jew, told me that an Iranian Moslem, in New York on a student visa, was about to be deported back to Iran, where he, a known opponent of the Shaw, would have his nipples pulled out with pliers. The Iranian kid's visa deadline had passed. The only thing that would block his deportation was for me to enroll him as my independent study student and fake the starting day, backdating the document so that the young fellow would look as if he had been enrolled for weeks. "It's up to you," the tall dude said. "I can't ask you to do it."
The administrator had given me a chance, then, to commit a crime against the State of New York, weaken the integrity of its state university and cheapen every credit the genuine students earned. I could honor my professional commitments and refuse to backdate official college documents, which would send a young man off to the torture chambers of Iran, or I could abandon honor, file fake documents, and take the easy way out.
A young man with black hair and red-brown skin peered at me from the hallway.
I nodded, then backdated the official documents. Next I turned to my tape player, put on Fats Domino and listened to a 2/4 backbeat. Interesting but ancient even then. Musical tastes change.
And only a few decades later, two Presidents of the United States, Christians, shipped guests of America out of New York to be tortured in foreign countries. In fairness to their families, I won't use these assholes real names (I'll call them George W., best remembered as a major source of methane, and William Jefferson, walking dildo).
Of course, William Jefferson sent only 14 people to be tortured. By tortured, I mean only this and nothing more: in one documented case a prisoner ordered transported by President Clinton (oops) was kept blindfolded and handcuffed for seven months, beaten with fists and chairs, stripped naked and given electric shocks, tied to a crucifix and raped, and then released on the ground that he was innocent.
At the time, many religious Americans believed, on no evidence, that inalienable rights were granted to humans by God. Some of these same people also argued that it was a good thing to torture Moslem prisoners. The way to reconcile these positions--that God gave each of us human rights and that it's good to torture Moslems--is to hold that Moslems are not human, in which case God gave them no rights, and it's moral to grate them like carrots. (Never mind that it is illegal to torture a dog or cat.)
Torture appealed to the Republican voting base; when the Republicans appealed to the base in 2008, they appealed to the base.
What governs how we exist? If you can answer that, you can ask what we know and where things begin for us and how we should behave.
In Europe people held that moral rules came from a god, that we came from a god. When that belief faltered, philosophers attempted to ground moral behavior in reason; that failed with Hume's Law: it is impossible to derive through reason an "ought" from an "is"--there is no logical bridge between a fact and a value.
Some went from Hume to relativism and then, if they pushed on, to nihilism.
The rebels in ancient China thought it impossible to come up with a permanent set of rules to live by because the meanings of words change.
We have the ability to write a string of words that look like a sentence but lack sense. Jon Stewart: "The American people can fart rainbows." Politics is filled with claims as empty as Stewart's, but we take them seriously because they are resemble meaningful remarks.
A man standing on a street corner in Denver, 5,000 feet above sea level, says fearlessly, "I am afraid of heights." Denver is wide; what he fears is narrowness.
Kay Ryan commented on words in her poem "SHIFT."
Words have loyalties
to so much
we don't control. . . .
It's hard for us
to imagine how small
a part we play in
holding up the tall spires we believe
our minds erect. . . .
Our morality and world picture must be grounded in something. Hume suggested "custom and habit," but where do customs and habits come from? On what are they grounded? What is given?
Susan and I drove with Sarah, our older daughter, from Long Island to Southern California. Sarah was entering college at Scripps in Claremont, where she had a scholarship. A year or two later our younger daughter, Maggie, chose Sarah Lawrence, so I drove her to Yonkers and found a place to park.
Maggie borrowed money for tuition. As she sat through a glum orientation (in the 1990s, many wealthy Sarah Lawrence students swanned about on campus in heroin-chic black blouses, black robes and black pants), I drifted across a tiny hill, smoking a cheap pipe and wondering what it would have been like to grow up rich. My father had been a machinist and then a millwrights' union business agent. My mother, a high school dropout, had founded and directed the first cooperative nursery school on the Palos Verdes peninsula. The school was famous; my mother, forgotten.
As I walked I silently practiced asking directions to the building where I was supposed to meet Maggie before lunch, Titsworthy Hall. Eventually I entered a tiny campus bookstore, where I picked up a paperback titled ON CERTAINTY, turned it over and looked at the first sentence, which read, "If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest."
I bought the paperback. There are a many books, well stocked with error, that explicate Wittgenstein's ON CERTAINTY; I won't attempt to duplicate them here.
Actions speak louder than words--we can see what humans do not doubt (what humans hold certain) by observing how people behave. A man reaches for an apple. He has no genuine doubt that the apple exists or that he himself exists or that he can hold a piece of fruit in one hand. The man bites into the apple, pulp and juice fill his mouth, he does not doubt.
What undergirds our world view is lack of doubt. Wittgenstein wrote: " I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal." This is the inherited formative certainty with which an infant reaches for her mother, the certainty from which nouns later flow. This certainty is given, much as life is a given.
We don't genuinely doubt, for example, that things exist around us. I can say that I doubt that a chair exists, but I sit in one. Things exist--that's fundamental. That belief is part of a system of words and rules that enable us to doubt that unicorns exist in the same way that zebras exist. (Certainty provides the structure that makes existential doubt possible.)
One consequence of Descartes' analysis of doubt was that it eventually led some thinkers to claim we lack an essence. Wittgenstein freed us from their sleight of hand.
Darwin classified us as a mammalian form of life. Mammals usually protect their young. I might not call this morality or empathy, depending on how we use those terms, but it's where they begin.
Camus held that we have an essence. (Morality depends on essence.)
Ancient Chinese rebels believed that our natures are partly shaped by culture, including language.
Hume thought that morality sprang from cultural training, which raised a question: on what is culture founded?
Perspectivism is the belief that truth is true only within a particular perspective. For our form of life, what we believe true grows from a point of view determined by the nature of our senses (this is more or less the same for all of us) and shaped by our nurture (which differs somewhat from place to place).
To be fully human is to be acculturated. Cultures emerge from the point of view of our species, which is why people of different cultures can learn to communicate. Their cultures both reflect the same form of life.
One might object that I have spent 50 years learning what everyone already understands: nature and nurture are the source of morality; and nature precedes nurture. The seed precedes the forest. The forest shapes the tree.
Examining obvious is the function of philosophy. My curiosity has been satisfied.
During my first year in high school, we rode horses down to Torrance Beach, near Los Angeles. In fact, we rode into the saltwater, which is hard on saddle leather. My gelding Mac, a placid bay, had cost my father, a machinist, a few day's wages. The horse fed himself most of the year on volunteer grasses around our house in the open hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. At that time the area had not yet been heavily settled or forested. The settled part was wealthy--we were almost the only working class family up there.
Lands End--where exactly does the land end? We know more or less where the land ends, but we can't pin it down to a damp space between two grains of sand, and we don't need to.
People have lived near Torrance Beach for ten thousand years. Los Angeles is older than London.
(3) Form of Life
Some months ago a damp string of ill-dressed people, some wearing masks (protection against swine flu), holding up signs, splashing in puddles, dancing, behaving like extras in a Fellini movie, marched in the rain for several miles. I limped along, wearing my father's stout blackthorn stick. We walked ahead of the Hubbub street band from Sebastopol, a volunteer brass and drum group, trombones blaring. We were asking that Latinos be treated fairly.
Whether you see people as the same or different depends on your purpose. If you gather orders from a crowd for ice cream cones, people will ask for chocolate or vanilla. People are different.
For my purpose in this paragraph, people are the same, in the sense that wolves are the same. Wolves constitute a species, although there are many kinds of wolves and each wolf is different.
When my daughters were three, we had a wolf with us. The wolf loved us. (If you ask me what love is, I will point to something I love.)
Life comes in different forms.
A daisy is a form of life.
A wolf is a form of life.
We are a form of life. Language grows out of a form of life (Wittgenstein). That's why we are able to translate from one human language to another--the different languages come from the same form of life--and why we understand, to a degree, wolves--their form of life has things in common with our own. Like us they live in families. That might explain why wolves were the first animals we domesticated. We taught wolf cubs to join our family (then we ate them when times were hard ).
A form of life changes so slowly that it feels constant. From my perspective, I am sitting in a chair. My great-grandparents--as near as I can tell--had the same basic perspective: they sat in chairs.
We are domesticated animals with an inescapable perspective. What we see, we see with eyes of a certain kind. What we say about what we hear or smell doesn't float like tule fog three feet off the ground. It's anchored in what we are.
(4) A Model of the World
In the 1950s my friends and I set out from the beach cities. We were, at best, crude shapes, uncarved & rough, searching for well-founded guidelines to follow that would make us into responsible men. We sought permanent rules for temporary beings. Meanwhile, life clattered alongside the four of us (Mowry, Jack, Tim and me) on our journey inland to the heart of the world, life buoyant and percussive, shaking a ring of keys in diminished arpeggios, minor-seventh scales, glissandos. We had no idea, really, what was happening.
One died on the way. Long Jack winked and left, and the rest of us now look as bleached as driftwood, carved into fixed, conventional shapes like poles along the North Pacific Rim. My shape includes the paunch.
In the early days, two of us took on guidance from universal military training. Tim joined the California National Guard. I mustered with the Army Reserve's 4216th Mess Kit Repair Unit, where my service included two weeks as a clerk at the now vanished Presidio of San Francisco.
The farther we drifted, the tighter the world model gripped us.
***
When lean women gather to hike in Armstrong Woods and find a 310 foot redwood in their path, they tramp around the tree, not over it. As I limp the three miles of dirt path and sidewalk to the Healdsburg plaza, I walk in a way that relates to what--from my perspective--exists. I avoid cars and seek shade on summer days. At The Goat I order hot chocolate with whipped cream and talk in a way that relates to what exists (whipped cream)--or, better, I talk in a way that relates to what I do not doubt exists (I do not doubt the existence of whipped cream).
Our species acts from a perspective that includes a basic model of the world (Wittgenstein's world picture); this basic model has roots going back to time immemorial and before that and so on. I don't doubt that I am surrounded by objects, that things fall down, etc. I am certain that I exist. Daisy doesn't doubt that she exists. The two of us don't talk much about our basic models of the world because Daisy and I and Wittgenstein share the same model. We take it as given. You can see that in the ways we act.
(5) Things Change
Imagine four shiny uncut shapes in the 1950s--Long Jack, Tim, Mowry and me, pale tan in color, with Jack the darkest--being shipped to four sites to take introductory courses in advanced human practices. We referred to the sites as Berkeley, Claremont, Occidental and Westwood, characteristic place names employed in accord with a grammar absorbed as children.
UCLA cost $30 a semester in those days, before our national leaders began a series of expensive wars of choice.
In college the four of us drank cheap bourbon and talked about how to make things. By 1960 we were smoking dope and eating peyote & morning-glory seeds.
About 40 years later, from the deck of a small fishing boat, I watched Long Jack's two good children, with children of their own, pour his ashes into the Pacific. In salt water the ashes took on a milky glow and formed a cloud, just below the glittering pacific surface, about ten feet long and five feet wide. This big loose object slowly floated off toward the peninsula where Jack, Tim, Mowry and I had lived as boys with oiled crewcuts.
"We don't know why we were born, why we're here or why we must die," Zhuangzi wrote. "Take it as fate that things change."
(6) Everyone Else Laughed
Jack once observed that in the course of their lives people lose so much that they have no way to cope with the loss, so they don't deal with it. Instead, as I see it, they eat pasta at The Bear Republic, where a red 'bent hangs from the ceiling. Later they stand in the rain at a peace vigil mounted to oppose the second war against Iraq, leaders of nothing but examples of choices.
The existentialists brought an emphasis on the individual and her choices back into philosophy--at the expense of other things.
Dick Weed, Stu Padasle and Seymour Buttz roar by the peace vigil in a pickup with a bumper strip that reads: "My Other Ride Is Your Mom." They shout at us: "Fuck you!"
"Enlist," we shout back.
Mighty Joan Didion mentioned "the particular vanity of perceiving social life as a problem to be solved by the good will of individuals." Perhaps some protesters embodied that vanity in the 1960s, when our country attacked Vietnam. But today, as I write this, with President Walking Eagle attacking Iraq, we don't expect to solve a problem. We stand in the street.
A walking eagle is too full of shit to fly.
During the 1960s, the antiwar protesters I liked best were sober. I walked behind serious people through the nation's capitol. We were tear-gassed several times (I'd had tear-gas training in the army). But in today's Second War against Iraq, the protesters I like best wear pointed hats, beat homemade drums and skip and hop as they dance west. In 2003 I waved a black bandara that Susan had sewed for me in 1968 that read "Tolstoy." A large blue San Francisco cop nodded to me. "Nice flag," he said. He smiled.
In San Francisco we marched uselessly down Market Street. And then an Akkadian in a dark suit stepped out and stood blocking my brother's path forward--Tim was holding one end of a street-wide banner. The Akkadian, gripping a can of pepper spray, was attempting to stop a 200,000 person peace demonstration. I raised my empty frame into a lumber, the best I could do, jogged forward and rammed into the Akkadian with my shoulder, bouncing him aside. He showered me with pepper spray, but I didn't feel it until four hours later when I forgot and rubbed my eyes. At that point I realized that it was a damned good thing that Susan had insisted on driving us back to the wine country while I rode shotgun. I was blind for five minutes.
***
A few weeks later a teenager in a Hummer revved alongside our small Healdsburg peace demonstration, his scabby elbow out the window, raised one finger to an 85-year-old war veteran, screamed, "Fuck you, hippie" and then, for some reason, "Go back to France." His girlfriend, beside him, stared straight ahead. I replied, "Your mother called. She needs her car." The driver didn't laugh. The girlfriend laughed. Everyone else laughed.
(7) Remember George Freeth
Jack, Mowry, Tim and I grew up near Redondo, where Irish-Hawaiian George Freeth (1883--1918) had introduced surfing to the mainland, using a 200 pound board. Like George Freeth, Albert Camus had lived near beaches. In college we read Camus on our own, almost by accident. He wasn't well known.
Camus had been born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913, two years after my father. Camus grew up poor and tubercular. His mother was Spanish, which might help explain his dislike of Franco and totalitarian governments. I wasn't ill or destitute growing up, although food became scarce once during a long strike that broke the CIO union my father had joined. The oil workers, who had gone without a raise throughout World War Two, asked for a raise once the war ended and the country was awash with prosperity. Instead of a raise, they got fired. That would not have surprised Camus.
Getting fired was to be expected. It's how the system works.
My father made things at a metal lathe in a lab in an oil refinery. Mowry's father worked for a time at his own wood lathe carving period furniture for the movies and constructing small boats. Jack's male parent, a big rough guy who smoothed his long son by pounding him on every surface with industrial fists, owned a small business in a nearby hamlet that ground glass lenses for the visually impaired.
Jack, a college water polo player, didn't tell me he'd been battered as a child until he was 60 years old.
Today I sit on the wooden porch of a craftsman-style cottage in Healdsburg, about 65 miles north of San Francisco, in the heart of America's wine country. I will lose the house soon. Two Republican recessions and a bubble in eight years have shrunk my pension. On a nearby table I keep a tumbler of sun tea, a pen, and a pad of paper. My partner of 45 years, Susan, is out with two friends, walking precincts for the Peace Project. I intend to write something for Daisy about my search for a starting point.
I've set up a study group on ethics at the local senior center. We will be discussing Camus, Zhuangzi, Hume, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, James, Sartre and Wittgenstein.
(8) One Life
About 50 years ago I took an undergraduate course on the French novel in translation, taught at UCLA by a brightly rouged, slender young dude whose name I don't recall. He taught well. Back then I loved fiction of any stripe, and the narrow French stripe shone brightly.
For that course I read THE STRANGER by Albert Camus, while sitting in the one soft chair in my parents' small concrete block home, which we had constructed with our hands, acting like Wittgenstein's tribe of builders. "Block," my father would say, and I would hand him a cement block.
In the early 1950s, Camus' novel was new to UCLA and new, in a sense, to secondary schools in France, where it was being taught for the first time.
When I mentioned Camus to a closeted gay professor, a Fitzgerald specialist, which made him a quarter mile beyond unsound on a 1950s English faculty, the scholar had not heard of Camus or, probably, of any living French novelist. Living authors were not objects of study at UCLA in that era. Even Fitzgerald hadn't been dead long enough to become respectable.
The commitment to literature as a research project, on which university departments are founded, is an example of scientism, in this case the inapt modeling of an aesthetic discussion on chemistry or physics projects. There was no shortage of scientism elsewhere. When Sartre mentioned the abstract schemes of Freudian psychoanalysis, he claimed that "they will possess simply the always increasing probability of scientific hypotheses." Good luck with that.
Despite the published warnings of Nelson Algren, a novelist who had visited France, my friends and I, during that period, repeatedly attempted to date women more neurotic than we were. Some of us succeeded, although such women proved hard to find.
I passed Camus' novel on to a darkly shining if somewhat suicidal working class undergraduate majoring in the composition of classical music. Her ancestry was French. She had scars on her wrists. Blue eyes, black hair. The scars ran across her wrists, an ineffective direction, but who knew that at the time? She was bright, with an IQ score of 174.
It was this young woman who called me a "tough," although she soon proved tougher, shaking free of natural attachments to marry a rich young lad for a while. Her blond husband embodied old money and an older name, known to close students of the American Revolution, the name of a middling liberal arts college. In contrast, my financial future promised the famous hour of cold that sucks out months of heat. After her marriage we continued to visit. That was a bad time. She wanted to remain married but bear my child. I said no. We were green, mad with youth, but it occurred to me that daughter of mine might need a father of similar temperament in the house she grew up in.
That was one of many experiences I (like everyone else) did not recover from.
About nine years later I noticed an attractive, generous looking person staring at me during a political meeting. She was a young woman who brought extras to the party. That was Susan, Jewish and middle class, and she got a job, put me through graduate school and will sleep beside me tonight. She's Daisy's grandmother and so on. Our marriage has had ups and downs, which are inevitable and circumstantial--for example, I no longer share her lifelong interest in ignoring me. But we're doing all right, I say, an optimist. She disagrees.
***
In college I'd noticed, as others had, that life appeared to have no intrinsic meaning. I'd then walked with friends to the Fox Theater in Westwood, where film actress Sandra Dee was making a personal appearance with her mother, who wore a gleaming metallic blouse that brought out the red in her neck. The two of them went everywhere together, hopeful calculation shining from their large brown peepers.
We'd read in class that life lacked intrinsic purpose, but my friends and I were not among those who experienced radical doubt as a liberation. In fact, we did not really experience radical doubt. Who does?
For Nietzsche our knowledge of the world is uncertain and so must be a fiction, according to one analysis I studied. (Analysts apparently read Nietzsche differently, finding different positions.) Anyway, a more careful angryhead might say, instead, that our knowledge is not absolutely certain but that doesn't make it fiction. (In current English the term "fiction" does not mean "not absolutely certain." The grammars of "fiction" and "uncertainty" differ.)
Camus seemed to imply that a meaningless life is its own value. That is, if you only live once, take care of what you've got. As Ronald Dworkin argued recently, each of us is responsible for finding value in life and deciding what kind of life to lead.
(9) Not Wanting To See
In Nietzsche's imaginary world, brutality might be an illusion. If objects don't really exist, cruelty is bearable--and what Nietzsche sees as objects might be only fictions (he hopes), thrown up on a blank screen we call the world. He attempts to get through each day, seeing things he'd rather not see.
Nietzsche had claimed that God, the supposed Source and Enforcer of Western morals and essences, was dead.
If you judge philosophers by the influence they've had, Nietzsche ranks with the best. In a recent poll of western academics he finished, with Wittgenstein, Kant, Aristotle and Plato, in the top five.
According to Nietzsche (and others), human reality is only how reality happens to appear to us. The roses we smell, we smell through limited human nostrils.
There is no arguing with that: we experience what we experience. Next, according to Nietzsche, we subscribe to absurd metaphysical ontologies. Other philosophers have said something similar, Hume for one. We claim a permanent stability in the world and face patterns of change. Or claim that everything changes while things stay the same.
Subscribing to false explanations is not a minor matter. It determines much of our behavior and leads to a willful stupidity among our leaders that may yet kill us all, but I doubt it.
***
Nietzsche separated humanity into two classes: noble predators and natural slaves. The most cogent critique of this approach was provided by Robert Benchley, who wrote that humanity is divided into two kinds of people: those who divide people into two kinds and those who do not.
***
Someday Daisy may ask, "Does God exist?"
In fact, we know next to nothing about the Creator of the Universe, if there is one. Nietzsche knew nothing. Churches know nothing. If a Creator exists, we do have a body of evidence to examine, the world the Creator possibly made. We can watch an osprey dive on a steelhead or visit a cancer ward.
About 84% of Americans, in a recent poll, stated that they believed in God. A much smaller majority of Europeans agreed. What died in Europe for many people in the late 1800s--and this might be what Nietzsche noticed--wasn't the plain belief in an unknown Creator. What died was a belief in the made-up stories, the sacred texts and paradoxical explanations of churchmen.
Nietzsche attended Schulpforta, a legendary secondary school, and the University of Leipzig. He was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel University at 24, before he'd earned his doctorate. During the Franco-Prussian war he served as a medical orderly, as did Wittgenstein in England in the Second World War (Wittgenstein saw combat for Austria in the First World War). Nietzsche wrote many books. In 1879 he became ill; during a period of wandering in Europe his health grew worse, ending in a final mental collapse when he saw a man beat a horse. Nietzsche died insane in 1900.
Camus read Nietzsche.
(10) The Death of God
When we started college in California, the death of God felt fresh. We'd been properly churched and so on, but we hadn't thought much about God beyond noting His apparent absence.
Camus had grown up in Algeria, and by the time of the Second World War, in that thin North African edge of the plump part of the world that called itself the West, many French Algerian intellectuals had stopped believing the Christian creation myth. Instead they believed, with Nietzsche, that the killing of God was the greatest achievement of humanity.
We didn't know it at the time, but Anaximander of Miletos--to whom is attributed the invention of the sundial--had proclaimed the entire stable of Greek gods dead more than 500 years before the birth of Christ. Anaximander held that the first principle was the Infinite, that there were an infinite number of worlds, that the earth was a heavenly body, and that humans had evolved from another animal. He was the pencil-necked Greek who theorized that humans had evolved from fish. Theories are judged by the number of facts they explain, and Anaximander's theory explained, better than most, the Bush family.
Many historians regard Anaximander as the first western philosopher, other than the philosophers who preceded him, whose names have been forgotten.
Nietzsche maintained that Christians had invented an omniscient God so that there would be a witness to each fragment of our (his) pain.
I was the first to serve a volleyball overhand at Avenue C in Redondo Beach in 1951, except for unknown servers who came before me. Back in those spring days I competed on the Ridgemont High tennis team, served hard, bought Big Jay McNeely records and wondered, now that God is dead, who will die next? The author?
I wondered if I could serve a volleyball the same way I served a tennis ball. It turned out that I could, using the heel of my palm as a racket. The serve had not been seen before, and I scored many points with it.
Anaximander, I learned later, was the first philosopher to publish a book on the nature of things. He invented the western model for metaphysical discourse. The Greeks have a lot to answer for.
From the perspective of Anaximander any object that existed--rock or lion--represented a punishable exception to non-Being that would be followed by atonement and a return to non-Being. For example, fir trees die and rot. Nietzsche, in a footnote to Anaximander, wrote, "Whatever comes into being must be ready for its painful dissolution."
My father died at home in discomfort.
Nietzsche, Shendao, Zhuangzi, Kant and Wittgenstein saw that people share a perspective or framework that shapes their view of the world, much as stretch jeans shape a round bottom. Unlike Zhuangzi, Kant, or Wittgenstein, more like Shendao, Nietzsche attempted to reject the human perspective of the masses of women or "herd" or randy young misters. Like Socrates, Nietzsche thought that ordinary people lacked the virtue and knowledge needed for self-government. Nietzsche wanted noble people to find a new basic perspective on the universe, which is not possible unless you give up your form of life.
***
In theory at least, our morality was founded on God's Ten Commandments. Without God, on what is morality based?If, as Nietzsche claimed, the world is a formless void onto which humans have projected horses and trees, then there are no moral facts. There is nothing to be moral about. Nietzsche wrote: "The moral judgment . . . believes in a reality which does not exist" (see: "The 'Improvers' of Mankind" in THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS,). Any action is permitted. No well founded moral guidelines, according to Nietzsche, are possible. Yet he lived a moral life, rejecting, for example, the anti-Semitism of his sister. Why did he do that?
Why did Nietzsche reject cruel people if moral judgments express only personal attitudes and feelings? Moral judgments make sense only if they are based on facts--I reject that man (a subjective decision) because I saw him beating a horse (that's a fact).
Ayn Rand, an intellectual hooker, copied a few thoughts from Nietzsche and turned them into a career of writing books for suckers.
***
Times change, but the basic perspective shared by our form of life cannot easily be changed because, as Nietzsche said disapprovingly, "Our whole humanity depends upon it."
(11) Doubt
I've been watching Daisy, about three, accepting a perspective and absorbing a language, which she will need to survive. We are bred to conform; the undomesticated get culled.
As a young man I experimented with minor shifts in perspective, employing wine, weed, peyote, Thai sticks, tabs of acid, hash, morning-glory seeds, Jim Beam, whatever. In high school we bought cheap whiskey illegally and drove to a cove at Portuguese Bend on the Palos Verdes peninsula to drink under the stars, to hold long jump contests and to fall face down on the sand. Mighty Joan Didion lived somewhere up the hill, but we first learned that decades later.
The four of us were not particularly skeptical, although in Western thought radical skepticism goes back a long way. In the 1300s Nicholas of Autrecourt, a heretic whose books were burned by Pope Clement VI, questioned whether we can know if the physical world exists when, perhaps, our perceptions of the world might be caused directly by God and not by the world itself.
Skepticism moves us forward if we understand the point at which doubt becomes a pretense.
Radical skepticism, the doubt that anything exists, reemerges regularly in our culture. In English we use nouns to name objects, but perhaps, some will claim, the objects aren't real. In that case nouns refer to nothing, which makes a first language difficult to learn. To get past that bump, you can assume that people are born with English innate in their brains, which is logical, but can you explain how the English got there? By natural selection?
Caught in what they consider the trap of a false & noun-based language, some 20th century followers of Nietzsche attempted to rebel against grammar, twisting the uses of key signs in an attempt to express something they couldn't articulate, exaggerating for effect, inflating words until they popped like spit bubbles, etc. That happens when you try to say more than you know.
We can only express what a limited vocabulary lets us say. The demand that we say more than we know is at the bottom of many 2,500-year-old problems in philosophy. A rule of thumb--if we can't answer a philosophical question after 2,500 years of thought, there might be something wrong with the question.
Remember Nietzsche. If objects around us don't really exist (being products of our perspective or language), then there is nothing to be moral about. But does it make sense to doubt if objects exist? Radical doubt depends on language. Without language you cannot formulate a radical doubt. Does it make sense, then, to doubt the existence of the mother who taught me English?
(12) Quantity of Life
In Camus' imaginary world all men are honest, and middle-aged mothers look forward to hemorrhoidectomies.
In 1954, more or less, my friends and I began to reach the starting point shared by doubters like Anaximander, Cicero, Zhuangzi, John Adams, Nietzsche, Camus and others.
Doubt is not immediate. Certainty comes naturally--a baby reaches for a rattle--and later on she learns how to doubt.
I responded by feel to the flat opening of Camus' THE STRANGER long before I could have told you that the novel was about a nihilistic uncut shape estranged from himself. Self-estrangement was a concept that a young, UCLA-educated cab driver, drinking tumblers of jug wine--Gallo Red Mountain--and piping weak 1950s weed, had difficulty pinning down. After chawing away on peyote buttons and sunflower seeds, it meant less. Today, of course--and I speak as an E6 emeritus--I have no idea what "self-estrangement" means. Maybe.
I do understand what mighty Joan Didion was talking about when she wrote of her mother's fixed and settled principles as "a barricade against some deep apprehension of meaninglessness." When you get old, you know too many dead people.
We have no good way to determine if the universe has a purpose.
We learn to doubt, and then, if lucky, we doubt doubt. That's a tenet of Wittgenstein and, later, Hilary Putnam: a genuine doubt can be justified.
At about the time Wittgenstein died, in the 1950s, Tim, Jack, Mowry and I were reading THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS. I managed to see CALIGULA on a New York stage. Camus liked to work in sets of three: a novel, a long essay and a play. Why he worked in threes I can not say. He had ten fingers.
Lee Van Cleef had nine.
Joe Woods, Marxist nephew of Richard Nixon's infamous secretary Rose Mary Woods, befriended Susan and me and our children when we moved to Eatons Neck on Long Island. He told me that philosophy was the most serious conversation one could have. Yet this serious conversation changes little. A nor'easter advances, and no matter what you say about it, the wind blows snow in your face.
When I first read Camus, I had not heard of Nicolai Hartmann, who took the position that all fundamental philosophical problems are ontological in nature. I opened THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS and read: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."
Suicide caught my attention--I found suicidal girlfriends as fascinating as bobcats--but I had trouble understanding Camus without a philosophical context. I knew nothing. Commentary about Camus lay thin on the ground at UCLA in 1954, or perhaps I didn't know how to search for it. I had no clear notion of how or why academic research was conducted. I'd been taught the form of a humanities research paper but none of the purpose, which turned out, often, to be tiny. As somebody once wrote, "Gods give small things to the small."
The formulation of a well-founded set of absolute and timeless ethical commandments was an ancient quest but new to me. I was starting from Confusion Hill, where a downhill road seems to climb, and for me the quest began with Camus' writings because that was where I first saw the foundations of ethics questioned.
Camus had a strong early impact on the four of us, and we could have chosen worse. He wrote gracefully, and he was of the Left but wary of the Left's nonsense.
Recently a friend in the Healdsburg Peace Project sat in a butterfly chair on my porch and helped me look at our cul-de-sac. In winter the neighborhood trees vibrated with slick wet bareness. A coarse gray sky drooped over the wooden houses across from us. No one at home--Susan and I were the only retired couple in the block. The other property owners had left for work.
My friend said he thought that the worst problem the Left has is that it believes its own bullshit.
As a courtesy to a good and often wise man, I did not bring up the temporary political alliance we had forged recently with some dimly lit twenty-first century Stalinoids.
***
Camus' discussion of ethics began with Nietzsche's assumption that we had lost the ancient religious explanation on which Christian ethics had supposedly been based. In the future, being washed in the blood of the lamb would not suffice for many as a theoretical starting point.Camus--and at first I missed this, along with much else--asked what might come next. The next step if our values were ungrounded (or poststructural, as they say today) was nihilism. Camus was not a nihilist (nor were many poststructuralists) but he looked at the huge gap between his actions and his philosophy of the absurd and concluded that nihilism ended in the murder of strangers: people could not live in peace without a value system.
Camus considered two things. (1) Many French Algerians had a powerful need for a well founded (in words) belief system that made explicit a purpose for life. In the past God had supplied good workers with the fundamentals, a purpose and a goal (earning eternal life in Heaven); in His absence, some people were apt to search for new faiths. (2) God and His spokespersons had given the West (as the Confucian tradition had given the East) what passed for constant rules to guide human behavior. With God, His Virgin Bride, His Son and the Holy Ghost gone missing, could Camus justify a guiding discourse? On what arguments could the rules be erected?
We read on. It seems that Albert Camus, a tubercular provincial whose father had died in a world war when Camus was one year old, set out to construct and justify a code of behavior for himself. The quantity of life struck him as a major factor. His father's life had lacked quantity. Perhaps this led Camus to behave with reasonable caution, as opposed to the impetuous behavior of a tubercular dentist like Doc Holliday.
Extra years are valuable--they have a price; the price is the difference between being rich and poor. In California, at the moment, the rich live, on average, six years longer than the poor. My sister died in her fifties because she was poor.
I had not seen the quantity of life stressed by other philosophers, but when Jack learned he was to die before reaching 70, he said, "I'm very angry." By then his voice was down to a nearly inaudible whisper.
He had a right to be angry. Perhaps because of the beatings he'd taken from his father, Long Jack had lived a nonviolent if stubborn life. He deserved more time. But what he deserved changed nothing.
There's a story told in Death Valley about a gigantic tortoise who lived in the desert near the edge of a sparsely forested mountain. The tortoise was known for her critique of mountain lions in which she pointed out the big cats' strengths and weaknesses. One cool evening a desert fox asked the tortoise how she had become competent in evaluating a mammal that was braver, more intelligent, more graceful and more beautiful than herself. The tortoise replied, "For every year the lion lives, I live six."
On another occasion, the same relativistic tortoise caught a snail making his way home from work. She stomped him to a pulp and stole his credit cards. When the sheriff arrived and asked the snail what had occurred, he could only shake his battered head. "I can't really tell you," the snail said. "It happened so fast."
(13) The Gap between Theory and Practice
Daisy, at three, doesn't want to hurt people. Yesterday she was throwing some colored plastic disks down a short flight of stairs, one disk at a time. Each time a disk landed, I said, "Ouch! Ouch!" She laughed and laughed. Finally, she said to me, "You can't hurt disks. They aren't people!" It occurred to me to ask her if we could hurt a cat. "No," she told me. "Cats aren't people."
Daisy is in the process of learning logic and also the grammar of "pain." Here is an oddity--Descartes, the father of modern western philosophy, agreed with her. He did not believe that animals suffered pain, although he noted that they acted as if they did. Animals, like clocks, were pain-free mechanisms. (I'm not sure why he followed the logic of a three-year-old in this case; perhaps it was because of how difficult it would have been to explain why God had created animal suffering.)
For Descartes (1596--1650) God had created man's essence. The project Descartes set for himself was to find something foundational for knowledge. He attempted to doubt each thing that he knew until he located a belief that he could not doubt. That would be his foundation.
Descartes wrote that he doubted all else but could not doubt that he was thinking, and so he formulated "I think: therefore, I exist." (Counters to this approach can be found in C. S. Peirce or in Wittgenstein's ON CERTAINTY.) I won't say more, except that I would like to sit down with Descartes in front of a warm fire and ask him, "Do you doubt that language exists?" and wait on his answer.
For 20th century phenomenologists and existentialists, including Sartre, God was dead. Man's essence died with God, but Sartre wrote, "There can be no other truth to take off from than this: I think; therefore, I exist." The foundational starting point for existentialism was unconceptualized individuality (existence). After 300 years, the philosopher was still trapped in Descartes' first person, still struggling against solipsism.
Sartre believed that he existed, then, without an essence provided by God. The philosopher would have to create an essence for himself. Sartre did this by making a commitment. The choice of commitment had to be subjective to be free. He wrote: "I have to realize the meaning of the world and of my essence: I decide it, alone, unjustifiably, and without excuse."
Existentialists, then, escaped from nihilism by committing themselves to religion, politics, economics or psychology. They claimed, somebody once wrote, to "see God's world through the rags of this." Poised to topple in a pit of despair, they hopped over it, making what Kierkegaard had called "a leap of faith."
Nietzsche saw this sort of thing as a "weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds."
Sartre held that people lived in situations in the world, surrounded by others. He believed that this situation could lead people to make positive and humane commitments. He rejected the claim that ethical choices were arbitrary, a position he attributed to Gide. But following the logic of Sartre's position, where every choice is unjustified, one is free to choose nihilism: Heidegger joined the Nazi party. For years Sartre supported Stalin, a murderous dictator. (Camus opposed the killing people in order to build a perfect future, whether it was done in the name of Heaven or of the working class.)
Albert Camus agreed with Sartre that life had no intrinsic meaning, but Camus argued that to give it a meaning was intellectual suicide. Camus then realized that he had claimed a nihilistic world view but had acted dutifully in real life. That was the gap he saw between theory and practice.
Camus concluded that most people behaved ethically, that people had to have value systems to survive and that people had an essence. As far as I know, he didn't write about the source of the human essence. Instead he explained how people experienced their essence and came to understand it. He argued that in the course of rebellion inside a culture, people discover within themselves something that they identify as human nature. A woman does not create herself, as existentialism suggests, out of nothing.
For Camus existence did not precede essence (except, no doubt, in the sense that A. J. Ayers suggested, which was that a man could not have an essence if he didn't exist.)
Science, of course, had an answer to the question about the origins of essences in animal species: natural selection. A wolf defended her cubs--some species have a capacity for what people might call moral behavior built into them. That helps the species survive. But science is devoted to empirical investigation, and it presupposes the existence of the world. That presupposition was what skeptics continued to call into question. Do wolf cubs really exist or are they merely mental constructs? Biological or psychological explanations open the door to determinism, which Sartre's existentialism attempted to deny.
Answers to skepticism came from G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein, not that many college students cared. Skepticism was too much verbal fun to give up.
(14) A Satisfied Mind
Camus saw that some people need a well-founded, systematic, complete and permanent explanation of everything, a goal that can not be met except by making up an answer. For example, an American President attempted to believe that the metaphysics of his grim religious sect had always been true everywhere in the universe and always would be.
***
What Camus came up with 70 years ago was this: we should accept the situation and live with the tension of wanting what cannot be had. "Anyone who despairs because of events is a coward," Camus wrote.
Later I came to Wittgenstein's position, which is that if you are looking for something that doesn't exist, you don't grasp what the following phrase means: "looking for something."
At the start of last winter, I searched the back seat of the Camry for my collapsible black umbrella, which no longer folded properly. I felt around in the sticky fluff under the front seat and emptied the back shelf and so on. I found nothing, searched again, and finally it occurred to me to check with Susan. "I left the umbrella in the car," I told her. "That must have been last March."
"I threw it out last June," she replied.
I immediately returned to the car and began to search the back seat again. Or not, whichever made more sense.
Some goals that we set we are unlikely to achieve. In politics I support progressive causes, many of which lose. They lose because these causes represent only the humane aspects of human nature, but I keep trying. This is Camus' Sysiphean sense of things: you struggle on in the face of failure. The next generation might succeed in part.
Recently Susan said, "Why are my glasses always in the last place I look?" I said, "Because when you find them, you stop looking."
In philosophy when you find a convincing answer, you're satisfied. You move to the next question.
(15) Fundamental Intuitions
For Charles Darwin one of the most important traits natural selection developed in humans was "intellectual powers." He also believed that animals "possess some power of reasoning."
How did Darwin learn that people and dogs think? He observed children like Daisy who appeared to be thinking, deciding and acting, and then he observed family dogs behaving in a similar way. Of course, we don't understand exactly what it means to think like a dog. It must be nonverbal--we do know that some people report thinking in images and then translating the images into language--Einstein once said that the translating was the hard part.
Intellectual powers contribute to our survival, but they have a down side. We sometimes use intellectual powers to create conspiracy theories, for example, or to convince people that they will live a second life in a higher realm. We argue that some races are inferior to others. We are pattern-seeking mammals, and we occasionally see patterns where none exist.
Darwin wrote that all people are descended from the same African ancestors and that the so-called races are not separate species. We are Africans, and we are kin to other forms of life.
Several schools of philosophy have attempted to apply Darwin to specific theories. Pragmatism has defined inquiry as one way in which an organism can come to terms with its environment.
"As man possesses the same senses as the lower animals," Darwin wrote, "his fundamental intuitions must be the same." Like a cat I am certain that mice exist.
(16) Words Have Uses
We became interested in how small children learn. Camus, as a child, learned to point in the following way (I follow Vygotsky's explanation). As a baby he attempted to grasp an item too far away to touch. His mother saw him and handed him the item. A series of related attempts turned the infant's self-centered grasping into a social gesture--events trained him to communicate by stretching out his hand. He began to look to his mother when he reached for distant things. Albert was the last person in the room to apprehend the meaning of his own vaguely pointing gesture, but in time the child internalized a social concept. He learned to point, and then he learned to ask for things, to point with words, as he picked up French from the family surrounding him.
By reaching for close items and picking them up, the toddler learned cause and effect. Deeds became words. The outside moved inside. He began to incorporate community verbal practices into how he did things. This world picture began to influence his perceptions.
***
To some extent we considered Camus a guide, although I believe today that he wrote to clarify things for himself more than to instruct others. From Nietzsche Camus took the fact that ethics are (in philosophical jargon) unfounded--not based on proofs. For the most part, here on the Pacific Rim, we don't attempt to derive morality from a proved argument. We leave that sort of thing to preachers from Texas, where reason long ago bent and deformed while defending slavery as a boon to all, especially for the Blacks. Deformed reason has been a hallmark of Southern politics since slavery was instituted. We know why. (In Northern politics, discourse was warped by the need to justify a system built on greed.)
In my lifetime a silly discourse captivated the American English department thinkers, a bag of post-structuralist heads that the long-dead Nietzsche would be forced to drag behind him for twenty years like a sled dog in the Iditarod. In her lifetime, Daisy will encounter new versions of this metaphysical rubbish--each generation invents its own. All anyone can do to counter this is to teach people how to detect nonsense.
Camus held that whatever guiding discourse people followed, it was a choice they had made. Or did he blame habit rather than choice? His thinking evolved.
As an undergraduate I had hoped to find a book somewhere in the 1950s UCLA library stacks that would contain a rational justification for the ethical system I already followed some of the time. In those days you could enter a university library and walk between a block-long array of moldy forgotten texts and pluck from a shelf whatever looked most eccentric. That's the truth.
Nietzsche attempted, without success, to displace the correspondence theory of truth. Let's say that I make a claim: "Over there you see a live oak." That statement is true if it corresponds to the facts--several biologists examine the tree and pronounce it a live oak. That is one way humans employ the term "truth" to this day.
But Nietzsche--and later others--tried to change the meaning of truth, taking Hume's path that whatever we see is seen from a human perspective. We don't see things the way they actually are, he guessed. (Or do we? How can we find out?)
What, then, is truth? What does the term mean?
It might sound odd to start by saying truth is a word, but it is. The meaning of a word, Wittgenstein wrote, is, in most cases, the same thing as its use. For example, I use the term "Daisy" to refer to my grandchild. The meaning is the usage--her parents might have given the child a different name, one not reminiscent of Daisy Miller and Daisy Buchanan.
The meaning of horse is not derived from the equine object. It comes from the use--we employ "horse" to refer to an equine object. (We also use horse to refer to a certain basketball game, a type of poker, etc. Horse has many different uses or meanings.)
For Ludwig Wittgenstein there was nothing mysterious about what words mean.
(17) Appearance
Daisy--I am guessing--will end up with a vocabulary of 30,000 words to describe a universe with more than 30,000 parts. Her sense of what we call reality will be cognitively opaque. Some one will say to her that because the world is not totally knowable, truth is opinion. Yet the words "opinion" and "truth" will still have different grammars.
A traveler who claims not to know that wings exist will fly in a jet to Punta Gorda. A Healdsburg wine tourist reading a menu at the Madrona Manor will say that she believes human reality is an illusion, but if she orders quail eggs and a server brings her a chocolate sundae, she'll call him a name he'll remember two days after he's dead.
***
We assume that the world exists and is knowable (up to a point). That's built in; it's genetics, not metaphysics.
Here in Healdsburg they used to hold an annual festival for artisan makers of fine guitars. The most expert guitar makers in the world would attend; musicians would come to play music for this audience.
At the last of the Healdsburg meetings, a final musician stumbled out onto the stage, limping on two thin legs. He wore a catsup-stained T-shirt, ragged Levis and old brown shoes with no socks. He held no guitar. Timidly he managed to borrow some other fellow's Les Paul and then turned his back to the audience, revealing that his unbelted pants had fallen part way down, exposing the top quarter of his butt crack. He paused to gather himself, then, with two shaking hands, suddenly filled the entire theater with sound. And it was awful.
(18) Integrity
We shared Hume's distrust of grand explanatory theories, which he called "obscure and uncertain speculations." We preferred philosophers who described experiences.
Starting from a few points, "self-evident truths," a Grand Theorist sets out to construct a systematic explanation of our place in the universe. I found it easier to believe that our basic beliefs were innumerable, not just a few.
We valued Francis Bacon's remark that a dream of the imagination should not be mistaken for "a pattern of the world."
Camus thought that if you believed that the world was meaningless, you had options: committing suicide (he noted that people don't kill themselves for metaphysical reasons), hoping (inventing a meaning for the world is the most common solution) or accepting the absurdity of life but taking a positive view (as a kind of liberation).
He asked us to examine our assumptions.
A human perspective is inevitably based on unfounded assumptions (for example, I assume that language exists). Our social system in the West grew in part from Greek and Hebrew assumptions (or unproved beliefs) that God is timeless and doesn't change, that truth is absolute and doesn't change, and that genuine knowledge is true in a timeless, absolute and changeless way. One of the West's old philosophical goals, then, was to acquire and to justify genuine, unchanging absolute knowledge. Yet what we know is doubtful.
After being Susan's partner for 45 years I can't be absolutely certain that she has brown eyes, because she may have been wearing corrective lenses without telling me.
However, I know she has brown eyes, and I can prove it. (A claim to knowledge requires something to back it up, in this case eye witnesses, and eye witnesses are fallible.)
I don't doubt that the external world (the world around me) exists. I can't prove that the world exists, because I have no unbiased witnesses, so I am not claiming to know that the world exists, only to be without doubt that it does. (When I say I am certain, I am saying that I do not doubt something, not that I know it and can prove it.)
Anyway, after quite a few centuries of living with a belief in timeless & absolute mental objects, during which inertia slowed social adjustments, some Europeans began to doubt parts of the old system. The rise of Protestantism, Descartes, science, technology, etc., began to alter the general outlook, I reckon.
Times change.
There is a conservative side in us that wants most things not to change much. The Spartans, admired by Plato and the writers of the United States Constitution, reflected this; the Spartans, as much as anyone, realized their static potential. They remained the same for so long that they rotted apart, and the town of Sparta exists today as a tattered cultural curiosity.
An enduring society needs stability and change, certainty and doubt.
In America organized religion endures. Americans seem unable to give up a system of symbols, beliefs and rites that walls in a safe psychic fort while obscuring the brute reality outside.
***
Camus lived during the peak of existentialism. For the existentialist, reason is useless for solving the problem of meaninglessness, but he finds something beyond reason and jumps its dry white bones until they splinter.
What made existentialism hum in the 1950s was that it returned philosophy to a good question: what is it like to exist? But in many cases, instead of providing a useful description of what it means to be human, existentialists presented explanations, metaphysical speculations of little value.
Camus saw that reason can't locate a purpose for life. For Camus, rational thought is helpful in sorting through our experiences, even if it cannot, in a final sense, explain them. Giving in to the irrational or deifying the irrational is like collapsing on a hot beach. Accepting a Grand Explanation is intellectual death.
In the 1840s, Americans who lived Back East discovered in themselves a terrible urge to reach the gold fields of California. Many seekers had to haul small wagons or even push wheelbarrows across the great American desert. Travelers asked in forts for maps although no trustworthy maps existed. The westward movers kept asking until some sun-addled trapper, squint-eyed from crunching intoxicating grasses, would nod slowly, accept a small bag of copper coins and then sketch a route in the dirt with a stick, sending them into Death Valley, although ignorant of the Kern River, which eventually Merle Haggard would describe in a song.
We seek explanations--see Plato--where no sound explanation is possible. (If you try to evaluate Plato's philosophy, you will find it hard to assign a monetary value to something so worthless.)
In the 1950s I hadn't yet heard of Plato's love of the Spartan totalitarians or of Heidegger's membership in the Nazi Party. From Camus I learned that the goal was to pause at the place where one can make a leap of faith and then not to jump. "Being able to remain on that dizzying crest--that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge."
(19) What Is Given
Certainties are, by definition, matters we don't doubt. That's all they are. Camus first held that the only certainty is that nothing is certain. Later he mentioned other certainties.
A certainty is basic to our species if everyone shares it. "Language exists" is a basic certainty.
"We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have . . . ," C. S. Peirce wrote. "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts."
It's unreasonable to pretend to doubt something if you have no reason to doubt it. (A philosopher asked, "Do you doubt you had a mother?")
Camus' mother happened to be deaf. He knew that. Deafness can be faked, and what he knew was theoretically uncertain. Knowledge is questionable, while certainty is unquestioned. That is a difference between the grammars of "know" and "certain" that Wittgenstein pointed out. ("Certain knowledge" would be "unquestioned questioned," which lacks sense.)
In THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS, we read that defiance gives life its value. But Camus also wrote, "The point is to live."
Let's say that in 2003 you were a Moslem living in San Francisco. You attended a Giants' game, where agents of President Walking Eagle arrested you, blindfolded you, and put you on a jet to Saudi Arabia. You understood that you were to be handed over to Arabs for torture. You knew that you had done nothing wrong but would soon confess to any crime. Would Camus consider suicide a reasonable option?
No. There was a good chance that the Saudi torturers, experienced and expert, unlike American torturers, would not believe your false confessions and would, in a few months, set free your husk. You should hang in there.
A tortoise was sunning her back when a bear said to her, "One day you will die. There's no god who can help you, and the other tortoises can do nothing to change your fate."
The tortoise replied. "Then I'm free from the rules of gods and free from the rules of tortoises." But can she be free from the perspective of tortoises and remain a tortoise?
Camus claimed that integrity has no need of rules. From another perspective, my integrity might be described as my following certain practices, perhaps the rules I absorbed on my mother's lap along with other social practices that in time became intuitive.
***
The Greek gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaseless & useless work, pushing a large stone up a hill, letting it roll back to the bottom, pushing the stone up again, and so on. His "whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing," Camus wrote. But Sisyphus didn't work like a donkey engine. He was conscious of his situation, much as a factory worker in China is conscious of her situation. (All work is useless--see "The Big Lebowsky.")"Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged," Camus wrote. When we admit that the world is purposeless, we "silence all the idols." Each of us is left in charge of his or her own life. The struggle is enough to fill your heart. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," Camus concludes.
***
Philosophy begins with what is given. For Camus, what was given was life itself. His pragmatic conclusion was to live as long as possible and to play many roles. For a while that was enough.
20. A Holistic Perspective
Mary Beard wrote that "Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, composer of the Indian national anthem and compulsive world traveler, is said to have cried at the sheer 'barbarian ugliness' when he first saw the Parthenon."
Tagore's native language carved the carcass of the world at different joints than the Greek language had done. Tagore had grown up in India when its rulers were nasty, British and short. His perspective differed from Beard's.
The problem is not that what I see doesn't justify distinctions like ugly and beautiful. The problem is that what we see justifies many distinctions. There's no single best way of dividing buildings into types. There is no best way to group distinctions together. But there are useful ways, depending on our goals.
"Nothing exists apart from the whole," wrote Nietzsche. (The claim that the best way to divide reality is not to divide it at all is one of ten thousand helpful perspectives.)
Daisy and I adopt a holistic perspective when we need it.
(21) Shendao Does the Right Thing
In the Shendao's imaginary world, things follow their own nature. What is natural is what is right. Whatever you do is natural because you are doing it.
The four of us followed the usual practices of our era. Mowry, Jack and Tim found jobs, married and fathered children. I married Susan, who taught in elementary schools to put me through graduate school.
Jobs change. Susan next put herself through a graduate program. She became an acquisitions librarian. I taught writing and literature at Empire State College in New York (a newly invented college dedicated to mentoring working adults one at a time). We raised our children. In the mornings I read old stories about a Chinese admonisher we call Confucius. That was back in the 1970s when nearly everyone was still alive.
Confucianism, of course, had been built on something older, a form of ethical humanism. The early Confucians believed that goodness could be taught and that people would live in harmony if guided by wise maxims and sound rituals. For some Confucians the goal was to perfect a permanent and absolute guiding discourse.
Not everyone agreed. Shendao, a rebel, rejected the final authority of social conventions. The ideographic Chinese writing from his era, 25 centuries ago, supports more than one interpretation, and I've nothing to add to that debate, which seems unlikely to end soon. I leave it to epigraphers. Also Shendao's writings, like those of Anaximander, his Greek contemporary, survive only as fragments in the commentaries of other writers; interpretations of such texts are untrustworthy.
The ancient Chinese rebels against Confucius had no group name for themselves. They lived during a time of pointless carnage.
I thought of Shendao and others as independent rebels in a predominantly Confucian culture. Or as predecessors of Zen Buddhism--but Buddhism had not yet reached China, so perhaps the rebels practiced something like modern Zen but without the religious elements.
Or you might consider the Chinese rebels linguistic philosophers, working with insights that would not be reached in the West for more than 2,000 years.
Perhaps, Jack suggested once, the Chinese rebels became skeptical about the old Confucian search for absolute ethical rules and rites because they saw that language shifted over time, sentences changed meaning in new contexts, and words occasionally required new readings, which were later subject to change.
In my own era of useless slaughters, I began to think about these Chinese rebels. Their ancient views reached me in English translations that had been molded by the slender fingers of much later Buddhist metaphysicians & by the hot tongs of Japanese zennists. Beneath a superimposed modern form lay a discourse that was older, more reasonable and not intuitive. That ancient discourse was Asian in origin, and not Buddhist (Buddhism reflects the Indo-European two-world perspective).
***
Not much is known about Shendao. He believed that not even a clod of dirt can miss following its own nature. Therefore nothing we do is wrong.
Shendao's guide to behavior offers no guidance.
The ancient Chinese were skeptics about our uses of language but not radical skeptics in the European philosophical sense. They didn't ask pseudo-questions like "Does language exist?"
"If language doesn't exist," Wittgenstein might have said, although he didn't, "how would we find that out?" And he might have answered, "I don't doubt that language exists--doubt doesn't work in that way."
"Do not use worthies and sages," Shendao wrote, predating zen by a thousand years. Following a leader cramped the people, from his perspective. Conforming to social systems deprived us of spontaneity. According to Shendao we already understand how to act, so we can dispense with the Confucian search for rules of behavior. Shendao's slogan was "Abandon knowledge." He also suggested that people "discard self." Without our verbal concept of self, we might leave egoism behind.
Maybe not.
Shendao, I expect, was not advising the Chinese to abandon their knowledge of how to grow peach trees or how to refine sugar. He hoped that people would, in general, follow a less regimented course in the expectation that intuition would free them from mistakes they got pushed into by social conventions and rigid rules of codified ethics.
Sure, Shendao sounds a bit like Nietzsche, and "abandon advice on how to behave" resembles advice on how to behave. Without social conventions we wouldn't be human--no one, including Shendao, would ask us to give up all conventions, not that we could.
(22) Language As Tragedy
In Laozi's imaginary world, we examine a Golden Age of simplicity that never existed.
In the 1960s the four of us scattered around the country to study in formal and informal ways. Outside of Buffalo, New York, I began to read early texts of rebellion in China.
According to an ancient legend, the DAODE JING was jotted down by a scholar, Laozi or Lao Tzu, who, as the story goes, had been required by a guard at a border post to write down a set of guiding principles before being allowed to leave China. Laozi complied with the guard's demand by writing conventional advice turned upside down. For example, in a paternalistic society, Laozi exalted the feminine.
Legends aside, the Daode Jing, compiled about 2,500 years ago, is probably a collection of fragments from several unnamed authors, as is often the case with old texts.
Of course the translations I found in the last century mostly came--I repeat myself--thickly buttered with Indo-European mysticism, which reached China about a thousand years after the deaths of Shendao, Laozi and Zhuangzi. Scrape off the ineffable stuff, and the plain toast is dry and crunchy.
The Confucians argued that our guiding discourse helps to shape us, and Laozi agreed, but this conventional shaping was, for Confucius, necessary; for Laozi, it presented a set of half-truths.
One argument might be that language is an instrument of social control and something to be avoided. From that perspective we should, to the extent possible, discard verbal learning and reject verbal distinctions, names and deliberate actions. Or so they say.
My guess is that Laozi did believe that discourse and names constrain us to obey. He struggled against Confucian guiding discourse. He questioned authority.
I began to wonder if the anti-language approach was meant by the Chinese to apply only to certain aspects of life. In ethical disputes, according to the mainstream ancient Chinese, perhaps, discussion and ritual formed the bedrock of community authority. From that orthodox perspective, if that perspective existed, the question became: was guiding discourse a good or bad thing?
I was, while looking at ancient Chinese philosophy, attending graduate school in Buffalo. It occurred to me that the most frequently quoted line in world literature was "dao ke dao fei chang dao," a sentence found in the DAODE JING.
This is how a Buddhist might translate the most quoted line (from Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 1). "The Tao (Way) that can be told of is not the eternal Tao." The dao, then, is for Buddhists, a mystery. For some Buddhists, that raises a question. If the dao that can be talked about is not the true dao, why write a book about the false dao?
In a different account, a dao was, in Chinese, a merely a mundane guiding principle, perspective, discourse or bit of advice, not something eternally true. In that case the famous line might read something like this: "The maxims (dao) we call the dao aren't constant."
***
It seemed to me as that two most famous early rebels against Confucian convention, Laozi and Zhuangzi, disagreed in part. For Laozi language and guiding discourses were, in some sense, unnatural, while Zhuangzi considered discourse part of what made us human.
Humans are linguistic mammals. Without language we grin like President Walking Eagle. And keep in mind that meanings are not always supposed to be clear. (A note for Daisy: ambiguity can be a useful tool.)
***
The ancient Chinese rebels focused on how different communities create different world views, not on the Western insight that each individual has a somewhat different perspective.
How should we behave when two communities argue? Perhaps we can agree that, because we are limited by our own cultural perspectives, we should respect each other's views. Live and let live. We continue to hold our own views, of course. We retain our cultural perspectives and our ability to judge from those perspectives. (When the Taliban threw acid in the faces of Moslem girls because they went to school, I knew how to react, not confused by cultural relativity.)
The opposite of treading cautiously among different cultures can be seen in the delusional rushes of ferocious warriors, something the Chinese endured too often.
(23) Valuing Weakness
In a New Yorker cartoon by BEK, two mice crouch outside a mouse hole in a room. One mouse says, "I'd much prefer to hide inside walls with original moldings." (Linguistic philosophy sketched in a cartoon.)
I prefer original moldings to replacement moldings because as a child I learned the concepts "original" and "replacement," along with which should be valued. Each time we learn a linguistic concept, Vygotsky claims, we learn how to react to that concept "in the right way." Learning a concept is learning how to behave.
An early Chinese rebel might say, "Replacements are better than originals," which would be liberating, in a way. And it might tend to make us skeptical about verbal guidance.
The DAODE JING contains a heap of reversed maxims, many of them delightful and even usable in some contexts. People still love the DAODE JING because they are charmed by the oddly reversed maxims Yet the point of reversing a maxim is to show that no maxim is absolute or permanent. "A penny saved is useless."
Laozi believed that names come in pairs, "born together." To learn a word is to learn its opposite at the same time. Each distinction we make creates two names. "Up" and "down" are a pair, according to Laozi 2500 years ago.
In the 20th century Wittgenstein will make a further point: that language does not consist solely of names. (What does it tell us about philosophy when Wittgenstein has to insist on this?)
The ancient Chinese saw that as children master concepts, they internalize society's preferences. A father says to a daughter, "Please hand me that pretty doll," and the child learns the use of "pretty" (and "ugly," as well).
Laozi played with opposites. He might tell us to value the ugly, for example. He might attempt to undo--or partly undo--some of the attitudes embedded in us by language and culture.
***
The old Cosby sitcom on television portrayed an educated black family that was warm, loving, clean, well off, supportive, kindly, liberal and decent. Later a rival sitcom, "Married With Children," was developed to mock the Cosby show. In "Married With Children" the Cosby virtues were reversed. The white family members were self-involved, poor, insensitive, uncaring, disloyal, unwashed, conservative, sexist and bawdy. This disgraceful comedy show (a favorite of mine) was a modest success, especially in the prison systems; but well educated people, by and large, either didn't watch it or watched it in secret. Educated tube watchers were strongly committed to humane (Confucian) maxims and could not bear to watch their liberal maxims being turned upside down for comic effect.
The white and black men who created "Married With Children" believed that the Cosby perspective was an inadequate simplification of how we live our lives--so they presented the opposite. Watching both shows you might get something approaching the complexity of the human situation.
Our culture and language help shape our values, help mold the distinctions we make, and help teach us how to act on certain distinctions. None of this, the Chinese rebels suggested, makes a constantly reliable guide to good behavior.
We should not exaggerate the centrality of words--cicadas act on distinctions without language.
The ancient Chinese rebels saw that different languages guide us somewhat differently and that no one could demonstrate that her language or her guiding discourse was absolutely or permanently right. We can't abandon language, either.
We learn language in ordinary social contexts--in the mundane flow of our lives. (Wittgenstein reminds us that language has meaning only in the midst of our activities.)
As children we learn words, enabling us to make the same choices as the adults around us.
I inherited a value system from my culture. (Culture makes us human; destroying a culture is grammatically related to, but not identical with, a genocide.)
Laozi suggested that we value weakness. "When people are born, they're soft; When they die, they end up rigid." My father, a machinist, wore a small gold football on a gold chain around his neck. He'd been a starting guard on an undefeated junior college football team that had won a national championship. He taught me that when I felt ill, I might as well go to work and get paid for my time.
Laozi gave the lesser side equal weight, not because weak is better than strong but to awaken us . There are moments when it's better to bend with the wind. There are times when it's good to be unyielding.
(24) Wild One
I had a hard time understanding what is meant by "The five tones cause one's ears to go deaf" (from THE DAODE JING, translated by Robert G. Henricks). Apparently there was a convention in ancient China that there existed five and only five tones. The convention made it hard for a Chinese listener to credit the rich gradations of tones found in nature or in another culture's voices.
Rebels sometimes say that they prefer undistorted natural senses to trained & conditioned senses, as if that were an option.
Some early Chinese rebels considered culture unnatural, but what could be more natural for a human child than to absorb a language and a world view? Our genes, Darwin might have said, if he had known about genes, will provide an explanation for how the absorption begins.
***
We sometimes seem to have a problem differentiating the things that exist in the world (rotting fish) and the things that exist only in language (Iraq's imaginary weapons of mass destruction in 2003). Peter Viereck, a conservative, made the following grammatical remark: "Reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away." He was defining the term "reality." Or Charles Sanders Peirce: "we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be. " Daisy has come up against obstacles that thwart her. As Harry G. Frankfurt put it, Some obstacles "are independent of us. That is the origin of our concept of reality, which is essentially a concept of what limits us, of what we cannot alter or control at will." Mortality will serve as an example.
Most generations have included those who attempt to deny reality. The most recent were the post-structuralists and followers of deconstruction. For them, at the start, no facts existed, only narratives, and all narratives were equally valid. A discourse describing the Holocaust and a discourse denying it were both valid. When the inanity of this position finally dawned on the deconstructionists, they made well-intentioned attempts to find something foundational; none of these attempts worked--they mainly consisted of finding this or that group of badly treated people and claiming that ill-treatment people had direct access to the truth.
***
Perhaps guiding discourses are as natural as oatmeal.
There are (obviously) many ways to look at one thing. My wife asked recently, "Why are you limping?" I responded, "I've been limping for five years. I have arthritis." She laughed heartily. She has always been (I say this without irony) a lot of fun.
Long ago, Chinese rebels argued that guiding discourses lacked constancy. Some of the rebels, but not all of them, held that Nature needed no guidance. A daisy grows in silence.
Daisy, on the other hand, is three now and seldom silent. She's learning to participate in dinner conversations, for which she has prepared two questions. She asks both of each adult seated at the table. (1) "What do you do at school?" and (2) "How were you born?" I guess she thinks that when adults leave the house, they go to a school (as she does). The second question was explained to me, perhaps, by Sarah, my daughter. Daisy asks how you were born because she was born through a C-section, and she's sorting out the options.
Verbal guidance might require interpretation (or there might be a customary response that everyone follows). Or one example of verbal guidance might contradict another example. The DAODE JING does not tell us that guiding discourses are self-defeating, only that they are not fixed. Verbal advice lacks the near-constancy found in nature where a daisy is a daisy.
The advice we live by relates to the world in changing ways. Conventions change. I responded to army commands in the same manner was those around me. I was guided by custom and a degenerate corporal in interpreting the command of "left face!" The most important thing I learned (from Larry Moss) in the military, however, was that if we were seated in the middle of a full room and an officer entered the room, everyone was supposed to stand at attention; but that if I remained seated (following Larry's example) while everyone else jumped up, no officer could see me. Once I learned that, I remained seated.
People have slowly shifting rules and customs. They have ways to judge rule following.
A Chinese rebel, asked what she is rebelling against, might respond, "Language." Nietzsche might say, "Christian Europe." In THE WILD ONE, when the protagonist is asked what he is rebelling against, he responds, "What have you got?"
(25) Zhuangzi Enjoys Cultural Relativism
In Zhuangzi's fables the large and the small have their uses.
Some of the early Chinese wanted to create an Eden, a place where "correct" was a term that had no use. They hoped to rely on instinct, for the most part, and follow a path like the one that runs from Wright's Beach to Goat Rock.
In the late 1960s I began to read Zhuangzi, "the laughing philosopher," a Chinese cobbler who'd lived about 2,300 years before me. Zhuangzi attributed the following comment on perspectivism to Wang Ni. "The way I see it, the rules of benevolence and righteousness and the paths of right and wrong are all hopelessly snarled and jumbled."
Camus had experienced the loss of belief in unchanging Christian rules as a serious matter. Some ancient Chinese rebels rejected the unchanging Confucian rules. A few rebels attempted to reject or modify the shaping power of language itself. (How do I express an anti-language position?--by turning cartwheels?) Zhuangzi took a different approach. He didn't see the lack of a final moral authority as tragedy. He found it comical.
Reading Zhuangzi in translation I became engaged in developing ordinary ideas rather than in developing accurate histories.
***
According to Zhuangzi, as paraphrased by a source I have lost, long ago in the north ocean there lived a fish who was so huge his waistline measured three thousand miles. (I am working from memory.) One day at daybreak he turned into a giant bird. The bird had a large back. When he flew, his wings hung like clouds in the sky. To boost wings that size, the winds had to pile up beneath them. Only then could the bird rise up on top of the winds and shoulder across the blue sky. Once he rose and set his eyes on the south, nothing could stop him.The cicada used to laugh at the giant bird, saying, "When I try hard and fly up, I might get as high as the peach tree. Sometimes I fall short and flutter back to the ground. How is bird going to rise a thousand miles and fly south?"
A giant yak stood by, as big as a storm covering the county. The yak knew how to be big, but it didn't know how to catch mice.
--from FREE AND EASY WANDERING by Zhuangzi
Perhaps we ought not take a specific community's view too seriously.
While Western thinkers weighed the imaginary problem of how to step into the same river twice, Zhuangzi considered something more amusing: we use a constantly shifting language to help partition the stuff we perceive in the world. Each animal in the shoe-repairer's fable talks in a practical way, as you've noticed, making workaday sense. Its guiding discourse emerges from the way it lives, from its form of life. Being big is good, but what if you are too big to catch a mouse? Being small is good, too,
but. . . .
For a time I believed that this Chinese insight negated Camus' search for a viable guiding discourse, but it didn't. Camus looked for useful discourse so he could guide himself, not for a universal point of view from which to grade others. The sort of advice he gave himself--have as many experiences as possible--emerged from his lived perspective.
Zhuangzi observed that the linguistic distinctions we make help to shape our choices and behavior (so that Camus values many experiences over few experiences, for example). Every guiding discourse is a natural. What else could it be? he asked. Zhuangzi was not anti-language.
The cobbler nods in agreement with dogmatists when they claim that their doctrines are natural. Of course they are (for what it's worth).
Where the Daode Jing tells us that all doctrines are wrong, including this one, the Cobbler tells us with a wink that doctrines and chemical reactions are, in an absolute sense, neither right nor wrong.
To know something is to master a conceptual scheme and its discrimination patterns; you master a discourse that you can test in the usual ways. We have systems for evaluating discourses, and our standards remain internal to the system.
"On a soft morning, Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner and Beyonce walked together down to the beach at Monte Rio. People considered Garbo, Gardner and Beyonce beautiful women, but the steelhead trout saw them and dived to the bottom of the river. The western blue birds flew in terror. The black-tailed deer and jackrabbits bolted into the brush. The California quail ran for their lives."
Adapted from a story by Zhuangzi
(26) Discourse
Someone said that we have an inner guide. Another replied, "If I have an inner guide, why should I follow it?"
If the only choice I have is to follow my inner guide, why discuss it?
According to Zhuangzi, the cobbler, whatever guides me (so that I assent to this but not to that) is for the most part learned. The cobbler is best known for the following short narrative (as translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English). "Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamed I was a butterfly flying happily here and there, enjoying life without knowing who I was. Suddenly I woke up, and I was indeed Zhuangzi. Did Zhuangzi dream he was a butterfly, or did the butterfly dream he was Zhuangzi? There must be some distinction between Zhuangzi and the butterfly."
Imagine a discussion between the cobbler and Descartes with the cobbler pointing out distinctions between Zhuangzi and the butterfly.
The difference between language and wind blowing through a knothole in a fence is that language is about something. The divisions in the world, as we see them, often inform the divisions in language, but the relationships between the two divisions wander, depending on our purposes.
If there were one correct correspondence between language and objects in the world, we would know it by now--or perhaps there is a correct correspondence, but it is not knowable.
This is a little repetitive, but . . . Hume wrote, summing up old problems in philosophy, that if "a controversy has long been kept on foot and remains still undecided, we may presume that there is some ambiguity in the expression and that the disputants affix different ideas to the terms employed in the controversy." Otherwise we would, being fellow humans, one form of life, see things the same way.
Language is about something, but what language is about depends on the context (including climate and age) in which it is used, and not just the verbal context.
It must be obvious that progressives, liberals, conservatives and rich lazy loafers like Walking Eagle employ words differently (in part). They make different distinctions about the world and follow somewhat different guiding discourses. Each believes the discourse of others to be too large or too small. Of course they also share signs and grammar, or they could not understand one another at all.
The realization that talk is natural might make me more tolerant of other views while I continue talking in my own way. I see that there are many perspectives; I use my own.
When we value peace above war, we do it within a discourse system or language game or world view. In one framework, peace is better than war. From another perspective, Fascism, for example, war is better than peace. This does not make war and peace equal from some cosmic neutral viewpoint. From a neutral viewpoint, things are neutral, not equal.
From one perspective (not mine) a serial killer is as natural as a daisy.
Before we had language, there were boundaries, the cobbler tells us. We at times ignore some of those natural boundaries. President Walking Eagle famously ignored the boundaries of Hurricane Katrina.
What we know and can prove is limited. In that sense, reality remains unknown, "the unknown context of our ways of knowing," as one person put it. Is reality what we know added to what we don't know? Or is reality a word we employ in many ways?
Do we know that we know nothing? How would we prove that claim? How would we differentiate between knowledge and ignorance?
Cats know about food. A cat knows how to catch mice, mice know how to find seeds, and I know how to heat up a bowl of split pea soup. Which of us is wrong?
Guiding discourses change. That made the cobbler skeptical--to a point--about guiding discourses.
Does a commitment to Realism change how I spend my day? I eat the same toast as before. Would Antirealism improve my breakfast?
A good softball pitcher throws to the spot indicated by her catcher. While she was learning to pitch, she thought about what she was doing and listened to her coach's corrections. Eventually throwing to the right spot became second nature, as if she were throwing in an unmediated way. Throwing became intuitive, in the same way that talking became immediate and intuitive for Daisy.
When something becomes intuitive, customary, I act without thinking. The voice in my head falls silent. I become absorbed in doing something. I lose self-consciousness.
A softball pitcher can learn something new. The danger is that, once she begins to think, she will think too much. She will steer the new pitch, losing the zip that comes only by abandoning conscious control. She will become a rationalist. (She will exaggerate the role of rational thought.)
Discourse is based on something else, in the sense that language had to emerge from something not linguistic.
(27) Rights & Rules
Ethical behavior is hard to measure--I do my share of the household chores early in the morning before Susan gets up, so they don't count. Also, I do them wrong.
According to ancient Chinese insights, there was no point in searching for permanent ethical rules. No such rules exist. The meanings of words change, and the meanings of rules change. That was the difference the rebels had with Confucius, who looked for permanent rules to follow. William James wrote much later: "There is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. "
It's reasonable to search for the origins of rules. I once tried to find out why, in baseball, a batter running to first base or home base is allowed to overrun those bases without getting tagged out but not allowed to overrun second or third base.
More than a century ago baseball was sometimes played in the winter by skaters on ice. Skaters can't stop quickly, and they were allowed to overrun all four bases. The skaters wanted to continue to overrun bases in the summer, but they met arguments from the barefoot summer players. Eventually a compromise was reached. Players were allowed to overrun two of the four bases.
***
Despite the nearly infinite complexity of moral problems, I usually do the right thing. There have been moments when I wasn't sure what was right. I also made mistakes or on occasion chose to do a bad thing and knew it when I did it.
In the 1970s, the Shaw of Iran and his secret police were torturing political opponents, who ranged from the religiously delusional to moderates to progressives to Stalinists.
I was sitting in my office at a college on Long Island one rainy morning, smoking a cigar (which will give you an idea of which century it was), when an administrator knocked on my door. This tall dude, a Jew, told me that an Iranian Moslem, in New York on a student visa, was about to be deported back to Iran, where he, a known opponent of the Shaw, would have his nipples pulled out with pliers. The Iranian kid's visa deadline had passed. The only thing that would block his deportation was for me to enroll him as my independent study student and fake the starting day, backdating the document so that the young fellow would look as if he had been enrolled for weeks. "It's up to you," the tall dude said. "I can't ask you to do it."
The administrator had given me a chance, then, to commit a crime against the State of New York, weaken the integrity of its state university and cheapen every credit the genuine students earned. I could honor my professional commitments and refuse to backdate official college documents, which would send a young man off to the torture chambers of Iran, or I could abandon honor, file fake documents, and take the easy way out.
A young man with black hair and red-brown skin peered at me from the hallway.
I nodded, then backdated the official documents. Next I turned to my tape player, put on Fats Domino and listened to a 2/4 backbeat. Interesting but ancient even then. Musical tastes change.
And only a few decades later, two Presidents of the United States, Christians, shipped guests of America out of New York to be tortured in foreign countries. In fairness to their families, I won't use these assholes real names (I'll call them George W., best remembered as a major source of methane, and William Jefferson, walking dildo).
Of course, William Jefferson sent only 14 people to be tortured. By tortured, I mean only this and nothing more: in one documented case a prisoner ordered transported by President Clinton (oops) was kept blindfolded and handcuffed for seven months, beaten with fists and chairs, stripped naked and given electric shocks, tied to a crucifix and raped, and then released on the ground that he was innocent.
At the time, many religious Americans believed, on no evidence, that inalienable rights were granted to humans by God. Some of these same people also argued that it was a good thing to torture Moslem prisoners. The way to reconcile these positions--that God gave each of us human rights and that it's good to torture Moslems--is to hold that Moslems are not human, in which case God gave them no rights, and it's moral to grate them like carrots. (Never mind that it is illegal to torture a dog or cat.)
Torture appealed to the Republican voting base; when the Republicans appealed to the base in 2008, they appealed to the base.
PART TWO
(28) The Problem
(28) The Problem
What governs how we exist? If you can answer that, you can ask what we know and where things begin for us and how we should behave.
In Europe people held that moral rules came from a god, that we came from a god. When that belief faltered, philosophers attempted to ground moral behavior in reason; that failed with Hume's Law: it is impossible to derive through reason an "ought" from an "is"--there is no logical bridge between a fact and a value.
Some went from Hume to relativism and then, if they pushed on, to nihilism.
The rebels in ancient China thought it impossible to come up with a permanent set of rules to live by because the meanings of words change.
We have the ability to write a string of words that look like a sentence but lack sense. Jon Stewart: "The American people can fart rainbows." Politics is filled with claims as empty as Stewart's, but we take them seriously because they are resemble meaningful remarks.
A man standing on a street corner in Denver, 5,000 feet above sea level, says fearlessly, "I am afraid of heights." Denver is wide; what he fears is narrowness.
Kay Ryan commented on words in her poem "SHIFT."
Words have loyalties
to so much
we don't control. . . .
It's hard for us
to imagine how small
a part we play in
holding up the tall spires we believe
our minds erect. . . .
Our morality and world picture must be grounded in something. Hume suggested "custom and habit," but where do customs and habits come from? On what are they grounded? What is given?
(29) Wittgenstein
"The dog trots freely in the street . . .
and the things he sees
are his reality"
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
and the things he sees
are his reality"
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Susan and I drove with Sarah, our older daughter, from Long Island to Southern California. Sarah was entering college at Scripps in Claremont, where she had a scholarship. A year or two later our younger daughter, Maggie, chose Sarah Lawrence, so I drove her to Yonkers and found a place to park.
Maggie borrowed money for tuition. As she sat through a glum orientation (in the 1990s, many wealthy Sarah Lawrence students swanned about on campus in heroin-chic black blouses, black robes and black pants), I drifted across a tiny hill, smoking a cheap pipe and wondering what it would have been like to grow up rich. My father had been a machinist and then a millwrights' union business agent. My mother, a high school dropout, had founded and directed the first cooperative nursery school on the Palos Verdes peninsula. The school was famous; my mother, forgotten.
As I walked I silently practiced asking directions to the building where I was supposed to meet Maggie before lunch, Titsworthy Hall. Eventually I entered a tiny campus bookstore, where I picked up a paperback titled ON CERTAINTY, turned it over and looked at the first sentence, which read, "If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest."
I bought the paperback. There are a many books, well stocked with error, that explicate Wittgenstein's ON CERTAINTY; I won't attempt to duplicate them here.
Actions speak louder than words--we can see what humans do not doubt (what humans hold certain) by observing how people behave. A man reaches for an apple. He has no genuine doubt that the apple exists or that he himself exists or that he can hold a piece of fruit in one hand. The man bites into the apple, pulp and juice fill his mouth, he does not doubt.
What undergirds our world view is lack of doubt. Wittgenstein wrote: " I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal." This is the inherited formative certainty with which an infant reaches for her mother, the certainty from which nouns later flow. This certainty is given, much as life is a given.
We don't genuinely doubt, for example, that things exist around us. I can say that I doubt that a chair exists, but I sit in one. Things exist--that's fundamental. That belief is part of a system of words and rules that enable us to doubt that unicorns exist in the same way that zebras exist. (Certainty provides the structure that makes existential doubt possible.)
One consequence of Descartes' analysis of doubt was that it eventually led some thinkers to claim we lack an essence. Wittgenstein freed us from their sleight of hand.
Darwin classified us as a mammalian form of life. Mammals usually protect their young. I might not call this morality or empathy, depending on how we use those terms, but it's where they begin.
Camus held that we have an essence. (Morality depends on essence.)
Ancient Chinese rebels believed that our natures are partly shaped by culture, including language.
Hume thought that morality sprang from cultural training, which raised a question: on what is culture founded?
Perspectivism is the belief that truth is true only within a particular perspective. For our form of life, what we believe true grows from a point of view determined by the nature of our senses (this is more or less the same for all of us) and shaped by our nurture (which differs somewhat from place to place).
To be fully human is to be acculturated. Cultures emerge from the point of view of our species, which is why people of different cultures can learn to communicate. Their cultures both reflect the same form of life.
One might object that I have spent 50 years learning what everyone already understands: nature and nurture are the source of morality; and nature precedes nurture. The seed precedes the forest. The forest shapes the tree.
Examining obvious is the function of philosophy. My curiosity has been satisfied.
End
