Is Love an Art or a Craft?

Irving Singer was a philosopher whose Times obit (“Irving Singer, M.I.T. Professor Who Wrote ‘The Nature of Love,’ Dies at 89," NYT, 2/15/15) describes how he had written a three volume work devoted to one of the most over used words in the English language, one whose definition has stymied and challenged thinkers throughout history. The Times obit quotes Singer thusly, “This, like so many philosophical works, began as an attempt to understand my own inadequacies. Everyone in my family persuaded me that I ought to be more loving, which troubled me. So like most philosophers, I dealt with the criticism by constructing a theory and a philosophy which enabled me to dismiss their ideas.” Singer who according to the Times taught for many years at M.I.T. seems have had a sensibility that in many respects was closer to that of humanistic psychologists like Erich Fromm who wrote The Art of Loving, who also had a philosophical background (as a product of the Frankfurt school). On the basis of the obit, Singer did not appear to be a utilitarian or consequentialist like Peter Singer or Derek Parfitt. He was not concerned with the kind of ethical problems that bugged trolleyologists like Philippa Foot and the description of his work in the obit with its emphasis on emotion doesn’t seem to tie it to language philosophers or the work of phenomenologists like Husserl or Heidegger. But the very inception of Singer’s project makes one think about how other great works of philosophy might have come into being. Did Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason derive the fact that his family found him to be was unreasonable? Did Heidegger’s Being and Time result from the philosopher’s problems with lateness or in the case of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a great mind’s inability to deal with varying kinds of absence (God, money, an empty cupboard). Could Sartre’s existentialism and his obsession with nothingness have derived from the fact that when he was was a little boy, he frequently came home to an empty refrigerator?

Confucius Say

“Confucius say” was a favorite way that Charlie Chan would introduce his aphoristic solutions to crime. In an op-ed piece in The Times (“A Confucian Constitution For China,” NYT, 7/10/12), Jiang Qing who is identified as founder of the Yan-ming Confucian Academy and Daniel A. Bell who is editing his forthcoming book, A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future offer the Charlie Chan approach to politics. Qing and Bell essentially suggest that the pressure on China to democratize is misguided. They argue that “the will of the majority may not be moral” and that “when there is a clash between the short-term interests of the populace and the long-term interests of mankind, as is the case with global warming, the people’s short-term interests become the political priority.” Surely these points about democracy are not limited to China and their  argument is in line with thinkers like the British philosopher Derek Parfit who tries to bridge the gap between Hume and Kant in his book On W hat Matters. Qing and Bell propose "a tricameral legislature" composed of a House of Exemplary Persons, a House of the Nation and a House of the People. The House of the Nation and the House of the People, sound a little like the Senate and the House of Representatives. The House of Exemplary Persons, which smacks of divine right, is where the problem lies. It’s nice to think that we could all agree on what is right, but when it relies on giving authority to any one religious group or order, no matter how benign that order might be, we are back to the very reasons why the founding fathers insisted on the separation of church and state.

Philosophy's Flights

Photo of A.J. Ayer

In “Philosophy’s Flights” in last Sunday’s Review (NY Times, 7/1/12), Jim Holt asks “Is Philosophy Literature?” He’s talking about analytic philosophers, philosophers of language like Bertrand Russell and later Thomas Nagel, Phlippa Foot (of trolley problem fame), Harvard’s Hilary Putnam, Kwame Apiah, and Colin McGinn who all ultimately came to the fore as a reaction against the unverifiable propositions of metaphysics. Of course today there are philosophers like Derek Parfit whose On What Matters attempts to bridge the gap between the limitations of the subjective (utilitarian) mind and broader ethical considerations. By the way, Holt’s piece is a selection from a longer series called The Stone, which can be found on the Times blog. Holt answers his own question with a resounding yes but not before he makes the following qualification (in the longer version) which is reminiscent of those commercials for new urine flow medications on CNN that offer a list of disclaimers. “Today analytic philosophy has a broader scope then it used to...it’s less obsessed with dissecting languages; its more continuous with the sciences (this partly due to the American philosopher Willard Quine who argued that language really has no fixed system of meanings for philosophers to analyze). Yet whether they are concerned with the nature of consciousness, of space-time or of the good life, analytic philosophers continue to lay heavy stress on logical rigor in their writings. The result, according to Martha Nussbaum (herself a sometime member of the tribe), is a prevailing style that is ‘correct, scientific, abstract, hygienically pallid’—a style meant to serve as ‘a kind of all-purpose solvent.’” In this little passage Holt takes back what he giveth away and it’s funny that missing from his list is the ne plus ultra of all language philosophy A.J. Ayer’s wondrous Language, Truth and Logic which does for analytic philosophy what Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style did for grammar. Still there are two exhibits that Holt offers in defense of analytic philosophy as literature, Quine’s article “On What There Is” which Holt comments “can be read over and over again, like a poem” and Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, a compendium of three Princeton lectures which don’t contain “a dogmatic or pompous word...and not a dull one either” that seem de rigueur for anyone interested in his initial query. And then there are the first and last lines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus “The world is everything that is the case” and “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wasn’t Wittgenstein the master of philosophical haiku?

On What Matters

Peter Singer is a great utilitarian philosopher and the author of a classic tome called Animal Liberation. He supports euthanasia for certain people, while decrying the confinement of pregnant pigs. In the May 20 issue of the TLS, Singer reviews Derek Parfit’s On What Matters, a book that takes aim at the ethical relativism that derives from Hume. Singer writes, “Reason applies to means not ends. Hence, Hume famously held, it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of a finger, and equally not contrary to reason to choose my total ruin to prevent a trivial harm to a stranger.” What is so delightful about philosophical treatises like Parfit’s two volumes (which run to 1,400 pages) and Singer’s review-length response, are the examples used to illustrate the points themselves. You also find this in treatises that deal with the Trolley Problem or the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which try to parse the subtleties of ethics and morality. As Singer points out, finding objective truths about human action inevitably leads back to “…Kant’s famous but imprecise idea that it is wrong to act on any maxim that could not be a universal law….” But this is too broad for Parfit, who adopts what Singer describes as an “intuitionist” approach. What if the earth is destroyed by some natural phenomenon? Was the advent of human life and culture worth it? “Our answer may depend,” Singer says in summarizing Parfit’s thinking, “not only on how we balance the suffering that has resulted from human existence against the happiness it has brought, but also on what weight we give to the badness of the fact that some people suffered greatly without having anything to compensate them for their suffering.”