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?

Nature’s Riddle

William D. Hamilton

In a review of Ullica Segerstrale’s biography of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton (“Inclusive Fitness," TLS 8/2/13), Nature’s Oracle: The Life and Work of W.D. Hamilton Jennie Erin Smith makes the following comment “The concept of inclusive fitness argued that an organism could increase its genetic success not merely by reproducing itself, but also by aiding the reproduction and survival of relatives carrying some proportion of identical genes.” What Hamilton was trying to deal with was essentially altruism or “why an animal should forego reproducing…or expose itself to danger to warn its fellows of a predator.” When you think of it altruism is actually contradicted by natural selection. Yet rather than being an aporia, it falls into a category that is becoming increasingly common amongst high level thinkers in both science and philosophy. For instance Thomas Nagel, who defines himself as an atheist, still maintains in his current book Mind and Cosmos, that pure naturalism cannot effectively explain the emergence of consciousness. The “inclusiveness”of a thinker like Nagel bears comparison to Hamilton who also exhibits a kind of scientific thinking that takes nothing for granted. But Hamilton who believed in Segerstrale’s words that warfare “could be seen...as adaptive rather than pathological” could also be quite provocative. Thinkers like Hamilton and Nagel, along with the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer of Animal Liberation fame are part of the “more things in heaven and earth” club who ask uncomfortable and bothersome questions that are bound to upset the applecart for purists who are unable to tolerate a multivalent view of the world. Philosophic and scientific multitasking is the name of this game.

Birdseye

In the routines of everyday life we often take things for granted. We are blinded to the eccentricities and oddities of the familiar simply because of the preconception of so-called reality that is created in our mind’s eye—an image that, by the way, it’s often hard to shake. In her review of Mark Kurlansky’s Birdseye, The Adventures of a Curious Man, Janet Maslin comments about the author’s subject, “The oxymoron ‘fresh frozen’ would  be nowhere without him.” (“The Inventor Who Put Frozen Peas on Our Tables,” NYT 4/25/2012). There are other wonderful locutions that Maslin quotes from Kurlansky’s book or that the book inspires in the reviewer. Here's a graph that combines both. “His philosophy of vegetable consumption, promoting agribusiness over local farming, is at least a talking point for being so unfashionable. Birdseye, Mr. Kurlansky writes, thought like ‘a foodie in reverse.’” Later Maslin quotes Kurlansky saying, “when Birdseye found something in nature, he always wondered what it would taste like and what would be the best way to cook it.” If Birdseye were alive now, he would be considered politically incorrect. One could imagine him as a right wing radio shock jock, but in his time he was an inventor and entrepreneur who embodied the essence of American innovativeness and ingenuity. One wonders what a character like Birdseye would have thought about the inhumane conditions under which animals today are raised and slaughtered that Miyan Park and Peter Singer describe in their essay “The Globalization of Animal Welfare,” in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs.

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.”

Life or Deficit

Yesterday, the Times ran a front-page piece datelined Washington. It began, “As the players here remake the nation’s vast regulatory system, they have been grappling with a subject that is more the province of poets and philosophers than bureaucrats: what is the value of human life?” (“As U.S. Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret,” NYT, 2/16/11). The EPA says $9.1 million according to the Times, a bump of $2.3 from the Bush years. $7.9 says the FDA, a whopping $2.9 increase from 2008. The Transportation Department logs in with a mere $6M. But there are fine points: “…the E.P.A. said it might set the value of preventing cancer deaths 50 percent higher than other deaths since cancer kills slowly…and Homeland Security suggested that the value of preventing deaths from terrorism might be 100 percent higher than other deaths.” In spite of the statistical underpinnings, much of this does seem to have philosophical import. For instance, according to the Times, the previous administration “rejected a plan in 2005 to make car companies double the roof strength of new vehicles.” In a gesture that a utilitarian like Peter Singer of Princeton might have something to say about, the administration concluded that the added expense of reinforcing the roofs “would exceed the value of lives saved by almost $800 million.” One problem here is that we are facing a projected deficit against which any value we might try to ascribe to life simply pales. You may be worth $7.9M, but what’s that in comparison to $1,400,000,000,000, the approximate projected shortfall of the economy in 2011? Another problem is that statistics are not very helpful when it comes to evaluating individual lives. Some people are just worth more than others. Are we to follow the E.P.A. and uniformly value every nasty gossip at $9.1M? Is every snitcher, backbiter and, yes, philanderer going to earn the F.D.A’s new $7.9M valuation? America prides itself on being a meritocracy. If we are going to put a new value on human life, let’s do it on a case-by-case basis.