(9) Giulia asked:
If it is in the long run that, somehow, truth may survive through the decay of untruth: to what extent is this the case in history?
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What do you call "truth"? There are several quite different meanings of truth. Read my essay on this in Philosophy Pathways Issue number 98 as of 7th February 2005.
There seems to be some general agreement that in mathematics and logics and in the natural sciences the idea "that, somehow, truth may survive through the decay of untruth" is at least a meaningful one. Why? Because logic, math, and nature are what they are, so we may define "truth" as "the real state of affairs" and get nearer to a true understanding of this state over the years. But even in this case, as Thomas Kuhn has shown for physics (while every historian of sciences has known it before), progress in understanding is not generally straightforward but proceeds by a chain of "paradigm shifts" separated by "normal science". See http://www.2think.org/kuhn.shtml for details. Those paradigm shifts may be compared to the genesis of new species and the extinction of others in biological evolution.
The essential precondition of scientific and technical progress is, as I hinted above, the very fact that the laws of nature are what they are. But this is not the case in interpersonal relations or in our understanding of our life and our goals and obligations etc.. If you have to find out on the nature of the genes or of the planet Jupiter, you know how to do some research on "facts" and apply some theories. But if you have to find out on the nature of your relations to other persons or to god or to your past or to your future, etc., how do you define a "research project" on these questions? You see the problem: There is no answer to those personal questions "out there". You have not to find the answer by some microscope or telescope, but you have to INVENT some answer like an artist. You have to make up your mind and to INTERPRET and DEFINE your relationships. Thus what you are confronted with is your FREEDOM. If your relation to some person is "bad", this is not by some "natural law" but may be changed by yourself and the other person working on this relation. Likewise with your past and future, which are both open to interpretation. If you see your past or future bright or gloomy this is not "in the facts" but is an artifact of your interpretation. Whether you see the glass half-full or half-empty is not a matter of the glass filled to 50% but is a matter of your evaluation.
The same applies with human "progress": Of course we all are gaining some new experience and insight all the time, but some people interpret this as a progress, while others see the same developments as a decline. The very notion of "progress" is meant to be a positive one as opposed to "decline". But these notions are evaluative and by this cannot be scientific, because science is by definition value-free. Science is only asking for facts and relations between facts, never evaluating. If you evaluate something, the question will always be "valuable for whom and by what argument?" Thus, whether you call history a progress or a decline does not depend on the historical facts, but depends on your ideas of what is good for mankind or for nature etc..
Thus your question whether "truth may survive through the decay of untruth" cannot be answered definitely, because it is seldom clear what "truth" should be in the first line. Since you are the artist of your own life — and mankind is in this same sense the artist of the history of mankind — you always may redefine the meaning of "the truth of my existence". Many people, after a religious conversion, called their former life "a life of darkness and error". Thus in their opinion some un-truth has decayed in the light of a new truth. But this remains a subjective evaluation and is not provable in any scientific way.
And what would you call truth and untruth in the arts? Surely Picasso is different from Rembrandt or Leonardo, but is any of them "more true"? By what standard? Likewise in music and literature and architecture.
There seem to be some things that we find "childish" after some time. You cannot and will not behave or feel like you are 7 when in fact you are 17 or 27 or 77. In this sense your question may have some meaning. But even then the meaning changes a bit. In what sense is your way of seeing life and the world around you more "true" when you see it with 17 than when you saw it with 7 years? It is different, even "more advanced", but to be "more true" does not mean the same as to be different or "more advanced".
This too applies with humanity: Today we cannot see slavery as something you can have or not. We think it is outdated and definitely bad and unacceptable. But we know that neither Socrates nor Plato nor Aristotle, nor even Jesus or Paulus thought this way. It is much a historical thing. Likewise duelling or suicide "for honor" or the lower status of women do not seem "natural" this time. Thus a whole frame of reference for evaluations has shifted over the centuries. But this is similar to modes of painting: Today no serious artist would engage in painting naked saints or Greek goddesses. Those times are gone. But would we call this "a decay of un-truth"? We instead have porno-pin-ups today. It's more a matter of customs than of truth.
So you cannot replace untruth by truth if you don't know what the meaning of truth could be. We are gaining experience and some insight, but truth is an evasive concept. And I even think that this is good: Life is a challenge, but not for the sciences but for the arts. See yourself as the creative artist leading your life like a movies-director leads the actions of the actors and actresses on the set. And see your life and that of mankind as a drama with a script to be always invented anew. On this see http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pirandel.htm and http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006CXGW/102-2137856-4669723?v=glance and http://www.eldritchpress.org/lp/sixp.htm. Have fun!
Hubertus Fremerey
(10) Alex asked:
I'm debating free will against compatibilism (as believed by Daniel Dennett). At the base of his argument is his belief in event-event causation (he was probably inspired by Hume). How can event-event causation lead to an Agent (humans) with the ability to MAKE an action (have free will)? For this to happen one needs a different view of causation which is a relationship between an entity and its action, as opposed to a relationship between an event and another.
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Well, since the concept of "compatibilism" was not known to me before, I just entered Compatibilism+Dennett in Google. Now have a look into some of this stuff yourself to find out on your question.
But of course this would be no answer, so let me do a try. What do you call an "event". If you bang your head against a wall, you will get a bump. This is a classical "event-event" reaction. But if you read a TV-program to know what movies or other information and entertainment you may have in the evening, this is somewhat more complicated: If the program happens to be written in Chinese and you don't read Chinese, then it will contain no information at all save some pictures and numbers. Thus to make this reading an "event" you first should be able to read. And then of course you should be able to understand what is written, because if your favourite movie or actor/actress or some other stuff of great interest to you is showing up at 9 pm, you may change your plans for the evening. Thus you once more need some information to make this an "event".
Now you see what it all comes to: The "event" in this case is not the written text on the magazine-paper but the event is in your brain, in the knowledge available in your memory. Without this memory-processing there would be no "event" — save the irrelevant fact that you are leafing through some printed pages of pulp.
You now have your "different view of causation which is a relationship between an entity and its action." The "entity" is you, the "relationship" is linked in your brain between "information" and "action depending on this information". The important thing to note is: The "event" (i.e. the information contained in the TV-mag) is NOT causal in any simple way for your actions. All you know about the world and about good movies and actors and about alternative ways of spending this evening etc. has been assembled in your brain more or less long since, even from the moment of your birth or before. What reading the TV-mag does is only to switch on or off some switches to make you go this way and not that one, but the "event" does not CREATE the switches or the way they are working, it only makes use of them.
And in the same way as your text-software is managed by an operating system (OS) on your computer, and the OS is managed by some firmware implemented in the booter of your PC, so your evaluating schemes in your brain and memory are organized in complex vertical and horizontal organizations like the government of a state. There seldom is simply "cause and effect". There is much "chaos" and "chance" involved. Even in your brain there is some "butterfly effect" (look it up).
Seen in this way to call human behaviour "determined by the neurons" is not wrong but is "trivial nonsense" in the same way as to say that the Moonshine-Sonata is made from hitting the right key on the piano in the right moment. This too would not be "wrong", but would be "trivial nonsense".
We are acting in a meaningful world — mostly. The neurologists are right on that you can convince a person in trance to do some absurd thing afterwards, and after awaking from the trance the person does (while not always!) what it is told and finds even some absurd explanation for what he/she does. But this is a very artificial situation. Normally we are not guided by some hypnotizer but by "situations" and by our understanding of those. Through all our years of life we have learned from elders and peers and from talks and books and movies and from our own experiences and consideration what to make of this or that situation. Thus we are "pre-programmed" in part by "phylo-genesis" (our "apish ancestry" as mammals and primates) and by "onto-genesis" (our private set of genes and our personal history and experiences) to react in a way to "events" that nobody can predict with certainty — not even we ourselves. But most of what we do becomes "meaningful" because of this complicated web of interacting cultural and personal "programs". Thus the idea that we are "determined by our neurons" is misleading at best. I have read some arguments of the best of todays neurologists, and they did not convince me that they know what they are speaking of. They argue like piano-makers trying to explain "how the Moonshine-Sonata is functioning". They are just missing the point.
I think this whole "neo-deterministic" arguing is a new form of "psychologism". Of course we need a brain ("neurons") to handle language. And there may be even a genetically determined "deep structure" of a universal human grammar in the sense suggested by Noam Chomsky. But a grammar and a language and the good use of a language are not to be analyzed by neurologists but by linguists and literary critics etc.. Thus to say that all human activity has its base in the "wet-ware" of neural tissue is a banality that does not explain much. It surely does not render human activities "meaningless". Our languages and literatures and music and arts etc. etc. remain as meaningful as before, and this is brought about by the complicated webs of culture, of collective and private thinking and arguing and experiencing. Thus don't get scared by those neurologists who seem to tell you otherwise.
And now I will have a first look into those Google-links to Dennett and his theory of compatibilism. And you should do likewise.
Hubertus Fremerey
(14) Conny asked:
Can you think conceptually without a language? If not, what implications does this have for von Humboldt's view?
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Yes.
But I'm not going to go on about Humboldt. You do that. Look here:
Bermudez, J.L. Thinking without Words.
Edited by Chalmers, D. J., Philosophy of Mind. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Gendlin, E. "Thinking Beyond Patterns: Body, Language, and Situations." edited by den Ouden, B. and Moen, M., 22-152. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1991.
Grandin, T. Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995.
Jonker, C.M., and Treur, J. "Modelling the Dynamics of Reasoning Processes: Reasoning by Assumption." Cognitive Systems Research 4 (2003): 119-36.
and
Gibbs, R. W. Jr. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Lazar, R.M., Marshall, R.S., Prell, G.D., and Pile-Spellman, J. "The Experience of Wernicke's Aphasia." Neurology 55 (2000): 1222-24.
Papafragou, A., Massey, C., and Gleitman, L. "Shake, Rattle, 'N' Roll: The Representation of Motion in Language and Cognition." Cognition 84 (2002): 189-219.
Reddy, M. "The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language." In Metaphor and Thought, edited by Ortony, A., 164-201. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
and
Arnheim, R. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974.
Goodman, N. Languages of Art. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976.
----. Ways of Worldmaking. 5th ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988.
Gopnik, A., Glymour, C., Sobel, D.M., Schulz, L.E., Kushnir, T., and Danks, D. "A Theory of Causal Learning in Children: Causal Maps and Bayes Nets." Psychological Review In Press (2003).
Steven Ravett Brown
(22) Cliff asked:
Is there any philosophical concept or calculus that can be used to distinguish between contingent, necessary and sufficient attributes of an object or activity? From what I have read, this is an extremely subjective exercise, whether one is dealing with structural, functional or behavioural aspects. As an — Irish — engineer, that will not do me, at all, at all. Take these two items 'X' and 'Y' (instances of class 'x' and 'y') and as different from one another as chalk is from cheese. How do I go about establishing and prioritising their attributes — from first principles?
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Lots of philosophers have looked for the 'first principles' here. Lots — one might even, while acknowledging that many turned away from the search earlier than others, say 'all'. A notable recent attempt, much discussed in the literature for and against, was made by a chap called Saul Kripke with his 'rigid designator' theory of reference. But for myself I strongly suspect that there are no first principles here — or, which comes to the same thing, that any principles you might set up for the purpose of distinguishing essential from not essential would be your invention and tool, rather than some a priori fact which you have discovered.
I recognise the style of mind which is dissatisfied with this fact about how language depends upon our intentions, but one might more usually ascribe such a style of mind to the physicist than the engineer. Engineers, after all, are supposed to be practical. Follow what works, and don't bother with theory unless it will help in showing what works. Perhaps in Ireland the physicists are practically minded engineers and the engineers are philosophically minded physicists.
My own view would be the now completely unfashionable stance of Leibniz, to some extent echoed by Tolstoy in War and Peace, for which all of the facts about an object are essential to it.
A man who did not cross the Rubicon would not have been Caesar. A man who did not die in his bunker would not have been Hitler — and so on. A supposed difficulty for my view, and perhaps the issue which makes this quandary about language a live philosophical question of some importance, is the light this casts on the counterfactuals which are the stuff of historical analysis and science, and indeed everyday self-flagellating regret. Many philosophers start from saying that Counter-factual statements refer to the real world, and hack about with their metaphysics until they have made it conform to this peculiar starting point. But against this approach both I and Tolstoy are in agreement: there is something deeply fishy, metaphysically fishy, about 'if Napoleon had not pressed on to Moscow' and likewise about 'if only I'd turned the gas off'. The facts are what they are. Napoleon is who he is. I am the clut who forgot the gas, I am not some other person. What happen happened. What we know we know. We cannot genuinely un-know it when we formulate a counter-factual. Counter-factuals have not merely a tenuous relation to the real world, they have rather no referential relation whatsoever. They refer not to the world we live in, but to countless invented fictional worlds.
Now counterfactuals may serve some function, indeed alarmingly many diverse and conflicting functions, but these functions operate in the world of fiction, and if such counterfactuals refer at all, it is in fiction and there only. Such are the limitations of historical analysis and historians generally, likewise of economists, sociologists, and astro-physicists. I and Tolstoy are of a mind: 'if only' clauses hypothesise non-existent breaks in a fictionally staccato world, as if one could stop time for an instant, pick it up, and throw it in a new direction. Such a thing cannot be done, (as Zeno showed, says Tolstoy, as Zeno showed, says I). Time flows continuously and the water passes under the bridge. What passed passed. The known qualities of a thing are it's known qualities. All of them. If some bloke claims to be Hitler, the fact that Hitler died in 1945 is reason enough for concluding that he isn't Hitler. No fact about Hitler would be more or less important in showing that this bloke wasn't Hitler — any and all of them would serve. If it we know that Hitler did x, then we know that only the bloke who did x is Hitler. Likewise we know that a Historian who writes 'if Hitler had been admitted to the school of art' is talking nonsense, or, which is the same thing in this case, using our words to describe his own fictional world.
Now, perhaps we might like to use the name of one thing to describe another a bit like it — fine, but in such cases we should try to remember the element of fiction. This is not Hitler, but Hitler2. Perhaps from some of our counterfactual fantasies (both marxism are nationalism came from this unpromising bunch) something positive may come, such as a predictive theory that actually works for a while. In such cases of obvious success what we would other wise call a 'fantasy' we would instead call 'imagination'. But for any given fiction the chances of this kind of success occurring are slight, and the difficulty is that with the definite exception of engineering, in most areas of human 'inquiry' people will be able to go on with their fantastically derived predictive theories for generations without ever having to discover in some practical and obvious way that the picture they are pleased to call 'imaginative' is in fact mere fantasy; without ever having to discover that their favourite ideas bear no relation to reality whatsoever. Perhaps this does not matter. Or perhaps it does.
David Robjant
(23) Gabriel asked:
What is the purpose of life and how do we achieve it?
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Why do you think that there is some purpose of life at all? Should there be? Perhaps there isn't! Life is not an animal nor a person. So why should there be a purpose of life? It seems plausible that only YOU define the purpose of your life!
But let's see what is implied: "Purpose" is anywhere between "goal" and "meaning". Does your life have a "goal"? Did you set such a goal for your life? Probably not. We seldom do. Or did you give meaning to your life? How is it done? A German philosopher called history-writing "giving meaning to the meaningless". Philosophy of history is mainly about the question whether history is "meaningless". The Jews and the Christians deny this by the argument, that God is the master of history. Even if we dumb humans think history to be meaningless, God knows better. He has His plans, while we do not know his plans. But Voltaire (1694-1778), one of the first "modern" historians, ridiculed this idea in his "Candide" (1759): There is no plan, history is absurd, but we humans can at least try to make the best of it. See http://kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/voltaire3.htm and http://www.literature.org/authors/voltaire/candide/. For a classical introduction to the philosophy of history see Karl Lowith "Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History" (orig. am. 1949) (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226495558/102-2137856-4669723?v=glance)
Now apply this to your private life, which is your private history. Some people feel "guided by God" or "directed by the stars" or in other ways see their fate as determined. I know this feeling myself. But I remain sceptic on this. We always stay responsible for what we do and not. In my opinion "existentialism" and "fatalism" are likewise mistaken: Our life is our task and we have to try our best to deliver as good a work as we may.
But there are different meanings of "meaning". From the movies and novels we know the lover adoringly stammer "you give meaning to my life" to the beauty (or the beast). What does it mean? There is a beloved person who is concentrating all your thoughts and actions to the one purpose (!) of pleasing her. Thus your thoughts and actions become directed like a compass-needle by a magnet. Your life has found a purpose (!) and by this got meaning (!), because all thoughts and actions are now brought into order by this one purpose.
Of course this general model is not restricted to falling in love with somebody. Your inner compass-needle may find its magnet in God or in the arts and music, or in some research, or in a life as an explorer or an engineer etc. etc.. There are many goals.
But where is life now? Life has no purpose — YOU have. If you have some goal where to go, giving direction and meaning to your life, then your life all of a sudden has found a purpose, because you have.
But do we really always need a goal where to go, directed by a compass? What about being just fascinated by life in the way the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915) was fascinated by insects and beetles (see http://www.efabre.net/ and http://www-museum.unl.edu/research/entomology/workers/JFabre.htm)? What's the purpose of a rose, a tree, a cloud, a lion, a baby?
We like to be loved for what we are, not for what we are useful for. We don't like to be "instrumentalized". Since what will happen when be become "worthless" in old age? To think that every object and action must be "good for something" is a very modern and somewhat absurd idea, driven by the modern obsession with "progress". This was the objection of Heidegger (1889-1976) to modernity: We moderns are always too busy and too loud. We should learn to listen again to the world, since the world — the "being" — is speaking to us. But since we are pre-occupied with ourselves and with "progress", we don't hear the voice of "being". This is the essence of the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10,38-42): Martha is busy, she wants to be useful. Mary is just listening to the words of the great rabbi. Mary knows that there are guests then and now, but this one is a really important guest, somebody to listen to. So no time to waste with being busy and "useful". We should learn to calm down, to listen, to see, to love.
All this is not "asking for a purpose". It is just "being here and now", being aware. This explains why Heidegger took Socrates to be the beginning of Occidental spiritual decline: Socrates was not listening, he was questioning and analyzing, he started the "intellectual noise" of the Occident. Because of this, Heidegger more and more admired the Pre-Socratics and then Zen-Buddhism. Zen-Buddhism could be called "the philosophy of awareness, the philosophy of listening". No ego, no purpose, just "being here and now". See http://www.rep.routledge.com/article-links/G101SECT2#S19
So what is the purpose of life and how to achieve it? Just try to open heart and mind to the world. The purpose will vanish, but the world may begin to speak to you. And that would be a real achievement.
Hubertus Fremerey
(27) Conny asked:
If Bohr is correct in the quantum objects may be beyond our capacity co conceptualize, then is it possible that both he and Einstein are correct, though they disagree, What do the limits of conceptualization or logic have to do with reality?
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Come on. What are you asking here, a question about physics or a question about metaphysics/ epistemology? Make up your mind. As for both Bohr and Einstein being correct, yes, that's possible. Bohr, if you've read any of the history here, would never let himself be pinned down as to whether he thought the uncertainty in measurement reflected a real, ontological uncertainty, or merely some sort of (perhaps temporary) restriction on instrumentation and methodology, and so there is room, just barely, to conceive of Bohr's position as an instrumental one which could thus be modified or refined to coincide with Einstein's belief in what are termed "hidden variables". There's no way, however, that I'm going to go further on this. There are reams of commentary, books, etc., etc., which are readily available for you to read here. Some few of the numerous writings are:
Bohm, D. Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961.
Greene, B. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2000.
Hess, K., and Philipp, W. "A Possible Loophole in the Theorem of Bell." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98, no. 25 (2001): 14224-27.
Mulhauser, G. R. "On the End of a Quantum Mechanical Romance." Psyche 2, no. 19 (1995).
Reichenbach, H. Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1965.
Rowe, M.A., Kielpinski, D., Meyer, V., Sackett, C.A., Itano, W.M., Monroe, C., and Wineland, D.J. "Experimental Violation of a Bell's Inequality with Efficient Detection." Nature 409 (2001): 791-94.
And then you throw out questions on the limits of 1) conceptualization, and 2) logic?? Go read some Kant before you get into that one:
Kant, I. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Pluhar, W. S. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1987.
----. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Pluhar, W.S.T. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1996.
----. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Pluhar, W.S.T. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002.
Pluhar, in my opinion, does a very good job of translation and explanation here. There's no way I'm going to even attempt to begin answering questions like that in this forum.
Steven Ravett Brown
(29) Dave asked:
I find other questions and answers unsatisfactory on this subject, so I hope you don't think I'm going over a topic already dealt with.
Whenever I hear a debate about freewill, it always starts in the middle of the debate. The first thing I would like clarified is what exactly people mean by 'freewill'. I am aware that until I scrutinized it, I believed that it made sense for someone (if one accepts the idea of some kind of spiritual moral authority) to be judged on their decisions. This was due to the fact that we are free to make these decisions and thusly accountable for them. This seemed obvious.
Once I'd begun to examine this though, I discovered that what we call freewill is actually an indefinable sense we have of accountability. I don't believe that the indefinable exists. If I look in a dictionary, it defines freewill (in a philosophical sense) as to do with being free to make ones own decisions. This presupposes that the decision-making process is itself free — in which case, why is it called a 'process'? Computers run according to processes that are confined by the parameters they are set by (their circuitry and programming). We are the same. A computer can make decisions, so can we.
But this debate is old and tired and I've never been able to convince anyone of it.
After years of mulling this over, I've reduced the whole debate into an easy-to-follow and easily provable, flawless piece of reasoning. It is flawless because it is right. Here it is:
Bear in mind that I believe freewill is an illusion. The phrase does not correspond to anything except our perceptions. It is not that I think doesn't exist, it is that it can't exist. Neither us or God or anything can be free in the way that is implied by religion. Because it can't be defined, how can it be disproved? Simply by disproving the one implicit aspect of free-will: That we could be fairly held morally accountable for our actions.
Anything that takes place or can be said to have occurred must either be caused to happen or happen without cause. Neither of these allow for the notion of freewill.
I have told this to people and hoped that they would say "that is correct, therefore, although I don't know why yet, freewill must be an illusion." None has responded this way.
So, a slightly elaborated version is:
If something occurs and is caused to occur, then it only occurs because it was caused. Take away the causer and it doesn't happen (unless caused by something else), put the causer back in and it does happen.
Although, would the result be exactly the same occurrence? Arguably not, but irrelevant to the point.
If something occurs and is not caused to occur, it occurs for no reason and without cause. It is, therefore, a spontaneous random event.
We are held accountable for our actions which are occurrences.
We are either being held accountable for occurrences which are dependent on a causer or we are being held accountable for spontaneous 'random' event.
I put 'random' in speech marks because it is ambiguous. I mean random in the sense of 'without cause' i.e. anything could have taken place.
If the universe is completely causal — then we are being judged according to a chain of causality. Every single occurrence that has been part of the chain of occurrences was dependent on every link in the chain. In other words, my actions might be dependent on a raindrop 700 billion years ago. I would be judged on this.
If the universe is not at all causal, it is a completely random event and I am judged according to nothing and my actions/hopes/life are meaningless.
If it's a mixture of the two then I am being judged either according to actions dependent on a finite chain of causes (until the chain is broken by a random occurrence) or judged according to a spontaneous, uncaused event.
My question is, how can anyone possibly refute this?
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Well, doing logic can be somewhat confusing. So for a first warm-up, I put a charming comment by Voltaire on how he came to write his "Candide" of 1759:
I must quote Lactantius, church father, who, in his chapter XIII, of his On the Wrath of God puts these words into the mouth of Epicurus:
Either god wants to remove the evil from this world, and cannot, or he can, and does not want to; or he neither wants to nor can; or he wants to and can. If he wants to but cannot, this is impotence, which is contrary to the nature of god; if he can but does not want to, this is wickedness, which is no less contrary to his nature; if he neither can nor wants to this is at once wickedness and impotence; if he wants to and can (which is the only one of these possibilities fitting for god) whence then comes the evil which is on earth?
The argument is powerful; so that Lactantius answers it very badly, saying that god wants evil but that he has given us the wisdom with which one acquires the good. It must be admitted that this answer is quite weak in comparison with the objection, for it assumes that god could create wisdom only by producing evil; besides our wisdom is pretty ridiculous!
Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury and Pope, who embodied their ideas, do not resolve the question any better than the others: their All is good means nothing more than that all is controlled by immutable laws. Who does not know that? You tell us nothing new when you observe, as all little children have done, that flies are born to be eaten by spiders, spiders by swallows, swallows by shrikes, shrikes by eagles, eagles to be killed by men, men to kill one another, and to be eaten by worms, and then, all but one in a thousand, by devils.
Here we have a clear and fixed order among every kind of animal. There is order everywhere. When a stone is formed in my bladder it is by means of admirable mechanics: calculous juices pass little by little into my blood, they filter into the kidneys, pass through the ureters, deposit themselves in my bladder, and assemble there by an excellent Newtonian attraction; the stone is formed, gets bigger, I suffer pains a thousand times worse than death, by the most elegant arrangement in the world. A surgeon, having perfected the art invented by Tubalcain, comes to thrust a sharp and cutting iron into the perineum, and takes hold of my stone with his pincers. It breaks under his efforts by a necessary mechanism; and by the same mechanism I die in frightful torments. All this is good, all this is the evident consequence of inalterable physical principles. I agree with them, and I knew it as well as you did.
If we were without feeling there would be no reason to object to this cause and effect. But this is not the point. We are inquiring whether there are any perceptible evils, and whence they come. "There are no evils," says Pope in his fourth essay on the All is good; "or if there are particular evils, they form the common good."
A strange general good! composed of the stone, the gout, all crimes, all suffering, death and damnation.
Taken from http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/VSA/Candide/tout.est.bien.html, which is from Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, edited and translated by Theodore Besterman (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 68-74.
So much for a first check on what is logical in this world. As we all know, the ways out of this conclusion have been two: Either there is no God at all, then the question of how to vindicate God — the theodicy — vanishes. Or we call all evils a test of the faithful or a punishment of the sinners and infidels brought about by God, then this is the usual explanation given by the true believer, avoiding the inference that God is cynical. See the story of Job on this. Thus pick what pleases you most.
Now I turn to your question on freewill.
We all know, that humans behave overall quite reasonably and morally correct — more or less so. And we all know, that punishments and admonitions and models of reasonable and moral behaviour are not without value generally — more or less so. But if things work out in this way quite convincing, what are you trying to show me? Do you really try to "prove" that human behaviour is meaningless? I think we should see the argument from the opposite side: Since the logic seems to "prove" something that apparently is not true — i.e., that human behaviour is without any reasonable or moral meaning — there must be a fault in the logic, not in the reality. Thus I will look for the fault in your logic.
The core of my argument will be, that in the case of humans there is no direct connection of cause and effect, stimulus and response, in the way we may assume such a direct connection working in plants and in primitive "lower" animals. The difference of "re-acting" and "acting" seems to be denied by your approach altogether. But I think you have not proven that this can be done.
You write:
If the universe is completely causal — then we are being judged according to a chain of causality. Every single occurrence that has been part of the chain of occurrences was dependent on every link in the chain. In other words, my actions might be dependent on a raindrop 700 billion years ago. I would be judged on this.
If the universe is not at all causal, it is a completely random event and I am judged according to nothing and my actions/hopes/life are meaningless.
If it's a mixture of the two then I am being judged either according to actions dependent on a finite chain of causes (until the chain is broken by a random occurrence) or judged according to a spontaneous, uncaused event.
My question is, how can anyone possibly refute this?
Well, I will try to refute this chain of arguments — and I really do not feel like a robot obeying the hints of "a raindrop 700 million years ago". But this may be "my illusion".
Taken merely as a logical argument, your argument on first sight looks sound. But this exactly seems to be the core of the problem. Your application of the concept of causality in my opinion is too vague in several respects.
First: I think you will not invoke supernatural forces, and neither do I. So let this be agreed on.
Second: The throw of a coin or dice, while surely causal, does not allow for a prediction. Thus a random-walk, while causal, does not allow a prediction either. But this is no refutation, only a warning: Causality does not include predictability. This is interesting insofar, as "Laplace's Demon", predicting the future of the world from knowing the "initial conditions" of all atoms in the world, was a misleading creature even in the time of his invention by Laplace at around 1800 (see http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~ldb/seminar/laplace.html and see http://www.hypography.com/topics/Laplaces_Demon_112215.cfm). To know this, one does not need even Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle", but only classical stochastics of the random walk. Today we know of many simple "chaotic machines" that never return to the same state and thus are unpredictable. Thus if you formulate the theory of "unfree will" you could not invoke the Laplacean Demon for help, since he is dead. And he even was a primitive demon, not knowing of the pitfalls of modern Quantum Mechanics, which would kill him anyway. But you didn't invoke him. So what else could justify your concept of predictability and predetermination?
Third: As you already see from the first argument, your "raindrop" would have no effect whatsoever on any current event. It would only make some minimal "noise", while the "signals" — the real causes of the event — are very, very much louder. But what are those "signals"? Suppose while you are reading this on your computer a drop of water hits your head. If you are sitting in a closed room you would be as startled as people in a horror-movie when blood is dropping from the ceiling. Not because of the little drop of fluid, but because you KNOW that something overhead must be very wrong if it's dropping on your head or hand. Thus your horror is not "caused" by the drop of fluid, but by your knowledge of this world and of what to expect and what not.
But what you call your "experience" or your "knowledge" — which in part rests on your experience and in part on "second-hand acquired knowledge" — is a very indirect "causal agent". It's not only that surely >99% of your knowledge is second-hand or "in your genes" and not in the events themselves ("drops of fluids"). Thus the DIRECT impact of most events in your life is minimal, while the indirect impact is usually much more important.
Well, you may say that you are "pre-determined" or "pre-programmed" by your genes and your memes, i.e. culturally learned patterns of interpreting the events that hit you. But how do you prove that there is no "second order chaos" in your brain: If you are undecided what pattern of reaction to chose when coping some "event", you are in the position of somebody fighting "immoral desires". And there moral arguing steps in: When parents and teachers and friends and movies and novels and the pastor etc. all try to convince you that a certain way of acting in a certain situation is preferable to another way, they try to strengthen one possible set of options over countless other sets of options and by this "give some bias to the better choice". Seen in this way, moral education — or any advice — is meant "to break the decisional chaos".
By the principle of liberty — even according to the Bible — man should be free to choose "by insight". Since insight is generating a distance between "the event" and "the reaction", using a "lookup-table" as a sort of "delay generator", there is no direct connection between "the event" and the "answer". By this the relation of "event" and "answer" becomes unpredictable. And because you are "a learning machine", your "answer" to a certain "event" may be totally different tomorrow from what it has been today.
I think there are some problems we have to live by. While the throw of the dice is "following the laws of physics", it is — by necessity! — unpredictable. Thus while we may think that any process "following the laws of physics" must be predictable, this is apparently not the case. And this has nothing to do with "uncertainty principle" but follows from the "logic of chance": It would be meaningless to speak of a fair dice if the outcome of throwing it is predictable. Likewise the arguments against "free will" seem faultless superficially, but at the same time seem to become meaningless when scrutinized.
For what indeed are you trying to prove? On the face of it you are trying to show that there is no free will, but if asked whether you will call all humans to be mere dumb automata you will hesitate when viewing at the arguments just given. If not, then I would like to know your counter-counter-arguments. I still think this moment, that human responsibility can be justified in a consistent way.
There seems to be a trap most "determinists" fall into: To be responsible we are not required to build up our "lookup-table" defining moral and reasonable behaviour "from scratch". Most of what we do is indeed predefined from "our genes" and from "our enculturation". For this we are not responsible. But we are expected to develop some "moral, emotional, and general intelligence". This intelligence is a form of "third order distancing" from the primary event, the first being the neuronal signal, the second the "lookup-table" in our memory itself, and the third being the intelligence of making good use of the lookup-table.
Compare it to a game of chess: Firstly there are the chess-board and the figures and rules of the game, which constitute the material given. Secondly there are the wisdoms of tactics etc., which are not "given" but applicable. And thirdly there are the actual moves of the opponent. The challenge of the player is on this third level, not on the two below. In my opinion, if this "reacting on the third level" is called "pre-determined", the whole arguing becomes "supernatural" — which form of explanation was excluded from the beginning.
I still think that the core of the whole problem of free will is contained in the right interpretation of "causality". Any unqualified concept of "cause" directly runs into "bad metaphysics", avoiding all problems of predictability as shown above.
I give your introductory statement a twist, where the "I" this time is "me": "Whenever I hear a debate about free will, it always starts in the middle of the debate. The first thing I would like clarified is what exactly people mean by 'un-free will'." So please tell me how you would try to "prove" that somebody is NOT free to choose IN A MEANINGFUL WAY. This qualification is important! We never are COMPLETELY free to choose. We surely are bound by the genes and memes of our "human nature and upbringing" TO A CERTAIN DEGREE. I would never deny this and no judge would deny this either. If you are a human member of modern Western society, no judge would expect you to behave like a "little green man" from Mars. But this granted there is room left for "reasonably" responsible and rational behaviour. And this alone is the point in question here. What your argument comes to — if I understand you right — is a claim, that there is NOT THE SLIGHTEST ROOM for such a "reasonably" responsible and rational behaviour. On this you did not convince me.
But in the end I have to admit that I did not find a simple and elegant argument of refutation — if there is any. I only tried to make some difficulties with notions like "completely causal" or "not at all causal" look as difficult as indeed they are. Logical paradoxes are resolved by showing up and resolving hidden ambiguities. Cf. the famous example of the "liars paradox", where the hidden ambiguity is in the unqualified "all" of "all Cretans are liars" when the speaker is Cretan. The paradox dissolves and turns into a mere assertion of fact if the speaker is excluded or not Cretan.
I think that this whole debate on "free will" is spoilt by such a hidden unresolved ambiguity we do not understand this time. But you are right: Since philosophy is on logic and good arguing, to understand what is wrong with your "logical" conclusion is important.
But then: Perhaps we have to accept that there are many facts that can be proven "by procedure" but not "by arguments". I have no problem to imagine a man-made robot that fulfills all criteria of "free will" by using look-up-tables and good principles and learning to evaluate situations and to act meaningfully in a similar way as a chess robot. Has anybody proven so far that such a robot could be reduced to some formula? Could it be that the hidden ambiguity of the "paradox of free will" is in this FALSE assumption that it must be resolvable "by logic"?
To put it otherwise: If somebody is showing you a robot that apparently behaves reasonably in any practical respect in different situations (see the "Bicentennial Man", http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0182789/), would this not "dis-solve" the "paradox of free will" as good as any "logic" argument? Today we know of several generally accepted mathematical "proofs" that are not at all "short and elegant" but long and complicated, and even replacing formulas by procedures (cf. the "Four Colour Problem"). Perhaps we simply overestimate what logic is able to do.
And I am not speaking of Pascal's "logique du coeur" here, which is quite another matter.
Hubertus Fremerey
(33) Sadi asked:
Why did peoples perception of the world change after the 1889 Paris world fair? how did the new inventions of the beginning of the 20th century have an impact on people?
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The first "modern" World Fair was in London in 1851 (there have been some other expositions before, see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/List_of_world%27s_fairs. The United Kingdom was on the way to become "the fabric of the world". London was perhaps the largest and most bustling city in the world then, and by introducing the new steam-engine in 1776, which had been modernized by James Watt from older, much less efficient models, the modern industrial era took off and fabrics and the surrounding agglomerations of workers housings began to sprout everywhere. The steam engine was put to work in the new steam-ships (Fulton from 1805) and in the new railways (Stephenson from 1825). Besides that the steam-engine allowed for mass-production and for a much better mining of coal and ore, which were needed for steel-production. There was much progress in chemistry, and electricity was practically "invented" by the work of Faraday and Maxwell. You should look up all those names in the internet or in a lexicon (f.i. enter http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Michael_Faraday, http://www.wordiq.com/definition/James_Clerk_Maxwell, http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Robert_Stephenson, http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Robert_Fulton, http://www.wordiq.com/definition/James_Watt)! These and many other links are free. Thus learn to use the net to your advantage and look up "Industrial Revolution" (http://www.wordiq.com/search/industrial%20revolution)! And look up "innovation" (http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Innovation).
This Industrial Revolution was connected to a social revolution by the 'rise of the working class', which was unknown before. Thus the famous 'workers parties' and 'socialist parties' were formed in the second part of the 19th century together with the new fabrication plants, coal- and steel-regions and industrial townships. See http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Social_Democrats and do some clicking there.
Thus you see that the whole society in Europe and in the USA was changing under the impact of 'Industrial Revolution', where the World Fair in Paris of 1889 (to honour the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution of 1789!) was only one of many similar events. F.i., the Americans had honoured in 1876 the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by a World Fair in Philadelphia, where the DoI had been formulated and published in 1776.(see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Centennial_Exposition and http://libwww.library.phila.gov/CenCol/) In both World Fairs (there were many more!) the strongly expanding new industry wanted to show proudly its new strength and to open new markets where to sell steam-engines, electrical engines, locomotives, cranes, harvesting machines, etc., but many smaller practical machines of everyday use too.
What changed the minds of people was a new outlook into the future, a new optimism of progress for the masses. When the Eiffel-Tower was built to be the symbol of the Paris World Fair of 1889, the French 'Impressionist' (Monet, Manet, Degas, etc.) were flowering in Paris. And Monet did several paintings of the new railways. (see http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/monet/ and http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/monet/paris/monet.st-lazare.jpg)
But of course, this same progress was felt as a decline by many other people, mainly by the old Elites who feared 'the rise of the masses'. The First World War (in its time simply 'The Great War' since nobody imagined a second one) was not the cause of the general change of society but its consequence. It was the final 'clash of cultures' — of the new socialist masses and the old conservative bourgeoise and nobility. Afterwards, in 1918, most kings and emperors and other princes stepped down, while socialist and liberal parties took over.
This is the general background, in which to place what you call 'the new inventions' — the railway, the steamship, the car, the telephone, the airplane and many others. While the steamship was from 1805, the famous great ocean-liners of the 'Titanic'-type were built in the years between 1895 and 1915, while the railways became a mass-vehicle for everybody from about the 1860s. Together with the telephone and a much more efficient post-service all these innovations stand for a new era of mass-travel and mass-communication. To this add the new mass-media — the daily newspapers 'for the boulevard', the books and monthlies, the photos. The time of the cinema and the airplane was more after the War.
You see how all these new inventions created the modern mass-culture you are used to. The real problem today is to imagine how life has been before in the time of NO telephone, NO cars, NO railways, NO electricity, NO radios, NO photos etc.. In the years of Goethe (1749-1832) and Jefferson (1743-1826) none of these were available. It has been said that a Roman of the times of Caesar, when transferred by a time-machine into the time of Goethe around 1800, would have had not much trouble to get along and find himself at home there, but Goethe himself, when advanced by the same time-machine into the year 1930 would have felt completely at a loss and misplaced. This is the surface of it.
The deeper problem was a clash of optimisms against pessimisms, of people — mainly from the working classes — who saw a grand hope and progress, and others — mainly from the governing classes — who saw a grand decline and the breakdown of all order as it was known to them. Never before in all of human history has there been a comparable transformation of the way of living and of the general character of the social order in such a short time.
But there was a deeper conflict too, that I only can hint at: Thoughtful people saw modern industry and its scientific and technical resources and the hope of a general progress and wealth as a moral and spiritual danger of utmost importance. When people began to move from a life near to nature in the countryside to a life in the 'sinful' cities and the workplaces and offices there, they would become 'alienated' — from nature, from God, from their own soul, from their neighbour. They would turn from pious to arrogant, from frugal to greedy people, and the arrogance and greed would render them indifferent to any deeper thoughts and values and feelings. This was the great concern not only of Marx, but also of Nietzsche and Heidegger and Marcuse and many others. Thus it was not only the ressentiment of the old ruling class against the new working class that made modernization and the rise of the affluent society look like a program of dubious and debatable value. There was — and in fact even is — a widespread fear that industrialization and modernization may turn out to be a great disaster for mankind. Well, I don't share this pessimism, but you should at least see the problem.
Now you see how your little question / Why did people's perception of the world change after the 1889 Paris world fair? How did the new inventions of the beginning of the 20th century have an impact on people?/ leads to very large answers if taken seriously.
Hubertus Fremerey
(44) James asked:
What are some Hindu philosophical ideas that similar to Plato's?
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Too many! Although it is hard, one might more honestly say impossible, to guess what is a case of a distantly shared linguistic history (Nietzsche has something aggravating to say on this) and what is a case of positive philosophical agreement supported by more recent intellectual contact, say between Hindu thinkers/traders and the presocratics. Whenever we get positive evidence about this, we seem to find that people underestimate the degree to which people moved around in the ancient world, but the problem there is: we don't often get evidence.
Several difficult cases of obvious parallels with mysterious ramifications in one single quote:
Bhagavad Gita 18/61 "And [God's] power of wonder moves all things — puppets in a play of shadows — whirling them onwards on the stream of time"
For puppetry read the Plato's central allegory of the Cave in the Republic — Plato talks about the objects carried along the road and appearing over the wall to cast shadows into the cave, but the way he does this is intended to evoke stages and puppetry — an under remarked aspect of the allegory, under remarked because there is so much going on there, what with the fire, the sun, shadows, copies and all.
For shadows (very important in Plato) — see same allegory.
For the stream of time (flux, very important to Plato's attitude towards empirical knowledge): see countless references to Heraclitus in Plato and also his gnomic remark (it slips me where) that Chronos (time divinity) is the offspring of Oceanus and Tethlys (water gods).
See, also, the way Plato talks about Pleasure and Pain in the Republic, as involving illusion: strong resemblances with Hindu thought and Buddhist developments of it here.
Again, Plato's degrees of reality thesis — the picture of levels of reality and of our slow and difficult moral ascendance through them might easily have been lifted from a Sanskrit faith. (Though I make no positive claim that they were).
Again, Plato allows, at least mythically, a kind of reincarnation: we exist in the world of the forms before birth, the soul is immortal in some important sense, also see the Myth of Er.
I don't mean to do an impression of that character on Goodness Gracious Me! and declare "That Plato? Indian!", but a surprisingly cogent case can be made for likemindedness. In many cases Plato is addressing indian questions and providing Hindu or Buddhist-like answers. There's certainly a sense in which various Sanskrit religious/philosophical thinkers are doing the same kind of thing as Plato, where A.Y.Ayer (for instance) isn't.
David Robjant
(45) Todd asked:
Hello, my question is based on this passage from an old book I found at a church basement sale: "A man's theory of life is largely a matter of temperament or constitution. He may find support for it in the teachings of philosophy, but he is apt to choose a philosophy which suits his way of thinking rather than to let his views of life be determined by abstract philosophic teachings." Frank Frost Abbott, The Common People of Ancient Rome. NY: Scribner's, 1911. So, for example, I think that living a life modeled on what I know about Stoicism is a good idea — but I am susceptible to the romantic notion of Socrates or Epicurus living an ascetic life because of my own need for identity. How do I know if I have chosen a sound philosophy to implement or if Stoicism appeals because it makes me feel superior? Is there a way to test the absolute value of a philosophy versus emotional convenience? Suggestions for further reading are most welcome. Thanks from Madison, Wisconsin.
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In answering this question I'd probably begin along these lines:
'Is there a foolproof way to test the absolute value of a philosophy versus it's emotional convenience? No. For some fairly easy to comprehend emotional reasons, people have been trying to come up with such a method for hundreds of years. See, in this bag: Aristotle, Descartes, Wittgenstein (both times). Abbott, however, goes too far. I would say that the power of ones constitution to act on one's philosophy rather implies the reciprocal power of one's philosophy to act on one's constitution. For as the former power shows, they are of like substance.
At any rate, Abbott has no real evidence for his affected pessimism about intellect. The thought merely appeals to him — presumably because it offers him a windy note of importance whilst saving him the trouble of any further thought about any philosophical view. Well, that shows the character of the man!
By the way, I treat your question as remote from the question "is there absolute truth?". What you are asking is: can we altogether divorce the value of this picture of the truth (a 'philosophy') from it's appeal to us? To that question the answer is 'no'. But the fact that we abandon this picture for that better one manifests the pull of a distant goal. I'd say that the ideal of perfection is necessary and present in the idea of improvement. We'd say that the better picture was more truthful, and there, already, would be the absolute.'
But then I'd think better of this and add:
'A better picture, a more truthful one, would acknowledge the very important truth that 'convenience' is not a simple concept, and that there are different kinds of convenience, even different kinds of 'emotional convenience'. For one thing, what is convenient for an apprentice is not what is convenient for a master carpenter. And in the the evolution of both ability and taste here we can see the distant pull of something, we might say a standard outside convenience — this would be the more usual way of saying this in moral language. Or — and this is important — we might put the very same point in quite a different register of moral or aesthetic language, and say that since that distant pull is an emotional one, at any rate acts on the emotions, this too is part of the way we evaluate the convenience of the thing. Is this chair convenient? It pleases in all kinds of ways. But something niggles — perhaps the angle of the neck support — it is not perfect. Something cack-handed about the execution, the limitations of it's maker stamped upon it. Only perfection, we might say, could be perfectly convenient. And that way of going on with the word 'convenient' would serve to remind us of American Pragmatists and of Plato's distant Good, in the light of which we see and feel everything. For what we are really talking about here, in the language of pragmatist philosophers, is 'taste'. And I'm with Dewey here: so far from there being no disputing about taste, taste is in fact the one thing that all disputes are at bottom, and rightly, about. What is the good life? That is a question of taste and convenience. But because we can quite immediately see that what is convenient for someone with no taste or ability is not perfectly convenient, and because we can conceive of improvement in skill (eg in chair making) and taste (eg in wine), the importance of convenience does not banish the absolute but, on the contrary, makes the Good the supreme matter of philosophical inquiry.'
Having said that I'd probably conclude: 'near enough for present purposes' and desist.
David Robjant
(48) Bill asked:
I have a friend who is often judging and labeling other people. Although I find it irritating, I wonder if by telling her (or just believing) that she is 'judgmental,' that I would, myself, be behaving hypocritically?
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Bill, what a neat knot.
I find fantastically irritating the sort of person who hands down confident comments on people they don't really want to get to know, or holds forth about lessons that should be learned from this case and lessons to be learned from that, when they have only the faintest idea what they are talking about, and where the rigour with which they scrutinise their sources of information mimics the parrot. Often, I think to myself, they are not so much trying to picture and categorize the world, as to picture and categorize themselves. It's no so much an outward thing as an inward one. Such gossips delight in confidently asserting this and that, showing to themselves how they are not as silly as so-and-so, much more savvy than sally, and so on. Of course, the need to go on about the imagined failings of others in order to boost ones own opinion of oneself is the most fantastic sign of one's own insecurity and general pointless nobodiness. It is fantastically ugly. People who are really ugly, and I don't mean noses, do this sort of thing — and they usually pause for you to join. The way they react if you demur can sometimes show how much they needed your support in their disguised ego-massage. The distaste of non-gossips for gossips is as nothing to the wounded anger felt by gossips for non-gossips.
Gossiping, of course, features pretty big as a sin (false witness, and these days egoism is rightly considered a sin), and nothing I've said here would be out of place in a sermon (apologies all). So I've not stinted on the judging here. But, judging aside, have I been 'judgmental'?
I guess 'judgmental' is one of those made up words got up for the purpose of cunning confusion. "You are being judgmental!" someone says, and the only thing one can be absolutely sure about is that they want you to stop. But do they want you to stop being judgmental, or to stop judging, or do they think the two come to the same thing ?Hard to tell — although what we can see, and you've pointed this out, is that if to be judgmental is just the same thing as to judge, then one can't accuse someone of being judgmental without being judgmental oneself. Neat, huh? I like the way this made up word sets us off into a relativist spin even as our mouths are forming the terminal '...mental'.
However, perhaps there's a way out of this mish mash: a way to fix a clear meaning for 'judgmental' and work with that. When we're annoyed at the sort of character who is "often" judging and labeling other people, and we reach for the condemnatory term "judgmental", I don't think that it's really this particular judgment or that particular judgment that we're objecting to. The problem isn't that they made a judgment about someone. The problem is the way they are at it nearly all the time — the way we start to see a habit and a sort of fixation emerge — a fixation which when it becomes clear makes us think differently about each particular judgment that they make. And the lines on which I at least start to think differently are the ones I set out above: here is someone obsessed about their own status and continually harping on about other people's imagined failings in order to pump themselves up. That's the sort of person I'd call "judgmental". And the irony of it is, as I said, that they are not really judging at all. It's just a kind of disguised egoism talk. It has nothing to do with looking at the world or trying to be accurate or knowing people or knowing some secret about how to live. Now, if I were to make a judgment about such a person, if I were to meet one, and thank God and my good luck and my thirty one years that I don't know any obvious examples just now, and if I was to think about such a person and let the word 'judgmental' form in my head as a judgment about them, I'd be judging, sure enough, but I wouldn't be being 'judgmental' because I wouldn't be reaching this verdict as part of a diseased habit of displaced egomania.
Or would I?
Well, there I'd just have to keep a watch.
David Robjant
