If You Can Read This, You Are Already Presupposing Many Complex Conceptual Frameworks.

In the Prolegomena to Ethics T.H. Green, speaking to us from 1883, offers a different way of thinking about what a person is. What Green seems to salvage (and by ‘salvage’, I mean ‘preemptively prescribe’) is an account of the individual that is neither isolated from the exterior world, nor biologically determined to carry out their pre-set performances. For Green, a person is not an empty vessel, and knowledge is not a substance in which it might contain. We have rich and developed set of tools as soon on as we are conscious.

What follows in this paper is a closer examination of Green’s account of person, and how it differs greatly from what we think of in our contemporary sense. It will be interesting to consider the reasons why this notion has been largely left behind. Although I will not discuss this too much here in this paper, I might offer the consideration that it is the fault of the modern distaste in metaphysics, in favour of self-creation and self-truths.

However inadequate his metaphysical setup¹, what is important to take away from Green is the stark contrast to the liberal view of persons that we have today. According to Green, our focus ought to be on how we consider context, cause and intention in the process of developing our moral selves. With some development and buttressing, a proper criticism of those liberal “preferences” might be made. Green had these philosophical problems coming and attempted to show a framework for how this incoming view would ultimately be problematic.

Green holds that we rely heavily on our social institutions and structures for the very base of our understandings of the world. Through this framework we are then made aware of what the self is and how we are cognitive ‘users’ a complex conceptual framework.

The common objects of experience… the particular things we perceive, this flower, this apple, this dog – in the only sense in which they are objects to us or are perceived at all, have their being only for, and result from the action of, a self-distinguishing consciousness.

As perceived, they consist in certain groups of facts, which again consist in possibilities of sensation, known to be related in certain ways to eachother and to some given fact of sensation. (§63)

The fact that we even perceive these things as objects suggests that we have some kind of object-oriented calibration of how we navigate the world. Furthermore, the organization and assumption of further concepts is achieved by a kind of process of inference, using the existing information as arbitrary (in the objective sense) and filling the empty spots in.

Knowledge is a kind of constant regurgitation of our prior experiences. It is an internal knowing that, in the sense that our every day experiences are constantly adding and checking our system of belief. This is a process of compounding networks of concepts that create a framework of what the world is.

The most primitive germ from which knowledge can be developed is already a perception of fact, which implies the action upon successive sensations of a consciousness which holds them in relation, and which therefore cannot itself be before or after them, or exist as a succession at all. (§70)

We do knowledge, a person is a knowledge-er. All of these aspects are entirely context dependant, and are occurring all together, at all times. Everything together, all at once.

We begin to see how this might differ from our modern conception of self when applying this to how we go about living according to our moral standards. The process of our moral beliefs is typically seen as some combination of our desire interests in dialogue with our rational ones.

Sometimes desire and reason have been represented as inviting the man in different directions, while the will has been supposed to decide which of the two directions shall be followed. (§116)

This is the typical form of morality of which we are familiar. The idea that ones heart can be in the ‘right place’, or that our minds can ‘say’ things that are different than other parts of our anatomy.

Green makes a case that these distinctions of sensation, or feeling, and desire are not objects of our consciousness that differ in kind. Instead, these objects require a consciousness to process them as sensations, feeling or desire to begin with. We only make sense of these objects as they are conscious objects that relate to the self, just as we are only able to make sense of our world spatially if we are presupposing an object-oriented world.

There is a difference here between the occurring of an object of consciousness and the act of organizing and articulating those objects. The world only exists as we are acting upon it in this way.

The real agent called Desire is the man or self or subject as desiring; the real agent called intellect is the man as understanding, as perceiving and conceiving; and the man that desires is identical with the man that understands. (§129)

It is problematic to talk about the objects of consciousness as though they are responsible in the decision making process, when we must always consider the subject of which they are the object of. This is the subject that is already rich and complex in its development of a conceptual framework. To assume that an inner dialogue between one’s “quasi-personifications” (§116) is to entirely ignore the process in which how our decisions are made.

Given that objects of consciousness are functions of the same intellectual tools that we use to make our decisions, moral or otherwise,

It lies in the view that in all conduct to which moral predicates are applicable… whether virtuous or vicious, expresses a motive consisting in an idea of personal good.(§115)

We are interested here in how all of these objects of consciousness are functions of the same intellectual tools that we use to make decisions.

We always make decisions based on what we think is best.

A moral life, and the answering of moral consciousness is then something that is not able to achieve with the individual, given the social process that it is.

It is important to note the difference in treating causality as intentional rather than mere occurrence in Green. That our beliefs are come to for specific reasons

We are already working out moral questions, as one reads this, and before, and after, these are always in the process of being checked and re-checked.

[this is from a bit of a letter i wrote to a philosophy pal of mine, we’re considering doing a directed reading together for our theses. this letter is a kind of case being made for wittgenstein being so important to me.]

Justin,
Facebook chess has been absolutely amazing by the way, I know I’m shit at it, but it’s still a lot of fun. Otherwise, I hope you’re keeping well.

I’m pretty excited about potentially working on something with/along side you next year. It’s been a bit difficult being away from school, and it’s upsetting that even more of the people I know and enjoy will be gone next year! In regards to Wittgenstein, I have no issues with telling you that it’s probably just a bit of a philosophy crush. For whatever reason, Wittgenstein just sticks with me. Although his outlook is somewhat original, and his methods of presentation, and the overall lore surrounding him is novel and interesting (both in terms of his ‘cult’ following, and otherwise) the ultimate ideas he presents and put forward are not very new at all. I think Wittgenstein is instead important because of the way in which he comes across these ideas, the context in which he is looking at them, and why he remains so difficult to read given the countless veins of thought that call him their originator. To me, he’s a bit like an Abraham, if I can put it so dramatically (and almost comically).

The central idea, and criticism that Wittgenstein has is that the external/internal divide is a misguided one. When speaking, when thinking, in terms of morality or metaphysics, everything we ‘get’ comes from the same ‘place’. This, supplemented with some interesting insight into the sceptical nature of consciousness and a nice articulation of ‘meaning as use’ is why, I think, he’s so interesting.

…

There isn’t any one decent way in to Wittgenstein. I took Dharamsi’s Analytic course, and for an entire term (when I would attend) I was EXTREMELY confused. It wasn’t until the second term when reading people like Robert Brandom [Articulating Reasons], or in Keenan’s Social and Political reading Charles Taylor [Malaise of Modernity] and Michael Sandel [Liberalism and the Limits of Justice], or Dharamsi’s Idealism class reading Hegel [Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of Right] that things started finally adding up. I was able to pursue how this central idea of ‘Public Personhood’ (as I am only somewhat calling it right now) operates in the world, and how and why there is so much tension between the ideological camps of ‘right and left’.I’m sure that someone more meticulous than I am would be able to pick this through in a much more clear and concise way, and far too often I try to see how as a whole these ideas operate (furthermore, that meticulous person might very well find that this whole project is horseshit.)

My further reading has been T.H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics, Tom Rockmore’s Marx after Marxism, Collingwood’s Idea of History and the collection of papers ‘The New Wittgenstein’ ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read. (above all else, I recommend reading along side of Wittgenstein after sinking your teeth in to Philosophical Investigations Book I, and the a bit of the Tractatus)

For me, Wittgenstein is like an idealist. In the same camp as Hegel and T.H. Green. But he is an idealist in such a way that he only opens up the world of ‘idealism’ to the analytic tradition at large, and doesn’t necessarily advance it. A way in which he is a peer of the analytic community, criticizing his own tradition for ‘getting it wrong’.

Sometimes I like to think that Frege sent Wittgenstein to England as a kind of anti-analytic plant, a malicious anti-representationalist trojan horse that would spring and corrupt all of Cambridge and thus, the analytic heart. But that’s just me wanting philosophy to be more dramatic than it is… wow i just realized that makes me look like a complete philosophy geek.

Okay! Hope your holidays went well, and I hope that this gives you some insight in to why I’m so interested in Wittgenstein. Either that, or you’re going to be entirely confused and scared off. Cheers!
/Aaron

I’d like to make the case that there is no real distinction between mind and body, mind and world, or any inside and outside dichotomy. In order to show this, it requires a great deal of work in regard to foundationalism, and epistemology. Epistemology is the study of the base forms of knowledge. It is the area of philosophy that deals with the question “What can we know?” In doing so, we are opened to the foundations of knowledge, and all of those things assumed as the first premises. The issue of course, being that these premises are up for grabs themselves.

In working toward an understanding of epistemological foundations, let’s look at the grand-daddy of them all, Rene Descartes and The Meditations. The central claim in the Second Meditation is “Cogito Ergo Sum”, or “I Think Therefore I Am”. Often touted as a kind of self-help mantra whereby your willing something to be the case makes it the case, this conception is entirely missing the substance of Cartesian epistemology.
…

“I Think Therefore I Am” is the central building-block of what the west views as the human consciousness. Most all social and political philosophy is built upon this notion of individual thought. If not this particular notion of individual, than one that is similar to it. Descartes articulates is well, and this is why he is so important. Descartes sets out to find the primary germ of knowledge. That which cannot be doubted or questioned, where and how far does our consciousness go? By eliminating all forms of doubt about the world, that which cannot be doubted would be the basic form of knowledge.

I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. (Meditation 2, quote from Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Descartes’ Epistemology)

Regardless of everything that can be doubted, doubt is an action of the mind, a thought. Thinking is an action and such an action requires an actor. I am, therefore, that actor. This is the base form of what we are as conscious beings. That we think, allows us to exist. This establishes the connection of mind to the world.

However, the question is whether this is the actual foundation, or base form of knowledge. Indeed, the thought experiment works in the way it is set up. We doubt all things that are doubtable, but that we are engaging in the act of doubting must constitute something for us. (If you look back on the Schrödinger series, you might recognize this as similar to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?“) That there is something concrete is not interesting in the end, this idea of ‘Something rather than nothing’ is not telling of anything more than what we commonly come to while brushing our teeth in the morning. instead what Descartes assumes is telling of the development of his epistemology.

Is Descartes truly at the furthest stretches of the mind? Is this act of doubt ridding all assumptions of the world and scientifically viewing the foundation of truth? Is he seeing where the software of the mind is written to the metal of the world’s hardware? Consider that by doubting all empirical aspects of the world, Descartes comes to the idea that the act of doubting constitutes our being a thing in the universe. Not only does this assume an object-oriented universe, but the assumption (even in the above quote) is still certain of a self, an actor separate yet connected to the world at large.

How is it that we go from the problem of consciousness, to the idea of something rather than nothing, to a split of mind and body? There is a lack of evidence if we are to take the Cartesian model.

To step back from the problem at hand, think about a language that is restricted to present tense, and what it would mean for a society to be without a sense of time. It is possible to imagine isn’t it? How does this limit/advance the world of these speakers? How is it augmented? The answer is; in more ways than we might know. In this same way that there are more possibilities of consciousness depending on our notion of present-tense, the issue of doubt, or distinctions and assumptions of mind and world might be problems of the language that we speak.

Returning to Cogito Ergo Sum, Descartes assumes there is a world separate from him, and is merely questioning his access to it. The act of doubting all empirical senses of the world has not dissolved the idea of there being a world separate from our minds. Furthermore, ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ assumes an object oriented universe, and the thinker as an actor therein, that the world is separate from its experiencer.

The question then, in keeping with what we have been looking at so far in Mk I and Mk II is whether this notion of mind and body is a viable distinction. The case could be made that there is no such problem. For we are required to both doubt and assume to make any and all every day actions. Their solidity is a build up of habitual practises in that action-based histories. We cannot assume anything outside of what we know.

We don’t really need proof of an external world, because it’s not a problem that we actually have. There is no real reason to assume that the world is not out there and that our consciousness is connected to it. Every act is a processed act. Processed, in that it has been wrung out in the washing of assumption and speculation. Our knowledge all come from the same place, that’s why this text is understandable and why even if there is a hint of concern of the mind/body problem, we can still get up tomorrow morning, brush our teeth and go to work.

What is freedom really? What does a person mean when they say their freedom is impeded upon? What do we mean when we talk of government (the verb, not the noun)?

This of course relates to the most “Introductory” of “Intro” questions “Are we as human beings in control of our own will, or are we determined by our biologies, god or some other higher control?”. I would say that how you answer this question relates entirely to several issues we’ve touched on so far. Namely, the question of ’something rather than nothing’, and the majority of the ‘A Cat Named Schrodinger‘ series that looks at epistemological foundations.

A podcast I’ve been listening to for some time now is Philosophy Bites, which is a short philosophy podcast that is very well produced and well presented. As an aside, far too often ‘philosophy’ podcasts, blogs, etc. are too whimsical, mild and broad (the present company included!). Bites is a short and concise presentation of an idea or notion or thinker often by someone who has committed a great deal of their own work to the topic at hand. I highly recommend this as it stays true to the tradition and the academic pursuit itself, in the format of a kind of interview or seminar.

On a recent edition of Philosophy Bites was Quentin Skinner and his attempt to define the state by way of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The reason I bring this particular discussion up is not for any specific contention with Hobbes, or Skinner’s interpretation, but that it is all together a typical and well presented view of ‘the State’ and what we typically think it means ‘to be governed’ thereby making a case for how we typically view the notion of freedom, and freedom of will.

Hobbes is the grandfather of the liberal democracy, and furthermore this idea of Leviathan is the foundation of all social and political philosophy thereafter. Also, for the upcoming Letters to Nana I’ll be discussing the idea of ‘Social Contract‘ and ‘State of Nature‘ at length, and this might help with some clarification. (Although, saying that it is by no means required listening. These are very accessible ideas!)

…

Essentially, Hobbes makes the case that we as human beings, at our most natural and uninterrupted stage, are ultimately free. That, before we lived in cities with families and governments, our purest selves were animalistic brutes, bent on only our own interests. With the incorporation of the state and our families and our social ties, we give up a kind of ‘right to everything’ in exchange for a kind of civilization. All the while, these brutish doppelgangers scheme inside of us.

This is why the prisoner’s dilemma is considered a given, why we think of breaking the law as the loss of one’s composure and why we continue to blindly economically support a system that assures us that blind support is a bad thing. (that was really meant to be an aside remark…) Freedom, in this case as we are discussing it, is the absence of impediments. It is a freedom from obstacle, or life of least resistance. This is how we typically think of being free, that we are ‘unchained’ from our problems that ‘tie us down’ etc.

It’s not surprising that at this point you might be asking why this is interesting at all, or how freedom could be anything but what we’ve outlined here. What of the ‘freedom’ of interest? In the Hobbes example of the ‘natural state’, we are entirely sure of our own interest and act upon them. How are we ‘free’ if we are merely slaves to our own biological functions?

Instead of maintaining that the external social ‘obstacles’ in our lives (government, taxes, family, obligation, etc.) are impediments, consider that these are the only aspects that constitute us. Consider a life without these things, are we able to maintain the same personality without these ‘obstacles’? Furthermore, without this social infrastructure, are we even people? This notion of freedom is entirely misplaced if it does not account for how our social ties are necessary for the development of our consciousness.

From Charles Taylor in What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty

“Freedom can’t just be the absence of external obstacles, for there may also be internal ones. And nor may the internal obstacles be just confined to those that the subject identifies as such, so that he is the final arbiter; for he may be profoundly mistaken about his purposes and about what he wants to repudiate. And if so, he is less capable of freedom in the meaningful sense of the word.”

The issue at hand is that this notion of freedom might in fact be unfounded, and impossible to actually achieve. Even though our consciousness depends on rules, and structures of information in order for there to be content of the mind, we consistently and ignorantly value an animalistic and self-centred existence masked as a supposed freedom.

All that we have are the rules and structures of social interaction; there is no prior to these institutions. For indeed, prior to these institutions, we are not even sentient, let alone sapient beings. It is not possible to discern which ‘feelings’ to follow, for how are we to know that they are actually what we really want if we are essentially bestial?

If our goal is a ’state of nature’, what would a state of nature, free of social bias, look like? The question is as valuable as asking “what does nothing look like,” in the same sense that we cannot see ‘nothing’ if ‘nothing’ is the absence of all things. We cannot tap in to this (seemingly) natural sense, for it is entirely unnatural and as artificial as the biased social life that we think we are living in.

I have always thought that philosophy was somehow worthwhile in of itself. Whereby studying great texts and engaging in discussions of great ideas, I was performing some sort of interesting and inherently important project for the world at large. After all, these writers are the people who have been in the business of making and breaking history. The leaders of revolution, the upheaval of cultural norms, the transformation of entire belief systems has occurred as a result of their ideas. The Enlightenment, the Da-Da movement, the Bolshevik revolution, the Protestant Reformation, these are all examples of tremendous social change resulting from philosophical practises.

I would argue that philosophy is the root of all of these things, and that any development on the theoretical side of a discipline such as political theory, literary theory or theology is philosophical. Furthermore, these instances are the very kind of act that philosophy is. I would say that Philosophy’s task, speaking in this grandiose and extravagant way, is the ideological development of humanity. The study of Philosophy, which we do here in the academy, is more on side of the development, maintenance and education of that ideological development; however, it is no more in control of it than the average hobo off the street.

This is not to say that philosophy is a project to be taken lightly nor is this an evolutionary account of ideas. The main purpose of Philosophy is the development of a better way of living. “Better” might be construed as more efficient, more profitable, more economically viable than previous periods of time history. Instead, I would want to make the case that ‘better’ ought to be for the development of a commonality among human beings, an organic and moral way of living together for a kind of humanitarian good.

The original notion presented of ‘government’, that ‘freedom’ is a freedom from is detrimental to the project of philosophy and above all, it encourages self-interested activity. It provides an unfounded excuse for the horrific things that we do for one another. It also breeds an ignorance to reasoning and justification in that it purports a kind of pre-self, or second self. In fact, it is awkward to even question the concept of freedom at all, for of course we act as though we’re freely in control of our lives as it is, regardless of whether it is the case or not.

Philosophy’s task is an active and ongoing one. It is at the head of all ideological revolution, political action, economic development, social relationships and self-reflection. Philosophy is entirely accessible to anyone at any time; in fact we do it every day.

Government, as in the verb, is not something we ought to be avoiding, but strongly developed. The human consciousness, as I intend to begin to make the case, is founded on rules and laws. The social system, and the government of that system on the human consciousness are one in the same thing. Our societies are us, and we are them.

Hobbes is only being used here as presenting the notion of a State of Nature, and the Social Contract. I have really not done justice to this idea. There are many versions of this argument, with many variations, and interpretations on those variations. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I’m trying to outline here. Whether or not Hobbes makes a case for freedom in the ‘positive’, or ‘negative’ way, I do not know. I have always read Hobbes in the negative light, but this might be a mistake.

Nonetheless, this has only been a suggestion that the way we typically think of ‘free will’ might be a misguided and ignorant view.

Wittgenstein has really made an impact on me, or more specifically, the experiences I’ve had in studying philosophy and the history of ideas has been expressed best by a Wittgensteinian view. I won’t lie to you, he’s kind of a hero of mine (see the title of this freakin’ website). However, the Wittgenstein I have a crush on might not be the Wittgenstein that so many others have had interest in…

The New Wittgenstein is a collection of papers and talks that are linked only in their interpretation of Wittgenstein as being alternative to any contemporary main-stream view. Perhaps I shouldn’t say “alternative”, the editor and author of the introduction describes it as “unorthodox”, and this is the very complex crux of what is “New” about this Wittgenstein.

It seems insanely difficult to explain such a complex problem such as this: that the ‘traditional’ Wittgensteinian view is incorrect, and the criticisms of that view are also incorrect, and the real goal of Wittgenstein’s writings are something different entirely from what has typically been thought.

Let’s back up for a moment and figure out that the hell that even means.

The traditional view of Wittgenstein is that there is a difference between early and late Wittgensteinian thought. Early Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a soldier during the First World War, and published it soon after. The Tractatus, traditionally speaking, is seen as developing a perfectly logical language to perfectly represent the world around us. This follows that all languages are built atop a logical grammatical structure, and our goal as philosophers is to dissect and make efficient our terms and concepts.

The later Wittgenstein is represented best by the Philosophical Investigations which was published after his death. The Investigations are a collection of notes and lectures by Wittgenstein comprised of two parts. Part I being a completed work ready for publishing yet had never been published by Wittgenstein, and Part II being a series of notes compiled by other editors, people in control of his estate, students, etc. This work is seen as a departure of the early Wittgenstein, and has a variety of interpretations. The most common is that the late Wittgenstein becomes skeptical of the logical perfection of language, and makes a case that philosophy is a kind of anomaly of language, that we can never truly convey the full meanings of our words and concepts of “cat” or “slab”, let alone “free-will” or “truth”. Other interpretations suggest that Wittgenstein makes further his case for the logical perfection of language by furthering the notion of a ‘private language‘.

The framework that Wittgenstein provides in his life’s work and teaching is measured in century of philosophical work that has followed. Nearly every major thinking in the Western world ends up being influenced by Wittgenstein. Some take the original Tractatus view and apply it to the Investigations to produce something like a Jerry Fodor, or Noam Chomsky. Others take the ‘departure’ of the late Wittgenstein very seriously to the extent of socially constructed institutions of language that Richard Rorty would make a case for. The differences between the philosophers mentioned here, or those that exist on either ’side’ of the early/late distinction are far too great and it is difficult to plead all of their cases fairly here, but what is important to understand is that all of the philosophy being done, all the problems and the structures in the past eighty-or-so years have been directly influenced and articulated by the books that have come out of this one man’s brain. This framework, and the setup of the ealry/late dichotomy is what we term in relation to the new Wittgenstein, as the old Wittgenstein.

The new Wittgenstein has little difference between the dichotomy of early and late. Although there are differences between the Tractatus and the Investigations the New view tends to reconsider the Tractatus as purposing something much different than the logical positivist’s project. There is, however, a lack of consistency in the new position except to say that it questions the dichotomy of the ‘perfect language’ or early Wittgenstein, and the ’socially constructed language’ or late Wittgenstein.

“These papers claim that one of Wittgenstein’s main aims throughout his work is getting us to see that the idea of an external standpoint on language is thoroughly confused and that its abandonment is accordingly without consequences for our entitlement to our basic epistemic ideals. Our willingness to insist that abandoning the idea does have such consequences is, by the lights of these papers, a sign that we are still participating in the confusion Wittgenstein seeks to address. This understanding of Wittgenstein as trying to free us in a quite radical manner from the idea of an external standpoint is what licenses talk, in reference to the papers, of a therapeutic aspiration. It is in so far as the papers represent Wittgenstein’s philosophy as therapeutic in this sense - in a sense which, importantly, constitutes a divergence from standard interpretations of his work at both periods - that they suggest a fundamentally different kind of continuity in his thought and thus make a novel contribution to Wittgenstein scholarship.”

from page 4 of the Introduction to The New Wittgenstein by Alice Crary

The reoccurring theme in the new writers is that Wittgenstein’s project has been entirely misunderstood as positing a theory of the world. His work was to manage something entirely different than prescribing solutions to existing philosophical problems. Instead, philosophy’s project is therapeutic. Therapeutic whereby we are in constant question of our epistemic commitments and assumptions, and at all times willing to change them and give them up for new ones. It is, in some sense, a logical positivism and a perfection of linguistic structures, but in knowing that it can never be accomplished in the matter in which we’ve once thought.

The more I read, the more I wonder about how and why Wittgenstein was so misunderstood. Frege’s attempt to implant an idealist in to Russel’s positivist Britain? Russel’s attempt to quell a British idealist uprising? I don’t know about you, but I am fascinated with philosophical love triangles/conspiracies.

There is so much more work to be done with this…