the fetter

Posted on June 10, 2024 by Peter

[Citta, a lay follower of Buddha, said,] “Suppose there was a black ox and a white ox yoked by a single harness or yoke. Would it be right to say that the black ox is the yoke of the white ox, or the white ox is the yoke of the black ox?”

[Several senior monks said,] “No, householder. The black ox is not the yoke of the white ox, nor is the white ox the yoke of the black ox. The yoke there is the single harness or yoke that they’re yoked by.”

[Citta replied,] “In the same way, the eye is not the fetter of sights, nor are sights the fetter of the eye. The fetter there is the desire and greed that arises from the pair of them.

“The ear … nose … tongue … body … mind is not the fetter of ideas, nor are ideas the fetter of the mind. The fetter there is the desire and greed that arises from the pair of them.”

“You’re fortunate, householder, so very fortunate, to traverse the Buddha’s deep teachings with the eye of wisdom.”
Samyuttanikaya, 41.1

Citta is a rich man, the treasurer of a town and the owner of estates. As a “householder,” he probably has a wife and family. He chooses not to renounce property, power, or intimate love. In several discourses, he receives instruction from monks, people who have renounced all these things. Here–meeting them in a wild mango grove that he has donated to their order–Citta instructs the monks.

Given Citta’s worldly way of life, his main risk is to treat the things of this world as ends and to strive to obtain or retain them. That is no path to happiness, because there is always more to want, and everything is fragile. It is certainly no way to help others.

But the monks face dangers, too, and one of them is to disparage the things that give meaning to human life and to derive pleasure from shunning those things. That is no better path to happiness, for oneself or others. As the story suggests, the monks have as much to learn from a wise layperson as he can learn from them.

Here is a 21st century gloss or response to this very ancient text. …

Evolution has equipped human beings with highly sensitive nervous systems that generate a vast range of feelings that matter to us–not just doses of pleasure and pain, but complex assemblages composed of such feelings as curiosity, concentration, attraction, aversion, fascination, awe, anxiety, distraction, horror, and almost infinitely more. We cannot talk about things mattering except by invoking these affective words.

Feelings differ according to the person and the objective situation, but they are also relative to the design of our species. A dog relishes urine smells that we are simply not designed to appreciate. It is not that sunsets are really beautiful and fire hydrants are actually stinky but that humans have positive reactions to some things, just as other creatures gain satisfaction from other things.

Therefore, beauty is not in the world or in us, but in the interaction. One ox is the world, the other is the mind, and what matters is the fetter.

Natural selection promotes survival, not happiness. Although the variations in people’s dispositions and life circumstances yield a range of results, from happiness to despair, suffering is an inevitable consequence of being designed for sensitivity. Bacteria survive by reproducing rapidly, but that is not why we have proliferated.

Trying to shun the things of the world is no use–the other ox must still be there. What deserves our attention is the way we relate to it.

I would add a point that I don’t think is likely to be found in the Pali Canon. We are not just natural creatures with nervous systems designed in certain ways. We are also profoundly historical creatures. We think in languages that previous human beings have developed over millennia. We assess natural objects using words and concepts that other people have made. And we live surrounded by things that people have fashioned on purpose. There are sunsets to watch but also paintings of sunsets. It’s impossible to watch the sun move behind the rotating earth without having learned how human beings have named and represented and explained and enjoyed “sunsets.”

That means that the yoke is not the relationship between my mind and the world. It is the accumulated history of all the minds and the world, where the world includes the products of all the other minds.

Much suffering and alienation is built into the fetters that we inherit. Improving them cannot be a task for individuals alone but must be accomplished together.

The advice of the Pali Canon would be to form affective communities that conduct rituals together, like the monks in the mango grove that Citta gave them. It’s an important question whether politics can also help–for example, whether making the earth literally more peaceful can create a better environment for our minds. (Citta devotes some of his time to political leadership.) I would also argue that the arts and humanities contribute by giving us new links between mind and world in the form of representations, interpretations, and objects that we can behold and use.

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analytic and holistic reasoning about social questions

Posted on May 24, 2024 by Peter

“President Biden’s student loan cancellations will bring relief.” “Retrospectively forgiving loans creates a moral hazard.” “At this college, students study the liberal arts.” “An unexamined life is not worth living for humans.”

These claims are, respectively, about a specific act (a policy announced yesterday), a pattern that applies across many cases, an assessment of an institution, and a universal principle.

These statements may be related. An ambitious defense of Biden’s decision to forgive student loans might connect that act to liberal education and thence to a good life, whereas a critique might tie the loan cancelation to cost increases. A good model of a social issue or question often combines several such components.

In this post, I will contrast two ways of thinking about models and their components.

Analytic reasoning

Analytic reasoning seeks characteristics that apply across cases. We can define government aid, moral hazard, and education, defend these definitions against alternatives, and then expect them generally to have the same significance wherever they apply. For example, becoming more self-aware is desirable, all else being equal or as far as that goes (ceteris paribus or pro tanto). We need a definition of self-awareness that allows us to understand what tends to produce it and what good it does. The same goes for loans, loan-forgiveness, and so on.

Methods like controlled field experiments and regression models require analysis, and they demonstrate that it has value. Ethical arguments that depend on sharply defined universals are quintessentially analytic. Qualitative research is often quite analytic, too, particularly when either the researcher or the research subjects employ general concepts.

Analytic reasoning offers the promise of generalizable solutions to social problems. For instance, let’s say you believe that we should spend more money on schools in poor communities. In that case, you are thinking analytically: you view money as an identifiable factor with predictable impact. Note that you might advocate increasing the national education budget while also being sensitive to local differences about things other than money.

Holistic reasoning

Holistic reasoning need not been any less rigorous, precise, or tough-minded than analytic reasoning, but it works with different objects: whole things. For example, we can describe a college as an entity. To do that requires saying many specific things about the institution, but each claim is not meant to generalize to other places.

At a given (imaginary) institution, the interplay between a rural setting, an affluent student body, an applied-science curriculum, a modest endowment, and a recent crisis of leadership could produce unexpected results, and those are only some of the factors that would explain the particular ethos that emerges at that college.

Holistic reasoning is wise if each factor is closely related to others in its specific context. For instance, often a statistic about a place is the result of decisions about what and how to measure, which (in turn) depend on who’s in charge and what incentives they face, which depends on prior political decisions, and so on–indefinitely. From a holistic perspective, a statistic lacks meaning except in conjunction with many other facts.

There is a link here to holistic theories of meaning and/or language, e.g., Robert Brandom: “one cannot have any concepts unless one has many concepts. For the content of each concept is articulated by its inferential relations to other concepts. Concepts, then, must come in packages” (Brandom 2000).

Holistic reasoning is also wise if values change their significance depending on the context, a view labeled as “holism” in metaethics. We are familiar with the idea that lying is bad–except in circumstances when it is good, or even courageous and necessary. An ethical holist believes that there are good and bad value-judgments, but they are not about abstract categories (such as lying). They are about wholes.

Finally, holistic reasoning is wise if we can gain insights about meaning that would be lost in analysis. In Clifford Geertz’ classic interpretation of a Balinese cockfight (Geertz 1972), he successively describes that phenomenon as “a chicken hacking another mindless to bits” (p. 84); “deep play” (p. 71), or an activity that has intrinsic interest for those involved; “fundamentally a dramatization of status concerns” (p. 74); an “encompassing structure” that presents a coherent vision of “death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance” (p. 79); and “a kind of sentimental education” from which a Balinese man “learns what his culture’s ethos and his private sensibility (or, anyway, certain aspects of them) look like when spelled out externally in a collective text” (p. 83).

Geertz offers lots of specific empirical data and uses concepts that would apply across cases, including terms like “chickens” and “betting” that arise globally. However, he is not primarily interested in what causes cockfights in Bali or what they cause. His main question is: What is this thing? Since Balinese cockfighting is a human activity, what it is is what it means. And it has meaning as a whole thing, not as a collection of parts.

Conclusion

This discussion may suggest that holistic reasoning is more sensitive and thoughtful than analytic reasoning. But recall that ambitious social reform proposals depend on analytic claims. If everything is contextual, then there is no basis for changing policies or priorities that apply across cases. Holistic reasoning may be conservative, in a Burkean sense–for better or for worse.

Then again, a “whole” need not be something small and local, like a cockfight in Bali or a college in the USA. A nation-state can also be analyzed and interpreted holistically and changed as a result.

It is trite to say that we need both analytic and holistic reasoning about policy, but we do. Instead of jumping to that conclusion, I’ve tried to draw a contrast that suggests some real disadvantages of each.

References: Brandom, Robert B. Articulating reasons: An introduction to inferentialism. Harvard University Press, 2001; Geertz, Clifford. “Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight.” Daedalus 134.4 (2005): 56-86. See also: against methodological individualism; applied ethics need not mean applying ethical systems; what must we believe?, modeling social reality; choosing models that illuminate issues–on the logic of abduction in the social sciences and policy; choosing models that illuminate issues–on the logic of abduction in the social sciences and policy; different kinds of social models etc.

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Verdant mountains usually walk

Posted on May 13, 2024 by Peter

In a museum not far from our house, there is a painting entitled “Zen Saying” by the great teacher Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768). Author of the koan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”, Hakuin “was the most influential Rinzai Master in Japanese history” (Kasulis 1981, p. 105), and Rinzai is one of the three traditions of Japanese Zen.

The label translates the calligraphed words as: “Verdant mountains usually walk, barren women give birth at night.” The label also explains that the character for “usual” or “normal” (tsune) is here elongated in an unusual way–indeed, to the very “limits of legibility.”*

When I try to think about verdant mountains walking, I can form inferences. For example: if verdant mountains walk, we’d better stay out of their way! I cannot picture them walking without resorting to a cartoonish image. This is a limitation of my imagination, of language, or of the possible.

I can imagine that Hakuin–after decades of practice–had a different experience from mine when he thought of walking mountains and barren women giving birth. I can picture him having that experience without sharing it.

(By the way, he might equally have seen statements such as “The self exists” and “There is no self” as senseless paradoxes.)

I cannot read Hakuin’s brushstrokes. I could, however, learn to read Japanese calligraphy, and I already know (roughly) what this text means. The characters are across a border of understanding from me, yet I can know what lies over there and can even shift the border by learning more from scholars and intermediaries.

I cannot feel what it was like to be the artist who painted this image, but I can learn many facts about his life, his genre, the koan he represents here, the tradition of koans, and his context. Again, Hakuin stands across a border, but I can indefinitely continue learning about what is on his side.

Right now, I am looking at a photograph of the painting, having recently seen the original. My mental state is reasonably calm but perhaps a bit distracted, since I am also typing. I know that I could see the same image while anxious or bored, and the whole experience would be different. I could even deliberately induce a state of anxiety. Then I would know that I had experienced the image while I was calm, but I would no longer be able to feel it the same way.

In short, there is a border around my current state of mind. I know what lies beyond it and can say (roughly) how it feels over there, but I cannot feel it now. I do know that the world for me always has a certain mood, which can change. In that sense, I know that my condition is temporal.

Expanding the scale of time, I can recall (sometimes vividly) what it felt like to be a child or a young parent with a child in arms. But those are memories rather than experiences. There is a border around my identity as a middle-aged person. I can see over it but cannot cross it.

I can imagine the permanent end of my own consciousness. But experiences turn instantly into memories, and not so with death. There is a border around the whole of a life. We can know what the world will be like without ourselves in it but cannot feel that absence. Hakuin experienced the end of his consciousness and left something for us that he can no longer know.

I am sitting and typing next to my dog. We each know and care a lot about the other. But Luca has no idea about Japanese Buddhist calligraphy, not even enough to form questions that are beyond his ken. He doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. I understand barely enough about Zen that I do know some of what I don’t know, but my dog’s example shows that there can easily be things entirely beyond any being’s capacity to grasp.

The Japanese word kyogai is important in Zen practice. It is often translated as “consciousness.” It turns out that it literally means “boundary” or “bounded place,” and it derives originally from the Sanskrit word visayah, in the sense of a pasture that has a boundary.

Think of an animal grazing in a space surrounded by hedges. Or think of Hakuin, with his specific language and mood, writing about verdant mountains that walk. The mountains are outside his pasture, and he is outside mine.

Mumon Yamada (1900-1988) taught:

This thing called kyogai is an individual thing. Only a sparrow can understand the kyogai of a sparrow. Only a hen can understand the kyogai of a hen and only another fish can understand the kyogai of a fish. In this cold weather, perhaps you are feeling sorry for the fish, poor thing, for it has to live in the freezing water. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it would be better off if you put it in warm water; that would kill it. You are a human and there is no way you can understand the kyogai of a fish (in Hori 2000)

This is not precisely true. We can understand a vast amount about the fish, including its ideal water temperature and details about its sensory organs and neurology. There is a sense in which we can understand the kyogai of the fish and the fish cannot. It presumably has no grasp of the category of kyogai (or to draw from a different tradition, Umwelt). However, it is correct that we can never know how it feels to be a fish. We can’t even feel as we ourselves do in a different mood. And who knows what kyogai we cannot even imagine?

Victor Sogen Hori adds:

Kyogai can be said to change and develop, for it is a product of human effort. Thus one can say “His kyogai is still unripe” (Mada kyogai ga mijuku) or “His kyogai is still shallow” (Mada kyogai ga asai), implying that even though the monk has been working at overcoming his indecision, or fear, or pride, he still shows traces of self-consciousness. Finally, kyogai bears the quite personal imprint of the particular individual. One person’s way of acting in a fire drill, cooking in the kitchen, carrying on the tasks of daily life may be energetic and impassioned; another may do the same tasks coolly and methodically. Yet each may in his own fashion be narikitta in the way he acts. Thus one can say of monk Daijo’s way of performing some task, “That is typically Daijo kyogai.” (Hori 2000, p. 293).

If we can change our kyogai, how should we go about that?

We can ignore the boundaries (including the boundary of death) and graze in our respective pastures. This may be wise.

We can explore our own pasture and its boundaries to come to understand it fully. That is what Kant meant by a “critique” of reason–not a criticism of it, but an analysis of its structure and limits.

We can interact with people who have crossed our own boundaries. I am fortunate that a painting from the hand of one of the most famous Zen masters is in my neighborhood. To study that painting is to observe someone from a different time and context–and specifically someone who wrote about things “whereof one cannot speak.” Hakuin wrote koans not for himself but to benefit others, living and not yet born.

And we can try to cross the boundaries. A koan is a tool for doing that. The painting by Hakuin represents a verbal koan in Japanese characters. It is also a physical object that can work as a koan.

Dogen (1200-1253) comments on the koan, “Who can hear insentient beings speak dharma?” He says:

Only the insentient know the dharma they speak of,
just as walls, grass, and trees know the spring.
Ordinary and sacred are not hemmed in by boundaries,
nor are mountains and rivers; sun, moon, or stars.

“Zen Saying” is an insentient object that hangs on the wall of the museum. During a few seconds more than 250 years ago, Hakuin took a stick of hardened soot and glue, ground it with water, dipped a brush into the mix, and spread some of the blackness downward across the paper to make a long, imperfectly straight, sometimes translucent line that is unmistakably a brushstroke. That line is a bit of earth, a thing. It depicts nothing, but it means “usual,” contributing to a sentence about something so unusual that we cannot envision it.*

The line is a trace of the act of a specific man who long ago became insentient soot himself. The other insentient things around this work look different in its presence, as–according to Heidegger–a Greek temple that stands on the earth and presents itself as the home of a god makes a world appear:

The luster and gleam of stone, glowing by grace of the sun, first makes manifest the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the weaving of the flowing sea, and in its own repose brings out the latter’s turmoil. Trees and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their contrasting shape and thus come to appear as that which they are (Heidegger 1964, pp. 669-70).

Standing in the presence of the “Zen Saying,” I sense my contrast with it and feel myself appearing as that which I am.

References: T.P. Kasulis, Zen Action, Zen Person (University Press of Hawaii, 1981); Victor Sogen Hori, “Koan and Kensho in the Rinzai Zen Curriculum,” in The Koan. Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism (2000); The Essential Dogen, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Lovitt (2013), p. 170; and Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (New York: The Modem Library, 1964). See also: thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition; ‘every thing that lives is holy’: Blake’s radical relativism; a Heideggerian meditation; nostalgia for now; Ito Jakuchu at the National Gallery; and on inhabiting earth with inaccessibly beautiful things

*I got that information from the label, but a friend tells me that the character that is so boldly elongated stands for “walk.”

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What was Nietzsche doing?

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Peter

I enjoyed guest-teaching a course on Leo Strauss last evening that enrolls an extraordinary group of students. Deeply steeped in political philosophy–and especially Nietzsche–they are able to cite Nietzschean texts by heart, with references.

I had assigned a selection from Will to Power for this session because, in my early work (and even in a roman-a-clef), I presented Strauss as thoroughly Nietszchean. As we discussed the earlier philosopher, I asked–without premeditation–what we think he was up to. Was Nietzsche …

A therapist
A political actor
An artist
A philosopher with views
A scholar

Any forced-choice question about a major thinker is reductive, but I recommend this one to provoke conversation.

Students provided some alternatives that were not on my impromptu list, such as “a recruiter of philosophers.” For what it’s worth, I would choose c. (an artist), while recognizing that a. and e. are also true, to a degree. I am not so sure that Nietzsche was political, in even the loosest sense of that word; in other words, I am skeptical that he wrote to change society. And I don’t think he had philosophical views, in the standard way, because his core doctrines were meant to be self-refuting. I think that Nietzsche wrote to create beautiful, original, and formally fascinating works, in which the author is also a character.

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applied ethics need not mean applying ethical systems

Posted on April 4, 2024 by Peter

Recently, hearing a distinguished technologist talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), I recognized a familiar style. People in a given technical field realize that they face an ethical issue. They turn to the relevant academic discipline (philosophy), and they think that they discern a set of available ethical “systems.” These options include at least utilitarianism and Kantianism/deontology. They apply each system to the issue at hand and explore its apparent conclusions. The various systems seem to disagree about at least some cases, and the analysts conclude that ethical questions are hard and unresolved and that people who happen to start from different premises will probably reach different conclusions. The last slide of the PowerPoint is a head-scratcher about the difficulty of ethical reasoning.

I suspect that these “systems” look authoritative because they have been discussed in vast numbers of peer-reviewed publications. If you want to mention deontology, you can cite Kant (1788) and innumerable subsequent works. For utilitarianism, you have Bentham (1789) and its successors. (See Stahl 2021 as just one example.) In a technocratic world, this form of authority seems weighty. You are not just expressing a personal opinion if you can mention a book that has thousands of citations.

The mental model behind this kind of analysis also resembles technical forms of reasoning. The various philosophical systems are seen as very general and internally consistent premises that generate conclusions algorithmically. Ethics is treated as a Normal Science.

To be fully satisfactory, a system’s premises should apply to all cases. Trolley-problems and similar thought-experiments are fascinating because they suggest that the general premises of different systems conflict in select cases. Different algorithms yield different results. The methodological assumption is that analyzing such exotic thought-experiments should clarify principles that will then apply universally. Since this method doesn’t seem to have succeeded (yet), the analyst is entitled to conclude that ethics is unresolved. Hence the last slide of the presentation is about not knowing what to do.

It is often acknowledged that there are more than two or three ethical views for which we can provide fancy citations. What about Thomism, Stoicism, Marxism (of various flavors), feminism, the Five Precepts of Buddhism, Confucianism, African “Sage Philosophy” as explored by H. Odera Oruka (1990), deep ecology, Nietzsche, Levinas, etc. etc.? The notion that there are two or three available systems has a specific history in secular, 20th-century, Anglophone philosophy departments, and it was always controversial even there.

Then again, when people extend the list of available philosophies, often they reach even more relativist conclusions. If “systems” from distant times and places disagree, then surely there can be no right answers. Now the PowerPoint really ends with a head-scratcher.

But in order to conduct this kind of analysis, one must assume that very general premises should apply across all relevant cases. In other words, the appropriate units of analysis are broad generalizations. It is either right or wrong that we should maximize aggregate welfare or that we should treat people as ends rather than means.

One of the leading systems, deontology, may not purport to generate guidance about specific cases. In the Shadow of God (2022) Michael Rosen gives an up-to-date argument that Kant did not intend for his principles to answer questions of applied ethics. If that’s true, then it’s a bit odd to treat utilitarianism and Kantianism as rival “systems.” Utilitarianism might even be the only available philosophy that can really work like an algorithm, and only in some of its forms.

If you are a particularist, you believe that generalizations are not the appropriate units of analysis. What is right or wrong is the specific act, not the generalization. Most people aren’t true particularists, but many are somewhat leery of pure abstraction. We presume that general ethical statements can have some validity and value but that generalizations rarely settle particular cases.

I like Jonathan Dancy’s aesthetic analogy: the best object of judgment is a painting, not a feature (like a splotch of red paint) that recurs in many paintings. Aesthetic judgment is holistic, and the whole is the work of art. Likewise, ethical judgment is often about a whole ethical situation that has many features, not about each feature taken abstractly.

One irony is that applied ethics derives its authority from the academic discipline of philosophy, yet not very many current philosophy professors apply ethical “systems” to cases. I think that approach comes most naturally to technologists who expect reasoning to be algorithmic, whereas philosophers are often humanists who prefer close readings and thick-description.

The applied ethics that I admire most is much more attentive to the empirical and pragmatic details of specific cases, much more closely engaged with the dilemmas of practitioners, more focused on real situations instead of thought-experiments, and more open to normative insights from a range of sources (literature, history, folklore …). It aims to address problems, not to provoke skepticism. And it accepts responsibility for its own consequences.

My favorite applied ethicists work in the world (almost always with collaborators) and are willing to reflect on whether the outcomes are good or bad. Their final PowerPoint slide says: “This is what we’re building, what we hope to accomplish, and why. What do you think about it?”

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Cephalus

Posted on March 11, 2024 by Peter

I am so lucky: near the finish line
With no tragedies. My three sons are fine.
I may never have to open the door
To wrenching news or the grim stench of war.

I sleep all right these days, now that lust is less
A master, and guilt, that dogged hunter,
Lets me burrow in a secret shelter
Where I tell myself I deserve success.

When I heard Socrates had come down here,
I sent a boy to stop him. My knees are such
I cannot walk uphill to Athens much.
I hate to miss the clever talk, and I fear
The wise and famous will forget Cephalus.

It was like old times; we quoted lovely lines.
But I knew he'd start to press: “What do you mean,
Cephalus? Doesn't that come in different kinds?”
The more we examine hope, the more hope declines.
I left Socrates to my son, exited the scene,
And, wearing my silly wreath, resumed my place,
Performing prayers in the marketplace.

Cf. Plato, Republic 331d: “‘Very well,’ said Cephalus, ‘I will turn the whole argument over to you. For now is the time when I must take charge of the sacrifices.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Aren’t I, Polemarchus, the heir to everything you have?’ ‘Certainly,’ he laughed, and he went at once to the sacrifices.” See also: Pindar on hope; philosophy and self-help; shelter

The Vuslat Foundation and Generous Listening

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Peter

The Vuslat Foundation has opened a public website as generouslistening.org. At the Tisch College of Civic Life, we are one of their partners, as you can tell from the description of a conference that we co-organized and held at Tufts last year (a symposium on “Generous Listening in Organizations“); a blog post by my colleague James Fisher about Quaker dialogues in West Africa; and other references on their site.

The Foundation also does much work on their own or with other partners, including remarkable support-groups for women displaced by the earthquakes in Southeast Turkey in 2023.

I come to this partnership as someone who has studied political deliberation–for instance, as a co-editor (with John Gastil) of the Deliberative Democracy Handbook. SInce the late 1900s, public deliberation has been a movement of theorists and practitioners, but it is rooted in much older ideas about politics that have typically emphasized speech, communication, persuasion, and rhetoric–as both virtues and threats.

The Vuslat Foundation has helped me to shift my focus from one side of the exchange to the other–from speaking to listening. Of course, these acts always go together (even when they are metaphors for written speech, signs, or gestures). It is hardly a novel insight that communication requires at least two people. But I have benefitted from thinking more about the listening side.

First, there’s an ethical imperative. Listening well (“generously,” in the language that the Vuslat Foundation has developed) is an important virtue. Using one’s voice well is also virtuous, and sometimes even obligatory, but the need to be a good listener seems especially compelling.

Second, we can think about listening holistically. One aspect is listening to other people in deliberations, but we also listen to ourselves, to animals, waves, or the wind, to human soundscapes, to near-silence, perhaps to the divine, and to those who are long dead. I have found it useful to think of civic listening as just one kind of listening.

Third, I am taken by the “interactionist” theory of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, which has helped me make sense of some of my own data–in forthcoming articles. To summarize their model crudely, imagine two or more people discussing what to do. When individuals speak, they tend to use motivated reasoning: inventing justifications for what they already want to believe, sometimes for bad reasons, such as self-interested bias. But when they listen to other people offer reasons, they are relatively good at assessing whether these points are valid, and they may change their minds. Mercier and Sperber offer an evolutionary explanation that suggests that highly social and verbal primates would develop the ability to make arguments to advance their own interests, but also the ability to assess others’ arguments in order to make good collective judgments.

Mercier and Sperber never suggest that listening always goes well. We can certainly listen selectively and exhibit bad motives when we select whom and what to listen to. But their theory suggests that we can improve individual skills and conditions for listening–perhaps more easily than we can improve speaking.

Finally, listening has spiritual (or at least psychotherapeutic) benefits that have been recognized and developed in many traditions. Although we can also gain spiritually from communicating well, the listening side is especially relevant to meditative practices of all kinds.

philosophy and self-help

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Peter

I recommend Kieran Setiya’s article “Is Philosophy Self-Help?” in The Point. Setiya has written serious philosophy that I have found helpful psychologically, and he has looked at the self-help business, starting with Samuel Smiles’ 1859 bestseller, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct.

Based partly on his article, I would emphasize these differences:

Self-help tries to meet the desires of the reader–usually but not invariably for happiness. In contrast, philosophy asks what the reader should desire. Personal happiness is one possible answer, but that is debatable in philosophy.
Self-help tries to serve the reader, addressing that person’s specific needs, values, and tastes. Philosophy asks whether human beings in general should pursue certain values. Some philosophers have given pluralist responses, emphasizing that individuals or cultures may or should hold different values. But such pluralism is, again, controversial in philosophy and would require a defense. As Setiya notes, “For Aristotle, the nature you should perfect is not your individual potential, but an objective human nature whose ideal expression lies in theoretical contemplation of the cosmos.”
Self-help influences individuals’ thoughts and choices. For some philosophers (e.g., Emerson) one’s self is the best topic, but for others, it’s essential to think about society and institutions, and possibly even to sacrifice oneself for them.

I’m in a reading group on Plato’s Republic, and all three differences between self-help and philosophy are already evident in the very first pages. Cephalus is presented as an old man who is happy. He has taken advice from Pindar and Simonides, whom he treats as self-help gurus. He has learned from them that he’s better off now that his appetites for sex and other desires have diminished. He derives serenity from reflecting on his own virtue.

Socrates is a threat to Cephalus’ happiness (and I am open to the possibility that Plato sees him as a menace). Socrates will not take Cephalus’ subjective beliefs for granted; he challenges the definition of justice that Cephalus has found in Simonides. He thereby demonstrates that Cephalus has drawn serenity from an unfounded belief in his own rightness.

Further, we know that Cephalus’ sons Polemarchus and Lysias (who are present in the dialogue) will later be selected to be two of the first ten victims of the Thirty Tyrants– Lysias narrowly escaping; Polemarchus suffering death. They will be singled out because, like Cephalus, they are wealthy resident aliens, not citizens. So we can see that Cephalus’ happiness is contingent on the accident that the city has chosen to treat him well. He should be thinking about how to secure justice for the community.

On the other hand, one might think that Cephalus is lucky not to get a full dose of Socrates. He leaves just before Socrates begins to critically analyze his beliefs, heading off to watch a civic/religious festival instead. I can read the portrait of Cephalus as elegiac: he fortunately lived a happy life to its conclusion before his happiness could be wrecked by either philosophy or politics.

Pindar on hope

Posted on February 23, 2024 by Peter

Cephalus says: “For if, looking at his own life, [an old man] identifies many wrong acts, then he often awakens from his sleep, as children do, in fear and bad hopes, but if he observes no injustice in himself, then pleasant hope is always nearby as a good caregiver, as Pindar says–for he puts it gracefully, Socrates, when he says of a person who gets through life justly and piously:

Sweetness in the heart,
Fosterer and elder-carer:
Hope, the best pilot of the thought
Of oft-twisted mortals

Cephalus adds: “Oh, how wonderfully well he says that …”

But then Socrates breaks the mood by asking what justice is, making Cephalus–a contented old man–wonder whether he has ever really known it.

If I read the Pindar verses correctly, the two main words in the second line refer to the care (respectively) of children and the elderly. Indeed, the course of a human life is a prevalent theme at the beginning of The Republic, from which I have taken this passage (331a). At the very outset, Socrates, an older adult, is physically stopped on the road by a “child,”* who has been sent by an old man, Cephalus. One of the attractions that Socrates is promised, if he agrees to stay, is an opportunity for dialogue with “young men” (328a). But Socrates asks Cephalus to report on what it’s like to be old.

Although The Republic is about justice, the entree to that discussion is the question of how to age well. A major question is why one should have to think about justice at all, and an answer suggested here is that knowing justice allows one to have hope in old age. One irony is that Cephalus is happy because he only thinks he knows justice; a second irony is that Cephalus’ sons will later be cruelly treated by the unjust. In both respects, his hope may be misplaced.

*I drafted this post while preparing for a reading group discussion, and a colleague with infinitely better Greek than mine said that this use of the word pais is unspecific about age. Here, it’s a patronizing word for slave. Cf. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 54. (The quoted verse is denoted Pindar Frag. 214, Loeb. Translations are mine.)

choosing models that illuminate issues–on the logic of abduction in the social sciences and policy

Posted on February 21, 2024 by Peter

It’s very common for people to use different explanatory and evaluative ideas to describe the same concrete situation, whether it’s the Israel/Palestine conflict, or bias in law enforcement, or almost anything else.

We should navigate between two obstacles, I think. One mistake to view rival ideas as simply subjective, because they are often value-laden, and to view politics as a mere clash among people with different subjective views. The other is to imagine that empirical research can settle such disputes by validating one model or (at least) refuting some of them. We can deliberate about competing models, but the discussion requires more than data.

It is often assumed that a model generates hypotheses, and we can test the model by testing its hypotheses. Nancy Cartwright disputes this assumption. She suggests that models are not like vending machines that yield hypotheses, but more like “fables” that present vivid scenarios and “morals”—suggestions for behavior—that we should look for in the world (Cartwright 1999, 185-6; Cartwright 2010).

Similarly, Max Weber understood an “ideal-type,” such as feudalism or the state, not as a hypothesis but as a “conceptual construct” that “offers guidance in the construction of hypotheses” (Weber 1905/1949, 93, 90). This means that disproving a hypothesis suggested by a model does not disprove the model, although repeated failures to suggest valid hypotheses might encourage us look for alternative models.

The fable of the tortoise and the hare does not pose an inference about reptiles and rabbits, or even a ceteris paribus hypothesis that moving slower yields better outcomes. Rather, it defines two personality types that may be worth looking for in the world; it cautions against arrogance; and it may suggest hypotheses, e.g., that making decisions more rapidly reduces the quality of information (Rae, Heathcote, Donkin, Averell & Brown 2014). Similarly, the model of the Prisoner’s Dilemma suggests that we should look for problems and form empirical hypotheses that involve individuals choosing independently. The model also makes a conceptual contribution by sharply defining cooperation and defection (Johnson 2020). Choosing any such model is a matter of judgment or practical wisdom, not a question of deciding which model is true

Forming and selecting an explanation for a specific situation is the logic of abduction. Deduction means drawing inferences from known premises; induction means generalizing from cases; but abduction involves connecting a single case to a relevant general idea. Charles Sanders Pierce coined the word (Douven 2021). Pierce was a pragmatist, and abduction is a pragmatic necessity, even in the natural sciences.

I would add that it is appropriate to apply normative principles when forming and selecting models of a society. First, the point is to improve situations, not only explain them. Second, any given model incorporates normative elements, even if it pretends to be strictly explanatory, and it should be assessed as such.

For Weber, an ideal-type is “an attempt to analyze historically unique configurations or their individual components by means of genetic concepts” (Weber 1905, 93). An ideal-type cannot be the basis of deductive conclusions about reality, because “a description of even the smallest slice off reality can never be exhaustive”; the “number and type of causes which have influenced any given event are always infinite”; and “there is nothing in the things themselves to set some of them apart as alone meriting attention” (Weber 1905, 78). Instead, we rightly choose our concepts to address aspects of specific situations that provide insights about our own problems, as we see them from “particular points of view” (Weber 1905, 81, italics in the original). Ideal-types are “model types which … contain what, from the point of view of the expositor, should be and what to him is ‘essential’ … because it is enduringly valuable” (Weber 1905, 97).

Weber objects to the assumption that we study phenomena to derive general laws that we can then apply deductively, as if a concrete investigation were the means to the end of general knowledge. He claims that the reverse is true; ideal-types are means to understanding the unique constellations of events that rightly concern us (Weber 1905, 79).

In the article that originated the concept (now almost a cliché) of “wicked problems,” Rittel and Webber posit that often solutions to social problems “are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.” They write, “Normally, many parties are equally equipped, interested, and/or entitled to judge the solutions,” and “their judgments are likely to differ widely in accord with their group or personal interests, their special value-sets, and their ideological predilections” (Rittel & Webber 1973, 162-3).

They mention that “‘Crime on the streets’ can be explained by not enough police, by too many criminals, by inadequate laws, cultural deprivation, deficient opportunity, phrenological aberrations, etc.” (Rittel & Webber 1973, 166). In fact, evidence has overwhelmed phrenological explanations for crime, while other explanations have become more persuasive since Rittel and Webber wrote. But they are right that reasonable people may choose different explanatory models and frameworks for the same phenomena. Like Weber, they argue that data cannot settle such choices, but “attitudinal criteria guide” rightly us. People choose explanations that are “plausible” and useful for their “intentions” and “action prospects” (Rittel & Webber 1973, 166).

Our diverse starting points do not guarantee that we must reach divergent conclusions. We can learn from one another, and to do so, we should collect and share evidence. For instance, imagine that my initial model presumes a root cause, such as structural racism. Someone demonstrates that it is possible to disrupt a cycle of inequality by adopting a policy, such as reforming employment contracts for police, that does not address the root cause. My initial model was not refuted, but the evidence may persuade me that I could achieve more with a cyclical model that has no “root.” I have learned and shifted my view, but I have not refuted the root-cause model, which I might even use again on another day.

This is a pragmatist conception of the relationship between evidence and models (cf. Aligica 2014, 166-199). Note that in this conception, evidence is not merely instrumental to an outcome, because it may also persuade us to change the outcome that we think is best to pursue.

See also: what must we believe?; different kinds of social models; making our models explicit; social education as learning to improve models. Sources: Cartwright, N. (1999). The dappled world: A study of the boundaries of science. Cambridge University Press; Cartwright, N. (2010). Models: Parables v fables. In R. Frigg & M.C. Hunter, Beyond mimesis and convention: Representation in art and science (pp. 19-31). Springer Netherlands; Weber, M. 1905/1949. “Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy. In E.A. Shils, & H.A. Finch (Eds.), Max Weber on The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe Ill.: The Free Press, 50- 112); Rae, B., Heathcote, A., Donkin, C., Averell, L., & Brown, S. (2014). The hare and the tortoise: Emphasizing speed can change the evidence used to make decisions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(5), 1226–1243; Rittel W.J. & Webber, M.M., (1973) Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences 4, 155-69; Douven, Igor, “Abduction”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Aligica, P. (2014) Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press

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