Now, I have a reputation for being able to teach most areas of philosophy. There are exceptions, of course, such as strange, continental-flavoured modules like ‘Feminist Philosophy’ and ‘Marxism’, but that is broadly correct.
An odd mixed sort of module is ‘Philosophy of Religion’.
Now, as everyone knows, analytical philosophers do not do silly obscure superstitious nonsense, and only ignorant fools are so lazy that they delegate their intellectual and moral faculties to God, a being that does not make any sense let alone actually exist.
True, some arguments for the existence of God, such as the infamous Ontological Argument which uses some complex modal logic, can only be understood by proper Anglos, but, really, even though we must be kind to students and offer them what they want to learn about, philosophy of religion is an area of subject which, despite its historical pedigree, is a bit infra-dig.
Anyway, I suppose I have to talk about it. And one thing I do know is that teachers of philosophers of religion have to be fully aware of one axiom if they are to Survive the Seminar, to coin a phrase.
Hermann Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe in case you forgot, apparently once said that when he heard the word ‘culture’ he would reach for his revolver. What I am told to do is likewise reach for some equally effective silencing instrument when someone in the seminar group starts to talk about their own religious experiences. Don’t even let them think about starting.
Exactly why? I have never got that far, and my recent experiences in churches are fairly anodyne, being restricted to weddings, christenings and funerals. The sermons tend to be fairly short, even slightly apologetic.
Still, I shall rely on expert advice, as always. In any case, I am a card-carrying atheist, and consequently have never had any religious experiences. That is to say, not since I read Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins on the evils of religious thought and practice, have I had any properly religious experiences, which is just as well. Why is that?
Because … a non-religious person’s religious experiences are the very worst. Not even Goering can really cope with them.
The title of this post reflects that of an article I wrote back in 2008. It had the snappy title of ‘Divine Hoorays: Some Parallels between Expressivism and Religious Ethics’. It was published in a very, very distinguished Philosophy journal, despite being about 11,500 words long, and the journal’s being overwhelmed with wannabe entries.
Did this publication make my career, I hear you ask with hot-eyed adoration? Actually, no. It fell dead-born from the press, to coin a phrase. I attach a link to the article in question, but I must warn you that, unless you are affiliated to a university, you will probably hit a paywall if you actually try to read it. That might not be the only thing you hit.
Now for some religious music …
So, why believe in God? Well, I guess there are two related reasons. Firstly, there must be some reason why everything exists. We used to wonder why we are here, but since Darwin we have been less inclined to think that there is a mystery here. Science, with a capital ‘S’ explains it well, as Richard Dawkins shows us.
The second reason is moral. Without a God, or some set of divine commands, there can be no going beyond the limited edicts of our particular tribe, society, species or whatever. We can all see how much better things could be. What exactly is it that we see?
Ethics and religion have a complex, though familiar relationship. In the UK, the desirability of religious education in schools is something hotly debated, if only because the country has citizens with many different religions. The Church of England is beleaguered, and for more than one reason.
Some think that the country and its people would be better off if there were no religious education at all. Or if there is to be any, it should be education about the mostly negative effects that religious belief has on people’s thought and action. Let us put them, figuratively, on the far left of the spectrum.
On the far right of this spectrum, are the religious conservatives (as they style themselves) who would insist that children should be taught to respect the authority of the clerics and/or religious texts. The alternative is that children think for themselves in a moral vacuum, and reach a terrifying, self-confident sort of moral chaos, one with which the modern world is all too familiar.
Moral chaos of the sort that conservatives fear viscerally goes under various philosophical names: moral relativism; moral subjectivism; moral nihilism; and so forth. Many seminars are conducted that look for fine distinctions here.
What do liberals (religious or secular) want in contrast? Here we have a problem. They believe in women’s rights, gay rights and so forth, but have a problem in explaining just where these rights come from.
They do not come from the law, even though human law can be better than religious law, being typically humane rather than godly (unsurprisingly). We know this, because people had to fight hard to change the law to make it less sexist and homophobic.
And many of us are old enough to remember that what is morally wrong can often be confused with what is just socially unacceptable or merely illegal. Think of laws about apartheid – or racial intermarriage in the American Deep South.
When we say, in general, that ‘the law should be changed’, we make a normative judgement. The word ‘should’ is a dead give-away here. Norms require a normative system, and the obvious question concerns where this system could come from. From us humans? A circle beckons: we are trying to improve human systems of thought and action, but are trapped within those systems since there is nothing outside them to which we can appeal – apparently.
Unless, of course, there is something or someone morally perfect ‘out there’ to which we can appeal.
Here is a related problem, one much debated in moral philosophy: what do we mean by ‘out there’ in this context? The United Nations? Well, not really. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are the USA, the UK, France, Russia and China, and the last two in particular are not obvious paragons of moral virtue. At least, their governments are not, and what else besides governments could have the sheer power to make moral authority?
No. This is to miss the point. What is the point is this. Real moral authority – what Kant called the Moral Law – has to be above and beyond any human authority. If this were not so, it would fail in its role to provide a corrective to human institutions, including human legal systems, some of which can be rather dismal.
The presence of the word ‘law’ in the phrase ‘the moral law’ is problematic. Laws require legislatures grounded in social traditions. They can be changed – fortunately, for otherwise they could never be improved (as happened in 1967 in the UK, for example, when adult consensual gay sex was decriminalized).
They can also be changed for the worse, unfortunately, as happens should a criminal gang take over the ruling classes. For example, the German legal system did not improve much between 1933 and 1945.
So what is this moral law, and where does it come from? Kant is not as helpful here as we might have hoped, but he does inform us that it is pretty awesome. In a famous passage, he writes:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
This passage, which (in the original German, of course) is written on Kant’s tombstone in his native Kaliningrad (now in Russia, and formerly known as Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia) is, to put it mildly, quite famous.
However, it is the penultimate word ‘within’ that I want to focus on. How can this moral law be both ‘out there’ and yet also ‘within me’? Indeed, how can anything at all, ethical or otherwise, be both external and internal in this sense?
Yet it really does have to be both – impossibly so. If it is not within, then it will be as meaningless to me as Aztec religious law with its elaborate dos and don’ts with regard to human sacrificial rituals, rituals that are of great anthropological interest but which do not affect my own attitudes towards human sacrifice in the least.
And if it is not out there, i.e., external to human authority, it will run the risk of being no better than something dreamt up by the Aztecs (or, indeed, the Nazis). Or by you or me, for that matter.
This dilemma has, in recent years, come to be known as the moral problem, by the way. (Well, sort of)
As was noted in my ur-article, Kant talks famously of God, Freedom and Immortality, the existence of which is known as the three postulates of pure practical reason.
He also said that it was some kind of ultimate mystery as to just how pure reason could be practical. By this he meant: just how something purely intellectual – something that is graspable by pure thought itself – could mean enough to us that it should prompt us actually to do something relevant.
Okay, I hear you say, just what does all this mean?
We-ell, let us lead up it gradually, and talk instead, in the first instance, of the boy-racers (BRs, for short) who drive erratically and at great speeds near my house.
Firstly, an epistemological question. Do the BRs know any better? Do they actually know how to drive correctly? Since most of them hold driving licenses, we must conclude that they do. They would not have passed their driving tests if they did not.
So, why do they do it, then? ‘Just for fun’ is one answer. When you have more testosterone in your system than is needed for ordinary biological purposes, you need some sort of release.
Do the BRs actually benefit from their driving behaviour? This is more problematic. If their girl-friends were impressed by their driving skills, we could see the point, but it is mostly other BRs who look impressed, the girlies preferring to stick together and to share a taxi home.
So, why do they (the BRs) do it, we ask in exasperation when we look at what we see in the Accident & Emergency (A&E) departments on a Saturday night? And more to the point, what do we do to change their behaviour, ideally before A&E get involved? Is it their (moral) knowledge that is insufficient, as we say when we declare that they don’t seem to know any better?
Some sort of compulsory re-education is needed, perhaps. Make them re-take their driving tests, and make the test difficult to pass unless you can convince the examiner that you understand some of the whys and wherefores of good driving. This is the obvious answer, but the liberal in us all might also start to feel some concern. Here’s why.
The evidence now is overwhelming that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is deliberately committing genocide against the Uyghur peoples of north-western China, and on a massive scale.
The depth of cruelty is well known, and I shall not relate it here. It is enough to know that their compulsory ‘re-education’ is not doing anything desirable, even if the CCP desire it.
So why cannot a philosophical BR not complain that his own human rights are being infringed when his right to drive legally is taken from him and he is forced to learn humiliating lessons in how most people think he ought to drive? Are not adolescent males in general, and BRs in particular, a persecuted minority, one whose rights might be strongly championed by Martian moralists who persist in interfering in the internal affairs of another planet (as CCP ethicists might phrase it)?
Phew, you say.
Okay, so this is a silly comparison, and no Westerner (especially if they live in Hong Kong) has any time for the CCP. It would be just as absurd, would it not, to suppose that Westerners could think that their right to own firearms outweighs the safety of the public at large, since gun-owners and BRs live on different moral planets, do they not? (Sarcasm alert)
Good driving skills (and good marksmanship) are virtues that we should all acquire if we wish to own either a car (or a gun). Good teaching skills, by contrast, are not required to engage in the forced indoctrination of an ethnic group whose members’ only ‘crime’ is that they belong to this group. We can say that with all the force of Western civilization behind us.
Okay, okay. Now for some Western analytical philosophy.
We talk of ‘good’ teaching skills, and yet ‘good’ is an evaluative term. We are trying to ground values in something firm, but it seems that, unless we can already tell good from bad, our solution will not work. This makes it pretty useless, does it not?
Also, more subtly but no less importantly, the terms education (= good) and indoctrination (= bad) are clearly evaluatively loaded. Who decides the difference? God? He does not work for any Education Authority that I know of, so He is not of much use here. In any case, who says that God’s authority is any good? God’s own creator, the Meta-God? Hmm.
This talk of authority is perhaps a bit oppressive, and it doesn’t matter whose authority is under consideration. However, it is Kant himself who is mostly responsible for this anti-authoritarian feeling nowadays, and it is to be found in his insistence that we should seldom talk of God Himself. Instead, we should talk of the Moral Law, which is impersonal.
However, the argument that morality cannot be grounded in religious authority (or any other kind, for that matter) is much older, and its most famous source is Plato’s dialogue, the Euthyphro. Let me relate.
Socrates is awaiting his own trial for corrupting the youth of Athens, and meets Euthyphro, an Athenian prophet, who is bringing a private prosecution against his own father for murder. A shocked Socrates learns that the murder of a slave (A) who had himself killed another slave (B) in a drunken brawl is at stake. (An irritated Euthyphro senior had grabbed slave A, tied him up and thrown him into a ditch with a view to handing him over to the authorities. However, he forgot about the matter, and slave A died of hunger, thirst and neglect.)
Euthyphro junior (to the outrage of his family) refuses to allow this death to go unpunished. On Socrates’s questioning, he replies that murder is murder and is a crime that all the gods must hate. The relationship of the murderer to his victim, or indeed of the prosecutor to the accused, is of no relevance.
The dialogue is famous for the question it provokes, known as the Euthyphro dilemma. Are pious deeds pious because they are loved by the gods? Or are they loved by the gods because they are pious deeds?
Or to translate the matter into a more modern idiom: is an action right because God commands it? Or does God command it because it is independently and antecedently right? You can perhaps see why religious ethicists get a bit nervous at this point.
If we go for the second horn of the dilemma, then God disappears from the picture altogether as far as ethics is concerned. The good deed in question was already good before God noticed that it was, so it cannot be God’s approval that actually makes it good. Something else must.
However, if we go for the first horn of the dilemma, God starts to look like an arbitrary bully. We assume that God in fact does not approve of human slavery, for example, but if He had done so then slavery would have become right after all. Religious authority has spoken. Of course, this remains purely hypothetical, and nobody would ever imagine that God could ever have felt that way – whatever ancient sacred texts might suggest.
Especially if the imaginers in question are given a free public education up to the age of 18 in a land dedicated to freedom of the individual. (And yes, there is indeed another sarcasm alert here.)
Evidently, religious ethicists need a third horn, to the effect that there is no real contrast to start with, and therefore nothing on which the dilemma can get to work. I mean by this that, appearances notwithstanding, the following two sentences need to be rather similar in meaning:
(i) Slavery is wrong
(ii) God forbids slavery
The Euthyphro dilemma thus actually has three horns, and therefore should strictly speaking be called a trilemma:
A. (i) is true because (ii) is
B. (ii) is true because (i) is
C. There is not enough difference in meaning between (i) and (ii) for an A/B debate to get started. (If this sounds outrageous, replace ‘God’ by ‘The Moral Law’, and then see what happens.)
The position defended in the paper published in the posh journal that I mentioned at the outset of this post is that the truth lies somewhere between B and C.
The title of that paper, you will recall, is ‘Divine Hoorays: Some Parallels between Expressivism and Religious Ethics’. You naturally want to know what is meant, in this context, by expressivism. I shall now explain. But firstly, some divisions within moral philosophy (or ‘philosophical ethics’) itself.
Ethics can be very down-to-earth sometimes, and can concern real-world problems in medical, legal or business ethics. This branch of ethics is sometimes known as applied ethics, or ‘practical ethics’, and it is in this area that debates between, for example, the rights of the unborn child versus a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body are conducted.
At a more general and more abstract level, we have normative ethics, which concerns general moral principles and approaches. It is in this context that we talk about, for example:
++ utilitarianism (roughly, the view that the right action is always the one which brings about the greatest total amount of happiness and absence-of-misery, and so forth);
++ Kantianism (roughly, you must never treat another rational being as a mere means to an end, however good; and that every moral maxim must be one you would wish to be followed by everyone else as well);
++ virtue ethics (roughly, the view that it is certain ‘excellences’ or qualities of character, rather than our actions themselves, that should be our primary concern. Just what makes such qualities excellent is a major issue here).
Finally, at the most abstract level, we have metaethics, which is the study of ethical language, and with what we are actually doing when we make a moral judgement. It is in this context that we ask whether a value judgement is a descriptive statement of fact or something more akin to an expression of feeling. Also a part of metaethics is the more psychological question of what a moral belief is. Is it a genuine belief as such, or a different sort of attitude altogether?
Expressivism is a metaethical theory. It is the view that ethical language is non-descriptive, and that the thought that slavery is wrong is not a belief about slavery, but something more akin to a dislike of slavery, a commitment to abolish slavery, to say ‘Boo! to slavery’ when prompted, and so on and so forth.
Now, ostensibly, expressivism is not much like divine command theory, which is the view that moral wrongness is grounded in God’s disapproval (we go for option A, in other words, with the Euthyphro dilemma). Quite the opposite, in fact.
There seems to be all the difference in the world between expressing my own attitudes and reporting on God’s. This remains so even if the attitudes in question are roughly of the same type (what are called non-cognitive attitudes).
This, however, is to assume a binary opposition between God and the Self (e.g., you or me), and my primary thesis is that this opposition is a delusion. God is inside us, and we are also inside Him. Let me explain.
One way of dethroning God is to say that He is a kind of human construction. God did not create us; rather, we created Him to fulfil various human needs. This is a view held by, among others, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche.
Yet this is oddly parallel to the orthodox view of the Abrahamic religions, which is that human beings are created by – and are fundamentally dependent on – God: we are a kind of divine construction, not the other way round.
What both positions have in common is the thesis that there is a kind of symbiotic relationship between God and Humanity, but with a sharply different view as to who is the senior partner. This suggests that there might be a third possibility, one which stresses a kind of mutual dependence. This is my view.
What does it mean? One way of illustrating the point is to ask the very different but related question: which comes first, an organism as a whole, or the individual cells that compose it?
Our immediate response is to say that it is like the chicken and the egg. A silly question, in other words. The organism does what it does because it is composed of individual cells all ‘doing their own thing’, as they used to say. They are subject to the ordinary laws of cytology, and they do not need an extra-cellular authority called The Organism to control their behaviour. Nor would their repertoire be much improved by the introduction of such an august being. It is in this context that we might, following Margaret Thatcher, say that there is no such thing as ‘the organism’, only individual cells and their immediate clusters. This is individualism.
But … it is equally true to say that cells do what they do only only because of the way they are structured within the organism as a whole. When isolated from each other, they would not flourish. Connections are everything, especially if we focus on – not a full organism – but a specific organ, such as a human brain. We do not try to reduce (all of) neurophysiology to neurocytology, for it would serve no scientific purpose. This is collectivism.
In short, the dispute between individualism and collectivism, which informs so much of the political debate within in the UK, is rather beside the point, and rests in any event on a kind of confusion. Societies need autonomous individuals, and individuals need supportive societies. It could hardly be otherwise – for such is empowerment.
On a less dramatic level, consider a pixellated monochrome portrait of someone (say, Sir Winston Churchill). What we have is a two-dimensional array of pixels of varying but inevitably discrete shades of grey. Now, do we explain the whole portrait in terms of the pixel-shades? Or the other way round? Chicken and egg, again.
Still, confusion can reign here, and the consequences can be serious. To return once again to the philosophy of religion, our main topic, consider the well known phrase ‘Vox populi, vox dei‘, which means ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God’. Is that true?
Yes and no, comes the answer.
On the ‘yes’ side is the following truth. In a genuine democracy, the people are sovereign. They have a right to govern themselves, and although the responsibility can be a burden, no sane individual would sacrifice her autonomy by abandoning self-rule. There is, after all, no higher authority to defer to.
On the ‘no’ side is the following truth. Humans are fallible in a way in which God is not. We, the People, can want dreadful things, and majorities can be seriously deluded. If majority opinion were the final arbiter of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, then we must despair. There is, apparently, nothing better that we can appeal to.
We are currently in a state of political turmoil, and a fine distinction is now made between democracy (which is good) and populism (which is bad). Underlying this is what I shall call the dilemma of democracy, which concerns how someone on the losing side of a vote should feel about the issue on which she voted. Was she right or was she wrong?
Well, if she is a conscientious citizen, she will have voted to bring about what she sincerely believes to be right. But if she is a good democrat, she must accept what is sometimes called ‘loser’s consent’, and thus suppose that it is the majority verdict that is right.
But, of course, they cannot both be right. Hence our dilemma, one which is as deep as any to be found in political philosophy.
What’s to do?
Well, we can improve communication between individuals within a society. The notion of telepathy (which plays an occasional role in this blog, as the attentive reader will have noticed) becomes directly relevant here. A society of unconnected individuals cannot flourish without harsh measures to ensure cooperation. However, at the other extreme, a society of like-minded clones is not something to want to join.
So what can we do to create an ideal society? I suggest that engaging in moral and political discourse is itself what is needed to avoid the grim Hobbesian dilemma: either heteronomy or chaos. Such discourse does not merely enable us to discover moral and political truths: it creates them.
So what does that last sentence mean, I hear you sigh? First, remember that every good citizen must engage in politics to some degree. Anyone who has ever served on a committee knows the man who always abstains but who announces, in a lofty voice, that as a good democrat he will go along with the majority. Such a man is not a good democrat, but one who simply refuses to take part in the democratic process. If everyone were like that, democracy would just cease.
But I can hear yawning, so here is some light entertainment …
There are more important ills that can arise. Thus consider a more specific vote, such as the second vote on Brexit (okay, it never actually happened, but imagine that it did). The original Brexit vote was upheld and with an increased majority, or so I insist.
Why is that? Had people become even more hostile towards the European Union (EU) than they were in 2016? No. It was just that many people thought that they ought to vote to stay out of the EU because that is what the majority of their country’s citizens wanted. Had they voted for what they themselves deep down really, really wanted, we would have obtained an entirely different verdict. Absurd? I don’t think so.
Or then again, consider a public news organization that is required to be impartial. The British Broadcasting Company (BBC), for example. Now, suppose its well-educated managerial staff wish, for the best of reasons, to give the populace at large what it wants. It will therefore not heavily subsidise (with public money) programmes that they (the staff) want to watch, but will focus on programmes that they (the staff) think that they (the populace) want to watch.
Are they (the populace) grateful for this? Actually, all that happens is that they (the populace) conclude that they (the managerial staff) are a bunch of condescending, elitist unmentionables … and, in consequence, vote for whatever they think will most annoy the highly educated classes.
In fairness, the BBC is in a real dilemma. It cannot realistically cater only for a highly educated minority. Yet it must avoid the fallacy of supposing that any show that features a wise and well-informed individual must also feature an idiot, so as to add ‘balance’. In a debate between God and Satan, the speaker/presenter cannot be neutral even if s/he still has to be.
Okay, we are getting into seriously difficult logical territory, and I do not wish to bore my readers with matters of little topical interest. And so, with the usual warning about sarcasm, I shall just desist from further commentary and talk instead about something else.
***
An alternative to expressivism is ethical cognitivism which declares that our moral experiences (for example, experiences of pure moral outrage) do not have a purely internal explanation, but are caused by and somehow represent a genuine Moral Reality. Something genuinely ‘out there’ whose intrinsic nature is – inevitably – deeply mysterious.
Likewise, a certain view about religious experiences is that they too depict and are caused by something genuinely Divine. The contrasting position is that (for example) Joan of Arc – who ‘heard voices’ telling her that she must save France from the forces of the wicked English – was ‘merely’ schizophrenic; and that her signs in the sky have a purely natural explanation and do not indicate divine messages of any kind.
I see that Hermann Goering is fingering his revolver again, so I shall not speak any more about St. Joan’s religious experiences. Instead, I shall depict them musically.
You may (or may not) be interested to know that this song also reminds me of Catherine (the fruit seller), whom I mention on occasion in earlier posts.
***
So what about the metaphysics of values? Are we going to be satisfied with a purely secular sort of naturalism, otherwise known as physicalism: there are atoms and the void, and that is all?
An important notion in metaphysics is supervenience, which I have only touched on in earlier posts. Roughly speaking, to say (for example) that values supervene on natural properties is to say that it is completely impossible to have two situations that differ in respect of values and yet do not differ in respect of their natural properties. If my killing was wrong, and yours was not, there must be a relevant further difference – something in the raw facts themselves.
Physicalism – a very popular, no-nonsense metaphysical position – is the doctrine that everything supervenes on the basic items recognized by physicists (elementary particles, spacetime, and so forth). Gilbert Ryle (remember him?) might complain that there are also prime numbers and Wednesdays and public opinions and navies, and that none of these rather varied sorts of entities are elementary particles (or even simple aggregates of them); but the point is that all these other items supervene on the particles.
You could not change the Royal Navy, for example, without disturbing an elementary particle or two.
Now, the two really problematic sorts of property that do not seem to supervene on physical properties – much as we would like them to – are mental and moral properties. Consciousness and values are the real shockers here, and many philosophers think that if only we could sort them out, metaphysics would be a completed science. There would be nothing more to do, and we could let the physicists take over everything.
A physical world just like ours – but without consciousness – would contain not you and me but our zombie twins, so called. A philosophical zombie, you may recall, is a creature that is behaviourally – to the last subatomic detail – just like a normal human being, but it is ‘all silent and dark within’.
What is it like to be a zombie? Answer: nothing at all. The lights are on, but there is no-one at home, as they say. So are zombies possible – or even coherently conceivable? Or is it that, once God had created the initial distribution of elementary particles, and switched the system on, consciousness (like the Royal Navy) just followed on without any further action from God needed? Ditto, values?
Now, it is here that even the non-physicalist suspects hidden complications, and wonders if conscious states (such as experiences of pain) really resemble evaluative properties (such as the wrongness of inflicting unnecessary pain). There are indeed some subtle problems here, as readers of the journals will have noticed …
Perhaps, we need to revise the original biblical creation story, as depicted in the first chapter of Genesis, in the light of modern opinions and customs. Here is my disorderly version.
lundi, le 1 janvier
Woke up in complete darkness. Yet again. I can’t understand why I put up with it. I mean, why can’t there just be some light somewhere? Oh.
mardi, le 2 janvier
I suppose I had better introduce myself. I can’t give you my proper name, since nobody has baptised me yet. The Boy has yet to appear in the narrative, so I can’t even talk about a christening. I guess that you will just have to find your own nickname for me.
Well, what do I do for a living? That would be a little hard to explain to my parents, if only because I don’t have any. Never have done, actually.
I guess I make things happen. More specifically, I separate Heaven from Earth, but don’t worry too much about the waters under the firmament. I also make them exist, all right, but these are details that only I need be concerned with.
Still, nature abhors a vacuum, so I had better do something constructive today. Like create a few air particles. Or even quite a lot.
***
I could really get to enjoy this line of work. So easy is it that I might create loads of other particles as well. All the muons and gluons (aah!) that anyone should ever want. I also like pretty patterns, so shall arrange all my lovely if somewhat elementary particles in the best of all possible ways. And then set them in motion. As you do.
mercredi, le 3 janvier
Hmm. A simple quality inspection, now. Yes, I have surveyed my creation and found that it is good. Almost perfect, in fact. Still …
… much as I loathe hard work, I am reluctant to bequeath a two-day working week to posterity, so I need to find out if physicalism is really, really true. After a refreshing cup of ginseng tea, I decide that I could use a bit more in the way of consciousness and values. So what’s to do – as you will shortly say, when words and their meanings have been brought fully into existence?
Well, easy does it, I say, and I guess that I don’t need to create consciousness and values all on the same day. This gives me the delicious dilemma of working out which to handle first.
Surely, consciousness must come first, for who needs values if there is no pain, I hear someone ask – plaintively? Well, daahling, actually I think that my inner dominatrix wants me to issue some Commandments first, and then see if the sensations jump into place. So, values first, and then maybe consciousness after that. My universe, my rules.
Now, expressivism looks like the cutest option given my minimalist outlook, so let us look at what needs to be evaluated. Firstly, I observe that some of my particles have arranged themselves into the shape of slave-owners who are beating their slaves black and blue. Do I approve? Well, actually not. There is not much I can do to stop them, unfortunately, but I can still hate the behaviour, albeit from a distance.
The good news is that my universe has now been gilded and stained in such a way as to set up a new creation. Not bad for a single day’s work.
Well, that’s values sorted out. A glass of communion wine (or two), and then bed.
jeudi, le 4 janvier
Bad hair day. I think I’ll give it a miss. And all that philosophizing about whether zombie slaves have human rights did my head in, to put it crudely …
vendredi, le 5 janvier
Okay, I notice a statue amongst my creations, quite pretty and possibly answering to the name of Pygmalion. (I know! In Greek mythology, ‘Pygmalion’ is the name of the sculptor, not the statue, but so what?) I see that it (the statue) moves just as I want it to, but I cannot empathize with it in the way I should like. Although made by me, it is not quite made in my image, if you get my meaning.
I know! If I fall in love with Pygmalion, I shall thereby confer consciousness onto it. My attitude towards it will be an attitude towards a soul, even if I am not of the opinion that it has a soul – and what more do you need in this line of work besides attitude? Can I fall in love with anyone I choose, quite voluntarily – and with business in mind? I dare say that you can work out the answer to that one.
Okay, the trick is done. I am in love with Pygmalion and so attribute consciousness to it. But was it conscious before I was so in love? And will it still endure pleasures and pains after I lose interest in it, and confer all my attention onto something else? In what sense do I ‘project’ my attitudes onto my subject matter? And what is this quasi-realism, by the way, and why does it really differ from a crude subjectivism? Don’t ask.
I won’t ask about the value of lust either.
samedi, le 6 janvier
It looks like I’ve had so much fun, that I am going to continue my philosophical investigations into the weekend – but only, I think in the morning of the Saturday. I don’t want to become a wage slave.
I see that a standard item of discussion amongst my colleagues concerns the letter of rejection that is typically received when referees employed by learned journals simply fail to understand or to appreciate what is said to them. My latest – rather terse – missive was somewhat impersonal, and it suggested gently but firmly that to write a creation story in the literary style of Belle de Jour is not the way to win friends and influence people. Or words to that effect. There was no mention of possible promotion, either.
dimanche, le 7 janvier
Okay, a rest. When it comes to religious experiences, things can get personal, as mentioned. To say that an experience actually ‘turned my life round’ can take some effort, especially if it is true.
Words alone seldom work, though some televangelists seem to have that sort of effect, for they can deliver a message which just bypasses the usual intellectual filters and barriers that keep us on an even keel.
Music is rather more complex, however, and is processed by a different part of the brain. We do not have filters and barriers here of a kind that we understand very well. Life-changing music can announce its presence immediately with a blast of meaning, but sometimes it can take a while before the pieces fall together.
The significance of kisses and ‘bearded barley’ (look it up, if you must), and the relevance of a phrase from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity will only make sense if you already know what I am talking about.
Moreover, unless you read a lot into the word ‘alternative’, you will feel nervous about religious rock bands from the late 1990s based in Nashville, Tennessee, especially if they originally hailed from Texas!
So, what is all this about, I hear you ask?
***
Well, there was I at a recent Joint Session (no giggles, please), feeling thoroughly sorry for myself.
I was leaving on Sunday morning – before the conference ended – because every time I tried to talk to the old friends I had come to see, I found that I had to avoid catching the eye of a certain Commissioning Editor of a distinguished publishing house who also sought their company.
Why? Well, if you have read some of the purple prose that I sometimes attempt to put into the public domain, you will see why. It did not occur to me then that such editors will have seen it all before (and worse), and might even be sympathetic to wannabe authors struggling to say the unsayable.
In the taxi, I reflected on life’s missed opportunities, writer’s block, the fact that all my friends were full professors despite being considerably younger than me – as well as the fact that there do not seem to be any research grants aimed at late-career academics. (I wonder why, I asked plaintively.)
Still, despair does not last long, and I soon found a sort of consolation – a kind of serenity – that comes from accepting the inevitable in its own terms. I was, indeed, starting to look forward to a long retirement centred around sherry and slippers, with no more mountains to climb.
But then, just as the taxi was pulling into Durham railway station, this familiar but as yet unidentifiable song came on the radio …
Philosophy and telepathy: an open discussion 