[lit-ideas] Re: The Medium is the Message
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2011 14:49:04 -0230
Phil et al: Please see specific replies below.
Quoting Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Walter O. wrote:
>
> "'Plato played by Walter O'?? Are we on the same planet?"
>
> "Unlike Phil, I am not happy with my designated role and I demand
> satisfaction!"
>
>
> Yeah, I saw that coming.
>
> But, Walter, I would have thought you would be somewhat sympathetic to
> Plato's argument about the well-ordered soul, with reason governing
> the passions and the will.
WO:
That's just the tip of the iceberg of course. As a Kantian Constructivist
rather
than a moral realist, I have no sympathies with P's metaphysics. And the good
professor Dr. Socrates would surely have agreed with me. His version of a
well-ordered soul, as given in the early moral dialogues, is more my cup of tea
(so to speak).
> And I will bet that you have a grudging
> respect for Trudeau, our former Canadian prime minister who tried to
> be the philosopher king.
WO:
Nothing grudging about my respect for PET. It's pretty much whole hearted.
Another fine man and mind from the Montreal neighborhood of Outremont :). He
would not have accepted a depiction of his work or intentions as those of a
philosopher king. In those days, if you had a classical education, read some of
the greats, could reason your way out of a paper bag, took a strong stand on
terrorism, thought that government and the Church should stay out of the
bedrooms of the nation, and treated most media personnel with the disdain they
deserved, you were labelled a philosopher king.
>
> Which brings to mind a conversation I was part of a few days ago. The
> conversation began with a flippant remark about how free will is
> possible if there is a God, but quickly moved to a discussion of the
> degree to which we know ourselves. My contribution, borrowed
> shamelessly from Nietzsche, was that free will does not refer to a
> capacity or ability, but rather to moral judgment. We attribute free
> will to people as part of holding them responsible for their actions,
> and to those who we don't hold responsible, we consider them to either
> not have a fully developed will, for example children, or have a will
> that is not free, for example the insane.
WO:
I just sent out a missive to our list on the topic of freedom. I agree with
Kant
that free will is a capacity (power, faculty, disposition) presupposed by any
possible form of agency, be it moral judgement, doing arithmetic, or deciding
to run for the Deanship of your Faculty. I agree with your statement on the
relationship between free will and attributing responsibility. (In a more
general context, Robert Brandom's *Making it explicit* is a nice read on the
role of attributions on recognizing others as having knowledge, abilities,
etc.. A bit overly-sociological, I think, but still worth a read.)
> While this may sound like a
> capacity, I argued that it wasn't in part because we don't attribute
> free will without reference to a larger context. What may appear to be
> a choice made of a free will may turn out to have been made under
> unseen duress or coercion. Ultimately, we can only attribute free will
> after the fact and only after considering the context.
WO:
Yes, the correctness of our attributions of free will must be
context-sensitive.
But the transcendental necessity of free will as a presupposition of rational
judgement and agency is not itself constituted by any attributions we make.
>But if I cannot
> be certain whether another person has made their choice according to a
> free will, without reference to a larger context, what makes me
> certain that I understand the choices I am making as I am making them?
> Don't most people look back on the choices they made and see them as
> part of larger events which were rarely clearly understood at the
> time? When we were teenagers, the decisions we made seemed to be such
> a struggle for authenticity and yet when I look back, I just think I
> was a typical teenager. I never thought of myself as acting like a
> teenager while I was acting like one. It seems, then, that we only
> understand ourselves and others, after the fact.
Yes, light dawns gradually over the whole. When I was 19 I was certain my
stepfather was an idiot. At the age of 27, I was amazed at how much he had
learned in the past 8 years.
> But then doesn't this
> lead to the possibility that I am not the best judge of who I am?
> Maybe, if I want to truly understand myself, I should not sit down in
> front of a fireplace and meditate on the question, 'Who am I?', but
> rather go around and ask the people with whom I interact.
But choose the people you ask carefully :). (Easy for Aristotle to recommend we
go ask a phronimos what the good/authentic life for me is. He thought it was
perfectly clear who the phronimoi in the neighborhood were. Today we have
Liberals, Conservatives and the NDP.) No doubt, identity, selfhood is socially
constructed in the sense that who I take myself to be is internally related to
who and what I am recognized as being by interlocutors in social interaction.
But my being as a rational and moral agent is not a product of such
constitution. Korsgaard rather than Kierkegaard is the better read here. See
her *Self-constitution* for an account of how our practical identities as
chosen would not be possible were we not agents that abided by the hypothetical
and categorical imperatives. Two principles we do not construct.
>
> Which leads me back to Mike's original comments. What interests me is
> not whether Mike is right about associating me with Kierkegaard, or
> Walter with Plato, but the fact that Mike made those connections. Now
> we may disagree, but what would be the nature of that disagreement?
WO:
Ultimately it's a disagreement over the kinds of reasons I take to be cogent in
moral judgement and deliberation. Though Mike may not formulate this
disagreement in such terms. Mike attributes Platonism to me and I deny it. This
reveals something of the limitations of Brandom's view that social attributions
are constitutive of identity. He ultimately fails to recognize the extent to
which my own understanding of myself is definitive of my selfhood and identity.
Mike is just plain wrong and my virtue emerges unscathed :).
Walter O.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Phil Enns
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