COMMENSAL ISSUE 90

Only 8 days (as of 7th December 1997) ‘til closing date so I'll try to keep this brief.

Theo Todman ( 89/2.4-2.5 ) : The Structure Of The Newsletter : Personally I quite like endless replies but I can see why some people (especially those who don’t contribute) might find them exasperating. It occurs to me that in some cases a brief editorial introduction to an ongoing debate might help to clarify the contribution for the benefit of newcomers and amnesiacs. However I'm not the one who'd have to write it, so feel free to dismiss the idea as being too much like hard work. In the meantime I'll do my best to make sense without requiring the reader to refer to previous issues. And as for the idea of grouping paragraphs by subject matter rather than author, I think this could work but individual writers should be allowed a "no tampering" option otherwise it might discourage some contributions.

Isaiah Berlin ( 89/5.2-5.4 ) - Actively Retired : Berlin gave up philosophy because he claimed it "can only be done by very clever people" and he didn't consider himself clever enough. I Would say that philosophy is done by all people whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not. Everything anyone does, thinks or says, is the result of a stimulus acting upon that person’s attitudes. These attitudes are also known as philosophies. For example "THUMP ! Do unto others before they do unto you ! That’s my philosophy!". And philosophy as an activity can be seen as any conscious examination of those attitudes. Which surely everybody does to varying degrees whether they intend to or not. Berlin may well have given up the job but to give up thought is surely not possible.

Mark Griffin ( 89/7-10 ) - The Morality Of Assassination : It seems obvious that assassinating one political leader is morally preferable to slaughtering millions of conscripted soldiers, and bombing hundreds of civilian-populated cities and I have myself: wondered just how the likes of Hitler and Saddam Hussein did manage to go un-assassinated having so seriously upset such large and well equipped world powers. Like you, I don't accept Theo’s idea of our leaders fearing direct retaliation because I’m sure if Hitler thought that assassinating Churchill was a good strategy he wouldn’t have waited for Churchill to try it first before he felt justified in doing it himself. Therefore, Churchill had nothing to worry about and should have iced the nasty little git as soon as possible.

The question seems therefore to be purely one of military strategy rather than ethics. The allies didn't assassinate Hitler simply because it wouldn't have done them any good. He would’ve simply been replaced by another, possibly more competent nasty little git. The curious point you did raise, however, is the one of terrorism. The IRA has, on occasion, attempted to kill various of our prime ministers. Surely if a prime minister dies in a terrorist attack they are replaced as efficiently as if they were assassinated by a rival world power. So why do the terrorists bother ? Personally, I imagine it must be because they have no real agenda for change but just lots of anger at the situation they believe to be unconscionable. Their anger is neither deliberate aggression nor defence but simply emotionally driven retaliation with very short term goals.

Although I don't think this is actually a philosophical issue, I do think that the issue of "whether or not it is a philosophical issue" is a philosophical issue. And one that can't be resolved without first addressing the underlying issue itself. Further discussion may yet bring to light a true philosophical issue at the core of this interesting little problem.

Philip Lloyd Lewis ( 89/13.4-14.5 ) - Two Tier Reality : It occurs to me that the originality of your theory is not so much the division of reality into two tiers but the elevation of "belief" to the status of "subjective reality" whilst acknowledging the under-rated illusiveness of real reality. Thereby promoting greater sympathy for the beliefs / subjective realities of other people ... which is nice! However you then go on to criticise Theo's approach to scientific research, stating that objective reality is unresearchable. Surely though this is only the case in your subjective reality and you can't know whether it is so in objective reality and clearly it isn't so in Theo’s subjective reality. Doesn't your theory in fact render all criticism obsolete ?

Michael Nisbet ( 89/16.6-18.2 ) - Self-Awareness And Mirrors : I think I see what you’re trying to do by renaming self-awareness as "reflexive awareness" - your idea being that the self is a mental construct that has no objective existence therefore nothing is truly "self-aware" but merely imagines its own individuality. However, I fail to see why the term "reflexive awareness" should be any more preferable. Surely, it is the word awareness that is the problem rather than the word "self"? But all this is beside the point ! Interesting as your assertions about the self being created at the moment of realisation are, they do seem to be dependent on the assumption that there is a moment of realisation. I contend that all creatures are aware of their own existence simply because it is the most obvious thing that any creature can perceive. The popular assumption that only humans and some apes are aware of their own existence is based on the incorrect belief that because a creature cannot recognise its own reflection it must be unaware of its own existence. This illogical deduction is only so widely accepted because most people like the idea that humans are fundamentally higher life-forms than all other animals. You are correct in saying "the realisation that the eye that is seen is the eye that is looking ... is more than just the understanding of reflective surfaces". However, of the two components (ie. self-awareness and understanding reflective surfaces), I am certain that the latter is by far the more difficult for the animal brain to contend with. Now if you could demonstrate that (say) blackbirds understood reflective surfaces but still attacked their own reflection, I would happily eat my words. The schizophrenic issue was not one that I was aware of but I don't think it invalidates my argument at all. The fact that a person with no clear perception of their own identity cannot recognise their own reflection does not mean that just because an animal or young baby cannot recognise its reflection it must therefore have no concept of its own identity.

Michael Nisbet ( 89/18.4 -19.2 ) - Morality And Society : In stunningly stark contrast to the issue of self-awareness, here, we seem to be in total agreement ! Funny old world innit ?

Theo Todman ( 89/19.4 ) - Morality, Society And Perfection : Although your question about ethical systems that focus an the perfection of the individual was directed at Michael, seeing as Michael and I seem to be in agreement on this one I think I'll give it a crack meself.

To understand this you need to first appreciate the cyclical nature of cause and effect. For example take lions and wildebeest. Lions didn't evolve to hunt wildebeest. Lions and wildebeest evolved simultaneously, each development in one being matched by a corresponding development in the other. Therefore wildebeest were both the cause of lions development and the effect. This duality is true of all natural developmental systems, including that of human society and morality. The concept of right and wrong actions is a necessary part of social behaviour but it is for the individual to perform those right or wrong actions. So the perfected social being is one that performs only right actions. Social behaviour and perfection of the soul are (as they say) two sides of the same coin. They developed in parallel just as did the lion and the wildebeest. Both simultaneously causing and being caused by each other. An ethical system that focuses on the perfection of the individual is only looking at one side of the coin and in my view that can be dangerous. Such systems have to rely on a set of rules to define right and wrong actions before they can put the onus on the perfection of the individual. These rules can, over time, become corrupted, and therein lies the danger.

Anthony Owens ( 89/20.6-21.1 ) - Super Photons : Thanks Anthony. Glad to know I wasn't hallucinating and you could well be right about the worm-hole stuff, after all I wasn't really expecting to have to answer questions on it months later. However, I am inclined to agree with Theo that most scientists do actually believe that c is actually constant. They may be wrong but they would never knowingly base later theories an something they believed even might be wrong.

Mike Rossell ( 89/23.2.23.4 ) - Is War Justified ? : It is a curious notion you have that all wars are entirely the fault of political leaders and all the soldiers are just unwilling pawns being sent to their deaths. Okay some soldiers are conscripts and some conscripts are unwilling but for a war to happen the balance of power needs to want it. That means politicians, soldiers and the general population. Admittedly individual politicians have more say than individual soldiers, who in turn have more say than individual members of the public and politicians have the additional facility of propaganda but it is not a case of WW2 just being "all Hitler’s fault". And a match between Tony Blair, Ian Paisley, Gerry Adams and Mo Mowlam would have no effect on the beliefs of the Irish population. Is war justified ? Not to me ! But I am only a man with a below average amount of say in whether or not wars take place.

Alan Carr ( 89/24.5 ) - Population And Re-incarnation : I suspect that the reason why the question of reincarnation hasn't yet been raised in these hallowed pages may be because it is a question that sits better in the Aquarian SIG. However, there are doubtless many philosophical questions raised by this and other paranormal type issues. How do we decide what's supernatural and what’s not ? How proved can anything really ever be ? Does the world consensus that there is some kind of deity constitute a reason for believing in God or merely for believing that most people are stupid ? Is it arrogant to maintain one’s own beliefs when the majority disagree ? Or is it gullible to do otherwise ? Can the balance be rationalised or is it all just relative ? ... I'm sure none of these are "the question of reincarnation" that you referred to, so I'll delay further comment until I better understand which particular philosophical angle you’re examining reincarnation from.

Stef Gula ( 89/28-30 ) : An excellent opening submission, if I may say so, containing enough that I agree with to make me think you know what you’re talking about and enough that I disagree with to give me cause to reply. Maarrvlous !

I agree entirely that all-comers should be welcome and quality should be considered a bonus not a requisite, and I can't wait to see how Anthony Owens deals with your thoughts on crime and punishment. However I can't resist jumping in on PL-L's behalf regarding probability... so here goes...

There is the rather sci-fi possibility that a new drug could produce a temporary metabolic shut-down that’s indistinguishable from death. There is the possibility that someone in the future could build a time machine, go back to before X was killed, prevent X from being killed and thereby have already created an alternate time-line in which X is still alive. Then there’s the issue of re-incarnation and life after death, the second coming and Jesus’ powers of resurrection, and of course the all-purpose "you could've dreamt it" argument. All of which add up to your alleged statement of fact having a probability of only about 0.999. Likewise, you can’t say for certain that X won't speak even if he is dead. Such an event may be unprecedented in your experience and mine but that doesn't mean it can't happen. To the best of my knowledge neither you nor I have ever died but I consider it very probable that both of us will do so eventually. Unprecedented events happen all the time. Nothing is impossible and nothing is inevitable. This I assign a probability of 0.999999 at least ! That’s subjective! Obviously !

Theo ( 89/36.3 ) - Ethical (In-)Consistency in Nazism : As you know, I am of the opinion that most Nazis considered their attitudes morally justified, even though I obviously disagree with them myself. Furthermore, I also consider that Nazism is fairly internally consistent. The need for ethical consistency is common to most people and if Nazism was totally ridiculous, the German people would never have fallen for it. Admittedly close examination and discussion by a group of gifted intellectuals could probably uncover numerous cracks in its logic but the same could probably be said of most other ideologies as well. The inconsistency that you mentioned (ie. using foreign oppression of Germans as an excuse for military aggression whilst simultaneously oppressing internal minority groups) is actually entirely defensible within the Nazi ideology. To you its hypocritical but to someone who genuinely believes that Germans matter and Jews don't there is no inconsistency. You then go on to accuse the Nazis of inventing silly racial theories but as I said these beliefs were the norm for almost everyone (even the Jews) prior to the second world war. And your reasoning that the Jews must have mattered because some of them were clever is subject to your personal (and I think unusual - perhaps even slightly dodgy) view that intelligence is a sound basis for assigning moral rights (see 89/31.4 ). The Nazis knew the Jews were intelligent and in fact feared that strength and that was one of the reasons they persecuted them so heavily. The secret of Jewish power was in their religion which gave them a unity that transcended national boundaries. Historically in most countries political power has been divided between the monarchy / parliament and the church and in 1930’s Germany the Jewish church (which wasn't even based in Germany) did pose a significant potential threat to the German government and the whole democratic process. The Nazi objection to the Jews was simply that they weren't German. Subsequent objections that they were stupid were in my opinion inconsistent and would probably have been retracted if any Nazi felt the urge to argue his viewpoint with a foreigner but Nazism itself would survive such a retraction quite unscathed.

(89/37.1 ) - The Purpose Of Art : The emotional response to art is the motivator not purpose. Just as food tastes nice but its purpose is to nourish the body, sex is fun but its purpose is to propagate the species and natural environments look pretty but their purpose (to us) is to provide us with food, water, shelter, firewood, etc. I agree that artists produce art in order to entertain but I was explaining why artists exist in the first place.

(89/37.4 ) - Belief And Delusion : Aaaaaaagggghhhh !!!! NO ! That’s not what I said at all ! Go and read 89/33.7 again and if you still don’t get it I WILL draw you a diagram ! (let’s see you scan that into your word processor).

(89/37.4 ) - I think Therefore I Could be a Bat : Obviously, I do think I probably really am a human and not a bat that’s dreaming it’s a human. What I said was that I am "statistically" as likely to be a bat as a human. I never said I pay any attention to statistics.

(89/37.6 ) - The Physics SIG : Best of luck. I’m sure you’ll be great at it. Don’t expect me to join though, ‘cos I just don’t know enough about physics. As you may’ve noticed.

(89/38.1 ) - Divine Fallibility : to me the term "revelation" only implies that the information was "revealed" as opposed to being deduced or invented or discovered or taught. I see no linguistic implication of the truth or otherwise of the revealed information.

(89/38.3 ) - Yet More Nazism : Is a "consciously archaic" philosophy really such a bad thing ? I’m sure all Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists would disagree with you on that one. The problem was not that Nazism looked backward but what it chose to look backward at.

I also find your description of Nazism as "such barbarism" quite fascinating. I understand the term "barbarian" to mean low-tech, unsophisticated. etc. so I don't see how you can accuse the civilisation that invented the jet fighter of being barbaric. Or is there a distinction between barbarism and "barbarianism" that I’m overlooking here ?

Another thing I’d like to take you to task on is the popular misconception that democracy is a fundamentally good thing, but I don’t have time, so remind me for the next issue and I’ll come back to it.

So when was this period when professional armies weren’t playing war games then ?

Yes but its not the war itself that was dangerous, just the subsequent persecution of the vanquished.

You say that the rules had changed for Europeans in Europe but Hitler’s war was never supposed to have been in Europe. His plan was to expand across Russia and into Asia to build an empire like that of the British and French. It mainly went wrong because other European countries decided to interfere. Besides which, the notion that Hitler’s crime was to aggress in Europe instead of Africa or India or the Americas is as unpalatable to the modern conscience as Nazism itself. This just seems to reinforce my point that at the time Nazism was merely a variation on the general international attitude to foreigners.

There ! I’m done ! If I can print this in time for the noon post tomorrow it should make the deadline ! Okay, so it wasn’t exactly "brief" but you can’t have everything ! .... just nearly everything ! You will let me know if I’m being too copious, won’t you.

Joyous seasonal type tidings one and all ...

Rick Street

Previous Article (in Commensal 89)

I can just hear the "aaarghh ! That’s not what I meant !" were I to summarise others’ views, so I think we’ll leave things as they are. While we’re on administrative matters - could you send me your contribution on disk next time. Your dot-matrix defeated my scanner last time round, so I had to re-type the article, which was deadly dull (the typing, not the article) I can tell you.

I think Isaiah Berlin was talking of doing philosophy as a profession when he said he wasn’t clever enough. I suspect he also had different standards of cleverness to us mortals. There’s a huge difference between being able to hold your own in an argument and having some creative insight or systematic understanding that hasn’t been held before by the next bloke in the pub. He made the connection with mathematics - if you want to be a mathematician and have something to say, you’d better be good at it or you won’t be able to do it & will end up a fool and a failure. I’m not sure whether the same is true of philosophy, in that as a discipline it doesn’t so obviously make progress, and answers aren’t so obviously right or wrong. Maybe it takes a good philosopher to recognise bad philosophy, along the lines of our "you’re all crap" absent friend ? Let us all be warned, and humble.

I agree with your criticism of Philip Lloyd Lewis - I don’t see how his system doesn’t condemn debate to futility. He has strenuously denied this, but hasn’t, at least to my satisfaction, explained why. You have your subjective reality & I have mine. Neither of us can get at the one-and-indivisible ultimate reality, so where do we go from here ?

I restrict my further comments to our own set of private on-going debates, though I feel strongly tempted to join in your " probabilities " debate with Stef Gula.

I wonder whether we ought to be a little more circumspect in our use of the Nazi holocaust as a philosophical example for ethical debate. For a start, I don’t want us to end up being accused of being a hot-bed of neo-Nazism or revisionism by a "for the sake of argument" passage being taken out of context. Secondly, all this is a bit insensitive - there are people out there who’ve been through the camps, or who had relatives who died there. I don’t want us to forget the unmitigated horror and evil of it all. Not that I’m advocating subservient timidity or the wholesale avoidance of "touchy subjects". People do, though, have a view of "armchair philosophers" being out of touch with the "real world", and I don’t want us to be tarred with that particular brush.

An anecdote .... my firm held its Christmas Party at The Ministry of Sound. In between all the shouting (to make oneself heard) and drinking (I don’t dance) I lost track of the time and missed my last train home, so had to get a cab back to Billericay. The cabbie arranged things so that people going vaguely in the same direction shared the fare, so my cab included a couple of young Israeli ladies who’d just flown in from Tel Aviv & were on their way to Colchester. They had recently completed national service, but had decided to join the Israeli Air Force. Anyway, we got into a vigorous conversation (as one does after a couple of bottles of cheap white wine - I had a feeling of being perfectly coherent, but you never can tell). Despite being in the armed forces, they were dead against Netanyahu and described the horror and dismay with which Rabin’s assassination (there we go again !) was generally greeted with genuine feeling. One thing that kept coming over, and this was the reason they’d joined up, despite the appearance of being cultured and highly intelligent - was their feeling of being set against the rest of the world and of needing to defend their homeland because, ultimately, nowhere else in the world was safe. End of anecdote and homily.

Consequent on the above, I’ve decided not to pursue the debate on Nazi ethics. Much of what you’ve written above I disagree with for reasons of historical accuracy, but that is of little relevance from a philosophical viewpoint. Maybe we can transplant the philosophical issues to a less sensitive platform ? That said, there is one issue from the second set of comments I feel I can’t let slip; namely barbarism. Here’s a quote from my favourite encyclopaedia :-

(Hitler) directed Himmler to prepare the ground for the "new order" in Europe. The concentration camps were expanded, and there were added to them extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Mauthausen, as well as mobile extermination squads. The Jews of Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union were most numerous among the victims; in German-occupied Europe between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 had been killed by the end of the war as the only solution in Hitler's view of the Jewish "problem." The sufferings of other races were only less when measured in numbers killed. Such BARBARISM was indiscriminate, even where, as in the Ukraine, Hitler might have encouraged nationalist feelings to his own advantage.

So, there is a precedent for this usage, and you can be as "fascinated" as you like. The article is by Alan Bullock, by the way, not some random hack. Also, technological prowess is not an indicator of an escape from barbarism - the technological efficiency of the death camps makes things worse if anything. In any case, there’s some debate as to whether the jet fighter was invented first by the Germans (let alone the Nazis) given that the Gloster Meteor came into service a couple of months prior to the Messerschmitt Me 262, but that’s a picky point.

On the issue of the purpose of art, I dare say it is a vastly more complex subject than either of us has allowed in our one-liners. I dare say it varies by historical époque, the medium, and whether we’re looking at it from the artist’s or patron’s perspective.

Well, now you have got me annoyed ! I suppose I provoked you by being slightly snide about your remarks on belief and delusion. I recommend that you read 89/33.7 again because what you said is most likely not what you meant. I’m sure you could draw me a simple Venn diagram (and, yes, my scanner would cope quite happily if you use a decent ribbon !). You said, ""Belief" and "delusion" are indeed interchangeable terms for the same set, ie. delusions, which being a sub-set of beliefs can be referred to by either title". Now I do see what you mean here, but, as it stands, this is a contradiction, unless we take sub-set in the sense of "improper" sub-set, where a set is allowed to be a subset of itself. The problem lies with your first assertion - what is your assertion that ""belief" and "delusion" are indeed interchangeable terms for the same set" supposed to mean other than that the sets of beliefs and delusions are identical, and therefore have the same elements ? Especially, since this is what Michael Nisbet was suggesting (in C88.16/2 ) was implicit in Philip Lloyd Lewis’s prior article in C87.20 . What I assume you meant was that there is a set of beliefs, of which a (proper) subset is the set of delusions, so that any delusion is a belief, though not all beliefs are delusions. Hence, it is fair to call a delusion a belief, but not, in general, a belief a delusion. Fair enough, I suppose. However, all this arose (and this is where "endless replies" are rather taxing on the patience) from Michael Nisbet accusing Philip Lloyd Lewis of being inconsistent in saying that "one man’s belief is another man’s delusion" C87.20 . I must say that if I’d wanted to take issue with Philip’s choice of words here, I’d have said that this implies that delusions were not beliefs, when he’d just said they were a subset of beliefs, rather than that he was implying that beliefs & delusions referred to the same set. Presumably, Philip meant that, defining a delusion as a false belief, what is a true belief for one person is a false belief (delusion) for another. Which, of course, is the whole point at issue - we just don’t know what the contents of the set of delusions is. I have more confidence that certain beliefs are delusions than Philip has, but there are definitely many doubtful cases. Whether all this is worth the paper it’s printed on is debatable, but we are, as philosophers, supposed to be speaking precisely. Which leads on to ...

What do you mean by asserting that you are "statistically" as likely to be a bat as a human ? I have racked my brains in vain to think of a recognised use of the term "statistically" that makes sense of this assertion.

I hope you will come back on democracy not being a good thing. Given that we need a form of government, and given human nature as it is, can you recommend a better form ? As someone said, democracy may not be perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got.

Theo