Tag: philosophy

We’ve been discussing Nietzsche in class and I have to ask a potentially rude question: are you fascinated by him bc you like his ideas, or are you fascinated by him in an I-can’t-look-away-from-this-five-car-three-horse-train-wreck?

Which text(s) of Nietzsche’s were you reading?

I like many of his ideas, though of course not all. What I dealt with in my dissertation was mostly his views on epistemology and the philosophy of science, and there’s a lot of good stuff there. Even some of his most apparently appalling ideas (such as the noble vs. slave morality stuff) can’t be dismissed out of hand when you think about them the way he did: from the perspective of someone who took a very long view of history and the history of philosophy. Philosophers aren’t only worth engaging with if you think they were right about everything; they’re worth engaging with if they pose a serious challenge to the things you had taken for granted.

Few modern philosophers have been misinterpreted as badly and as widely as Nietzsche. Some of that was deliberate distortion on the part of his Nazi sister (whose German-nationalist and antisemitic ideas he repudiated in print while he was still capable of doing so); some of it is a consequence of his intentionally esoteric writing style. That’s not to say that his ideas aren’t radical and potentially dangerous if understood correctly; they are. Just maybe not in the obvious way.

On the moral criticism of art

From Daniel Jacobson (1997), “In Praise of Immoral Art” (Philosophical Topics, Vol. 25, No. 1), pp. 163-5:

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Teaching on the relationship between aesthetic and moral value, I am often reminded of Tumblr antis… and also just standard Tumblr social justice-oriented evaluations of media. Jacobson does not spare the moralist Left (p. 160):

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Now, I’m not saying that a work’s moral content is irrelevant to its value, including its aesthetic value, and neither is Jacobson. But let’s not make that all we care about; and let’s also pay attention to the implicit stance of the work, which may not endorse everything it depicts… including who fares well and badly in the end. Let’s not force creators, even creators of pop culture, to tailor their work to the worst interpreters in the audience.

“angrymadsygin replied to your post “Some Nietzsche quotes that express my thoughts on The Tumblr Consensus”

@philosopherking1887​ What about those who refuse to determinedly adopt anything and keep their thoughts to themselves? Those who sift everything and keep only what they wish to? Those who hover about like a silent blimp? Is there an answer? Just wondering. I told you some time ago that I dislike reading philosophy because I find it subjective, that’s why I’m asking. You are learned in this field and I wanted to know if you read something about that kind of person.

@angrymadsygin this criticism is certainly not aimed at “those who refuse to determinedly adopt anything” and “who sift everything and keep only what they wish to.” There is definitely a philosophical term for people who continually weigh considerations and never come down on one side of an issue or the other: Pyrrhonian skeptics. A common interpretation of this late Hellenistic school is that they had a quasi-dogmatic policy of avoiding “dogmatism,” which is to say, of suspending judgment on every question and ginning up arguments on both sides of any issue until they achieved “equipollence,” i.e., until the considerations on each side appeared to have equal weight. The goal of this policy, according to this interpretation, was ataraxia, non-disturbance or peace of mind: if you never commit yourself to a position, you won’t be bothered about working to defend it, and you won’t be troubled by arguments or evidence that appear to show that you are wrong. However, the Pyrrhonian skeptics themselves (including their most prolific spokesman, Sextus Empiricus) denied that this was a policy, and said that suspension of judgment was simply the natural result of continued inquiry and ataraxia a fortunate side effect. The name itself, skeptikos, means “thoughtful, inquisitive [person]” and is derived from the verb skeptesthai, “to consider, reflect, look into.” I am a fan of the Pyrrhonian skeptics; I think they were cool. Clearly I am not one, however, because I do have strong opinions and I express them… but I make sure that I am always able to defend them with reasons. And I also (try to) remain open to changing my view when presented with sufficient reason to do so.

The people I was criticizing in the post you replied to are the people who unthinkingly parrot a party line and/or defend that party line with half-baked “arguments” that are easily pulled apart and debunked with just a slightly closer look at the issue in question. Obviously, I was talking about the person in the post I’d just reblogged who claimed – with no evidence other than the things Thor* says in Ragnarok (or that Taika Waititi has said in interviews) and in direct contradiction to what we saw in previous movies – that Loki has been trying to kill Thor for their whole lives and enjoys hurting and betraying Thor, and Thor showed the patience of a saint in putting up with him for so long. (So much for “show, don’t tell,” right? Apparently the things Thor*, TR, and TW just tell people take precedence over the things they’ve been shown for 3 movies.) I’m talking about the post that claims that Taika Waititi characterizes Thor and Loki much better than Joss Whedon because Waititi has a better understanding of Norse mythology and Whedon sees everything through the lens of Christianity, while Waititi remains unsullied by the influence of Christian culture (indigeneity fetishism, anyone?). I’m talking about the post that says “honestly the only way to explain joss’s loki is to say he was strung out on torture and space meth the whole time” when yes that is actually the explanation Joss was telegraphing (well, maybe not the space meth part, but Loki has definitely been through some shit). I’m talking about the post with a gif of Steve saying “son of a gun” next to a gif of Steve saying “son of a bitch” that claims that this shows the difference between Whedon’s inept good ol’ boy from Kansas characterization of Steve and actual Brooklyn army vet Steve… when the second gif is from Age of Ultron, which was *written by Joss Whedon*. And I’m talking about the people who thoughtlessly reblog these posts without disputing these claims even in the tags, thereby endorsing the view that they’re seeing coming from everyone else around them.

As to the view that philosophy is “subjective”: it is, like most things, a blend of subjectivity and objectivity. Unlike empirical sciences, philosophy doesn’t rest on experimental data that can be quantified – and that which is measurable or quantifiable is, these days, the paradigm of objectivity… to the extent that you can give just about anything an aura of objectivity if you put some numbers in. Numbers are only objective if everyone knows exactly what’s being measured and how. But philosophy is NOT, contrary to the picture in the popular imagination, simply a matter of some mystical guru types – or white men speaking from the authority of their whiteness and maleness – pronouncing some unsupported doctrines and expecting other people to take their word for it.

What sets philosophy apart from, e.g., religion, or ideology, or just plain making shit up, is that philosophers present reasons for their views: they defend them with arguments and with appeals to some commonly available evidence, such as general observations about everyday life, or history, or human nature. If you disagree with the philosopher’s conclusion, it’s then on you, the reader/interlocutor, to determine what part of the argument didn’t work. Was the reasoning invalid – i.e., did the conclusion not follow logically from the premises – or was one of the premises false? Figuring out what you think was wrong with the argument makes disagreement more than just a matter of people shouting contrary views at each other. If you can show that the argument was invalid, you force the philosopher (or their followers) to rethink the conclusion; maybe they can come up with a valid argument, but it puts the onus back on them to produce one. If you can point to empirical evidence that one of the premises is false, again, they need to rethink the conclusion. Often the disagreement is on a premise that is utterly unprovable: something about the basic nature of humanity or of the universe (is the universe basically rational, intelligible, orderly or irrational, unintelligible, chaotic? are human beings basically good or basically evil? does the good life consist in dedicating oneself to relieving the suffering of others, or in creating something by which one will be remembered?). These very fundamental premises may rightly be called “subjective,” because they might ultimately boil down to a very general feeling, reflecting one’s own character and/or needs (Nietzsche and William James, my philosophical heroes, both emphasize that point). But it’s still helpful to distinguish the disputants’ common ground from the points on which they can’t be reconciled. This giving and demanding of reasons, the effort to find common ground and maybe even come to agreement on the basis of logic and evidence, is the objective component of philosophy.

Left anarchist on Facebook: Instead of just putting people other than white men in positions of power, we should abolish all positions of power.

Me, a (small-p) pragmatist: How exactly is that going to work? Can there be temporary rotating executive positions? Or will all decisions be made by consensus among all of the people they affect? Will there still be teachers? Parents?

Also me, a Nietzschean: So basically you’re saying you want to abolish life (which is maybe not a bad idea at this point).

Thor’s character development and types of morality

@foundlingmother, I’m making this a separate post instead of reblogging because this is getting well off the trail of the original post and I don’t want to keep dragging poor writernotwaiting into it. Here is the thread of discussion and here’s what you said in your reblog:

That’s an interesting distinction between compassion and respect. I think I would say, taking into account @illwynd‘s explanation of the ways Thor shows that he’s compassionate, or at least trying to be, that part of Thor’s character growth may be that he feels worthiness is tied to, to use the Nietzschean terminology, a slave morality (the contrast between being a good man and a great king, for instance).

That might be some of what’s going on; Thor is probably picking up some (post-)Christian moral ideas from all the Western-educated humans he’s hanging out with. And of course I don’t expect most of the MCU writers to have a very thorough understanding of when certain moral ideas developed and where they came from. So of course to most writers and audiences, “becoming morally better” is going to be more or less synonymous with “becoming more selfless and altruistic.” That said, a noble value system certainly doesn’t preclude caring about other people, and the kind of narcissistic selfishness we associate with people like Trump is still an ignoble mindset, a way of being bad or contemptible according to noble value systems like those of ancient Greece or feudal Europe.

As I’ve said before in discussions of various philosophical issues in the MCU, I think the “good man vs. great king” issue is actually more about deontological vs. consequentialist modes of moral reasoning (I discuss the contrast a bit in this post on Thanos and Ultron and a bit more in this follow-up; apparently I also touched on it in this weird exchange). That’s a distinction that mostly comes up within what Nietzsche calls “slave morality” – the standard examples are Kantianism and utililtarianism, both of which are secular adaptations of Christian morality – but it can actually cut across the slave vs. noble morality distinction. So there can be deontological or consequentialist ways of implementing a noble morality. The reason I think that’s what Thor was talking about is this line: “The brutality, the sacrifice, it changes you.” I think what he had in mind was Odin’s willingness to sacrifice many Asgardian lives (and Malekith’s willingness to sacrifice most of his people) for the sake of victory. The reason this is relevant to ruling is that when you’re making decisions about large numbers of people with different needs and interests, you’re always going to have to trade the well-being of some for the well-being of others. I think we all saw the stupidity of Steve’s “We don’t trade lives” claim in Infinity War, because he was trading lives: in order to buy time to save Vision, he knowingly risked a whole bunch of Wakandan lives. In trying to keep his deontologist conscience clean, to remain “a good man,” he just hid from himself that he was being a bad leader making an indefensible trade, sacrificing many lives for one instead of vice versa.

This got very long, so I’m putting most of it under a cut.

A note on terminology, because it’s clearly very loaded: the “noble” and “slave” labels on moralities/value systems refer to whom the value system ultimately benefits. A noble value system is posited and maintained by the noble class (which may be either a knightly or a priestly caste) and works to justify and preserve their dominant position in society. A slave value system may or may not be invented by the lower classes of society (Buddhism, which counts as a slave morality in Nietzsche’s sense, was invented by a prince), but it definitely works to their advantage, because it protects the vulnerable and promotes social equality. The terminology is unfortunate in a context where the word “slave” immediately brings to mind the American system of Black chattel slavery; that is definitely not what Nietzsche had in mind. He was a classicist before he became a philosopher, so he’s usually thinking about slavery in the ancient world as well as serfdom in pre-modern Europe. This is definitely unorthodox, but I’m going to start using “serf morality” instead of “slave morality” to avoid irrelevant racial connotations.

The main difference between noble and serf morality, on the issue of caring for and helping others, has to do with the way you think about the obligation to do so. The type of serf morality that Nietzsche calls “the morality of compassion” or “the morality of suffering” says that you have an obligation to relieve all suffering, and to care about all others who suffer. (Sometimes an exception is made for those who make others suffer and you’re allowed to hate them and want them to suffer; sometimes you’re supposed to pity and help them too.) You’re supposed to make the happiness and/or well-being of other people your primary goal in life, and you’re supposed to care about everyone, regardless of their relationship to you. Some forms of (post-)Christian morality permit you to prioritize people to whom you have special relationships (family and friends), but the purest form of this morality requires you to care about everyone equally, and ascetic or monastic Christianity discourages forming special relationships because that will inject an element of selfishness into your desire to benefit certain people. The purer forms of this morality – philosophical Christianity, with or without God – also consider the salvation of one’s own soul to be an unacceptably selfish motivation for helping others. Ideally, everyone’s entire motivation is to eliminate the suffering of others, not because of anything particular about them or their relation to you, but simply because they exist and they suffer. The morality of compassion is universalistic, egalitarian, and outward-focused.

Noble value systems allow agents to be selective in whose well-being they care about. Special relationships are extremely important. Traditionally, this usually means family relationships and comradeship-in-arms because aristocratic societies have conventionally been very heredity-focused and martial. But it also includes what Aristotle scholars call “character friendships”: friendships formed with kindred spirits because of mutual admiration for each other’s qualities and abilities. The standards of a noble morality only apply to a small class of people, namely, the nobility; it’s largely silent on how non-nobles should behave, and different versions have different rules about how nobles should treat non-nobles. Respect is reserved for other nobles, but some noble moralities, especially medieval hybrids of Christianity and Roman/pagan noble morality, also encourage benevolence, generosity, and forbearance toward commoners. Under certain circumstances, nobles can be obligated to care about the well-being of certain non-nobles, but it’s virtually always a matter of regarding them as your own, as your responsibility. Lords are supposed to care about the commoners who live in their lands and are obligated to protect them and provide for them; Christian knights are supposed to care about other Christians. In the ideal city described in Plato’s Republic, the guardians (the warrior class) are compared to guard dogs who are friendly to their master’s family but hostile to strangers. Their responsibility is to all the citizens of their city, even the lower-class ones; to that extent, all citizens are their own in the same way family members are. Caring for others in noble moralities is selective and is always a matter of regarding certain others as an extension of oneself and, therefore, regarding their well-being as part of one’s own well-being. Noble moralities also don’t preclude sacrificing yourself for others – that would be very silly in a warrior’s code of conduct – but self-sacrifice is not selfless when you’re sacrificing a part of yourself (your life, your body) for another part of yourself: the people who matter to you, your family, your comrades, your countrymen. There’s also the understanding that those who sacrifice themselves in such a way will be remembered and honored; you exchange a brief life for long-lasting glory.

(To be clear: Nietzsche was not in favor of going back to a Homeric-style warrior noble morality; he was very aware of the many cultural changes that have made that both impossible and undesirable, mostly involving the internalization and intellectualization of human life and activity. He was imagining communities being constructed and battle lines drawn on the ground of ideas, not geography or ethnicity, which can no longer defensibly be said to have the significance they once did. Nationalism, he thought, was a spasm of an outdated worldview. But he also questioned the value of selflessness and wondered about the end goal of a moral system whose primary motivation is the alleviation of suffering.)

So… I’m not sure if Thor’s moral improvement was a matter of moving toward serf morality or just becoming a better representative of noble morality. I definitely think Odin’s goal was the latter. “Humility” considered as an absolute value, as in the more of it the better, definitely belongs to serf morality, but there is a place for humility as a balancing quality in noble morality: Aristotle places magnanimity, or “greatness of soul,” as the virtue at the mean between vanity or arrogance – claiming more honor than you deserve – and an excess of humility or “smallness of soul,” which is effectively meekness, laying claim to less honor than you actually deserve. Thor was arrogant and vain; he invited adulation, he overestimated his own abilities and (as we saw in the deleted scene) the amount of credit he deserved for victories he shared with others. He needed to be shown that he isn’t invincible and that he sometimes has to rely on others, but the goal wasn’t for him to become self-effacing. His maturation also involved a greater awareness and sensitivity to the needs of others: contrast his complete obliviousness to the danger his friends are in during the Jotunheim battle with the slow-motion sequence in the Puente Antiguo battle where Thor looks around and really takes in how much his friends are struggling. That – along with his acknowledgment that he might have done something to wrong Loki and his attempt to apologize – might be considered an increase in empathy and/or compassion; in any case, it’s definitely doing a better job of caring for the people with whom he has a relationship, and for whom he is responsible. Making friends in Midgard does seem to have done something to widen the scope of his compassion and/or benevolence, since he now sees a problem with wiping out the Jotnar.

Forgive me, this is really random but, there’s this youtuber I really think you would like (if you aren’t already familiar with her) called Contrapoints. She mostly focuses on social justice issues but she has a really funny, often weird and surreal approach to her videos. (She reminded me specifically of you because she’s a philosophy grad and sometimes discusses philosophical concepts as they relate to her points)

Thanks for the recommendation! I watched one of her political videos then found the one called “Why I Quit Academia” because I was curious (her YouTube channel describes her as an “ex-philosopher”). It sounds like she was educated in a Continental rather than analytic philosophy department, at least in grad school – and probably in undergrad, too, or she wouldn’t have chosen such a department for grad school. So she’s describing a flavor of bullshit that I tend to encounter from people in other humanities disciplines – mostly various literature departments (Comp Lit is usually the worst), but also History, Art History, etc. Analytic philosophy departments are their own brand of special.

She quotes Daniel Dennett, who’s definitely an analytic philosopher, as saying that most of academic philosophy involves discovering higher-order truths about Chmess: a variant of chess that nobody plays. He was probably talking about the kind of bullshit metaphysics that goes on in analytic departments: trying to discover the deep nature of things by analyzing our concepts of them, which mostly ends up being an explication of the worldview presupposed by a very specific upper-middle-class dialect of English. For the most part, analytic philosophers don’t claim to be advancing the cause of social justice when they do that kind of stuff… but now philosophy of race and gender have become very trendy in analytic departments. People tend not to be as aggressively Leftist, and you do actually find the occasional libertarian (Nozick, also cited in the video, was an analytic philosopher) or Christian monarchist (OK, maybe there’s just the one in my department). Importantly, analytic philosophers (like Contrapoints!) usually think there’s more than merely symbolic value in engaging directly with the opposition, and that you can change people’s minds with reasons… even if we acknowledge that most beliefs are formed non-rationally and only justified post hoc.

Analytic philosophers, unlike Continental philosophers, pride themselves on writing clearly and intelligibly and making explicit what they mean by key technical terms. It’s definitely possible to hide a lot of bullshit behind a facade of clarity, and to read a paper understanding every sentence perfectly but then come away wondering what the hell you were supposed to get out of it. But they can also write things that are accessible to a general audience without being dumbed-down. An internet acquaintance of mine, Kate Manne (a professor at Cornell), recently published a book called Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny that has attracted some mainstream attention – including the ire of Jordan Peterson and his troll army, which must speak in its favor.

Now I’m mostly just rambling, but… I guess it seems like Contrapoints might have been better served by studying in an analytic department, since she seems to value clarity, accessibility, cross-ideology engagement, and humor.

FWIW, my father, who is a hardcore Ayn Rand supporter, calls Thanos’ philosophy derivative of a socialist mindset that doesn’t recognize the value of human life, whereas my father believes capitalists see each person as capable of solving wicked problems in the future and therefore as valuable as the resources deemed scarce. Since you’re calling Thanos hypothetically extreme pro-capitalist, here’s what one extreme capitalist says. Maybe everyone just wants to push evil Thanos on their opponents?

I don’t doubt that people on both ends of the political spectrum want to disavow a view they see as obviously repugnant and blame it on their opponents. However, it also seems clear to me that the grounds on which people on the Left call Thanos’s worldview pro-capitalist and people on the Right call it socialist are quite different. In short, the leftist critics on Tumblr attribute his factual assumptions to capitalist ideology, while your Rand-supporting father is attributing his normative framework to a socialist mindset.

What people on Tumblr have been saying in various ways is that “overpopulation is a myth”: it is a false causal explanation for the existence and persistence of material scarcity. The idea of overpopulation, this criticism goes, enables rich people to blame poor people for their own poverty. The problem, these rich capitalists say, isn’t the distribution of resources; it isn’t that rich countries overproduce food and throw most of it away, or that rich people hoard money, or that powerful corporations renew patents on life-saving technology to make sure that the products remain scarce and expensive. It’s that those stupid poor people with no self-control just won’t stop making babies. I suspect that this criticism is something of an oversimplification; a growing human population will have more and more energy demands, which may or may not be possible to meet with only renewable energy resources, and will of course require more and more food, which will in turn require that wilderness be cleared for agriculture (unless urban farming and vertical gardens really catch on). On the other hand, population growth rates do slow down as societies become more educated and gender-egalitarian. So I suspect that the gap between the West and the rest of the world (whose labor and resources the West has been exploiting for the past few centuries) is a large part of the apparent problem, and if that gap were allowed to close, there would no longer be any reason to worry about runaway population growth.

What your father seems to be voicing is a general criticism of consequentialist ethics (which operates by maximizing some good outcome): that it aggregates well-being, and therefore has no problem sacrificing the well-being of a few people in order to improve the situation of a large number of people. The most common form of consequentialism is utilitarianism, for which the good to be maximized is pleasure or happiness. A criticism originally voiced by John Rawls and taken up by various other philosophical critics of utilitarianism is that it fails to recognize or respect “the separateness of persons.” It’s perfectly fine for one person to forgo a benefit at one time in order to enjoy a greater benefit at a later time, e.g., by saving and investing money, or by refraining from indulgences in order to preserve one’s health, because the near-term costs are borne by the same person who enjoys the long-term benefits. Utilitarianism makes the same kind of calculation across populations rather than across time, imposing smaller costs in one place in order to reap greater benefits elsewhere; but this is illegitimate (the criticism goes) because the people who bear the costs are not the same as the people who enjoy the benefits. Pretty obviously Thanos is reasoning in a consequentialist/utilitarian way: he’s trying to maximize average happiness by replacing a large number of low-quality lives with a smaller number of high-quality lives. It sucks for the people who die (or maybe not, since he wants to give them a quick, painless death) and for the people who lose loved ones, but in theory, things will be a lot better for the next few generations.

Consequentialism is a kind of collectivist thinking, you might say: the goal is to maximize well-being (however that’s defined) across the entire population of moral patients (creatures who deserve moral consideration, which might be humans, intelligent beings, sentient beings, all living beings…) without regard for how that well-being is distributed among the individuals. As a practical matter, utilitarianism tends to promote egalitarian distribution of resources because of the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility: each added unit of whatever goods (money, food, etc.) provides more pleasure/happiness to someone with less of it than to someone with more of it, so you’ll tend to maximize happiness as the distribution nears equality – ignoring things like different individuals’ utility functions (i.e., how much pleasure/happiness each person gets from one unit of the good at each level of prior possession). So I can see how someone might think of utilitarianism as a “socialist” style of ethics… except that a lot of socialists hate it, too, and attribute it to capitalism (Bentham’s utilitarianism is one of the foundations of modern economic theory). But then both socialists and capitalists like to accuse each other of regarding human life as expendable, as something you can put a numerical value on, rather than as sacred, inviolable, possessing immeasurable dignity rather than a measurable price.

Do you have recommendations of books to someone who knows nothing of philosophy and would like to learn about it? Until I read your post about Ultron and Thanos I have never heard of some terms (like consequentialism) and I would love to learn more.

My standard recommendation for introductory reading about philosophical concepts and thinkers is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu; it’s a memorable URL). It has helpful, accessible explanations, links to related topics, and recommendations for further reading – and it’s free! So, for example, there are articles on Consequentialism and Deontological Ethics; they give a basic summary of the concepts at the beginning, then go into more technical specifics for students and scholars.

fuckyeahrichardiii replied to your post “fuckyeahrichardiii replied to your post “You know, it wasn’t until I…”

Reading this has me practically crying in relief — I’ve felt like an oddball because it seems like the movie was universally loved and I couldn’t understand why.

I thought I was alone, too, @fuckyeahrichardiii – at least among MCU fans other than the “Loki apologists” who have been annoying the rest of the fandom since 2012. But being the contrarian I am, when I think I’m alone in an opinion (including thinking there’s nothing wrong with 1st person POV, or that Joss Whedon is still a good writer in many respects), I don’t keep my mouth shut for fear of alienating people or starting controversy. I make posts bitching about it, either hoping to call allies out of the woodwork, or to force people to reconsider the opinions that they formed “for no reasons worthy of the name” (as William James puts it in “The Will to Believe”), merely “out of habit” and/or to go along with the rest of their community, as Nietzsche says of the “fettered spirit” in Human, All Too Human (I, 226). “Later… [they] may perhaps have also devised a couple of reasons favorable to [their] habits” (as one sees in posts people make presenting their Tumblr-approved opinions); but typically, alas, “if one refutes those reasons one does not refute [them] in their general position.”

(Yeah, I judge people who don’t think for themselves. Fucking deal with it.)

It seems that, on this issue, I have actually been finding allies who were too scared to say anything because they thought they were alone (among non-Loki-justifiers) – and possibly even getting people to reconsider the high opinion of the movie they assumed they must have because everyone else seemed to…