Replies to Sartre
July 1st 2008 10:09
It's possible that you do believe in a deity, but don't believe that he/she/it/they have any special moral authority. And if you're atheist or agnostic in the first place, then the question is somewhat irrelevant.
So there's plenty of people for whom the option of existentialist ethics is attractive -- the position (to put it vaguely and crudely) that there is no objective morality out there in the world, no set of ethical laws written into the universe, and therefore what you're forced to do, moment to moment, is create right and wrong, good and bad. You must make a choice, and you're unable not to choose. It would be "bad faith", "inauthentic", blinding yourself to the truth, to abscond from consciously choosing, or to lie to yourself and pretend that you're not deciding or can't decide.
For instance, why is it wrong to torture people? Well, instinctively, one gives a reason like: "Because suffering is wrong" or "Because violating someone's autonomy is wrong", but why in turn are those things wrong? The game of giving reasons demands some ultimate foundation...
But is ethics like physics? Is "suffering is wrong" like E=MC2? Are there ethical facts you can have recourse to? Because if not, then perhaps you'll wind up agreeing with the existentialist: "This is wrong, because I decide, arbitrarily, this moment, that suffering or violation of autonomy is wrong -- there is no other reason..."
(Incidentally: (a) there's a number of other assumptions to discuss here, about the nature of ethical language, the nature of truth, the nature of empirical facts and scientific knowledge, but I'm going to blithely ignore all these; and (b) I base this interpretation on "Existentialism is a humanism", a famous essay that Sartre later repudiated... but let's treat this as "Sartrean ethics" for argument's sake.)
Anyways, so pure decision, for some people, becomes an attractive foundation for ethics, an alternative to objective laws. -- What can be said in response?
Here's three thoughts.
1. Michel Foucault out-Sartres Sartre. His position is somewhat mysterious to me, but it involves pointing out that there is no reason to have "good faith" or to be "authentic" either. What might be left (apparently a Nietzschean thought) is to live life "artistically", to shape your life like a work of art.
2. Bernard Williams argues against Sarte as follows (Ethics and the limits of philosophy, 1985):
So there's plenty of people for whom the option of existentialist ethics is attractive -- the position (to put it vaguely and crudely) that there is no objective morality out there in the world, no set of ethical laws written into the universe, and therefore what you're forced to do, moment to moment, is create right and wrong, good and bad. You must make a choice, and you're unable not to choose. It would be "bad faith", "inauthentic", blinding yourself to the truth, to abscond from consciously choosing, or to lie to yourself and pretend that you're not deciding or can't decide.
For instance, why is it wrong to torture people? Well, instinctively, one gives a reason like: "Because suffering is wrong" or "Because violating someone's autonomy is wrong", but why in turn are those things wrong? The game of giving reasons demands some ultimate foundation...
But is ethics like physics? Is "suffering is wrong" like E=MC2? Are there ethical facts you can have recourse to? Because if not, then perhaps you'll wind up agreeing with the existentialist: "This is wrong, because I decide, arbitrarily, this moment, that suffering or violation of autonomy is wrong -- there is no other reason..."
(Incidentally: (a) there's a number of other assumptions to discuss here, about the nature of ethical language, the nature of truth, the nature of empirical facts and scientific knowledge, but I'm going to blithely ignore all these; and (b) I base this interpretation on "Existentialism is a humanism", a famous essay that Sartre later repudiated... but let's treat this as "Sartrean ethics" for argument's sake.)
Anyways, so pure decision, for some people, becomes an attractive foundation for ethics, an alternative to objective laws. -- What can be said in response?
Here's three thoughts.
1. Michel Foucault out-Sartres Sartre. His position is somewhat mysterious to me, but it involves pointing out that there is no reason to have "good faith" or to be "authentic" either. What might be left (apparently a Nietzschean thought) is to live life "artistically", to shape your life like a work of art.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
2. Bernard Williams argues against Sarte as follows (Ethics and the limits of philosophy, 1985):
| If ethical conviction is not to be identified with knowledge or certainty, what is it? There are those who... think that the source of ethical conviction must be a decision, to adopt certain moral principles or to live in one way rather than another. This cannot be right because ethical conviction, like any other form of being convinced, must have some aspect of passivity to it, must in some sense come to you... [I]f ethics is a matter of decision, and we are uncertain, then we are uncertain what to decide. |
The point, on my interpretation, is that as a matter of psychological fact a decision model is unsatisfying. It solves no quandaries; and, on one view, the whole point of talking about ethics is to be able to address dilemmas.
(Of course, Sartre might simply bite the bullet on this one: "Yes, it's uncertain what to decide. So what?" Or: "Yes, it's impossible for real people to do it, but so what?")
At any rate, Williams prefers some sort of ethical "confidence", instead of "certainty" or "decision" (also somewhat mysterious to me); and he rejects the whole idea that we need play the game of giving reasons and arrive at some ultimate foundation:
| [Confidence] is basically a social phenomenon... It is a social and psychological question what kinds of institutions, upbringing, and public discourse help to foster it... This does not mean that it has nothing to do with rational argument. Social states can be affected, one way or another, by rational argument. Moreover, if we try to generate confidence without rational argument or by suppressing it, we are quite likely to fail, but, besides that, we shall be sacrificing other goods. Confidence is merely one good among others: it has a price, and the price should not be set too high... The truth is that the basic question is how to live and what to do... and the amount of time and human energy to be spent in reflecting... must itself depend on what, from the perspective of the ethical life we actually have, we count as a life worth living... |
Bernard Williams (1929-2003)
3. The non-religious theologian Don Cupitt makes a claim similar to Williams' in an interview (What philosophers think, 2003, edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom). The point, again, seems to be that, from a practical standpoint, the Sartrean way of thinking about ethics is either impossible or difficult or undesirable.
| I sometimes quote... the contrast between Sartre's atheism and the religious attitude of a British philosopher like Ernest Gellner, who was certainly no theist and no religious believer. But he did tell me, "I have a religious attitude to life." He wondered at life, he felt there was something there that deserved our respect and acknowledgement, just in the flow of life itself. He didn't like either the Marxist or the atheist existentialist view of the individual human being as a purely sovereign positer of values and organizer of the world. One needs to have a sort of to-and-fro, a dialectic between the self and life. |
Cupritt describes this attitude as 'love of life, a kind of moral responsiveness to existence, no more than that, trying to get away from a rather aggressively masculine, Sartrean imperialism of the will."
| Zizeck makes the point here by arguing that, contrary to the rationalist notion, human thinking is very often heterological rather than purely autonomous... We don't just think up our values and impose them on experience. Rather our thinking is always prompted by things out there, and persons who think for us. It's no accident that celebrity endorsement and celebrity opinion is nowadays needed for English people to take any idea at all seriously. We think through various kinds of proxies, symbols and ideas. Very few people are purely sovereign and autonomous creative thinkers in a post-Cartesian individualist way. Most of us work through myths, through other people, through values derived from religion. |
So, while Cupitt isn't a "theist" in the traditional sense, he thinks: "religion supplies us with poetry and myths to live by, and human beings need stories to live by... So I don't think any religious beliefs are literally true, but I think they're all existentially or morally useful, or a great many of them are.'"
Don Cupitt (1934-)
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Comment by Cibbuano
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Comment by Cibbuano
20/20 Filmsight
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... I feel like a lot of philosophy is a 'so what?' proposition. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be studied, but that it frustrates me.
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
I do however think that few people spend much time milling over the great why of why something is right or wrong.
Trust pulls most people through.
Either they trust the laws or they move on to their own set of of laws based upon a new premise that they trust.
Comment by Bill Green
Talking Headlines
This is where the post-modernists lose the thread. They have been so cloistered from reality that they imagine that immediate things like pain are abstractions. They're fucking not abstractions and many real consequences follow.
Also the original academic French post-modernists collaborated with the Nazis and had no wish to have things like truth or reality imposed upon them. What better way to disguise their disgrace than pretend it had no significance - a new philosophy was born: What is truth? Would the chair still be in the room if I leave the room? And many other dazzling questions, like, was I a traitor for helping my neighbors into a death camp? Maybe they would have ended up there anyway?
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
Dear Cibby,
Well, here's some random thoughts...
-- Not everyone has a taste for chess, or for mathematics, or for art, or for sports. My girlfriend doesn't "get" computer games. Che Guevera was notoriously amusical -- couldn't see the point of music at all...
-- Problems only arise from particular ways of thinking. You're only going to worry about how many angels dance on the head of a pin if you believe in angels; you only worry about the existence of God if religion has been important in your life or the lives of people you care about; and the same is true of any problem asked relative to any theory, "scientific" or otherwise.
-- The urgency of questions and their answers is also going to vary from person to person. A person like Russell might care deeply about finding some sort of certainty in life; another person might care about the rightness or wrongness of abortion; another might care about what they should be doing when they're doing art; another might be very curious about explaining consciousness.
Some more random thoughts...
-- John Searle and Zizek have a view of philosophy as an activity people engage in when no method is decided upon. Once you decide on a method, it's no longer a philosophical issue -- it breaks off from philosophy to become experimental science, or logic, or psychology, or economics, or sociology, or whatever... Perhaps frustration is natural to such a discipline.
-- I suppose frustration arises relative to expectations and desires -- if you want or expect something, and don't get it, then you're frustrated... But what beliefs are you holding such that you're able to be frustrated, and are these beliefs true? For instance, do you expect philosophy to deliver something that it can't?
-- Philosophy does give plenty of answers; it's a false stereotype that it doesn't. But it doesn't often arrive at answers that are satisfactory to everyone -- they tend only to be satisfying to people who accept certain premises. Plenty of people have theories of mind, language, ethics, and so forth; and they're able to attract huge numbers of disciples. It's just that they don't attract everyone...
But isn't the same true of "science"?
Dear Damo,
Do you think they ought to worry about such things, though?
When you say that "Trust pulls most people through", is trust a good thing? Or is it something like unthinking habit, or irrationality, or blind obeisance before tradition?
What exactly are they "trusting"? Are the trusting pure luck -- that fortune will happen to make their instinctive actions accord with what is right?
Dear Bill,
I am hesitant to respond to your comment, for a number of reasons.
For instance:
-- I don't quite grasp your point, nor the thread of your argument (but it's 6am as I'm writing this, and I've been up all night -- I'll try to think about your comment more this evening).
-- I think you're erecting something of a strawman. I don't know much about post-modernism, but I don't think it'll be easy for you to find any person who identifies himself as a "post-modernist" asserting "pain does not exist" (although, you may find an "eliminativist" asserting this, on the basis that the word "pain" is somehow insufficient, and our ordinary mental-term language should be superseded by scientific language). I don't think most post-modernism addresses itself to the status of subjective experience... Why is it that you think that "post-modernism" believes this?
-- About whether chairs still exist in a room when you leave them, I don't think this is a concern of post-modernism either. This sort of question seems to me to pertain more to Descartes-style solipsism, to questions about the status of "external objects", and to an old position that goes under the name "idealism".
-- In your last paragraph you seem to draw a connection between skepticism about external objects and nihilism about ethical values. But I don't think there's any logical connection here. For instance, a classic idealist was Bishop Berkeley, who notoriously believed that there are only minds, and no matter. So he was an irrealist about things like chairs -- but he wasalso a traditional Christian bishop -- so he would have believed in objective moral truths.
-- Whom are you thinking of when you speak of the original French post-modernists who collaborated with Nazis, and in which of their writings do they defend Nazism? I'm inclined to think that post-modernism was instead born out of horror at Nazism, and that there's this continuous drive in what gets labelled "post-modernism" towards developing an ethics that will stop another Holocaust. For instance, there is the worry in Lyotard that "modernism" and Enlightenment ideals somehow led to Auschwitz; there is the concern in Derrida with giving voice to the oppressed; and there is the attempt in Levinas to develop sensitivity to the demands another human presence places on you.
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
1. There are objective moral truths (like "torture is wrong because torturers get carnal pleasure from it and therefore want to do it again").
2. These truths are self-evident.
3. Post-modernists are an example of people who deny these truths.
4. Therefore post-modernism is mistaken.
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
For a start we often trust our eyes.
Then:
Parents and teachers.
We may trust maths and science.
I guess people tend to trust anything that creates sanity and makes sense.
I think without trust everything falls apart even sanity.
Even a mind that does not trust its own judgement goes into disarray.
Comment by Bill Green
Talking Headlines
Nony, My problem with pm is that their writers have no humour, or wit ( although early New Yorker stories were very funny as they sent up pm rules), no knowledge of reality, no drama; have characters who all carry the same dramatic weight; and no stories, of which we know there are plenty. We're deconstructing, they often say, not remembering that the individual who was close to the first deconstructionist was Sigmund.It's only when pms write about the world they know that they perform brilliant feats.
As for torture, it hurts individuals and pleasures the torturer. I doubt that pms would deny that torture hurts, especially if it happens to them.
Pm has a chance. I remember Peter Carey wrote a great novel about his family but decided not to go that way again because his pm fans roasted the book.
Comment by Ronald
nothing