Dr Brenner's Philosophical Gleanings

“The world is there”: what men mean by that lies close to my heart. –W, WVC p. 118/ In “Lecture on Ethics,” W. spoke of wonder at the existence of the world as his “experience par excellence.” In this, I think, he was expressing an attitude towards the world much like what, in “Ethics of Elfland,” Chesterton called “elementary wonder.” (Cf. Brenner, “Chesterton, W. & the Foundations of Ethics.”) –w.h.b.

Dialogue: S:“Why is there a world? – R: There just is! – S: Because God chose to create it!/ Comment: S’s answer amplifies mystery; R’s dismisses it./ In “Science and the Savages,” Chesterton remarks that, rather than making the world less mysterious, and so something to no longer wonder at, primitive personification of nature is an expression, and amplification of wonder. –w.h.b. & sjw

This wonder finds a strikingly expression in the following from the first chapter of Bernard Malamud’s novel, A New Life:

two years I lived in self hatred, willing to part with life… But one morning, in somebody’s filthy cellar, I awoke under burlap bags and saw my rotting shoes on a broken chair. They were lit in dim sunlight from a shaft or window. I stared at the chair; it looked like a painting, a thing with a value of its own. I squeezed what was left of my brain to understand why this should move me so deeply, why I was crying. Then, I thought, Levin, if you were dead, there’d be no light on your shoes in the cellar. I came to believe what I had often wanted to, that life is holy. I then became a man of principle. Here “amazement that anything should exist” (wonder at the ordinary, ”believing that life is holy”) is connected with “becoming a man of principle”

and so with the moral imperative. Cf. Blake’s “holiness of the minute particular.” (Cf.: “Two things fill the mind with wonder and awe: the starry skies above me and the moral law within me.” Kant is connecting awe at the impersonal beauty we observe in the cosmic order with the respect we feel for the imperative enjoining to bring about another, personal, beauty in our lives. –w.h.b.)

[I] am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. –W, LE pp. 43-44 in PO

We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing ensures that this projection will take place …That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing…all the whirl of organism W. calls “forms of life.” –Cavell, “Availability …” p. 52

In PI, the sense of wonder, the source of all philosophy, is diffused over the whole range of human life and consciousness./ The achievement of W's later philosophy is its demonstration of the strangeness of the ordinary. Such things are so close to us that we hardly notice them in daily life and it takes the philosopher's perception to pick them out and describe them. The method is a careful juxtaposition of familiar things but the result is a new understanding of them./ Philosophy, he thinks, is not like science because its task is not to theorize but only to describe. The understanding that philosophers seek can be caught…only by a description which makes us see the familiar phenomenon in the right way. [In this,] philosophy is like art./ The philosophy of the past modeled itself on science, and its theories became more and more remote from life as it is lived …The new philosophy comes back from the desert with a new message: describe the familiar in the right way, and you will understand it. –Pears, False Prison, vol. 1, pp. 17-19

How could fire or fire's resemblance to the sun have failed to make an impression on the awakening mind of man?/ But not “because he can't explain it” (the stupid superstition of our time)…I do not mean that it is fire that must make an impression on anyone… For no phenomenon is particularly mysterious in itself, but any of them can become so to us, and it is precisely the characteristic feature of the awakening human spirit that a phenomenon has meaning for it. –W, PO p. 129

THE MEANING OF THE WORLD is not in the world (NB p. 73). Wonder has something to do with that. But the meaning of the world is not known. It’s more like an atmosphere, a spiritual fragrance, aroma of significance, a savor of the divine. Of course it isn't talk that occasions wonder. It’s the world itself – a flower, an amoeba,…So we describe the amoeba, its behavior, chemistry, etc. And when we’ve done all this, what remains? Wonder. You see what there is here. An amoeba. But that there should be such a thing! Wonder is inarticulate. It can’t even ask questions. Here we run up against what cannot be understood. When [my student] Evans treats this, it’s as though, if he only knew one more detail, he’d then be satisfied. But wonder is not satisfied with another detail…It is not a question. It might break out in fear or again in singing. The amoeba declares the glory of God and the mosquito his handiwork…But don’t ask how. The experience of wonder borders on the sublime. It calls for reverence. –Bouwsma, ‘62 Lecture Notes

“WILD & STARTLING”: Chesterton’s application of that phrase to life [in “Ethics of Elfland”] is not application in virtue of some feature…of life. It is a rendering in words of a fundamental responsiveness to life. –Diamond, “We are Perpetually Moralists” p. 95/ Chesterton used “wild and startling” in what W. called “a secondary sense, ”in order to express a fundamental responsiveness to life. (Might Heidegger have called Chesterton’ use of those words was ontological, rather than ontic?) –w.h.b.

REVERENCE is an ancient virtue that survives among us in half forgotten patterns of civility, in moments of inarticulate awe, and in nostalgia for the lost ways of traditional cultures. It begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control…The capacity for awe, as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting fellow human beings, flaws and all. This in turn fosters the ability to be ashamed when we show moral flaws exceeding the normal human allotment…Simply put, reverence is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods. –Woodruff, Reverence pp. 3-4

The tombs of the ancients…always represent scenes from everyday life. Here a husband and wife look out from a niche as from a window. Here a father and mother and son look at each other with indescribable tenderness. Here a married couple join hands, here a father reclines on a couch and appears to be chatting with his family. To me, the immediacy of these sculptures was extremely moving…There is no knight in armor kneeling in anticipation of a joyful resurrection. With varying degrees of skill, the artist has represented only the simple realities of human beings, perpetuating their existence and giving them everlasting life. –Goethe, Letters From Italy, Auden, ed., pp. 15-16

Drury told W. that … he had been shocked to find on the wall of an Egyptian temple a bas-relief of the god Horus, with an erect phallus, in the act of ejaculation and collecting the semen in a bowl./ W. responded: “Why in the world shouldn’t they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated? Not every religion has to have St. Augustine’s attitude to sex.”–Monk, Duty of Genius pp. 453-54

The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety. –W, PO p. 127 (Cf. Rev. 3:15-16.)/ We can easily imagine, for example, that the king of a tribe is kept hidden from everyone, but also that every man in the tribe must see him. Certainly, then, the latter will not be left to happen in some more or less chance manner, but he will be shown to the people. Perhaps no one will be allowed to touch him, but perhaps everyone must touch him. Recall that after Schubert’s death his brother cut some of Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave such pieces, consisting of a few bars, to his favorite pupils. This act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable to us as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no one. And if S’s brother had burned the scores, that too would be understandable as a sign of piety. –W, PO p. 127

One could begin a book on anthropology by saying … except for animal activities such as ingestion, etc., men also perform actions which bear a characteristic peculiar to themselves, and these could be called ritualistic actions./ [T]he characteristic feature of a ritualist action is not…an opinion, whether true or false, although an opinion…can itself be ritualistic or part of a rite. –W, PO p. 129

Consider rites surrounding hunting. Hunters may ask an animal for forgiveness after slaying. Crude explanations may suggest that the hunters are afraid of being pursued by the spirits of the dead animals: “Once they are rescued from these mistaken views, they drop the rituals of appeasement.” But if we look closer at the context in which dependence on hunting loomed large in the life of a tribe, a deeper meaning will suggest itself. The hunters have a sense of the mystery of life and hence of life ended. This is expressed in the ritual. It shows their sense of the animal's life and the seriousness of ending it. Compare this with the mass killing of animals for food in our society. –Phillips,

No matter how sophisticated our science, it will never be able to achieve more than crisis management so long as we go on living in an acquisitive, self-assertive society of individuals …for whom the earth itself is nothing but a resource for human self-realization. –Pattison, The Later Heidegger p.207

We should not childishly refuse to study the meaner animals, for in all works of nature there is something of the marvelous. A story is told of Heraclitus, that when some visitors desired to see him but hesitated when they found him in the kitchen warming himself by the fire, he bade them: “Come in, don’t be afraid! For here, too, are gods.” In like manner, boldly and without distaste, we ought to pursue the investigation of every sort of animal, for every one of them will reveal to us something both of nature and of beauty. I say beauty, because in nature it is purpose, not haphazard, that predominates… –Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 645a:15-25 (Wheelwright tr.)

In the reaction of wonder at existence the very contingency of events takes on the aspect of a gift – a gift of grace. Seeing one’s existence as a gift of grace is connected with “dying to self.” Making the self central is denying God’s grace. The man of faith regards even his own moral endeavors as gifts (Eph. 2:8-10). –Phillips, Fantasy to Faith, pp. 298-300/ (For it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his own good pleasure. –Phil. 2: 13)

In “the faithful frame of mind” we are aware that being is not simply a fact but also a gift… And the response of [religious] faith is to recognize that we too must give. –Scruton, Soul of the World p. 191 (Cf. Chesterton’s “Ethics of Elfland.”)

“TO LET BE” (Heidegger’s Seinlassen) is to experience and trust things as what they are and not as they figure in some “dimmed down,” perhaps reductionist, vision that suits certain human purposes. It is, e.g., to resist such practices as genetically engineering bulls so that, … they become fat, placid lumps convenient for masturbation by machines. Such practices are blind to the integrity of bulls, to the “place” they have in the world, to what they are. (Think of practices equally blind to the integrity of our fellow human beings)./ The humble person will have respect for “little things”… for inconspicuous, unglamorous things, like eating a meal…To be obsessed … with the gigantic and the striking – to be incapable of “a celebration of the ordinary” and unassuming – is to have fallen victim to measuring the world by a yardstick that betrays an inflated reckoning of the scale of human achievement. –Cooper, Measure of Things, pp. 362 & ?

[I]f we consider the taking in of the visual world with a kind of wonder and freshness of perception, a visual attention which can simply marvel at a shade of blue or at the twistedness of a tree trunk, which can take in the beauty and goodness of the world, then we do indeed have a model of the moral awareness of reality./ Contrast the idea of “what’s there is to be seen” as determined by the demands of agency (e.g., a rock climber's perception of a rock wall) with Alexander Wat's seeing trees as he moves from one prison to another: he sees the serene dignity, the radiance of trees, triumphing over the “anti-world” of prisons. Note that all this is “there to be seen” only because his perception is imbued with his moral sensibility. His visual awareness is a kind of moral awareness of the world./ (Conrad connected a person’s conscience with the reflection in his consciousness of “self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe”...) –Diamond, “Murdoch & the Search for Human Goodness” p. 108

[V]irtue is good habit and virtuous action. But the background conditions of such habit and action, in human beings, is a just mode of vision and a good quality of consciousness. –Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good p. 375

MORAL DIFFERENCES need not be seen as differences of choice; they are frequently differences of vision. Consider Chesterton’s view of the world as filled with the wonder of fairy tales; life is understood as an extraordinary adventure. “This world,” he says, “is a wild and startling place” [Orthodoxy, ch. 4]. That Gestalt went with a great tenderness towards the world, a sense of modesty, and a willingness to submit to what might appear to be odd limitations – limitations, though, tied to the totally odd kindness to oneself of being alive in this wild and startling world. A profound antipathy towards knowingness and immodesty is also connected to C’s understanding of life./ Life as adventure in a fairy tale was, for C., the best way of putting something that was for him a kind of perception; it reflected connections that underlay any conscious understanding of the world. It preceded anything that was for him a matter of choice or of principles governing choice; it gave him a language, and images, in which he was able to think about what some choice might mean. The difference between C., and those who don’t share his view of the world is … not, at its roots, a difference of moral principles, a difference about what we ought to do./ C’s application to life of the expression “wild and startling” isn’t an application in virtue of some feature life supposedly has…It’s a rendering in words of a fundamental kind of responsiveness to life./ Moral philosophy today encourages a particular moral style of attention: it directs one away from the moral color of an individual’s awareness, and to choice and principles of choice in a world conceived as simply there for cognitive judgment. –Diamond, RS pp. 92-95 & 105

The child is inescapably affected by others: he cares about them and about his relation to them. Although only language and reflection allows us to unfold our full humanity, even the deepest, most reflective inner life remains an expression of – and sometimes a repression of – the responsive openness to others that we share with the small [pre-linguistic] child. (Cf. W, Z §545 & LW-I §867.)/ The ethical is the very form of human intelligibility…W’s later work…revolves on this radical insight (see PI p. 178). The very teaching of language presupposes that child and adult already understand each other…Our understanding of each other is fundamentally affective and non-neutral (e.g., a child recognizes that the adult is addressing him, not just making noises (cf. PI §§1-2 & PO p. 383). We cannot meaningfully claim, e.g., that compassion is good as though expressing an opinion people might agree or disagree with. For what's called morally good is given in our in our very openness to each other, i.e., in compassion and kindred responses (cf. CV p. 46)./ In real moral conflicts there is a radical refusal to understand on at least one side. Such conflicts aren't a matter of rationality or irrationality./ The problem with callousness is its callousness! –Backström, “From Nonsense to Openness” p. (edited & lightly paraphrased)

CONSCIENCE … is manifest in our spontaneous reactions to the good and evil we sense, e.g. when we’re warmed by another's smile or chilled by their callousness. While affective, these are not blind reactions but modes of understanding [cf. PI §287]; one perceives and opens oneself to the openness expressed in the other’s smile … If there were no such understanding, there would be no morality. The ethical isn’t some merely subjective or cultural “evaluation” of reality. Nor some isolatable sphere of life, but the very heart of our understanding of self and others, the very form of human intelligibility./ What is good and evil in culturally relative moralities can’t be decided by appeal to those moralities themselves; it is seen only in light of the untaught moral understanding that arises and develops in the encounter between particular human beings … Huck Finn’s encounter with Jim revealed to him the sinister aspect of the moral values he’d been taught: respect for property (Jim), gratitude (to Jim’s owner), loyalty (to one’s slaveholding people), etc. Huck’s case shows how the socially determined duties of “my station” may be revealed to me as moral evasions in relation to another person – to you, here…The idea of an untaught moral responsiveness to others sounds impossible to philosophers who assume that one’s access to reality, including our perception of other human beings, is itself always conceptually mediated, hence structured by cultural norms, and that acquiring moral understanding is just “a particular case of a general phenomenon: initiation into conceptual capacities” (Mcdowell). This is thought to be a central teaching of W. That is a deep misunderstanding of W. Although he is constantly talking about language, W’s basic point is such things as are responses to another’s pain or joy are “so many natural, instinctive, kinds of behavior towards other human beings, and our language is merely an auxiliary to and further extension of this relation” (Z §545). –Backström, op. cit. p. 257

“FELLOW CREATURES.” According to Cora Diamond, we do not cherish the life of the mentally challenged infant over that of a chicken because [pace P. Singer] we favor humans over animals. Our responses to human beings and animals are not constituted upon our respect or disrespect towards their interests or capacities; our responses and attitudes towards them go along to determine what they are: “[I]t is not out of respect for the interests of beings of the class to which we belong that we give names to each other, or that we treat human sexuality or birth or death as we do, marking them – in their various ways as significant or serious…These are all things that go to determine what sort of concept ‘human being is’…And so too…the idea of the difference between human beings and animals” (Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People” p. 324). –Iczkovits, W’s Ethical Thought p. 213 f.

ETHICS [aka morality] is not a function of enlightened self-interest. It introduces a new mode of discrimination into human life. –Phillips, Introducing Phil., p. 87

Undergirding this new mode of discrimination is the sort of openness and wonder that W., Heidegger, Diamond, & Backström speak about in passages quoted above – or so I suggest. –w.h.b.

MORAL THOUGHT is not a mere department of discourse. Thought is inherently and ubiquitously moral or immoral – just as it is inherently and ubiquitously logical, or illogical]. –Diamond, “We Are Perpetually Moralists” p.104

There is a strong impression made by the end of the Tractatus, as if W. saw the world looking at him with a face; logic helped to reveal that face … the world thought of, not as how things are [but as] however they are – seen as a whole – is a matter of logic; thought of as my life, it is a matter of ethics. –Anscombe, An Intro. to W’s Tractatus

In our cognitive activities we may be aiming at getting things right, but how we carry on these activities, how we understand what “getting it right” might involve or might cost in the particular case, reveals our own nature as moral beings. Thought is inherently and ubiquitously moral; belonging to the particular subject matter we need to reject the idea that moral thought is a mere department of discourse./ For something to be an object of cognitive activity is for there to be some practice or practices of establishing and coming to understand facts belonging to the particular subject matter. The idea of the ubiquity of value suggests an important kind of distinction between fact and value. Botany, history, etc. are not ubiquitously present to consciousness; and that they are not belongs to there being a specialized investigation of biological, historical, etc. facts. If morals are ubiquitous, they are not facts. –Diamond, op. cit. pp. 103, 04, 07 (italics added)

The human capacity for loyalty to something larger than the individual…is a presupposition of ethics… But the exercise of that capacity is compatible with … the glorification of warfare and machismo./ [I] think that the “macho” ethic was only superseded when large numbers of people began to see that someone who refused to play that game was not necessarily a wimp. –Putnam, Ethics Without Ontology p. 23f

In Plato’s Gorgias, King Archelaus represents the amoralist, Callicles the tribalistic warrior ethic, and Socrates, someone who refused to play Callicles’ game but wasn’t a wimp./ Callicles and Socrates don’t inhabit the same “ethical world.” So, when S. says that it’s wrong to intentionally harm anyone, this doesn’t sound ethical or unethical to C., but like a piece of wild imprudence. He would regard a man who lived according to Socrates maxim as a fool, not a moral exemplar. –w.h.b.

Socrates moved away from the warrior ethic, as found in Callicles, but did not lose the courage that is associated with it. To say that Socrates and Callicles inhabit different “ethical worlds” is to say that what is presented as a viable option for one, is not a viable option for the other. Callicles inhabits a tribalistic world, and Socrates’ claim that it is morally reprehensible to intentionally harm another person is an attack on that world, but more importantly, it is not an option within Callicles’s world of ethical possibilities. –sjw

THE GOLDEN RULE doesn’t determine what our principles and aims must be, but establishes the constraints within which we may reasonably pursue them./ It lays the foundation for cooperation between free and rational beings, ensuring that, acting together, they won’t be subordinated to the “I” attitude of any particular person or group. –Scruton, Uses of Pessimism, pp. 122-23

If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game and the players are supposed, say, to jump over the boundary… So if I draw a boundary line, that is not yet to say what I am drawing it for. –W, PI §499

Moral considerations impose a limit on our purposes and their execution which the distinction between means and ends cannot account for, since means and ends alike come under moral scrutiny. Yet in passing it should be said that to say that such scrutiny imposes limits on our conduct, though correct, may mislead if talk of limits is conceived too narrowly. It may give the impression that moral considerations play a purely negative part, namely, that of preventing men from doing what they want to do and pronouncing vetoes from time to time on their plans and aspirations. While it is true that moral considerations limit our actions in this way, they also constitute a limit in another sense. To appreciate this, one must not think of the limit simply as a boundary which curtails expansion, but also as the boundary of a territory which has riches to offer to those who pass over into it which cannot be found elsewhere. If moral considerations condemn meanness, they also extol generosity; if they condemn lying, they have a regard for truthfulness. Generosity, truthfulness, kindness, loyalty, etc. are not mere negations or restrictions, but positive virtues and ideals in human life which for many make that life worth living. Morality is as much a discovery of the worthwhile as a condemnation of the worthless. –Phillips, Through a Darkening Glass,

MORALITY, like art, is a matter of knowing where to draw the line. –Chesterton

My principles are not to have any. Vice is my virtue, debauchery my asceticism, impiety my religion.–Don Juan, in Bergman’s The Devil’s Eye

Norman Malcolm asked whether, “I trample on other men’s toes all I can” – a remark attributed to Cesare Borgia – could be an ethical principle.] At that W. frowned. “Ethical principle! Not everything is an ethical principle. How is an ethical principle identified? … A principle is ethical by virtue of its surroundings.” –Bouwsma, W. Conversations, pp. 5-6 (my italics)./ The relevant surroundings would be that of moral education – where it would be nonsense to propose teaching the children to trample other men’s toes all they can./ Compare that with the following example from P. Foot: “Clapping hands three times in an hour is a good action”: can’t there be surroundings in virtue of which that would be an ethical principle? Can’t we imagine people for whom “Clapping …” would be a ritual action expressing tribal solidarity, and therefore part of moral education? –w.h.b./ An ethical principle, if it is to be a principle at all, must be something which, at one time or another, could ask something of me which goes against my own, personal desires. In contrast, the attempt at an ethical principle: “I trample on other men’s toes all I can” does just the opposite. It rules out the possibility of ever asking anything of me which I would not actually want. –sjw/ It sounds like Borgia wasn’t a man of principle at all! For isn’t “acting on principle” the opposite of “acting like you feel like”? –w.h.b.

Like Borgia, Archaelaus, the amoralist from the Gorgias, rejects all duty to other people. But this rejection of any duty to others (“I trample on other men’s toes all I can”) cannot itself constitute an ethical principle. In fact, to have a duty to another person is precisely not to trample on their toes whenever one can. While Calicles’ principle (“might is right”) may not be one which we would willingly assent to, it does constitute an ethical principle, since it admits that one may, at one time or another, have a duty to some man which is stronger. –sjw

Questions: Is an amoralist just a total egoist? (Is an amoralist someone who recognizes only “duties to himself”?) Did Borgia develop his principle out of a sense of “duty to himself,” or rather because the principle would allow him to justify doing whatever the hell he wanted? Does it make sense to talk about having a duty to do whatever you want? (I may have a duty to myself to maintain my health and refuse to eat pizza every night of the week – but can I, alternatively, have a duty to eat whatever I want for dinner every night?) –w.h.b.

What is essential in using a word is that I commit myself to a rule of use./ But we’re accustomed to look on a machine as the expression of a rule of movement. The machine per se does not, however, commit itself. We look at it as a symbol of a general rule; we see the intention behind it, the way it ought to work. –W, WLL pp. 36 & 40

Imagine that it had come into existence by accident; now someone accidentally presses its knob ... and it calculates the product 25 x 20./ I want to say: it is essential to mathematics that its signs are also employed in mufti./ It is the use outside mathematics, and so the meaning of the signs, that makes the sign-game into mathematics./ Just as it is not a logical inference either for me to make a change from one formation to another (say from one arrangement of chairs to another) if these arrangements have not a linguistic function apart from this transformation. –W, RFM p. 257

Machines don't understand what they “say” because they have no lives in which it matters to do or say one thing or another, so that “for them” there's nothing their talk is about.” –Dilman,

The operation with signs has to take place in a certain context in order for us to say it's [thoughtful,] not mechanical. It seems therefore that the use of our words is constrained by a factual framework. But how can that be? How could we describe the framework if we didn't allow for the possibility of something else? …We don't say of a table that it doesn't think. “A table doesn't think” would not be part of the factual framework precisely because it has no significant negation./ Under what conditions the language game with “think” is physically impossible doesn't interest the logician ... What interests us is that without a certain relatively stable context, the concept of thinking would not exist. [And so you wouldn't have the l-game in which to ask what conditions are required for teaching & using the concept.]/ [A world in which nobody's sure any more about the names of people they’ve known all their lives would be a world in which there'd be no proper names.] –W, RPP-II pp. 189-90, 192, 198-99