Towards a Coherence Theory of Silliness

Introduction:

A number of recent papers have made considerable progress towards giving a full account of silliness. The concept of silliness is a sorely neglected topic in the history of philosophy, and none of the major philosophers have so far written treatises on the matter. Some people look back to Hegel and Jacques Derrida, whose collected works may be regarded as extended meditations on the topic, as pioneers in the field. But most people view it as unfair to regard these writers as “philosophers”; and there is some dispute, even among leading writers on silliness, about whether or not the writings of such people as Hegel and Derrida really do fall under the category of “silliness”; with some commentators regarding the related concepts of “artful nonsense” and “gibberish” as more appropriate in those cases.

The merit of those views, however, is not the subject of this paper, and nor are any of the other new and interesting questions relating to the history of silliness in philosophical writings. Rather, I am concerned here with the concept of “silliness”, aloof from any historical considerations. In particular, I will elaborate upon a particular account of silliness, which I will call the “coherence theory of silliness,” and which I have mentioned briefly in an earlier paper. The core of the coherentist view is that the coherence of a potential silliness-set is a necessary condition for that silliness set to be an actual silliness set. This view may be contrasted with, and has been attacked by proponents of, the “cohesion” theory of silliness. This view holds that coherence is not a necessary condition for silliness, and proposes its own necessary condition in the place of coherence. The key difference between the replacement condition (“cohesion”), and the “coherence” condition, is that the former emphasises the intrinsic relations between silliness scenarios, while the former emphasises the extrinsic relations between silliness scenarios. In this paper I will first respond to some objections to this view that have been put forward by Jones (2006) and Andrews (2006); and will then use my comments upon those objections to motivate some refinements to my own view, which will include a distinction between local and global silliness.

Silliness Sets and Silliness Scenarios

It is almost unanimously agreed that the most useful unit of analysis for the concept of silliness is the “silliness scenario.” The canonical definition of the “silliness scenario” was given by Jones in his pioneering 2005 paper. Later papers have made some refinements upon Jones’ account, but they are of a highly technical nature, and the essence remains the same. For Jones, an event E is a silliness scenario if and only if the following conditions hold:

(1)Interaction: E must be apprehended by at least two humans agents if the perpetrator of the scenario was a human; and at least one human if the perpetrator of the scenario was not a human. (Discussion about this condition has centred mainly around the problem of zombie perpetrators, solitary silliness, and delayed apprehension. All of these issues warrant further investigation, but they do not pose any real problems for the interaction condition).

(2)Non-Cognition: the agents must apprehend the silliness of E without any cognitive engagement in that event. The agents may, of course, be engaged cognitively with aspects of E that do not actually give rise to any silliness; the agent may, for example, apprehend cognitively some of the intellectually involved parts of a joke, but still apprehend the silly parts without using the cognitive faculty. (This has proven to be the most troublesome condition. There has been considerable discussion about the kind of “cognitive engagement” that is appropriate to this condition, with some advising an abandonment of “cognition” altogether, and settling for a more mild condition; most of these accounts make some use of Davis’ notion of “cognitive relaxation.” Some more recent accounts have investigated the notion of “cognitive tension”, asserting (rightly, I think) that the distinctive features of silliness, which Jone’s (2) gestures towards, is not the absence of cognition, but the tension between what is apprehended using the higher cognitive function, and what is appreciated in the silliness event. If there is some disagreement, however, about just what (2) is gesturing towards, all writers agree that it is gesturing towards something, and that (2) or some variant of (2) is essential to any account of silliness.)

(3)Inconsequence: E must be “detached” from any non-silly event. This condition is designed to capture the thought that an event is not usually regarded as silly if it has any genuine real-life consequences (except whatever immediate emotional responses it might elicit from the apprehending agents [see condition (4)]). The silly event must be absurd, free-standing, trivial. As with (2), there is not much doubt that (3) points towards a distinctive feature of silliness; but, as with (2), there is some debate about how to work out the details. In particular, there is debate about what sort of “detachment” is required (logical, topical, psychological, or a combination of those three); and about just how strict the “non-silly” requirement should be. With regards to the second point, some writers prefer to relax the “non-silly” requirement, and replace it with a requirement that is based on “non-funny” events, or even on “non-fun” events.)

(4)Funniness. Clearly the silly event must be amusing: it must elicit a light-hearted response from the agents. The main point of contention surrounding this condition is to do with the relationship between it and the other three conditions; in particular, whether or not this condition is independent of those conditions. Most writers agree that the silly event elicits a different emotional response from the funny event (or else there would no real basis for distinguishing between the two kinds of event). But some hold that this difference should be attributed to the different sort of funniness that inheres in the event; while others hold that that silly events and funny events share the same sort of funniness, and that the difference resides only in the other properties of the silly event (inconsequence, non-cognition etc.) that are absent in funny events. Others (including myself) hold that the debate between these two positions is meaningless.

These, then, are widely accepted as necessary and sufficient conditions for an event to constitute a silly scenario. These conditions may seem irrelevant in this paper, since this paper is concerned with the notion of a silliness set, rather than that of a silliness scenario. But some of those conditions are relevant to the objections that have been levelled against the coherence theory of silliness, and also to my response to those objections. I will move onto those objections, and my response, after outlining the notion of a “silliness set”, and briefly considering the “cohesionist” approach to silliness sets.

Silliness scenarios need not occur in isolation. According to condition (3), silliness scenarios must be detached from any non-silly events; but of course any particular silliness scenario does not need to be detached from other silliness scenarios. In fact, some of the richest and most interesting silly phenomena emerge only out of silly scenarios when they are considered together, and not when each one is considered on its own. Of course, not any collection of silliness scenarios will do. We must consider silliness sets to be collections of scenarios that are related to each other in some substantive way; and the disagreement between coherentists and cohesionists is over just what sort of relation must hold between a collection of silliness scenarios, before that collection can rightly be considered as a silliness set.

Coherence and Cohesion of Silly Sets

On the cohesionist view, the right relation is one that holds between the parts of each scenario in the set, and not the whole scenarios. To work out, from some collection of silly scenarios, which ones constitute a silliness set, each scenario must first be divided into a number of “silly elements”, and then the silly elements from all of the scenarios in the collection of candidate scenarios must then be brought together into a “silly group.” The elements in the silly group are then considered together, irrespective of the silly scenarios from which they were derived. Precisely, they are considered in respect of the richness if the relations that hold between them; this gives rise to a “cluster” of silly elements, all of which enjoy many connections with one another. A scenario belongs to the “silliness set” if and only if all of its silly elements belong to the silly cluster.

The cohesionist view may be contrasted with the coherentist view, according to which the relations to be considered are the relations that hold between the silly scenarios as wholes. There is some temptation to think that the coherentist and the cohesionist views are not in competition at all, but rather that they are equivalent. But this is not the case. That is, there is a genuine question about which of these views gives the right necessary condition for status as a silly set.

To see this, one might consider the analogy of sets of novels (it does not matter if they are silly novels or not). One might take a coherentist view on the criterion for set membership of novels: one consider each novel as a whole (the theme, say), and then determine set membership on the basis of similarities between the themes of the candidate novels. Or, one could adopt the cohesionist view, and hold that the basis for set membership should be the topics of the chapters in the novels: the novels that get into a set should be ones whose chapters are closely related. Now, it is clear in this example that a collection of entities may satisfy the coherentist criterion for set status, without satisfying the cohesionist criterion. This would be the case if the “theme” was an emergent property: one which does not manifest itself in each chapter taken individually, but only when they are considered together. In such a case, it seems likely that the themes of a group of novels may be very similar, but the chapters of each have no special connections between them. A similar situation could plausibly give rise to a set of novels that satisfy the cohesionist criterion, without satisfying the coherentist criterion: the set of novels may have chapters that are very closely related, but which give rise to themes that have no special connection between them. Hence, the choice between the coherence criterion and the cohesion criterion is a genuine choice: one will end up regarding different silly collections as silly sets, if one chooses one of these criteria over the other.

The Cohesionist Attack:

Jones (2005) asks us to consider the following “sillygism”, which he claims to be sound. (In Jone’s terminology, which I will adopt here, a “sillygism” is a list of silly scenarios that have been put forward as a candidate for a silly set. If the collection does indeed turn out to be a silly, the list represents a “sound” sillygism; if not, it is an “unsound” sillygism. If one or more of the scenarios in the silly set are not in fact “silly”, but the scenarios nevertheless satisfy some criterion for set-hood, then the sillygism is “valid” but not “sound.”) Consider the following set of three sillyness scenarios:

1)A man, M2, walks into a bar, B, with a bucket of water, BW in his hand, H. M1 takes B and throws it onto another man, M2, who is sitting at a table talking to a penguin, P1. M2 looks down at his shoes, smiles and utters the statement S1:

S1: “If you do that again I’ll eat your shoelace.”


2)M2 walks into another bar with an Irishman, I, an Englishman, E, and an elephant, EL. EL sees P1 sitting on the bar drinking vodka. E goes up to the bar and orders a Guiness. E goes up to the bar and orders a bar-maid. P1 utters the statement S2

S2: “Throw me a bone, Jim, there’s a shoelace on my soup.”

3)EL walks into a corner dairy, CD, and asks for a penguin. The shop-keeper, S, responds with S3:

S3: “I’m sorry, we’ve run out of penguins. But yesterday the bar-maid delivered a new batch of shoelaces. Will a shoe-lace be sufficient?”

EL replies with S4:

S4: “That should do the trick. Thanks.”


Now, Jone’s claim is that this sillygism, if sound, is a counter-example to the coherentist criterion for silliness sets. For, Jones claims that the coherentist cannot account for the soundness of SA. He claims, that is, that SA fails to satisfy the coherentist criterion. Morevoer, he argues that SA is one of a much larger class of syllogisms that, though sound, do not satisfy the coherentist criterion. If Jones is right, the coherentist account is in serious trouble.

It is hard to deny that SA is a sound syllogism. Some (Pritchard, 2006) have raised some doubts about its soundness, pointing for example to the introduction of the vodka and the Guinness in 2), and the shop-keeper in 3). Some have gone so far as to question the validity of the set, pointing in particular at the “funniness” condition for silliness. In Pritchard (2006) we find the claim (for example) that “while SA3 might raise a giggle for some people, SA2 is pretty lame. And SA1 is scandalous. Quite simply, SA is not funny.” But Pritchard’s intuitions about silliness have been shown to be deviant in other cases; and most philosophers, including a number of logicians, agree that SA is funny.

The novel part of Jone’s argument (and the part I wish to attack here) is his claim that the coherentist criterion cannot account for the soundness of SA. Before giving my response to Jone’s claims here, I will rehearse his argument briefly.

To be continued, given further inspiration. In the meantime, consider this silliness scenario (especially the sub-scenario in the 30-60second range).

Mapping out Science and Literature

I want to study the intersection of science and literature. But what does this mean? There are a few basic divisions to make here, and they help to map out this odd and interesting field of study. Some of the following divisions are interdependent (it would be nice to get rid of this interdependency; in the meantime, richness takes priority over clarity).

Method and matter
What happens when scientists apply the scientific method* to the phenomenon of literature, and vice versa? Scientists, especially psychologists, can study the cognitive processes that go on in an poet's head. Less interestingly, they can analyse handwriting and manuscripts as physical phenomena (eg. to date old scrolls). Likewise, there are novels about science and its social etc. implications (though usually about the implications of science, not science itself. I don't know any works of laboratory fiction, expect perhaps the writings of some sociologists).

*Here I've interpreted "method" broadly, to span discovery, justification and method of presentation (ie. language).

A study of the above kind will provide "weak" answers to the question of how each discipline contributes the other. I say "weak" because the answers do not tell us whether or not literature types are doing the same sort of things as science types. Science can give us insights into the workings of the literary mind; but it can also give us insights into the workings of the solar system. "Strong" questions about science and literature will reveal similarities and differences between the scientific and literary methods. For example, some people think that imagination is the link between physics and poetry: is it really, and what do we mean by "imagination"? And where do metaphors fit into all of this?

Parallel cases and the rest
A good way to examine the respective methods of science and literature is to look at cases where they are applied to the same subject matter. For example, large parts of psychology are not relevant to the method of science or of literature. But these parts of psychology are part of the subject matter of both disciplines. Finding this sort of common ground helps to eliminate unwanted variables, giving better grounds for comparison.

Foreground and background questions
We can think of science and literature as consisting in their respective subject matter and their respective methods of inquiry and expression. A naive view would clearly separate these spheres from the rest of the world. But an awful lot happens outside of these two spheres, and a lot of it is relevant to the spheres themselves. People possess values and make statements about those values; they have social lives and form political parties. They have rich psychological lives. In a lot of cases these happenings will be effected by what goes on in the two spheres; in some cases (certainly in the realm of literature) the causal arrow will run in the other direction. One way to illuminate the connection between science and literature is to look at how they interact in the background world of daydreams and social lives and politics.

Historical and philosophical questions
This division is more straightforward for some people than for others. The problem is that some philosophers of science reckon they need historical examples to verify their claims about ideal scientific methods (eg. Popper can't be right, because that's not how Newton did it). And some historians reckon they need the philosophy of science to decide whether or not they are studying science (as opposed to superstition or popular rubbish).

Still, there are some straightforward mistakes that one can make in this area. To avoid controversy, perhaps it is better to talk about general questions, about all known science, and questions about specific historical fields. It is known, for example, that the Roman poet Lucretius wrote a poem that theorised about the natural world, putting forward an early version of atomism; and that this poem was influential in the development of science. But it would be wrong to conclude that all known science is necessarily poetic in origin.

It is interesting and valuable to learn about particular epochs and particular figures in known science (what were the literary influences of Peracelsus? What, if anything, did the nineteenth century discover about the role of the unconscious mind in literary composition?) But this is quite different from making broad hypotheses about all the science that has ever been done.

"It's What Makes Us Human"

Sometimes, when one person is gaily expounding the virtues of her chosen course of life or study, or two people are hotly expounding the shortcomings of eachothers', someone will reach for the "it's what makes us human" defense. The idea seems to be that there is an intrinsic value in doing the things that make humans distinctive. This kind of argument is especially common with respect to cognition: we should value thought, the argument runs, because it is what separates us from mere beasts.

Sometimes the word "human" is meant to pick out a set of stand-alone goods (eg. a rich emotional life; concern for others), and the speaker furnishes independent grounds for thinking that these really are goods. But sometimes the claim really seems to be that a trait possesses value solely in virtue of it making humans different from other species.* Is this claim reasonable?

*And sometimes people will exploit the ambiguity for rhetorical effect, trying to benefit both from the validity of the first claim, and advantage of the second claim (which consists in not obviously requiring any additional justification).

At first glance it looks a bit fishy. Suppose that a highly intelligent race landed on the moon and started interacting with us. Surely the presence of this race would not persuade us that cognitive excellence was no longer important, and that we should aim for the newly-distinctive trait of cognitive mediocrity. It seems odd that the presence or otherwise of another race could impact on our value system in this way.

However, of there is fishiness here I don't think it is a very solid fishiness. Most of us can appreciate the reasonableness of a country taking pride in its distinctiveness. Distinctiveness means standing out; it is a step away from anonymity. People value their "sense of identity."

Sure, distinctive national traits (superb cuisine, great landscapes etc.) are valued in themselves, because they guarantee citizens a good meal in that country, or a great view. And it would be easy to conflate this kind of value with the value of distinctiveness. But people are not just proud of their national excellences. They are also proud of their national quirks, their eccentricities, things that are hard to see as excellencies in themselves.

For example, in New Zealand we are proud of the Kiwi, a small flightless bird with a silly beak. If we found out that some other country also had a kiwi, we would feel uncomfortable. And if someone were to come along and kill off all our Kiwi, we would feel this to be a crime not just against Kiwis but also against New Zealanders.**

**Is this a reasonable feeling? For the sake of argument, let's say that it is. But it would be great to hear anyone else's thoughts on this.

The situation is more complicated than the above paragraph suggests. After all, a "sense of national identity" would not mean much if it were held by only one person. Our instinct to form groups is just as strong as our instinct to demonstrate the uniqueness of our own group. But it remains true that distinctiveness is a strong impulse. If the instinct is reasonable, then distinctiveness can constitute a reason for a country to favour a trait. Whether or not, in the final weigh-up, the value of distinctiveness overrides the value of togetherness, is something to work out carefully in particular cases.

But why should the same lines of argument carry over to the case of an entire race of people? Well, why not? They arguments seem to apply as well to the case of a family as to the case of a nation. In this case, I think, the onus is on the skeptic to show that there is a salient difference between countries and races, such that the blithe assumption of continuity is unwarranted.

In saying that, it's worth emphasising the relative weakness of the "distinctiveness" consideration. As noted above, one can't say in general whether distinctiveness or togetherness will carry greater weight. And the intrinsic value (or intrinsic disvalue) of a trait can easily override either of those considerations (cf. the case of cognition). In summary, it's OK to draw on the "it makes us human" defense, but it should be seen in context; it is not very convincing on its own.

The Good Hedonist

Imagine the life of a moral hedonist: one who performs good acts because they are good, but for purely selfish reasons. His greatest pleasure is performing good acts for others, but he couldn't care less about the people he helps. For the moral hedonist, charity is orgasmic. He strolls down the street joyously handing out money to beggars. He sends bulging food parcels to the local mission, he volunteers for UNICEF on weekends, he spends his evenings plotting the good health of his neighbour. And this gives him a very great thrill. But when his neighbour comes down with cancer or chilblains, his only regret is that there was never any chance for him to perform the good deed of saving the victim.

How do we assess this person morally, and how should we assess him? My suspicion is that society is disposed to be unfairly harsh on the moral hedonist. We tend to be more forgiving to the conventional hedonist (sex and chocolate, etc.) than the person who takes a selfish pleasure in helping others. (Possibly I am wrong here, and it's just me who is unfair. But there's nothing wrong with self-correction. And possibly the error is rather leniancy towards the conventional hedonist than harshness towards the moral hedonist. But possibly not...) So here are three small points in favour of the character just described.

1) Helpful deeds are (in general) still helpful when they are done selfishly. The beggar doesn't care if you don't care: he's got something to eat when he had nothing before. In many cases, the benefactor of a good act will not be in a position even to know whether we care or not. This is pretty clear in the UNICEF case. It's less clear in the beggar's case, but probably still true. At any rate, the true moral hedonist will make every attempt to suppress any signs of insincerity that might hurt the benefactor.

Granted, this strategy is unlikely to work for long in the case of a close friendship. In principle, I'm not sure that the perfectly skilled and dedicated moral hedonist would ever give himself away (we would need a situation in which revealing the deceit would not hurt the feelings of the so-called-friend). But in practice, the skill and dedication would have to be superhuman to have the right effect in the long-term. (And perhaps the imperfectly skilled moral hedonist would not form any friendships at all, given the hurt that the inevitable exposure would cause).

Nevertheless, it is still true that the moral hedonist can do an awful lot of good. If we think otherwise, it may be because intuitions tell us that an uncaring person is a nuisance. And of course this is true in the case of those misanthropes who take no selfish pleasure in doing good to others. But clearly the moral hedonist is a different kettle of fish.

2) The moral hedonist is not (necessarily) a hypocrite. Sure, if he sincerely professes to act selflessly, then the moral hedonist is certainly mistaken. But this is primarily an epistemic mistake, not a moral one. There need not be any deliberate duplicity involved.

This is important because our (unwarranted) harshness towards the moral hedonist (if it exists) is probably due to our (warranted) harshness towards genuine hypocrites. We routinely despise people who profess that their good deeds spring from selfless intentions, when the opposite is the case. And often this judgment is justified. Perhaps the judgment is directed at the charitable politician who has both eyes on winning votes. Perhaps it's the rockstar who promotes third-world welfare just because it makes him or her more famous; or the businessman who puts money into the same third-world country to get a better chance of exploiting that country in the future.

These people necessarily deserve our contempt (because their selfish habits will have harmful consequences.) But the moral hedonist does not. The differences between the two cases have already been covered. In most cases the actions of the moral hedonist will "track the good"; and he need not be deliberately dishonest about his motives (indeed, he may publicly pronounce the truth about those motives).

3) As with religious "hypocrites," we may be phsychologically biased against the moral hedonist. People get terribly prickly about heaven-seeking righteousness. "What fools, what contemptible fools! These people act rightly just because they're scared of being roasted when they die." And we tend to express our disgust by grouping these people alongside the duplicitous politicians and rockstars I described above (which is not quite fair, assuming the moral teaching of religions are not seriously misguided. Well, I did say not quite fair.)

My suggestion is that this prickliness is partly due to a kind of moral jealousy. We value the moral high-ground very much, and get hot under the collar when other people cheat their way to the top. Perhaps this attitude is beneficial in the long run, by protecting society against moral "false positives." But in individual cases it will lead to an unjust assessment of the moral worth of the hedonist.

I mean this point to apply to the case of the moral hedonist who is not deliberately dishonest about his motives, but who does not actively promote his true motives. We see this person go about their good deeds, and are anxious to point out that they are really not so selfless as one might think. And in the case where we assume erroneously that the moral hedonist is necessarily a true hypocrite, our prickliness compounds the error.


Conclusion: Of course, the uncaring person is less worthy than the person who acts in the same way for purer motives. But the two cases may be closer than we think. At the very least, I reserve the right to be unashamed when I derive a selfish pleasure from giving money to beggars.

Why Must Scientists Be Poor?

[Update: The University of Toronto has increased the profitability of working with the institution to bring inventions into the marketplace. Clearly this blog has some high-powered readers.]

According to a talk I heard at a recent conference, it is the view of orthodox scholarship that scientific discoveries should not be eligible for patents. (By “patent” I mean an agreement by which the discoverer is entitled to a financial reward from those who make use of the discovery).

This seems odd to me. Is there any good reason to deny scientists (and academic researchers in general) to benefit financially from lucrative applications of their work? A few reasons jump to mind, but they don’t seem very convincing. I wonder if I am missing something here, or if scientists (and academic researchers in general) oppose patenting just on the grounds of scholarly purity.

The first temptation is to reach for the “discovery”/”invention” distinction. How can a person claim ownership of some pre-existing thing that they just happen to stumble upon, like a wallet in the street? Quite easily, I should think, if the thing in question is not already owned by someone else, and if the process of discovery was long and difficult.

Why would we think otherwise, except by relying on the misleading analogy with found physical objects, like wallets? Certainly we have no problem with the practice of rewarding people for their discoveries (Nobel Prize, anyone?) Why should we baulk at making this reward financial?

Perhaps we have a problem with rewarding ideas, as opposed to objects or practices. But is this distinction tenable? Patents for ideas would only ever apply to ideas that have been somehow realized in practice, in which case they are objects and practices. In this case, surely at least some of the credit should go towards the author of the idea, without whom the objects or practices could not have existed. It seems inconsistent to reward a person who designs and builds a particular kind of fridge, but not the person who formulated the theories of thermodynamics that the designer relied upon.

Of course, it would be a tiny bit impracticable to patent the laws of thermodynamics(so many different uses, with such a complex and sometimes distant relationship with the original laws). But surely not all scientific discoveries are of such a general kind.

(It is possible that the distinction between ideas and objects/practices is sometimes conflated with the distinction between thoughts and statements, or between notions and thoughts. Of course one cannot patent an unexpressed idea. And it would be hard to justify the patenting of a vague idea or notion, as opposed to a clearly formulated idea. But obviously a scientific discovery can take the form of a clearly formulated statement.)

What about the “communal effort” objection? Granted, scientific discoveries are the result of many people’s work, stretching back for many decades. But so are new drugs, and new tennis racquet designs. And if it’s impossible to grant a patent to an individual scientist, why not try the research team who did the important work on a particular discovery?

This pretty much exhausts the plausible objections to scientific patents, as least that I can think of. Am I wrong to think that scientists are currently denied the right to patenting their work? Or are scientists that concerned about the integrity of their work that they are unwilling to accept direct financial rewards (or perhaps their employers are unwilling to let them)?

Short, Sharp and Shallow

The main lesson of working life is that there is no room for polish. There is never time to make a masterpiece instead of a sketch, and no-one would notice the difference anyway.

Conclusions need only be as fine-grained as the choices that depend on them: if the choice is between walking and running, let’s not labour the difference between strolling and ambling. And because certainty will elude even the most prolonged and earnest study, let’s not quibble about justification: a few short reasons will do. The most profound investigation will only ever be useful in summary form. Profound investigations never get finished anyway: better a complete draft than a disjointed final.

It is interesting to apply the same lessons to philosophy. At the very least, it frees up more time to write about stupidity and cows. More, it is good training in brevity. So here is a short Q&A on some philosophical topics that have been on my mind recently.

What distinguishes excellence from mere prowess? A person who can tie their shoelaces very fast does, in one sense, excel at a task. But we would not say they have achieved the kind of excellence that a brilliant physicist achieves, or even a brilliant athlete. What’s the difference?

Not very interesting, this one. Excellence requires prowess in a valued practice. The general question of where values come from is more interesting, but it is much too deep for this post.

To what extent must the pursuit of excellence compromise a person’s relationships with other people? There is something selfish about pursuing excellence for its own sake. How bad is this form of selfishness?

In general, the answer to the first question is “a moderate amount.” Excellence takes a lot of time, leaving less time to get involved with other people. Excellence leads to strong relationships with the few people who share our chosen excellence. But it weakens relationships with the large number of people who don’t. Particular forms of excellence may, however, make us more skilled at caring for other people (eg. excellence in social work).

“Not too bad” is the answer to the other question. Reclusiveness does not harm other people, except those who long to know one better (this harm is heavily case-dependent). Excellence in a field creates problems for everyone else who wants to be the best in the field. But arguably people should not measure their success in relative terms. And excellence helps a person’s colleagues insofar as it inspires and instructs them to do better.

Given that rationality causes everyone to think the same thing, how can rationality make us more autonomous?

Rationality on its own gives us one kind of autonomy, the kind that comes from the deliberate pursuit of an excellence. Philosophers have this kind of autonomy, but so do mathematicians and bakers. Moral autonomy is a different thing. Rationality only gives us moral autonomy insofar as we apply general principles to the facts of our individual lives. Sometimes the facts are obvious, and the principles are the hard thing to know. Other times it is the other way round. In the latter cases, philosophy is not much use.

There is value in living an examined life, and it has something to do with autonomy. But how much of this value can be gotten through philosophy?

Not all of it. If autonomy is to mean anything at all, it must require autonomy of action as well as thought. And thought does not become action without strength of will. Autonomy also means acting in according with the facts of one’s own situation (see previous Q). Which requires knowledge one’s own desires, interests and abilities. This knowledge usually comes about through cognitive work, but sometimes it is more like the work of the historian, the journalist or the poet than that of the philosopher.

Not all of it, you say. But how much? And isn’t that an empirical question, and one that philosophers qua philosophers are not equipped to answer?

I don’t know how much. Perhaps it depends on the individual. Don’t ask awkward questions.

Clearly it is best for people to be sensitive to the “facts of their own situation”, as you put it. Best to satisfy one’s own values, rather than someone else’s. But is self-expression valuable for its own sake?

For some people more than others. A good painter will have a style different from other good painters. This is not just because the painter is particularly good at that style, or because he valued that style before he began painting, and has finally achieved it. He will value that style simply because it is his own. It is him. Self-expression looks bad because it is used as a cheap marketing ploy by hundreds of clothes shops. And it seems to be more highly valued in the arts than the sciences. And it is suspect because it looks so easy: what could be more uninspired than merely being oneself? But talk to the painter who has “found his style” and you will see that self-expression is both difficult and highly prized.

What can we really learn from art?

Art teaches by presenting dry topics in an entertaining form (eg. the dialogues of Plato). It also teaches by acting powerfully on our psychology (the baddies have ugly skin so we try to be good). But art only teaches in these ways because people are epistemically flawed. This makes art useful, but not very impressive. Art also works on the emotions, uplifting and depressing and making us content or restless or happy. In this way art changes our moods, but not our beliefs.

Well…? Consider the ideal philosopher (who loves even the driest wisdom and cares not for moods). Would that person have any use for art?

Art excels in particulars. And particulars lead us, in various ways, to a better grasp of general principles. Most simply, particulars suggest problems. They can also help to solve problems. But this is not terribly helpful. The question you should ask next is how the particulars in art (which are often quite different from experiments in science and thought experiments in philosophy) can help to solve scientific and philosophical problems.

How can the particulars in art (which are often quite different from experiments in science and thought experiments in philosophy) help to solve scientific and philosophical problems?

Good question. Part of the answer is that art deals in particulars relating to ordinary human experience (love, ageing, death, etc.). Another part is that art embeds those particulars in a rich context. For the rest of the answer, you’ll have to go somewhere else. Thanks for asking.

A large part of our moral reasoning consists in “weighing up” different considerations, and this is a form of quantitative reasoning. What does this tell us about the scope of moral philosophy, given that philosophy is usually regarded as a form of qualitative reasoning?

It is true that philosophy does not usually use numbers in its reasoning (except in an elementary form). But we do not usually use numbers in the “weighing-up” process you just described. And insofar as we do use numbers, it’s a matter of basic arithmetic. The real work comes in when we a) work out which considerations are just red herrings, having no weight at all b) work out which considerations we have missed out so far c) work out how to interpret those considerations so as to form an easy numerical problem and/or d) use qualitative techniques (eg. analogy) to solve the problem, when it resists an easy numerical interpretation. The ethicist is well-equipped for all these tasks.

Making No Difference At All

We need to stop treating science as if it were a single monolithic entity, a solid kingdom embattled against rival kingdoms. On the one hand, the various sciences differ hugely. Ecology and anthropology are not at all like physics, nor is biology, and this is not disastrous because they do not have to be.

This passage is from a book I am reading about symbols and science, and an elegant and well-written book it is too. But I am suspicious of the line of reasoning evident in the quoted passage, and I think there is a mistake in that line of reasoning that is made quite often. The mistake is to think that, if a group of objects are such that each object differs hugely from each other object, then there is no hope of finding any commonality in that group. Below are three reasons why commonality can exist despite large differences.

First, objects usually differ in respect of one or more qualities; and, since different respects are often independent of one another, a group of objects can differ greatly from eachother in most respects, yet be very alike in other respects. The set of complete sentences varies greatly in respect of length, tone, syntax, and content; but this does not stop them being alike in respect of their basic grammatical structure.

And in the scientific case, ecology and physics may differ greatly in respect of the precision their statements, and in their subject matter, and in their affinity with mathematics, but perhaps they share a common method. Perhaps they do not share a common method, in which case there is some reason to doubt the “monolithic” character of science. But simply saying that different sciences “differ hugely” is not enough to establish the lack of commonality in the sciences.

Another reason is more causal than conceptual. Small variations at a microscopic level can lead to highly divergent behaviors at a macroscopic level; hence a group of objects can appear to differ hugely in their everyday appearance, yet still have very clear structural similarities. The set of all tri-molecules (that is, the set of all molecular substances such that each molecule contains three separate atoms, a group I just made up then), is clearly a quite homogeneous set; yet it contains substances that are as different in appearance and behavior as CO2 and H2O.

The third reason draws on the fact that statements about similarity and difference only really make sense in relation to some standard of comparison. In respect of size, is a plate similar to a table? There is no way of getting a determinate answer to this question, I think, except by bringing in some standard of similarity to compare the plate/table case to. We may not be able to say whether a plate is similar to a table, in respect of size, but we can say whether a plate is more similar to a table than (say) a plate is to house.

This point is relevant because, as soon as one relativises similarity in this way, one universalizes it. If two objects can be similar simply by being more similar than some other two objects, then almost any two objects can be similar. If your scope is broad enough, any two objects in your vision will look close together. It doesn’t matter how much anthropology differs from physics; what matters is how the difference between those two pursuits compares to the differences between those pursuits separately, and non-scientific pursuits (say, English and History). One can bang on all one likes about how different anthropology is from physics. But as long as one has not shown that one of those pursuits is more similar to English (say) than it is to the other of those pursuits, then one has given no reason to question the “monolithic” character of the sciences.

But perhaps I have been a bit unfair here. The standard of comparison I have mentioned is, I think, usually established implicitly, by context. And by demanding that all statements of similarity and difference carry with them an explicit standard of comparison, I am showing a kind of insensitivity to ordinary usage that (some might say) only a philosopher could suffer from. When someone says that the temperature on Tuesday will be “similar” to that on Wednesday, we don’t all put on puzzled expressions and ask the speaker to relativise her statement to some standard. If it turns out that Tuesday’s temperature differs from Wednesday’s by 2.5 degrees, we are not surprised, even though this difference would (in some scientific contexts, for example) be vast. We are aware, in an intuitive sort of way, that the context of everyday weather fixes certain rules about which pairs of temperature are to be considered similar, and which are not.

And perhaps the reader is expected, from the passage above, to intuit some kind of context. And the natural context to use is that of prior expectation. That is, what the author means when she says “physics and anthropology differ hugely” is really “physics and anthropology differ much more than is commonly appreciated.” And the latter statement both makes pretty good sense, and is interesting.

Nevertheless, it is also pretty clear that the latter statement is milder than the claim that the author is trying to make. The claim is that it is somehow impossible to warrant the grouping of physics and anthropology, that they are hopelessly disparate. And, for the three reasons given above (though only the first and third only really apply here) this strong claim does not follow from the milder claim about the inaccuracy of popular beliefs.

A similar pattern of thought is sometimes present in discussions about ethnicity. When discussing the census, for example, commentators sometimes protest (for example) that Korean and Chinese should not be grouped together (eg. under the label of Asian), on the basis that Korean culture is “vastly different” from Chinese culture, or that the two have “very little in common.”

Again, it may be that people do often make genuine mistakes about the closeness of Korean and Chinese culture, and it is worthwhile to counter these mistakes by clarifying the distinctive qualities of each. But the fact that the two cultures are less similar, or similar in fewer respects, than is commonly imagined, does not mean that they should never be grouped together. They may differ greatly, and yet still differ less than what Chinese culture differs from any given European culture. Or in some respects (say, population size) Korea may be more naturally grouped with European countries than with China; and yet in all relevant respects they are enough alike to be put in the same box.

Taking Offense

Are we ever justified in taking offense? I think the answer is “no”, by which I mean that when people take offense at a remark, they do so partly because of a fault in themselves; and removing this fault would remove the disposition to take offense.

When I talk about “taking offense” in this post, I do not refer to the act of taking offense on someone else’s behalf. Often we use the word in this way, to mean just that we disapprove of the way in which another person is being treated. We are “offended” by the people who attack Jewish graves, though we may not be Jewish. And I do not refer to our response to an “offense”, in the general sense of the word, which we use broadly to mean something like a “transgression,” a failure to follow the rules. Nor am I talking about a slightly narrower sense of the word, which we use to refer to transgressions against ourselves, things that disgust us, as in an “offensive smell.”

What I mean (I think) is the rising anger that we feel when we feel we have been “defamed”: when we come across words or pictures or actions (usually words) that slight our character. In some circumstances, such as when the slight is false and also lowers us in other people’s opinion, it is clear that we are justified in feeling wronged by such an action. But often we (or at least I) take offense at slights that are not like this, of which noone is aware except ourselves and the perpetrator of the insult. We (or at least I) hear or overhear an unflattering remark and immediately become heated by it, as if an infuriating injury has been inflicted on us.

Sometimes there is a good reason to take some offense at a slight like this, even if it does not diminish us in the eyes of any third party. The slight may be evidence of the speaker’s ingratitude, for example. And the fact that there is one party other than ourselves that thinks ill of us, and who does so on weak rounds, might be reason to feel wronged by that person. But usually (again I speak for myself here) the offense taken is disproportionate to the wrong inflicted. If the slight is false, and clearly false, then it does not take much to set the person right. And if the slight is true, then it is hard to see how any sense of wrong-doing is justified.

In either case, at least half the fault lies with the offended person. In the first case, a person who reacts angrily, who “takes offense”, has only his lack of articulateness to blame for that anger: a perfectly articulate and persuasive person would just calmly show the speaker why he or she is wrong. And in the second case (when the slight is false) surely the person who “takes offense” should not blame the speaker for her anger, but her own insecurity or self-hate, which presumably is what causes her to react angrily to a true portrait of herself. The heated feeling that we associate with “taking offense’ is really a sense of frustration at our own inadequacy.

Not being a perfectly articulate or self-secure person, I find it easier to scoff at those who take offense than to avoid offense myself. To speak personally (with the thought in mind that describing my own condition will cast light on others’) in extreme cases I can successfully avoid taking offense, for the reasons just given. An obviously false slight is easy to disprove; an obviously true slight is not worth railing against. It is when the slight is partially true (either because its import is somewhat vague, because it is precise but we lack the conceptual scheme to distinguish the intended slight from other slights, or because our behavior varies with respect to the fault) that I start to feel prickly, and am most likely to raise my voice or sulk. I wonder if this applies to other people: what really nettles is the slight that is just true enough that it is not easy to persuade the speaker that he is wrong, but is false enough that we feel a righteous desire to do so, and hence to clear our name.

By the above I don’t mean to say, in the case of any offensive slight, that the antagonist is completely blameless. If the offender knows that a slight will cause distress that is greater than any likely consequent good, then surely they have done something wrong, even if a weakness in the protagonist is partly responsible for the distress. If we persuade a person to buy a dud car for an exorbitant price, we do not escape blame simply because the person is woefully misinformed about cars.

Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out that part of the blame does lie with the person who suffers the wrong, in the case of the offended person as in the case of the woefully misinformed person.

*******

Supposing all the above is true, what can be taken from it? The lesson, I think, is that an immunity to taking offense is a quality worth aiming for, because in most ordinary people it is a good measure of intellect and self-knowledge. (I say “most ordinary people” because there may be people who are immune to offense, but who are so immune because they simply don’t understand what people say to them, or are too apathetic to care, too lacking in self-esteem to bother with self-defense, or are just extremely mild-mannered.)

To have this sort of immunity means having the confidence and articulateness to show another person why their slight is wrong, when it is wrong. It means recognizing faults when they already exist, and avoiding the temptation to cover up these faults with indignation. And, when a person’s judgment is delicately balanced between truth and falsity, it means being able to make the sort of conceptual distinctions that help one to clarify the meaning of insult, and accordingly to act as one would in the case of a true slight (if it turns out the insult is true) or false slight (if it is not true).

But I think that is a hard ideal to achieve. The lesson for the meantime is that the act of taking offence should not be read as a sign of some wrongdoing on the part of the speaker. Rather it should be read as an indication that, although a fault does lie somewhere in the slighted person, that fault should be looked for in their reaction to the slight rather than in the content of the slight itself.

Boys Debating Nicely

Note: This post originally appeared as a guest post over on Philosophy Etcetera.

I note that there has been an upsurge of interest in all-male schools in New Zealand, and that part of the reason for this is, reportedly, the "feminising" of coededucational schools (no references, sorry: it was some time ago). According to one principal, coed schools are becoming increasingly unsuitable for boys because they do not cater for the "masculine" needs of boys; in particular, coed schools tend to emphasise "group discussion and deliberation," rather than more combative, aggressive activities of the kind that are attractive to young males.

Reports like this bring out a problem in school education thathas been suggested to me by a small amount of anecdotal evidence and a slightly larger (but still fairly small) amount of personal experience: namely, that the tendency among school-age males towards combative activities, and away from cooperative activities, looks to be at odds with some of the intellectual values that school is supposed to inculcate in students. Let us suppose for a moment that school-age males do favour combative over cooperative pursuits, including those in the domain of critical thinking. What kind of problem does this present, and how can it be mitigated or overcome? Is the problem exaggerated?

This question is interesting to me partly because intellectual values in question here are of a kind that is especially pertinent to Philosophy. One of the skills that study in Philosophy is meant to develop is the ability to argue nicely: to take other people’s views seriously, and to respond to them with charity and sensitivity; to be open to the possibility that one might be wrong, and to revise one’s beliefs when one discovers that one is wrong; to avoid simplistic dichotomies between right and wrong*; to regard the pursuit of truth as an inherently valuable activity, and not to sacrifice this end for the sake of other ends, such as that of beating a long-time rival, winning personal glory, or avoiding the embarrassment of public error. This may not be a comprehensive list, or an entirely accurate one, but you get the idea. And it is natural to think that the intellectual and social qualities in this list cannot be introduced unless the combative spirit of young lads is somehow softened or removed. What I want to argue here is that that the situation is quite so bad as one might think, given this brief analysis of the problem. Male combativeness is a real problem here, but it might also be part of the solution; and insofar as it is a problem, it is only partially a problem.

*I do not mean to say anything daringly post-modern here. I mean to say that many claims are too vague or complex to be straightforwardly true or false; and that the best way to arrive at a truth about such statements is to replace it with a set of more precise claims, whose truth-values may differ from eachother.

The first point to note is that arguing nicely is not the only end of communal discussion. We also want students to argue rigorously, and one way to promote this value is to encourage students to subject any beliefs or arguments to severe scrutiny. To be sure, an overly combative person is likely to bestow such scrutiny primarily upon the ideas of his opponent; and to ignore or obfuscate the errors in his own thinking. But at least this is a start. One might also object that a combative person is more likely than a cooperative one to be dishonest in his scrutiny: to exaggerate the flaws of their opponents' thinking by the use of deviant dialectical tactics, of rhetorical rather than philosophical forms of persuasion. But it looks to me as if that sort of dishonesty is more a function of the intellectual powers of the disputant, rather than their attitude to the debate. If all members of a dispute are good at distinguishing rhetorical tactics from philosophical ones, then it looks as if this problem would at least partly disappear. For, if one is really intent upon proving one’s opponent wrong, and everyone involved is aware of what constitutes a genuine proof; then any deviant tactics are likely to be counter-productive to one’s competitive aims. So one way to cope with a combative spirit, and to turn it towards worthwhile intellectual ends, is to improve the rational powers of students.

Of course, such rational improvement is not sufficient to guarantee a good discussion. Social and other intellectual skills are also important. But again, it is a good start.

Another point is that arguing nicely is something that one can be combative about. There is no difficulty, at least in principle, of getting a few groups of people together to compete against eachother with regard to their facility for dignified, honest, cooperative deliberation. Of course, there is some difficulty, in principle, in having groups compete against eachother with regards to the sincerity of their commitment to arguing nicely. If a student sees the worth of arguing nicely only when such a practice allows him to compete viciously with rival groups, then clearly that student is missing something important. But a facility for arguing nicely is, I think, at least as valuable as a desire to argue nicely for its own sake; it is certainly a good start.

Perhaps it is a little unrealistic, though, to think that combatively-minded young lads will be as enthusiastic about competing over something like communal inquiry, as over things like romance or wrestling. But if this is the case, then the problem may lie not with the combative nature of young lads but with their disinterest in formal learning: they turn away from communal inquiry not because it does not allow them to indulge their combative instincts, but because it is an intellectual rather than a sporting activity. This is still a problem, of course, but it is a problem for another day.

And, insofar as communal inquiry does fail to satisfy the combative instincts of energetic young lads, something can still be salvaged (conceptually at least) by clarifying the notion of "combativeness." So far I have used the notion of "combative" in a fairly loose sense. Now I want to distinguish a few senses of the word, because I think there are some kinds of combativeness that are more compatible with cooperative debate than others. It is possible to distinguish conceptually between these senses of the word; distinguishing between them in practice (ie. by separating out one sort of combative behaviour from other sorts) is probably a lot more difficult, and eliminating the undesirable forms of combativeness is probably more difficult again. But the conceptual distinction is a good place to begin. So here are three kinds of combativeness:

Antagonism. To say that males are antagonistic is to say that they enjoy situations where two or more people are not only fiercely engaged in some competition or another, but that they compete spitefully or maliciously. They genuinely wish to cause eachother personal harm, either physically or emotionally or socially; and if they cannot do it themselves they like to watch it happen.

Competitiveness. The trait of relishing any chance to set one's own abilities against those of another. Fierce competition need not mean antagonistic competition: one can "play hard but play fair."

Ambition. I use "ambition" to refer to a desire to excel, though not necessarily at the expense of others. A merely ambitious person will wish only to perform as well as they possibly can, enjoying the strain and excitement of a difficult challenge. The challenge need not be posed by another person, and the strain need not be against another person.

Now, clearly antagonistic people are going to be ill-suited to good communal discussion. Not only are they likely to see the activity as an effort of self-aggrandisement, but that self-aggrandisement will take the form of petty personal abuse. They are unlikely even to engage their opponent in genuine debate, except about his height or facial features or the habits of his mother. Competitive people will be more successful, since they will compete over the matter under debate (ethics, politics, religion, the quality of some work of art, etc.) rather than irrelevant personal details. And people who are merely ambitious, without being competitive (in the sense just defined), will be even more successful in arguing nicely: they will not only seek truth themselves, but also encourage the efforts of others to seek the truth, since by doing the latter they enhance their own chances of achieving that end. So ambition is not only compatible with arguing nicely, but also conducive to it: far from being removed or softened, it should be encouraged.

Just how these three different traits are manifested in the average male school student (ie. in what kind of interrelation and in what proportion), is something for phsycologists and sociologists and teachers to work out, I think. It is empirical question (though of course not a merely empirical question). But it would be hard to answer the empirical question without having the conceptual distinction already in place.

I have written all of this without ever having tried to engage young males in good communal discussion, and I would be interested to hear from anyone who has had practical experience in this matter. Is it as difficult a task as it is sometimes made out to be? And are there any other traits within the broad notion of "combativeness" that I have missed out, or that are especially prevalent in school-age males? Comments appreciated, as usual.

Education as an Ideal

Over here is a part one of my introduction to my interest in Education. The other two parts were posted over on Philosophy Etcetera, which kindly let me post as a "guest blogger" for a few days. So here are Education as an Ideal Part 2 and Education as an Ideal Part 3.

Philosophy: Why I Do It

Here I have put down some thoughts on what sort of philosophical content I will have on this blog. Now it is time to do what I am meant primarily to do in these introductions, which is to answer the very reasonable question of why I bother with all this antisocial and time-consuming literary and mental work, work that many people would find dull, excessively abstract, solipsistic and, at best, a noble-minded folly.

So why do I bother with philosophy? I bother for the same reason that other people bother with Lazy Boys and beachfront scenery: because it is a form of relaxation, a way of soothing the mind. The mechanism is a little different in the philosophy case than the two cases just mentioned, but the result is similar: it gives a sense of calmness and order, or relief from chaos. Some might say that it is an antidote to the frenetic pace of modern life. I do not really want to say that, partly because other people say it and partly because I am not sure that modern life is as frenetic, in relation to earlier kinds of life, as it is sometimes cracked up to be. But I do say that philosophy is an antidote to the mindlessness of modern life.

Being mindful of things, in the way that philosophy is mindful, is soothing, but it is also difficult. I don’t count this as a deterrent, at least not usually. I bother with philosophy, despite its difficulty, for the same reasons that other people bother with poetry and triathlons, despite their difficulty: because difficulty in a pursuit asks for effort from the pursuer, and because effort has two rewards: the reliable but rather thin reward that comes merely from putting a lot of honest work into something; and the less reliable but richer reward that comes from getting closer to some form of excellence. The first of these rewards does not need any further explanation. The second does need further explanation, because one might reasonably ask the question: why pursue the excellence of philosophy over other kinds of excellence? And, perhaps it is not entirely silly to ask the question: why regard the excellence of philosophy as possessing any value at all, never mind an excellence that is so great as to shove most other excellencies out of the way?

One answer is that a quick and insightful mind makes it easier to advance in the world: it gets you a job, and it helps you to do useful practical things such as haggling and persuading others to support your pet projects. I do not think that this is a very good answer. For one thing, it is not especially philosophical to do philosophy in order to secure a high-paying job (though I do think there is something to be said for “active epistemology”, which I have described very roughly somewhere in here). For another thing, philosophy (in my experience) tends to interfere destructively with many practical tasks, rather than give an extra edge to my execution of them. Some time in the sixth or seventh century BC (or thereabouts) Thales fell into a well because he was too busy looking at the stars; and ever since then philosophers have had a reputation for looking to keenly at what seems to be a long way off and too dimly at what is at their feet.

I can give a better answer by trying to describe the things I admire about people who do philosophy well. And I can do that by trying to describe briefly the nature of philosophical learning. Acquiring a facility for philosophy, I think, is like acquiring a fairly powerful microscope. It gives you access to a who new domain of objects and relations and patterns, a domain that has a richness and variety that you could not have imagined existed if you looked at things just with your naked eye.

It is a very seductive toy, this microscope. You want to keep looking further into all those strange rock-like things and those knobbly little green things, and more closely at the eccentric patterns you see just on the edge of your scope. You feel like you could discover some amazing things down there, things people have never known about before. At the same time, however, you can very easily get completely lost, and end up discovering only trivialities or boring details or things that people have already discovered, and which they have discovered by a much less tortuous route than you have. A good philosopher is enticed by the detail without being seduced by it. A good philosopher, I think, is also well aware that all of this detail is not worth observing unless it can be linked up somehow with what you can observe with the naked eye. A bad philosopher will interpret the details carelessly, and end up saying something laughable about the world of the naked eye, and all that microscopic effort will go to waste. A good philosopher keeps one eye on the lens and one eye on the window, and out of both eyes still has a good sense of perspective.

A good philosopher is also admirable for the way he or she presents the results of his or her inquiry. All that tiny detail is so complex, and so foreign to our ordinary objects of vision, that it is easy to get confused when reporting about it, and to confuse readers as well; and so philosophy, like microscopy, calls for an especially clear and careful manner of expression.

I like this manner of expression. I like its honesty and its precision and its lack of tinsel, the firmness of its syntax (all those short sentences, structured according to their logic) and the way in which it refuses to be carried away by sentiment, whether moral or aesthetic. Here, for example, is the start of the introduction to Philosophy As It Is, an anthology of philosophical exemplars.

The best introduction to philosophy is philosophy itself. This is not an original thought, but it is not common for it to be taken as literally and as seriously as we have taken it in bringing together this volume of essays and introductions.

Good philosophy is rigorous, and has been since Socrates and before. The quality of rigorousness is not preserved in dilution. Reflection on philosophy (by which we mean attempts to introduce it or describe it or survey it or explain its nature), as distinct from attempts to do it, may be more or less instructive. Some books on philosophy, as contrasted with books of philosophy, are excellent. At its best, however, this sort of thing still lacks an its essential quality of its subject matter….

This sort of writing is poetry to me. Look at that introductory statement: it is clean as you can get, and uncompromising. Look at the honesty of the first clause in the second sentence, and the nice clarification that follows from it, and look too at those words “seriously” and “literally”, each doing their own job and doing it without fuss. Look at that italicization, true as a well-timed punch. Look too at the next sentence. Just look at that sentence: “The quality of rigorousness is not preserved in dilution.” What economy! What clarity! What a deft little metaphor, weighted precisely so as to express the point but not to strain it! It is comparable, for its expressive qualities, to something like this:

And nothing ‘gainst time’s scythe can make defense,
Save breath to brave him when he takes thee hence.

And then there is the explication in brackets, extending meaning but not excessively so, and the perfectly simple expression, in a neat parallelism, of a distinction that could one could so easily labour over in two or three sentences, and the measured tone of the whole, a tone that is not at all deliberately cultivated, but is a consequence of the main purpose of the prose, which is to present the truth clearly and persuasively. It is informal when it can be (“that sort of thing”), and it is does not tangle itself up with verbose diction; but at important moments in a sentence or a paragraph, when clarity and persuasiveness are most needed, it tightens up its language and fixes meaning in place. I could go on.

In this brief survey of the attractions of philosophy, I should also make mention of two other important qualities of the discipline: its necessity, and its generality. In general, philosophical truths bear more resemblance to the truths of mathematics than the truths of history: the sense in which philosophical truths could have failed to be truths is a very weak sense. Just what is meant by necessity, and what kind of necessity obtains in the case of philosophical truths, is of course a terribly large question, and I do not know much about the question, let alone the answer. All I want to say here is that philosophical truths have a kind of security about them that does not obtain in some other disciplines (like History), and that this security is attractive.

By the generality of philosophy I mean its applicability to a wide range of problems and interests. My metaphor of the microscope tends to obscure this point, suggesting as it does that philosophy is concerned mainly with the minutiae of life, and perhaps that it is only concerned with one or two sub-sections of life. On the contrary, philosophy is one of the broadest intellectual disciplines, and its subject matter stretches right across from aesthetics to mathematics, taking in History and Education and Science and Politics, and of course Ethics, along the way. Just what sort of priority enjoys over the other standard intellectual disciplines is another large question. I may have a go at answering this at some later date; for now it is enough to say that philosophy can make substantive contributions to our understanding of all of the disciplines just mentioned, and that its method is also well-adapted to solving, or at least assuaging, some of the problems of life.

And perhaps this last point is the most important point. What makes philosophy such an attractive pastime is that it is such a natural pastime, one that arises almost inadvertently when one begins trying to ask and answer questions about the world and the people in it. Everyone, I think, feels an urge to ask and answer such questions. And if one is going to do philosophy naturally, one might as well do it properly.

Philosophy: What I Do With It

Over here you can find a pretty oblique answer to the questions: what kind of thing does this blog mean by “philosophy”? and why do I think that it worth blogging about? The linked post is really an essay on Plato, and it is quite long. Hopefully the thoughts on this and the next post give a more direct and readable answer to the questions just stated, and function better as an introduction to the philosophical content of this blog.


I do not have the will or the ability to live a life of philosophy, but I do wish to life a philosophical life. The style, standard, frequency, duration and subject matter of my attempts to write philosophy, are hard for me to describe in advance: indeed, part of my motivation for making these attempts is that they might reveal to me just what that style, standard etc. really is. But the first sentence in this introduction will probably turn out to be a good guide to the nature of that philosophical content of this blog.

By that first sentence I mean that I do not have the time, enthusiasm, or the natural ability to pursue the discipline of philosophy as fully as one does so when one becomes an academic philosopher or a popular philosopher or any other person who makes a living out of writing philosophy. I am full of admiration for the small number of people who do possess the time etc. to make such a living, but I am one of the large number of people who do not. Nevertheless, I am also one of the people (who are also pretty large in number, I suspect) who wish to engage in philosophical reflection for its own sake and who (more characteristically) wish to engage philosophically with the non-philosophical activities that fill up the large part of the life of this group. Voting, writing, enjoying literature, working, socialising, and (to some extent) falling in love: all of these activities can, I think, be informed and enriched by philosophy, and I am one of those people who would like the activities of everyday life to be magnified in this way by reasoned contemplation.

For me, and perhaps for others, this approach to philosophy has two main consequences for the philosophy thus generated. Firstly, the subject matter of that philosophy is unlikely to coincide with that of standard philosophy (by which I mean the work done in orthodox Western philosophy departments). Unless the urge to do philosophy for its own sake is especially strong, then one is likely to miss out some of the more abstract and technical topics; hence this blog is unlikely to contain any thoughts on high-level metaphysics or on formal logic. And I will make unusual additions to the standard philosophical subject matter, as well as unusual exclusions. For example, over here I have placed under the label of “philosophy” a piece of writing that deals mainly with travel. As far as I know, this is a pioneering effort in the philosophy of travel; I doubt, however, that any professors of philosophy would, upon reading a piece like that one, make excited moves to add their own contributions to this ground-breaking field of study. Travel is just not the sort of thing that you worry about as a philosopher. As a person who lives, however, you are likely to travel at some point or another, and if you are going to worry about it you might as well do so philosophically. Of course, I do not want to include just anything under the label of philosophy. I do not want to disgrace the label on my blog, or render it meaningless through inappropriate use. But I do want to apply the philosophical method to a wider range of topics than is usual.

The second major feature of my approach to philosophy is that it will probably lead to a greater than usual amount of reflection upon the nature of the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophical activities such as work, writing, etc. It is an orthodox philosophical urge, I think, this urge to reflect upon one’s own forms of reflection; because my forms of reflection are unorthodox, however, my reflections upon those forms are likely to be unorthodox as well, in their subject matter and also in their methods of inquiry and presentation. So, for example, the piece on travel here is an attempt to illuminate the relationship between philosophy and travel. And probably I will write one or two more pieces in the same spirit: the spirit of questioning and clarifying the connection between philosophical reflection and everything else, where “everything else” means practical activities like work and play, but also non-philosophical forms of reflection, such as literature. Worse, I will probably include under the “philosophy” label even those bits of writing that have only a thematic, and not a methodological, connection with standard philosophy: on this blog, a poem about philosophy counts as “philosophy.” This may seem like a failure to take philosophy seriously. However, I prefer to think of it as something quite different, as a consequence of a serious desire to work out what philosophy amounts to, and hence a desire to deploy any medium I can in the attempt.

My peculiar approach to philosophy, and also some interests that are independent of philosophy, lead me to take a particular interest in two branches of the discipline: philosophy of literature, and philosophy of education. I enjoy writing creatively, and I have aspirations to teach, and these interests would exist even if I did not know philosophy from scatology. But my approach to these branches of philosophy will probably be guided by my approach to philosophy as a whole. So, firstly, I am especially interested in the relation between literature and philosophy; if pressed to give details, I would say that I am interested in the extent to which literature, novels in particular, can be a legitimate source of ethical insight. Another aspect of the philosophy of literature that I might pursue is that of metaphor; but that aspect does not have quite so intimate a connexion with my desire to study the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy, as the ethical-epistemic aspect.

In the field of education, I am interested in questions surrounding how philosophy might be incoorporated into school education. One such question is what sort of philosophy should be taught in schools, if philosophy does find its way into that domain. One answer, which I favour, is that it should be that kind of philosophy that enables students to live a philosophical life, though not necessarily a life of philosophy. Hopefully my peculiar approach to philosophy on this blog will help me to clarify this notion of a “philosophical life,” and to discover how it might be compared and contrasted with a “life of philosophy.”

That, then, is a rough account of what I expect to post in the way of philosophy. It is a rough account because I do not really know what will be the standard, style, frequency, duration and subject matter of my attempts to do philosophy on this blog. The only certain thing is that, with time, I will know.

Travel and Philosophy

A philosophy of pure thought is for an existing individual a chimera, if the truth that is sought is something to exist in. To exist under the guidance of pure thought is like travelling in Denmark with the help of a small map of Europe, on which Denmark shows no larger than a steel pen-point - Aye, it is still more impossible. --Kirkegaard.

PHAEDRUS: …you don't go away from the city out over the border, and it seems to me you don't go outside the walls at all.

SOCRATES: Forgive me, my dear friend. You see, I am fond of learning. Now the country places and the trees won't teach me anything, and the people in the city do. But you seem to have found the charm to bring me out. For as people lead hungry animals by shaking in front of them a branch of leaves or some fruit, just so, I think, you, by holding before me discourses in books, will lead me all over Attica and wherever else you please. --Phaedrus

I’m not sure that travel broadens the mind. But it does underline the narrowness of experience. -–Joe Bennett

To a philosopher, travel is unnecessary. To a philosopher, travel is also insufficient; and it may also be undesirable. Nevertheless, there is practice (I will it “active philosophy”) which resembles philosophy, and which is considerably advanced by the practice of travel. In the following I will discuss the relationship between philosophy and travel, and between standard philosophy and “active philosophy”, and in doing so I hope to shed a bit of light on all of those practices, and especially upon my reasons for doing a bit a travel here and there. Unfortunately, I will also find it necessary to rush across great areas of philosophical interest with a very hasty and weak sort of light. Hopefully, however, the overall effect is that I do more to illuminate these topics than to darken them.

The independence of philosophy and travel, as described in the first two sentences of this essay, seems to me to be true historically. My small knowledge of the history of philosophy suggests to me that philosophers qua philosophers feel no great need to stick their thumb out, so to speak, and wait to be driven over the horizon. One thinks of Plato, who seems disinclined to leave the city, at least in the above quote, unless he is tempted out of there by learned discourses. One thinks of Kant, shut up in Konigsberg; and of Descartes, huddled in his oven to write his Meditations. All of them embody a view of the philosopher as above or outside the world of travellers, or otherwise detached from it.

Descartes does offer a counterpoint to the general rule, because he seems to have benefited philosophically from his journeyings through Europe. But this is a weak counterpoint, because Descartes benefited from observing the thinking habits of other people, which is only one part of what travellers usually do; because Descartes observations on his travels surely played only a small part in his writings, acting as an initial stimulus to those writings rather than a thorough-going determinant of their nature; and because in the present-day world the travels of Descartes’ kind are redundant, since the kind of thoughts that Descartes found instructive to observe on his travels can probably be found today in any well-stocked library or well-stocked philosophy department.

Wittgenstein offers another weak counterpoint. He found it useful to travel to Norway and Ireland to produce some of his work. But one would not want to say that these movements through space had much effect on his current of thought. Those movements probably ensured that the current ran as swiftly and smoothly as possible, but I doubt that they had any effect on the direction in which it ran. I expect they were less like the movements of an archeologist, who goes to Africa to study the rocks there; and more like the movements of a mathematician, who goes from one room to another because he is sickened or distracted by the noise in the first room. So philosophers do travel for their philosophy, but they do so to find more stimulating colleagues or a more salubrious environment, and not much more.

Of course, one can make the same point without hiking through the pages of history. What can we learn about the nature of Substance, or the status of the a priori, by spending a week in Southern France? What can we learn about the is-ought gap in the Himalayas, that we cannot learn at a desk? What does the scenery of New Zealand have to tell us about Gettier cases and the corroboration of scientific theories? Very little, except in the sense of offering us a comfortable setting in which to think (and perhaps not even that). Just why this is the case is of course a matter for philosophical discussion, and an empiricist is likely to give a different answer than a Platonist, and both of those answers will probably differ from this one. Here it is enough to note that it is the case: philosophers don’t need to travel, and even if they did need to it would not be much help.

It may even be a hindrance. That is, a philosopher might regard travel as undesirable, especially if she is a Platonist. In that case she would ask: what would Plato have thought of the modern traveller, leaving home for the sake of spectacle and sensual enrichment, for craggy peaks and clear lakes and lying-back-in-the-sun-drinking-cocktails: passive, fat, delighting in pseudo-indigenous pageantry, travelling by pamphlet, facing the world through shaded glass. And she would answer in the obvious way. In answering that way she would probably point me towards one of the problems with talking generally about the activity of travel. For of course not all travellers resemble the person just described, and the more well-informed or adventurous or long-term traveller probably has a different relation with philosophy than all the other sorts of travellers. To save time, however, I won’t bother differentiating different kinds of travellers, and just use “traveller” to refer to someone who sits in between the tiki-tourist and the earnest cultural adventurer.

Despite all of the above, there is of course considerable value in travel, and I do think that some of that value is of a roughly philosophical kind. By this I mean that there is an activity, a domain of thought and action, that is similar but not identical to philosophy, and which is advanced by travel, and is perhaps advanced to its fullest extent only through travel of some kind or another. For want of a better label, I will call this domain “active philosophy.” By contrast, “standard philosophy” is my label for the academic philosophy practiced in orthodox Western university departments). I propose that for each of the main branches of standard philosophy, there is a corresponding branch of active philosophy; and that although the correspondence is pretty rough, it would be misleading to ignore it.

One main branch of philosophy is epistemology. As mentioned above, for an epistemologist there is not much to gain by travelling the world. But for a person who is interested in acquiring knowledge of a practical kind quickly and independently and reliably, it is surely quite a good idea to spend a few months making one’s way about the world, especially about the more challenging parts of the world. Planning, haggling, negotiating, deciding here and now what to do here and now: all of these activities call forth the thinking faculty, and all of them are called forth by travel. Travel cultivates the faculty of practical awareness, of being alert to things in the immediate vicinity, of being alive to the world. This faculty has little to do with epistemology as usually practiced, in subject matter or in method, and a person who is competent at active epistemology is unlikely, by virtue of that competence, to be good at real epistemology. Nevertheless, epistemology is reflection upon knowledge; and one who has mastered this the practical faculty just described, has mastered one kind of knowledge. (Even this is a pretty weak connection. Fortunately, however, it is the weakest of the three that I will discuss)

And what about metaphysics? Do travellers gain a kind of awareness that corresponds to the kind of awareness that a metaphysician is looking for? I think they do gain such an awareness, though again the correspondence with scholarly metaphysics is loose. Scholarly metaphysics, I am told, is the study of the “fundamental nature of reality.” And although the “reality” to the traveller investigates is a bit different to that which the metaphysician investigates, I do think that the former, by virtue of their travel, achieves a kind of ontological insight. It is a less grand sort of insight than that phrase suggests, but it is insight nonetheless. It is insight concerning what human lives basically consists in. One stays at home, and becomes preoccupied by a particular set of problems and interests, whether they are personal or financial or philosophical. One goes abroad, and discovers that a lot of other people are preoccupied by problems and concerns of a completely different kind. One already knows this when one is at home, in a vague and impersonal sort of way: one only needs to look at a good atlas to see, say, that 57% or the world work in factories and the rest do not; or that 54% of the worlds population practices a religion. But one knows this sort of thing in a different way, a more intense and personal way, when one goes abroad. I won’t try to say what this different kind of “knowing” consists in, and how it differs from ordinary knowing; I’ll just say that, in my current opinion, it is an advance upon the good-atlas way of knowing about the basic constituents of human life.

The insight I have just mentioned can come in two forms, I think: the objective and the subjective. Objectively, one discovers something about what the majority of people do in their lives. Objectively, one also get a more precise awareness of how diverse the world is, how much those different ways of living vary; often, I suspect, the traveler, having gotten this more precise awareness, places the emphasis upon the difference. “I was reminded that the world is wide and full of difference,” writes Joe Bennett of one of his hitch-hiking experiences. And in being so reminded, he has gained renewed awareness of a state of affairs that may, without too much strain, be regarded as “fundamental” to the reality of the human world.

Subjectively, the traveler discovers something about which way of living is best suited to himself. One could think of this as an ontological discovery, since it concerns fundamentals: it concerns the basic units of one’s life around which the rest will be organized, whether the basic units are Work and Family, or Writing, or Other People. But probably it is better to think of it as an ethical discovery, since it concerns what one values most highly. And as an ethical discovery, it belongs in the next paragraph.

Ethics is concerned with evaluating competing courses of action. Travel both causes a person to discover courses of action that were previously hidden from him, and to discover new reasons for favoring courses of action that were previously unappealing to him. One discovers new ways of living, as mentioned above; one also discovers new manners of being, new ways of holding oneself or behaving oneself or new ways of interacting with others. One discovers personality types that had never occurred to one as possibilities (not that one would have denied their possibility, if someone had asked about them; just that one did not have the experience or the imagination to conceive of them, and to ask the question of oneself). Perhaps one has always tended to favour introverts, not having known any appealing extroverts; and then one travels, and begins to see how certain shades of extroversion, which were previously clouded in one’s mind by the unattractive shades of this characteristic, are actually attractive. Perhaps one has always thought of religious people as rather foolish and confused, and their claims to spiritual superiority as just so much folly and confusion; and then one travels, and discovers that certain people do possess a kind of calmness, an honest, well-grounded, desirable sort of calm, that seems to be a result of their religious sort of life. Discoveries of this kind are certainly aided by travel. They may also be aided by detached philosophical reflection, but I do not think that they can be fully discovered solely in that abstract manner, since they have a large empirical component to them: to know them, we need to know something about our responses to certain kinds of person or activity. These discoveries are beyond abstract thought in a way that resembles the way in which our attitude towards vanilla icecream is beyond abstract thought.

The above paragraph is concerned with ethics insofar as ethics is a matter of deciding between competing courses of action. But ethics might also be a matter of acting in accordance with those decisions. I say “might” because success in ethics, in the scholarly version of that discipline, is by-and-large independent of a persons success in acting ethically; and I avoid saying “is not” because it is plausible to think that this independence of thought and action represents a failure to be properly philosophical. That debate is irrelevant to the claim I want to make here, however, which is that active ethics (by which I mean the practice of acting in accordance with ethically sound beliefs) is a practice which is, firstly, closely related to scholarly ethics, and secondly, that is advanced by travel. I take it that the first claim is obvious (though precisely what is the nature of close relation between ethics and active ethics, is not so obvious. I will discuss that relation a bit later on). The second claim is supported by the fact that travel can furnish us with practical skills that enable us to act ethically. One such practical skill is intellectual, and has already been discussed (under the label of active epistemology). Other practical skills are social. Through travel we learn to communicate with other people, tolerate their eccentricities, appreciate their virtues, and generally to be agreeable to them; and without these skills, our chances of living a fully moral life are lessened. (Though I am not sure just what sort of moral negligence would be involved, if someone failed to cultivate these skills. Are we morally obliged to be charismatic? I think I’ll discuss that kind of question in another post.) And practical skills, of the kind that are developed through travel, can influence our ability to live well in other ways. If we want to devote our lives to some sort grand, ethically driven program of reform, whether in politics or in education or in science, usually we will need a greater amount than usual of eloquence and charm and facility with people; and surely travel can help to cultivate these qualities as well.

At this point I should acknowledge that nothing I have said here is new or surprising. Indeed, the practices that I have grouped under the label of “active philosophy” are so well-known as to be easily summarized by cliches. What I mean by a facility in “active epistemology” is really just what people mean when they talk about being able to “think on one’s feet” and “keep your wits about you.” And what I mean by a facility for “active metaphysics” is really just what people mean by “having a sense of perspective,” or a “strong sense of identity.” Perhaps “active ethics” is less easily summarised in commonplace terms. But even there one does not have to grope around for too long to find an everyday approximation to my newly-invented term: being an active ethicist is more-or-less the same as being a good bloke. Nevertheless, I think there is some genuine value in doing what I have just done: there is value, that is, in trying to clarify and re-describe concepts that we usually treat, lighthandedly, as cliches.

There is also value in trying to describe the relationship between standard philosophy and the main elements, just described, of active philosophy. One could interpret Kirkegaard as trying, in the quote given at the start of this post, to give such a description. This might be a faulty interpretation: it may be wrong, for example, to think that Kirkegaard’s “philosophy to exist in” is my “active philosophy.” My purposes here are not to accurately describe the thoughts of a past philosopher, however, so any misreading of Kirkegaard I commit is beside the point. The point of presenting Kirkegaard’s metaphor is to suggest one way of describing the relation between active philosophy and standard philosophy. The suggestion is that standard philosophy is useless when it comes to succeeding at active philosophy; and the reason for this is the coarseness of the information that standard philosophy gives us about the best way to think and to behave in the world. Standard philosophy is good for certain kinds of large-scale navigation, perhaps, but it is useless in any practical situation.

It would be nice if I could now go on to give a detailed, reasoned account of my attitude towards this view. However, I cannot do that. For one thing, the question of how active philosophy stands in relation to standard philosophy is complicated by the vagueness with which both of those relata are defined, and the fact that the relation may vary over the different branches of each. For another thing, the question about the relation between these two kinds of activity is one version of the question: what is the relation between philosophy and life? And that is the sort of question that you answer over a lifetime, not over a few paragraphs.

The best I can do here is to say that I disagree with Kirkegaard’s view, and to discuss very briefly what thoughts motivate this disagreement. For what it is worth, I propose that Kirkegaard’s metaphor can be improved by just a little tweaking: by replacing the map of Europe with a large-scale map of Denmark; and adding in a particular sort of map to represent the kind of guidance that is given by active philosophy: that particular sort of map is, I think, a map of the natural terrain of Denmark, a topological map perhaps. This is an improvement on Kirkegaard’s view because it does justice to the guiding role that standard philosophy can play for active philosophy; and because it recognizes that the two kinds of philosophy really are of different kinds. I will discuss these points a bit more in the paragraphs below.

The first point that standard philosophy can play a “guiding role” in active philosophy. By “guiding role” I mean the role of giving course-grained but widely applicable recommendations about how a person should pursue their active philosophy. Standard philosophy can play such a guiding role, I think, at least in relation to some of the branches of active philosophy. In ethics, for example, our actions can be guided in an obvious way by our philosophizing: by philosophizing, we reach conclusion about how to act, and then act in accordance with those conclusions. And this guiding influence is not just present in this or that region of active philosophy. Rather, it is present in all regions: we are guided by our philosophising (at least potentially) in our long-term projects, our short-term projects, our social actions, out political and our intellectual actions. This is not to say, of course, that standard philosophy is omniscient, that it leaves no room for “play,” no extra work for active philosophy to do. Its influence is general, but it is also course-grained: our philosophising may give us the concepts of “introversion” and “extraversion”, and it may help us to recognize and evaluate the lessons that active philosophy puts forward for us; but it is not in the power of philosophising to encounter those lessons, to come across the attractive extrovert or to live for a while with the inspiring devotee of religion (it may be in the power of the imagination to come across these things; but that is another story).

My second point is that the content of active philosophy differs from that of standard philosophy. The former is made up primarily of a set of clearly articulated beliefs and inferences. Although it refers to the world of action and of things, the procedures of standard philosophy take place entirely in the minds of the philosopher, in such a way, ideally, that its products can be entirely represented in words. Active philosophy, on the other hand, is made up primarily of a set of practical skills: the procedures by which active philosophers pursue their discipline, and the products that come out at the end of those procedures, are actions and sensations rather than thoughts and sentences. One becomes a good active epistemologist mainly by getting practice at “thinking on the spot”; and one shows that one is a good active epistemologist by putting this practice to use in real situations. Similarly with the practical skills that are the domain of the active ethicist. Even active metaphysics, as mentioned above, produces a kind of knowledge that is (in some way that I have not clarified) “different” from ordinary philosophical knowledge. This difference in kind, between active philosophy and standard philosophy, invites us to tweak Kirkegaard’s image in the way I have suggested above: to imagine standard philosophy as a large-scale map of Denmark’s roads, and active philosophy as a map of the country’s natural landscape. The former is one kind of thing, a system of objects whose natures and interconnections can be clearly delineated; and the latter is another kind of thing, a less orderly but more detailed kind of thing than the former. And if we want to go widely and safely through the terrain of life, we need maps of both kinds.

In summary, I have described an activity called “active philosophy.” This activity can be described in correspondence with the activity referred to here as “standard philosophy”; and I have outlined the correspondence as it applies to the three main branches of philosophy. My main purpose here was to say that the orthodox philosopher cannot gain any real benefit from travel; but that the active philosopher can do so. My secondary purpose was to try to say something sensible (though of course not comprehensive) the relation between active and standard philosophy, and I used Kirkegaard’s metaphor to help me in this attempt.

Now, these two purposes have taken up far more time and far more space than I intended them to take up, and as a result my overarching purpose may have been lost: that is, I may not have given a very clear account of my interest in travel, and my reasons for writing about it. (For one thing, I have not given an exhaustive account of my reasons for travelling: I have only given an account of why a philosophically inclined person might have reasons to travel). I have three excuses for my wobbliness of subject-matter and long-windedness of expression. First, there’s some value discussing the relation between travel and philosophy, and about active philosophy, even if this discussion leads one into one or two sidetracks. Second, I do intend to write a shorter and more palatable post about my travels, which I hope will fill in the gaps that are left by this one. (For example, it will give an account of why a literature-inclined person might have reasons to travel.) Thirdly, I did not force you to read this (but thank-you very much if you have, and I wait enthusiastically for your comments, however minor they might be).