Symposium: Things and Persons
D. M. Mackinnon, H. A. Hodges, John Wisdom
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 22 (1948), pp. 179-215
[SK's comments]
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III.—By JOHN WISDOM.
...
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...
3. To return.
MacKinnon wants ethical problems taken seriously,
and perhaps we ought to say
that
he wants them taken seriously not merely by people who have a particular problem to deal with,
but also
by people who are dealing with a problem of some generality
even though, as in a problem play, the problem is presented through a particular case.
Connected with this
which is, I believe, his main concern
are two other points :
(1) He thinks that
many ethical problems are
better put
in terms of people
than
in terms of acts.
Thus he says that writers like Kierkegaard, Buber and Marcel raise the problem of the individual.
He also says that Butler,
as opposed to a utilitarian,
argues that
the proper subject of the moralist is the individual or person in his nature and in his relation with his fellows,
and that
he refuses consequently to allow that we can so to speak
"absorb
ethical reflection
in discussion of
the means of promoting good".
(2) MacKinnon insists that the results of ethical reflection are not something that can be presented in a principle
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or set of principles.
He says that Butler and Kant are wrong if they suppose that ethical ideas can be conceived in terms of
a general formula.
"The use of any such formula",
he says,
"can only have the effect of drawing an artificial boundary to contain that which in its nature cannot be contained.
The responsiveness of man to man,
the "disponability" of a man in the presence of his fellows,
the diversity of human love—
these are not things that can be mapped.
... ".
4. But to consider these points.
And first someone may ask
"What is it to take ethical problems seriously?
Don't we all want to take them seriously?
Don't
too many of us
take them seriously?
Who doesn't take them seriously?
...
MacKinnon says : In
utilitarianism
one encounters a clear example,
clear to the point of a caricature,
of the approach to ethics which
refuses altogether
to take
personal existence
seriously.
You see this in the insistence that the notion of happiness is fundamentally simple,
that in effect happiness can be so defined as to constitute the twin of the whole analysis.
It is insisted that in human satisfaction there is nothing mysterious".
4.1. One may pick up
a book on art
and it be
very dull.
It is dull when it tries to give
rules, canons,
which will enable us to deduce whether a picture or a poem is good.
It is dull when it tries to set out
in general terms
what makes a good picture good.
Like a logician sets out what makes a good demonstration good.
...
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... [But] Even here there is danger of the explanation being taken to be more adequate than it is.
...
When it comes to what makes a good picture good or a good poem good
the whole plan is a failure and is apt to lead
not to
understanding and discriminating feeling
for what is good,
but to that
rigid and dead reaction to recognised points
sometimes found in dog fanciers and characteristic of the pharisees.
It is the same with a book on ethics which tries to set out what makes right acts right and good men good.
Even if the author has given up as futile the idea of setting out conditions necessary and sufficient ... , the game is a bore and a menace.
For in this game he confines himself to
the evident
and thus to
the obvious.
The only ethical principles worth attention are ones which are false
like
"Dishonesty to oneself is the only
crime".
They do represent
serious ethical effort
when they are
first hand.
What exactly is going on here,
presuming we jointly maintain
(1) that there are 'true' and
false
ethical judgments,
(2) that there is no possibility of reducing ethical judgments to
general terms
and
(3) that
first hand effort
is (necessarily?)
serious
?
Guessing desperately, I would say that all of this taken together suggests nothing else but that the inward search for 'mind' and 'consciousness' has been projected outward; hence we are confronted here by its (hitherto) inscrutable aspects, turned inside out, staring back at us.
Perhaps the best argument in favor of Utilitarianism is that it allows us to 'get a grip, any grip'. It's not the worst thing to have some rough-and-ready heurstic standing by, to which otherwise intractable questions might be referred. Sometimes it would be better simply to be rid of those sorts of questions than to have to wrestle with them "first hand".
If such "serious efforts" of mind are, themselves, one day reduced to heuristics, then the coincidence of (1), (2) and (3) will be explained via the most parsimonious route: our perceptions and cognitions just are infinitely finer grained than our "terms"; in some sense, then, generalizable ethical principles would exist, but they would be inarticulable, hence ineffable in a way, and therefore functionally non-existent.
...
4.2. One may pick up a book on art
and it not be dull.
To some people
it will not be dull if it
contains a lot of stories
about painters, writers and musicians—how one
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was very poor and kept a little dog
and so on.
But that's not æsthetics.
To some people it will not be dull
if it is about
what beauty is,
what sort of difference there is between two people when one praises a poem and the other says it's very poor.
But that's meta-æsthetics.
There is however a third and proper way in which a book on art may not be dull.
Mr. Lionello Venturi who writes the introduction to the Phaidon Botticelli
helps one to see
Botticelli.
Mr. Edmund Wilson, the author of Axel's Castle, helps one to
a juster apprehension
of the works he writes about.
In general
a good critic by his art
brings out features
of the art he writes about,
or better,
brings home the character
of what he writes about,
in such a way that
one can
feel and see, see and feel
that character much better than one did before.
Such a critic tackles æsthetic problems,
with his head and with his heart,
with his heart and with his head
and so tackles them seriously.
It is worth noticing how
such revealing, moving talk,
such rhetoric, as his,
need not
be directed towards showing that a work is
good or bad.
It may be directed simply towards
showing it to us
for what it is.
For this old saw
to be sensible at all
is for Subjectivism (in some version)
necessarily to be assumed.
Otherwise,
what can there be
for one person
to
show
or
reveal
to another,
as the two stand before
one and the same artwork?
It may be directed for example to showing us that though Mr. Thornton Wilder's Heaven's my Destination and much of the work of Mr. Thurber
at first seem comic,
they are really tragic.
This is so contrary to the spirit of the philosopher who gave us the dog gone 'round the cow that it's hard to believe this was written by the same person. Et tu, Johnnie?
If we apply the 'wisdom' of the barnyard here,
we find,
first:
that the Professor takes the
mere facts
of the Wilder and Thurber cases to be radically unsettled; or at least the facts are more opaque to some and more transparent to others;
and,
second:
that the global emotional valence of a work is
(a) nothing less than
real
but also,
(b) can and does
at first seem
(to some, if not to others)
to be
other
than what it "really" and necessarily is;
but happily,
(c) someone who knows what's "really" up with these works can
just tell
this to someone who only knows what "seems" to be the case.
Chekov called The Cherry Orchard a comedy.
But obviously anyone perfectly content with this description has not,
as we say, understood
The Cherry Orchard.
...
The art of giving us
a fuller apprehension
of a work of
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art is a wider æsthetics,
a wider activity
than that of showing that it is beautful or ugly.
Primary art itself, very often, reveals the familiar,
shows us what we have looked at but not seen.
A poem may show us swans as birds which survive from a world of colour and light before the sad, dim morning of the Fall or again as swans on a river, as it might be three ducks on a pond.
Our eyesight may be all right or at least good enough to enable us to see a bandstand in a Park.
And yet a picture of the bandstand in the park may make us say
"I never noticed how here the bizarre meets the banal and dread hunts gaiety up spiral pillars to the sky."
In short
an artist may enable us to see
what we have
looked at so often
and
never seen
or even
to
see again
what we had
lost the power to see.
Well,
if you can
look at
x
repeatedly
without
seeing
y,
then
you are
not much
of a
y-person,
are you?
After writing this
I opened Oscar Wilde's
The Decay of Lying
and read
"To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing.
One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. . . .
At present, people see fogs,
not
because there are
fogs,
but because poets and painters
have taught them
the mysterious loveliness of such effects."
He ought to have said surely that one does not see a thing until one sees its ugliness, its charm, its grace, its banality, and so on.
Well, sure.
But this is at most half the story.
No one is
taught
anything they are unable to learn.
...
5. And of course
it is possible to do ethics seriously.
Novelists do often.
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Crime and Punishment,
Anna Karenina,
The Brothers Karamazov,
...
Something particular
is presented, but
so presented
that in it
something universal
is
seen through
without any attempt to net in a formula the infinite idiosyncracy of the stuff of Time.
The account given of
formula
suggests,
actually,
that
something particular
simply cannot be "generalized";
also,
that
it matters more that "efforts" at moral judgment
be "first hand"
than that they be "true".
A critic speaks perhaps of a particular picture and
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just that picture is his subject.
But somehow he so speaks that we can the better see not only that picture but others also.
When Rembrandt paints an old woman's head just that old woman's head is what he paints.
At the same time we want to say that it is by no means just that old woman's head that he has painted.
What are 'the facts of the case'?
Or are we not to be doing all that kind of thing when we do art?
(Why would/should we not?)
It is possible to make
in ethics and æsthetics
remarks which are general
and still not worthless.
This happens when
some value
is
temporally undervalued
or perhaps has always been undervalued.
Clive Bell emphasized the importance of the formal features of a work of art by saying that beauty depends entirely upon these.
Nietsche reemphasized certain values apt to be underestimated in Christian ethics.
And Christ emphasized certain values which perhaps had never been adequately emphasized.
The phrase to emphasize a neglected value stands for a process which can be small and can be big enough to demand a very big man.
There's a Chesterton's Fence argument to be made about this concept of
neglect
.
Why the neglect?
It's not "neglect" when we're getting along alright without something.
The very accusation of "neglect" carries within it the accusation that we're not getting along alright.
So, that is the real question in such cases.
I of all people
would just love to think
that that CB passes this test while FN and JC fail it;
but,
hand to heart,
obvs the answer is precisely the contrary.
The novels which I have mentioned
could be called
studies of acts,
but clearly
they are better called
studies of persons.
A person is
an exceedingly complex pattern in time.
Anything which helps us
to see the pattern
in the
apparently largely chaotic procession
of incidents which make up a person's life story
helps us
to "see him for what he is,"
How hard should we have to look for the
pattern
in amongst the
complexity
?
How to account for the observer's own role in forming the "pattern"?
just as remarks which order the incidents of a novel for us help us to see that novel for what it is
and
remarks which order the parts of a visual or auditory pattern help us to see or hear that pattern for what it is.
There are
general psychological remarks
which can very much help us in
making sense out of nonsense
just as other scientific hypotheses
have
made sense out of a chaos of facts.
Hmm.
Really the onus is on the
facts
to validate the
hypothesis,
no?
Mere plausibility is not validation.
Plausibility is not difficult.
I would like to add that
I am aware that the novels I spoke of
are not primarily ethical studies
in the ordinary sense of studies
with a view to a verdict
"Good" or "Bad."
In a court of law,
even when the facts are agreed upon,
the situation is studied with a view to a verdict,
but
the verdict is expressed not in critical words like "good" and "bad"
but in words like "murder in the first degree", "man-
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slaughter ", "negligence", and so on.
The novels I mentioned are special efforts to see people for what they are.
This is not
an exotic process
but one which
in some degree
goes on in us all the time
we are concerned with others.
Well then what's with
the novels
?
How
understanding of people is connected with ethics
I shall not here try to say.
But this much may be said :
before we pay much attention to a man's judgment of others,
whether ethical or not,
we must have confidence that
he understands them
and
that
we understand him
so that we may understand his judgment of them.
6. Wider æsthetics and wider ethics are,
I realize,
not metaphysics or philosophy
in the sense in which I have been using these words,
but they are,
I submit,
connected with metaphysics in two ways worth mentioning.
First
it is part of the business of metaphysics
to correct misleading accounts
of what they are
in the same way that it corrects misleading accounts of any other procedure for discovery,
such as mathematics and metaphysics.
And this is necessary
although we have been familiar with the æsthetic and ethical procedures
for centuries.
Second
there is a likeness between the techniques
used in
art criticism, ethics, and art
on the one hand
and
metaphysics
on the other.
Selection of the typical,
caricature.
metaphor,
paradox,
all are used
to discover the familiar.
Suppose we call
all such attempts
to see things for what they are,
to find the reality in appearance,
philosophy or metaphysics.
Then we begin to understand why people who are not philosophers
obstinately expect
something of philosophy of which they feel cheated
if we tell them that philosophy is the curing of mental cramp which has been induced by the fascination of certain analogies suggested by our language,
by too narrow an idea of the logic of our language.
They still feel cheated when we offer the more positive description
that
philosophy is the meta-study which attempts to gain a better grasp of the notes of categories of sentences.
There are
in people
two feelings here:
(1) that philosophy is wider than the study of how we know the categories
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matter, mind, time, space, necessity, value,
(2) that even this study of the categories is not adequately described as a certain sort of study of words.
I believe there is a good deal of illusion and confusion here.
Light is thrown on our desire to bring philosophy nearer to life in J. O. Wisdom's study "Three Dreams of Descartes" in The International Fournal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. XXVII, Part I, and less directly in his study of Schopenhauer.
At the same time metaphysics can come into literature.
For example
there are one or two places in Proust where it can be seen
how
metaphysics
can grow out of life
and how metaphysics can help us to show ourselves life.
After I had written this sentence I happened to open a collection of essays by the Greek poet Demetrios Capetanakis and there read
"There are moments in Proust's work when the need to find a solution in philosophy of the most urgent problems of existence is so painful that we begin to feel that we cannot go on.
We summon our intelligence to our aid, to give us a moment of rest, of respite;
but only a moment, because philosophic anxiety can never cease. . . .
Proust's affirmation,
for instance,
that
love is only a kind of madness
and that
the individuality of the person we love is an illusion,
has nothing definitive about it.
We turn the page, and we find Proust fighting with all his strength to find another solution to this problem that in reality has no solution."
Those who think that philosophy can help
are apt to think that philosophers have
some special knowledge which enables them to answer the questions that trouble the enquirer
or that he has a technique which the enquirer himself has not
which
if applied to the questions of life might solve them.
What the philosopher in the narrower sense of one who studies the procedures suitable to various categories of question can do is to make clearer what procedure is suitable to these questions about what this and that really is.
It then appears that the suitable procedure is like his own when he asks what value, necessity, mind and matter really are.
We may now recall that such statements as
"There are
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no acts which are really unselfish ",
"There are no acts which are really free"
and even such typical metaphysical paradoxes as
"No one really knows what goes on in the mind of another",
"There is really no such thing as matter",
"Nothing is really good or bad, it is only that we regret some things and not others ",
are not themselves meta-statements,
that is
they are not statements about statements.
They are statements
which
in the ordinary usage of language
are false,
they are statements in a new language which is a distortion of ordinary language.
One way of answering
"What point have these paradoxes?"
is to reply
"They show up the roles, the inter-relations between the roles, of categories of statements (or sentences)",
but
another way of answering
is to reply
"They show up the nature of, the inter-relations between categories of rational procedure, of thought",
and
another way of answering is to reply
"They show up the nature of the interrelations between categories of fact, of being".
And with this we return to the starting point of our circular tour through "Philosophy is about words".
When someone,
Proust perhaps,
says
"Individuality is an illusion"
or
"Love is madness"
it is
something about the world
which he has grasped and felt
which
forces him
to make these
outrageous statements.
"Altruism is an illusion",
"Value is an illusion",
"Mind is an illusion",
"The rationality of scientific reasoning is an illusion"
arise in a way which
though it is different and more a matter of confusion about words
is yet not altogether different.
I have represented
all these paradoxes
as
coming wholly from
reflection on things already experienced,
but
"Individuality is an illusion",
"Love is an illusion ",
"Altruism is an illusion,"
may,
as we know,
come in part from
new experience
surprises, disappointments.
"The table isn't solid ",
"The sun we see is the sun which existed 8 minutes ago",
"Every sound is everywhere",
"People have thoughts and feelings they don't know of",
come
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largely or in part from discovery of new facts.
Scientists, as we know, are not all or only concerned with collecting new facts.
What is more
they are not concerned only with predicting the future.
Copernicus gave us a new picture of the world.
Freud makes sense out of nonsense.
Science of this kind,
philosophy
and certain art
are akin
in that
they reveal what lies not behind or beyond but hidden in the obvious.
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