The Free Thinker

An Analogy

Consider the following scenario.

A computer has been set to work on a large series of mathematical optimization problems. Either they are not solvable analytically or the computer does not know how; it solves them (to a specified degree of precision) by means of numeric methods.

An expert mathematician-cum-computer-scientist is told that the computer has been working on the optimization problems for a single day, and he is told that the computer has solved the first x optimizations in the series. He is provided with a cross-section of all the computer's operations for one millisecond. From these he can compile a list of the algorithms that the computer is currently running, but he does not know all the algorithms available to the computer. There may be latent algorithms that are not being implemented at the time.

Having compiled this list, the scientist is then asked: What is the probability that the computer was using only the algorithms observed and recorded in the list to solve the optimization problems?

If, as is common, the algorithms the computer is using involve some amount of random search, the scientist probably cannot determine with certainty whether the listed algorithms would have been sufficient to solve the optimization problems. Even if the algorithms seem radically inadequate to solve x optimizations in one day, the computer might have benefited from a string of lucky guesses.

What the scientist could do, in principle, is assign an ex ante probability to the occurrence of the computer solving x optimizations in one day using the given algorithms. He could deduce a probability distribution for time to solve for each optimization, and then add these distributions to calculate a probability of time to solve x optimizations. In a typical case the scientist might find that the chances of the computer solving at least x optimizations in one day is 99.9999%, or 1E-30%. The scientist might also be able to calculate the odds of the computer solving no more than x optimizations. 

If the scientist assumes that anything that is infinitesimally unlikely did not occur, he may draw one of the following three conclusions: (a) the list of algorithms plausibly explain the computer's degree of success, (b) the computer could not have solved x optimizations in a day with those algorithms and must have used other, more effective ones for part of the time, or been supplied with some answers by an outside source, or (c) the computer would certainly have solved more than x optimizations using the set of algorithms observed, and it must have been interrupted or have been using less effective algorithms for part of the time.

If, on the other hand, the properties of the algorithms or of the optimization problems are not sufficiently well understood, the scientist may profess himself unable to ascertain whether the algorithms are sufficient, or super-sufficient, to explain the computer's success or not.

Evolutionary biology is in a position similar to that of the computer scientist in the example. Life exhibits a certain amount of order. Geology and the fossil record suggest a time scale during which this amount of order is supposed to have emerged. Biologists observe certain processes at work in nature which would tend to alter gene pools over time, and thus to produce order.

But unlike the scientist in the scenario, evolutionary biologists do not understand the properties either of biological order or of the mutation and natural selection processes sufficiently well to estimate the ex ante probability that life as we know it could have emerged in a few billion years. If they did, they might find that it's infinitesimally unlikely that life as we know it could have emerged so quickly, or, on the contrary, that sentient beings would have emerged with near certainty within 100 million years at most. In either case, they would have to conclude that the theory of evolution as taught today can't be true; that some other processes we have not observed or conceived of must account for the existence of life; or perhaps, that some other processes must have been slowing evolution down.

As it is, we're just not in a position to know whether the Darwinist claim that all life on earth emerged through evolution is possible or not. If we did know that it was possible, we still would not know, of course, whether it really occurred that way.

The whole above argument assumes that life is reducible to a material basis. I think we know by the experience of free will that human life, at least, is not. In the past I have also presented a proof of "the necessity of agnosticism about mind-brain supervenience." If the task of a theory of life is not merely to explain its material organization but also how at least one organism, man, possesses a supernatural soul, then it seems clear right away that Darwinian evolution is not a very promising theory. But even if we set that aside, the radically inadequate evidentiary basis for Darwinism makes it, not a bona fide scientific theory, but simply the latest of the creation-myths man has believed in from time to time.

Daniel Dennett, the Oblivious Radical Skeptic

Critics of the theory of evolution-- who may not deny it but who are inclined, at least, to limit its scope-- include some like Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, and Roger Penrose, the eminent physicist and mathematician.  Here is Wikipedia's summary of Penrose's critique:

Penrose has written controversial books on the connection between fundamental physics and human (or animal) consciousness. In The Emperor's New Mind (1989), he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Penrose hints at the characteristics this new physics may have and specifies the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics (what he terms correct quantum gravity, CQG). He claims that the present computer is unable to have intelligence because it is an algorithmically deterministic system. He argues against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer—this is in contrast to views, e.g., artificial intelligence, that thought can be simulated. Penrose notes that a process can conceivably be deterministic without being algorithmic. This is based on claims that consciousness transcends formal logic systems because things such as the insolubility of the halting problem and Gödel's incompleteness theorem restrict an algorithmically based logic from traits such as mathematical insight.

In Daniel Dennett's exposition of a Darwinist philosophy-of-everything, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett argues against Penrose's ideas as follows:

Penrose's challenge needs to be answered, even if, as I and others in AI are convinced, he is making a fairly simple mistake...  Mathematicians, Penrose says, use "mathematical insight" to see that a certain proposition follows from the soundness of a certain system.  He then goes to some length to argue that there could be no algorithm, or at any rate no practical algorithm, "for" mathematical insight.  But, in going to all this trouble, he overlooks the possibility that some algorithm-- many different algorithms, in fact-- might yield mathematical insight even though that was no just what it was "for"...  Penrose pays careful attention to what it is like to be a mathematician, but he overlooks a possibility-- indeed, a likelihood-- that is familiar to AI researchers: the possibility that underlying our general capacity to deal with such "ingredients" is a heuristic program of mind-boggling complexity.  Such a complicated algorithm would approximate the competence of the perfect understander, and be "invisible" to its beneficiary.  Whenever we say we solved some problem "by intuition," all that really means is we don't know how we solved it.

I have often entertained various radically skeptical positions, but this is a depth of skepticism I have never plumbed.  We know that the senses can be mistaken.  Hallucinations and optical illusions, mirages in the desert and so on, can be brought in to clinch the point, but I don't think they're really necessary: we know the nature of the senses well enough to know that they are contingent and fallible.  If any further proof were needed scientific descriptions of eyes and ears would quickly reveal that these instruments are capable of being deceived.  If we've read our Hume we're well aware that our habit of induction, of making inferences from patterns, lacks solid epistemic foundations in logic.  This is where I bring in faith in a sense that may or may not be idiosyncratic, what I call a "meta-belief" that cannot be defined-- a phrase like "there is order in the world" is effective enough in summoning to an interlocutor's mind the idea I'm talking about but as a definition is completely question-begging, and could be understood only by one who already shares the meta-belief-- and the belief in which is at once indelible and undeniable yet can atrophy or fail to be applied, and the consistent application of which, e.g., by a revolutionary scientific theorist, is regarded as a virtue.  Yet I accept that the skeptic has in a sense not been honorably answered.  If one were to say "I do not believe there is order in the world," I could easily show that his behavior is inconsistent with his professed belief and call on him to admit that he really does believe in order, but I could not, in the strictest sense, refute him.  To insist on this degree of concession to the skeptic may, indeed, make me appear in some eyes to be guilty of skepticism myself.

Yet all this can be said without for one moment casting the slightest doubt on our purely intellectual faculties of mathematics and logic; and I for one never do cast doubt on them.  I do not even want to class them as examples of faith.  My view is that we can really know, by pure reason, that 2+2=4, or that if p implies q then not-q implies not-p.  With any purely interior phenomenon, it is difficult to police how words are used or to develop a highly subtle and rigorous vocabulary; as a result the word "intuition" is used in quite varied ways, so there is a limited and irrelevant sense in which I would agree with Dennett that at least in some cases people who say they know something "by intuition" mean that they don't know how they know.  But we have a mathematical/logical faculty as well, and when we use it, we do know how we know: by our mathematical/logical faculty.  Dennett wants to ask a further question that he regards as more fundamental, namely, what is the physical mechanism underlying this faculty?  But he is wrong in thinking this question more fundamental.  Relative to our mathematical and logical faculty, the very existence of matter is a highly contingent and conjectural hypothesis.  Far more conjectural still-- indeed, wholly unprovable, and Dennett accepts it, at bottom, as sheer dogma-- is the hypothesis that everything has a material explanation.  Unless one has unwarrantedly embraced this dogma ex ante, there is no reason to think that any material explanation exists.

It is part of our experience of the mathematical and logical faculty that it apprehends the truth.  We can err, but we err by failing to apply it, by taking short cuts or letting mere mental associations interfere with its operation.  For all my fondness for Cartesian questioning, I don't think it is possible to question our logical faculties as one might-- if one is philosophically inclined, one even must-- question the existence of the physical world.  If one denies this ex ante, it is very hard to get back to it.  In particular, if one accepts that the mind and its logical faculties are a bundle of physical algorithms, well, we know that many or most-- and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves, if I understand what I've read about, that all-- physical algorithms are fallible.  Therefore the mind is fallible.  Dennett actually concedes this:

To make the distinction vivid, we can imagine that a space pirate, Rumpelstiltskin by name, is holding the planet hostage, but will release us unharmed if we can answer a thousand true-false questions about sentences of arithmetic. Should we put a human mathematician on the witness stand, or a computer truth-checker devised by the best programmers?  According to Penrose, if we hang our fate on the computer and let Rumpelstiltskin see the computer's program, he can devise an Achilles'-heel proposition that will foil our machine... But Penrose has given us no reason to believe that this isn't just as true of any human mathematicians we might put on the witness stand. None of us is perfect, and even a team of experts no doubt has some weaknesses that Rumpelstiltskin could exploit, given enough information about their brains.

"No doubt," says Dennett, but I not only doubt this, I deny it, and my evidence is simply that I know that the nature of the logical faculty of the mind is to apprehend truth, and that this is an implicit premise of all mathematics.  But let's stop for a moment on what Dennett is saying.  He is not saying-- he cannot be if he is to be consistent-- that a mathematician might take a shortcut out of habit or get distracted by a mental association and err, in a way that he himself would recognize easily enough if his mistake were shown to him.  He is saying that there are some arithmetical propositions that the mathematician would always get wrong, by the nature of his mental algorithm.  Some x * y = z would be false but would seem to this mathematician's fallible logical faculty to be true.  But if there is some proposition that our minds are programmed to get wrong, why shouldn't there be many such propositions -- perhaps some that we use every day?  Of course Dennett would appeal to natural selection, but (a) many many many propositions that we use all the time nowadays would have been useless for our prehistoric ancestors to know, and the time since the dawn of civilization is probably insufficient for evolution to have done much work on our minds, and (b) it is not necessarily the case that knowing the truth is most conducive to the survival of one's selfish genes. 

Dennett is strangely oblivious to the radical skepticism inherent in his argument; strangely, because he is a philosopher of sorts and one might think he would be sensitive to it.  But Dennett is no Descartes.  He is complacent in his materialism.  He questions his world selectively, he doesn't step outside the bounds of his biased version of common sense.  In this case, he thinks he has refuted Penrose, and moves on; he doesn't realize that his refutation of Penrose, if valid, is a refutation of all the truth-claims of mathematics and logic without the whole edifice of human knowledge crumbles. 

The Double Standard and the Golden Rule Case for Free Love

In the exchange with Nato, MS, and Joyless Moralist in the comments of a recent post, I find myself reminded of why I feel impelled to insist on regarding gender roles as asymmetric, or as a critic might, tendentiously but not unreasonably, put it, on holding a "double standard" vis-a-vis men and women in sexual matters. It is not merely that I think that there is a basis for this double standard in human nature and in ethics (though I do). It is that the prohibition of premarital sex, which I think is correct, seems to me untenable unless combined with this kind of double standard.

The essence of the problem can be shown if we try to apply to sexual morality the Golden Rule, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." At the risk of sounding flippant, but in fact the deduction is strictly logical if we accept symmetry between the genders, this implies: "if you wish a girl would try to seduce you, try to seduce her." Other ethical rules-- don't tell lies, be just and merciful, etc.-- are generally extensions of the Golden Rule: I don't want others to lie to me, or treat me unfairly, or cruelly, so I shouldn't do it to others. But if they are not careful, the churches can formulate their sexual rules in ways that make them seem directly contrary to it.

By the time I was 24, I had long felt a sense of bad faith about the proposition, in which I presumptively believed as a churchgoer and as a member of the family I was born into, that premarital sex was wrong. I don't think I was particularly weak-willed then. When there was a conflict between a principle and a passion, the principle generally won out. As an example of this, I didn't drink alcohol for four years after leaving the Mormon church, for the sole purpose of proving-- not even to anyone in particular, but as if to some abstract "impartial spectator"-- that my motive for leaving the Mormon church was that I believed it to be false, and not just because I wanted to be able to drink. This was in college, and I was constantly in environments where drinking was normal and expected. I didn't have any moral qualms about drinking (in moderation of course) but regarded it as innocent and enjoyable. Yet I abstained for four years, long after it was clear I'd made the point to the satisfaction of any hypothetical observer, postponing the transition to what I had always regarded as a more rational and healthy practice until an opportunity came to break the obsolete taboo in circumstances where social pressure was completely absent. If I had had a firm belief that premarital sex was wrong, I would have acted accordingly.

But the rule seemed arbitrary, senseless, unnatural, opposed to life. I had heard arguments for the proposition from the Mormons but they seemed not only unpersuasive but even insincere. For example, Mormons would wax eloquent about the satisfaction of "saving yourself" for your spouse, of how rewarding it is for one's wedding night to be one's first time. This is, strictly speaking, an appeal to self-interest: you will enjoy your wedding night more if it's your first time. It might be persuasive to women, and in fact, I think this does come near to expressing the heart of the matter when it comes to why women should be virgins at marriage, but for a man it is absurdly feeble. It is not in a man's nature to be convinced by this argument. The relative value it places on things is wrong. But the crucial point is that it is an appeal to self-interest, and that robs it of its moral force.

At best, this argument is an appeal to do something good for an unknown, perhaps non-existent person: one's future spouse. To make it compelling in those terms, one has to insist that the value that one's future spouse will place on one's virginity at marriage is extremely high. For a woman, again, this argument has some force. It is in a man's nature to value virginity highly and to feel intense jealousy of the past sexual partners of a woman he loves. Some men successfully suppress this feeling but it is a factor a woman should take into account ex ante. No doubt there are some women, too, who highly value the virginity of their husbands; but there are others, on the other hand, who value sexual experience. More subtly, I don't think the idea of being valued for his virginity at marriage by a woman can appeal to a man, even one who for whatever reason intends to be a virgin at marriage. Such an attitude belittles him, compromises his masculine independence. A man feels, as I think a woman might not, that a future spouse for whom his virginity would be a deal-breaker is a future spouse he can do without. Anyway, no woman who wants a virgin husband is obliged to marry him. And if he risks narrowing his selection, that is again a non-moral appeal to self-interest.

It seemed to me then, and I suppose I still suspect that it is the case, that many or most Mormons and other religious people were rationalizing a tenet that they actually held dogmatically on the basis of revelation. Also, I suspected (and still suspect) that in some cases it was a sour-grapes story to hide their envy for people who had sexual opportunities they had sacrificed or could never have had. But my principles forbade me-- they still do, though now I might qualify it somewhat-- to accept tenets held dogmatically on the basis of revelation. For once one relinquishes reason and admits the principle of authority, there are a thousand authorities clamoring to be submitted to; and unless one is to accept one's creed by the accident of birth, which as a statistical matter most people do but which can't be justified epistemically, one has no grounds to choose between them. To have accepted the prohibition of premarital sex on the basis of authority would have been the act of the woodcutter who cuts off the branch that he was sitting on; for it was only on the basis of a moral commitment to reason that I could justify having left the Mormon church.

Mormons endorse a degree of role differentiation between the genders that makes many liberal, secular people uncomfortable. Yet when it comes to inculcating sexual scruples in the young, Mormons are, I think, quite free from double standards. If I had to guess, I suspect the same is true of Protestants and most other Christians today, although of course Mormons are especially militant and efficient in their program of indoctrinating the young. Mormons do not treat promiscuous girls as having debased themselves while regarding promiscuous boys with indulgence. They insist on the absolute prohibition of premarital sex and apply it equally to boys and girls. As a result, I largely missed, or at least inadequately appreciated, the reason that the Golden Rule case for free love fails, which is that what a man wants to do will have a very different significance for her than it does for him, whether she knows it or not.

So by the time I was 24, I found myself increasingly unable to believe the proposition that premarital sex was wrong (except to some extent, and in most cases, by means of some makeshift arguments of a highly romantic character which, in retrospect, I find incomprehensible). Of course, not believing in it, I could have abided by it anyway, and might well have done so. I had two strong reasons to do so. The first was my family, with whom a premarital sexual relationship might cause a rift. The second was Christianity. I was a churchgoer, though not baptized into any particular denomination (other than Mormonism). The commonly-heard arguments that Jesus didn't really say much about sex and that the early Christians' acceptance of traditional sexual taboos might have reflected mere culture and the state of technology (no contraceptives) seemed like less of a travesty to me then that they do now, but still, I didn't believe them. It seemed to me that if I were to have an unmarried sexual relationship it would my churchgoing and avowal of Christianity would be marred by an element of hypocrisy. I valued Christianity more than sexual freedom. If it had just been a question of denying myself certain pleasures which were possibly innocent, that would have been easy-- like my four years' abstinence from alcohol, with my comically inadequate motive.

But the difference from alcohol was this: in abstaining from sex, I was hurting not only myself but others, or so it seemed at the time. Some girls were disappointed, two at least were perplexed, saddened, and humiliated by my refusal. The sexual scruples I adhered to without believing in seemed not merely to sacrifice pleasures but to make me heartless and cruel towards those to him I felt tenderness and wanted to satisfy.

Now suppose, for the sake of argument, we accept the double standard. We accept that a man may, if anything, distinguish himself by conquests, liaisons, and intrigues, but that a woman who succumbs is a "fallen" woman, a "lost" woman, a slut, that she debases herself, and makes any man who marries her a fool. In that case the Golden Rule case for free love vanishes like smoke. The symmetry of "I'd like her to seduce me, so I should seduce her" becomes invalid. Instead, the question is: "Would I like to be ruined, lost, fallen, disgraced, degraded? If not, I shouldn't ruin and disgrace her." Just because a woman is willing doesn't change anything. She may be misguided or weak enough to be ready to ruin herself, but one still ought not to be her accomplice in self-destruction, just as one should not give a drink to a drunkard or a pistol to a suicide. The prohibition of premarital sex becomes, on these assumptions, quite rational.

Of course all that is rather harsh, perhaps even un-Christian, recalling that Jesus forgave the woman taken in adultery. Better to say that an unchaste woman can and ought to be forgiven, but that the loss is real; that it is a woman's nature-- a woman's nature, please note; it is important not to make this gender-neutral, which signals to a man to look for the same thing in his own nature, and he will not find it and will therefore disbelieve your whole argument-- for sexual desire to lead to fulfillment only in marriage and childrearing; that a young woman may not know this about herself (how could she, except by hearsay, not having lived through it?) and that she may mistakenly believe that a casual, "free love" relationship will give her satisfaction, but that despite her consent you will still (or at least, that you are very likely to) wound her in the end by taking advantage of her error; and that a young woman who pretends to desire only free love may even know already that marriage and childrearing are what she wants, but feel compelled to hide this from a man for fear of scaring him away, or even-- sadder still-- admire a man so much that she would not presume to ask for them, though she is fully within her rights to demand these things in return for offering herself to him. To this it must be added that there are women who are really willing to engage in no-strings-attached sex, and whom a man, by using her, will not wrong any more than a thief wrongs another thief when they collaborate in a crime. And we should be careful in judging such women or generalizing about them; they are individuals, they often have virtues, they vary in their interests and tastes, and so on... and yet a certain shallowness, a certain emptiness, a certain cruelty is inescapably attached to the path they have chosen. The simple fact of the imbalance in the desire for commitment between men and women gives those women who are willing to do without it a large selection and therefore a high degree of power. And power corrupts. At the same time, sexual desire detached from its natural goal of marriage and family becomes a function of mere whim, caprice, fancy. If a man is not a candidate for husband, what is he?  He may be a "toy boy," a source of momentary delight for some trivial reason, a good workout or a good joke or a good party, soon put down. Emotions will come into play, yet without justice or logic to them, since the shared plans that could give them logic is absent. Why, after all, should a current lover's yearning for her count more than the yearning of the next man, whom she hasn't tried yet? If we do not want to revive the scornful condemnation that the words "fallen woman" carry, let us remember the phrase's connotation of danger. A man might become obsessed with such a woman, might be driven to suicide for her sake, he might waste years of his life in pursuit of such women, generally in vain but disappointing even when occasionally successful. Most importantly-- and here the Golden Rule comes in again-- he will waste energies on them which could be put to a thousand better uses. Better, for one's own safety and that of others, to stay out of that rat race. Look for the signs of such women, and walk away.

I don't mean to say that the double standard is the only reason to avoid premarital sex. From a higher point of view, the greatest happiness comes from union with God, and this is available to all of us, even to all of us all the time, but only inasmuch as we are pure in heart. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." A sexual indiscretion darkens our eyes to the glorious innocent pleasures with which God surrounds us: a sunrise, the song of a bird, the branches of trees swaying against the sky, a blade of grass, the smile of a friend, the sunlight of an October day. The purer one's heart is, the more one rejoices in all these simple things, the more one sees God in them. A sexual affair, the suspense that leads up to it, the memories it leaves behind, what toil and tedium they all are, how they burden the mind, heart, soul, how they obscure better things, so much better things! However, this argument would be opaque to most people most of the time. The double standard argument is stronger, more elemental. It is based on attitudes, norms, judgments, values that bubble up naturally generation after generation, for they are rooted in instinct. Teenagers coin slang that expresses it more aptly than any learned explanation could. A Christian should try to soften its hard edges, should comfort those whom it teaches men to scorn; but it is legitimate, it is fundamental, it has wisdom in it, it must be given its due. To be too enlightened to acknowledge it is to cut oneself off from the gritty realism that is needed to exorcise the Golden Rule case for free love.

Paul Cites His Sources

Paul writes to the Ephesians:

If indeed you have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which was given to me for you, how that by revelation He made known to me the mystery (as I have briefly written already, by which, when you read, you may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ)... (Ephesians 3:2-4)

I remember that when I was younger I found passages like this in Paul's epistles off-putting. It came across to me as Paul bragging, pulling rank, bullying. When I read this passage the other day, it was so obvious why Paul wrote this that I didn't see how I could have missed it before. It has nothing to do with boasting; it's about evidence. Paul is not writing to credulous fools who believe everything they are told. They want to know how he knows. And Paul is not mentioning his personal encounter with Jesus to pull rank, but because he wants to persuade his audience of things that are very important, and this personal encounter is the reason they should believe he is telling the truth.

Coherentism

Joyless Moralist has a certain advantage in our debates, because while she seems to understand my philosophy fairly well, I have never been able to understand hers.  As a result, I probably misrepresent it, and perhaps I will be doing so again when I say that the following passage called into my mind the word "coherentism."  Coherentism is a school of epistemology according to which a belief can be considered justified/knowledge if it "coheres with"-- a large system of beliefs, even if none of the beliefs is justified.  Thus JM writes:

Obviously there have been very systematic and high-level discussions going on in periods when pretty much nobody was interested in Cartesian-type "rigor." It's clearly possible. And that shouldn't surprise us, because in point of fact we will find a large number of points of agreement with those we might wish to convince, and these become starting points. Not many people like arguing about religion as much as me, and I certainly have no commitment to a Cartesian view of knowledge, but this has never proved an obstacle in getting a discussion off the ground, with Muslims, Orthodox, atheists, adherents to Eastern religion or anyone else...  I have never met anyone "unlucky" enough not to reach the conclusion that there is order in the world, or that other minds exist. Nobody has ever complained, in a debate, that I was unfairly "imposing" such beliefs on them; you need a good amount of fairly perverse philosophical education to even worry about things like that.

JM suggests that it is not necessary, in Cartesian fashion, to dig down to the foundations of knowledge and see which beliefs are justified, so to speak, from the ground up.  Instead, we can find "points of agreement" with our interlocutors and use those as "starting places."  Of course, one may ask the question, do we really know that we are right about the points of agreement, or might they rather represent mistakes which we happen to have in common?  But JM seems to think it requires a "perverse philosophical education" to ask such questions too persistently.

Even if we accept that, however, there's another problem.  Suppose A, who thinks that B, is trying to persuade C, who believes that D, (A and C are persons; B and D, propositions) to come over to his way of thinking.  A discovers that he and C share a common belief that E, and manages to construct a proof that if E, then B.  If C wishes to have coherent beliefs, he then has two choices: he might accept B, or he might abandon E.  We have no reason, so far, to say which he ought to do.  More generally, a coherentist epistemology seems ab initio to deprive us of any grounds for choosing one coherent belief-system rather than another.

A might proceed to find common beliefs F, G, and H from which he can prove that B (or that E), but C may abandon these beliefs as well in preference to abandoning D. It would seem that the only way to make B really compelling is to find some belief X that is somehow indubitable, and to use that as a foundation for knowledge.  For Descartes, X is "I think therefore I am."  JM seems to doubt even that, or at least to say the phrase can mean nothing unless we know what "I" and "am" are.  It is difficult for me not to regard these concepts as at bottom self-evident, even if exploration beyond basic intuition might be possible and rewarding.  However, if JM is right, one response would be to look for some other truth that is really foundational.  JM seems not to want to do that, but, in rejecting the foundationalist approach to knowledge, I do not how she escapes the general problems with coherentism.

I should say that the two instances of shared beliefs she mentions-- order and other minds-- seem to me very strange and special cases of beliefs that, to put a hard matter in an inadequate way, can be doubted, as a mental gesture, but will rarely if ever really be disbelieved.  I agree that she is unlikely to ever meet anyone who does not believe those two, though the beliefs are also so ineffable that as soon as one attempts to imply them agreement will be imperilled.  My objections are to coherentism generally.  The particular applications of it JM has in mind may be sound, but for reasons that do not apply in general.

Epistemology and Mapmaking

In a recent debate with (mostly) Joyless Moralist, the subject of epistemology was raised.  I wrote:

It sometimes happens that an advance in epistemology occasions a loss in real insights which were not developed in ways that satisfy new epistemic standards.

To this Joyless Moralist replied:

This is one of the funniest statements I've read on this blog. New epistemic standards? So, it's as though the FESC (Federal Epistemic Standards Commission) passed some new rules, and now earlier insights, even though you admit that they're "real", have to be recalled? Maybe we could bribe the Epistemic Standard Police to look the other way while we sell some on the sly through the philosophy black market.

But seriously. When I say that an insight is "real", I mean that it captures some part of the truth. If you're adhering to an epistemic standard that excludes that, there's a problem with your standard, because the whole point of philosophy and theology is to seek the truth.

So I thought I'd quote one of my favorite sources on the ambiguous role of rising epistemic standards in intellectual history, Paul Krugman's Development, Geography and Economic Theory.  Krugman uses mapmaking as a metaphor:

A friend of mine who combines a professional interest in Africa with a hobby of collecting antique maps has written a fascinating paper on what he calls "the evolution of ignorance" about Africa. The paper describes how European maps of the African continent evolved from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

You might have supposed that the process would have been more or less linear: as European knowledge of the continent advanced, the maps would have shown both increasing accuracy and increasing levels of detail. But that's not what happened. In the fifteenth century, maps of Africa were, of course, quite inaccurate about distances, coastlines, and so on. They did, however, contain quite a lot of information about the interior, based essentially on second- or third-hand travelers' reports. Thus the maps showed Timbuktu, the River Niger, and so forth. Admittedly, they also contained quite a lot of untrue information, like regions inhabited by men with mouths in their stomachs. Still, in the early fifteenth century Africa on maps was a filled space.

Over time, the art of mapmaking and the quality of information used to make maps got steadily better. The coastline of Africa was first explored, then plotted with growing accuracy, and by the eighteenth century that coastline was shown in a manner essentially indistinguishable from that of modern maps. Cities and peoples along the coast were also shown with great fidelity.

On the other hand, the interior emptied out. The weird mythical creatures were gone, but so were the real cities and rivers. In a way, Europeans had become more ignorant about Africa than they had been before.

It should be obvious what happened: the improvement in the art of mapmaking raised the standard for what was considered valid data. Second-hand reports of the form "six days south of the end of the desert you encounter a vast river flowing from east to west" were no longer something you would use to draw your map. Only features of the landscape that had been visited by reliable informants equipped with sextants and compasses now qualified. And so the crowded if confused continental interior of the old maps became "darkest Africa," an empty space.

Krugman is using this as a metaphor for the recent history of the field of economics:

In these lectures I will present an interpretation of the evolution of ideas in the two fields of development and economic geography. I will argue that in each of these fields, between the 1940s and the 1970s, there was a cycle somewhat similar to the story of how improved mapmaking temporarily diminished European knowledge about Africa. A rise in the standards of rigor and logic led to a much improved level of understanding of some things, but for a time it also led to an unwillingness to confront those areas that the new technical rigor could not yet reach. Areas of inquiry that had been filled in, however imperfectly, became blanks.

Development and economic geography are fascinating subjects and the dissertation I want to write is related to this passage, but economics is not my concern here. Rather, Krugman's mapmaking metaphor may illuminate what JM found so odd in my statement. Socrates and Descartes, those defining figures of ancient and modern philosophy respectively, are notably skeptical; they question and doubt and undermine, and tend towards substituting acknowledged ignorance for claims to knowledge that are exposed as groundless. To focus on modern philosophy, much that the medievals thought they knew the moderns doubted, demanding reasons that could not be given. And when, as I think sometimes or often was the case, what the medievals believed and the moderns doubted contained a good deal of truth, a loss of real insight may have occurred.

If heightening one's epistemic scruples can lead to losses of true insights, why should we ever do it?  Because, of course, credulous people adopt inadequately supported false beliefs as well as inadequately supported true ones.  We sacrifice Timbuktu and the River Niger in order to stop believing in the men with mouths in their stomachs.  More specifically, it seems to me that epistemic scruples are often made more exacting when people encounter disagreement.  If everyone says A, I am satisfied; but if I encounter someone who thinks B instead, I am compelled to look for reasons.  Descartes lived in a world of Catholics, Muslims, Protestants, and Jews: who was right?  Socrates lived in a Greece whose beliefs had been challenged by encounters with foreign cultures and by new currents in philosophy: what was true?  One had to look for a common basis on which to found agreement.  The alternative is not appealing.  It is simply to insist that one's views are right and shout down the alternatives.

There is, however, an important difference between philosophy and mapmaking, which is related to something I discussed in an earlier post, "The Domains of Reason, and of Intersubjectivity."  There are things one can think about quite rationally, but where one can prove little or nothing because one's evidence is internal.  Mapmaking deals only in the intersubjective, but philosophy relies, sometimes, on introspection.  This limits the degree to which consensus can be established by means of academic debate.  The search for truth here ultimately calls for a very different kind of conversation.

Argument versus Scorn

The first verse of Psalm 1 makes an interesting parallel:

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. (Psalms 1:1)

Repetition is a frequently used poetic device in the psalms; a thought is said, then said again in different words.  So the parallel placement of "the ungodly... sinners... the scornful" suggests that the psalmist saw these three as almost synonyms, or at least closely related.  I have also seen the last word translated "the mockers."  I should add that ungodly sinners do not have a monopoly on mockery in the Psalms, for Psalm 2 says:

He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall hold them in derision. (Psalms 2:4)

Still, I think Psalms 1's identification of scorn as a defining trait of the wicked is more typical, and it reminds me of Nietzsche.  Nietzsche is certainly "scornful" and a "mocker," and this is an important if not the principal mode of persuasion he uses.  I think his heavy reliance on this mode of persuasion should be regarded as illegitimate, and should go a long way towards discrediting him as a major philosopher.  Furthermore, I think a worldview as evil and insane as Nietzsche's could not be advocated solely or primarily by argument.  Argument as a mode of persuasion cannot always be cleanly distinguished from rhetoric or poetry or scorn.  It is prone to error, and also, perhaps, has a tendency to lead to excessive skepticism and abdication of truth-claims.  Yet it has a sufficiently stubborn and persistent tendency towards truth that a capable and devoted practitioner of argument could never become as far gone as Nietzsche.

The following passage from Beyond Good and Evil was chosen more or less at random as an illustration:

228. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific appliances--and that "virtue," in my opinion, has been MORE injured by the TEDIOUSNESS of its advocates than by anything else;

Nietzsche, the mocker, attacks moral philosophers by calling them boring.  To an arguer, this is irrelevant: some truths may be boring, some falsehoods interesting, but one's business is to look for truth.  Statistics is a very boring subject but useful for understanding the world.

at the same time, however, I would not wish to overlook their general usefulness. It is desirable that as few people as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very desirable that morals should not some day become interesting! But let us not be afraid! Things still remain today as they have always been: I see no one in Europe who has (or DISCLOSES) an idea of the fact that philosophizing concerning morals might be conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner--that CALAMITY might be involved therein.

More mockery: Nietzsche suggests that moral philosophers are either cowards and hypocrites or playing the fool, performing a function of putting the mind to sleep which is the opposite of their stated mission yet which earns their bread.  There are also, of course, tantalizing hints here of arguments that might be interesting if they were developed.  Why and for whom is it "desirable" that few should reflect about morals?  He might be saying, like Voltaire, that one should not doubt the existence of God in front of the servants lest they steal the spoons.  Or, if Nietzsche is being ironic, what real view is he hinting at and masking?  None of this rises to the level of argument, however.

Observe, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians: how ponderously and respectably they stalk on, stalk along (a Homeric metaphor expresses it better) in the footsteps of Bentham, just as he had already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable Helvetius! (no, he was not a dangerous man, Helvetius, CE SENATEUR POCOCURANTE, to use an expression of Galiani).

Let me submit that to mock is essentially to devalue something, and this may consist of little more than conveying to one's interlocutor a low estimate of its value.  "Indefatigable" literally means something like not easily tired and thus ought to be something good, but a mocker uses the phrase as a means of devaluing it.  "Inevitable," a value-neutral word in itself, is if anything value-positive to an arguer, to say that B follows inevitably from A is (provided that we believe A) as much as to say that B is true.  Yet Nietzsche manages to suggest that the very inevitability of English utilitarians somehow devalues them.  Nietzsche gives "respectable" a negative connotation by coupling it with ponderous, and he uses "dangerous" with a positive connotation.  Such tricks illuminate the "ungodly... sinners... mockers" parallel in Psalm 1.  The mocker devalues the holy and the good, and thus spares the ungodly and the sinners from any pangs of conscience they might have.  No arguments are needed.

No new thought, nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better expression of an old thought, not even a proper history of what has been previously thought on the subject: an IMPOSSIBLE literature, taking it all in all, unless one knows how to leaven it with some mischief.

If Bentham and other utilitarians never expressed a new thought, nor fine-tuned or better expressed an old thought, why did anyone read them?  Yet people did.  So perhaps Nietzsche is missing something.  But the claim is, anyway, irrelevant.  Whether or not the English utilitarians were original has nothing to do with whether they were right.

In effect, the old English vice called CANT, which is MORAL TARTUFFISM, has insinuated itself also into these moralists (whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one MUST read them),

Why?  Aren't ad hominem attacks invalid?  If someone makes a good argument with bad motives, it is no less true.  Of course, if we are to interrogate the motives of the utilitarians, we might also interrogate those of Nietzsche, the pathetic, lonely, sexually inactive invalid, comforting himself by persuading himself he was better than others, enjoying the pleasures of scorn to compensate for lacking those of health and family and friendship that others enjoy.  Nietzsche seems rather more vulnerable than the utilitarians on this score.  But it's better to put all questions of motives to one side.

concealed this time under the new form of the scientific spirit; moreover, there is not absent from them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience, from which a race of former Puritans must naturally suffer, in all their scientific tinkering with morals.

Again: ad hominem, therefore irrelevant.  But perhaps persuasive, as mockery.

(Is not a moralist the opposite of a Puritan? That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as questionable, as worthy of interrogation, in short, as a problem? Is moralizing not-immoral?)

This remark is a display of ignorance.  It is common, even typical, for puritanical men and women to interrogate their morality, as history shows.

In the end, they all want English morality to be recognized as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind, or the "general utility," or "the happiness of the greatest number,"--no! the happiness of ENGLAND, will be best served thereby. They would like, by all means, to convince themselves that the striving after English happiness, I mean after COMFORT and FASHION (and in the highest instance, a seat in Parliament), is at the same time the true path of virtue; in fact, that in so far as there has been virtue in the world hitherto, it has just consisted in such striving.

A charge like this certainly would need to be backed up.  The claim that utilitarians identify "the happiness of the greatest number" with the happiness of England is obviously and grossly unjust-- clearly Bentham's principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain applies to all humans, not just Englishmen.  Any utilitarian knows that people might derive pleasure from many things, not just comfort and fashion, and that there are differences among people and cultures as to what brings pleasure.  Certainly pleasure and pain are concepts readily intelligible to people of all cultures.  The charge of English ethnocentrism is singularly inapt as a critique of utilitarianism.

Not one of those ponderous, conscience-stricken herding-animals (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as conducive to the general welfare) wants to have any knowledge or inkling of the facts that the "general welfare" is no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum,

Nietzsche has been building up to this, and we may credit him here with a shred of something that might be characterized as argument.  Nietzsche is, in his vague and hysterical way, making a point which was made by his contemporary Vilfredo Pareto and is now more cogently expressed in the standard doctrines of mainstream economics.  Utility can be deduced from behavior, but we have no compelling grounds for defining utility in such a way as to be amenable to cardinal rather than ordinal representation (that is, to say "x gives Person A twice as much (as opposed to simply more) satisfaction than y), or to regard it as inter-personally comparable.  Unfortunately, he exaggerates to the point of making his claim untenable.  People possess and can express some notion of their own good, can derive from analogy to themselves and from listening to what other people say some notion of the good of others, and can, by observing people's consumption of market commodities and summing up total consumption across the economy, arrive at some concrete measures of the general welfare.  Certainly there can be differences of opinion about how to define and measure the general welfare, and there may even be fundamental and fatal flaws in the concept that careful argument could expose-- ultimately I might even agree that there are-- but to say it is only a "nostrum" and that it cannot "at all be grasped" is simply naive. 

The phrase "herding-animals" is one of Nietzsche's favorite expressions of mockery.  It is, as usual, singularly inapt.  Modern European civilization places unique emphasis on the individual's welfare and liberty, where most other civilizations have been more inclined to subordinate the individual to the society, or, to put it in Nietzschean terms, the "herd."

--that what is fair to one MAY NOT at all be fair to another,

Notice the switch from talk of "the general welfare" to talk of what is "fair."  Nietzsche is either confused or sloppy here, for he seems to treat considerations of justice and utility as synonymous.  They are, of course, distinct: a claim of justice characteristically overrides considerations of utility at least in the immediate sense.  Of course, many moral philosophers would deny that "what is fair to one may not... be fair to another," arguing instead that actions and decisions are just or unjust objectively, independently of anyone's point of view.  Nietzsche's relativistic alternative is asserted here as if it were revealed truth, with no argument in its support. 

that the requirement of one morality for all is really a detriment to higher men, in short, that there is a DISTINCTION OF RANK between man and man, and consequently between morality and morality.

If Nietzsche had offered a clear explanation of what "higher men" are, of why we should believe in (innate?) "distinctions of rank" in some fundamental sense, then we could have an argument about (a) whether "the requirement of one morality for all is really a detriment to higher men," and (b) if so, whether that is a cogent point against it-- for one might, after all, say that yes, the requirement of one morality hurts higher men, but it benefits the rest of us, and that is more important.  But Nietzsche does not, and could not, define what "higher men" are.  To the "higher man" we apply the criticism which Nietzsche unwarrantedly made of the concept of the "general welfare": it is "no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum."

Nietzsche's words here eerily suggest the philosophy of Dostoyevsky's character Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.  Raskolnikov thought that morality is binding on most people, on ordinary people, but that some higher personalities are entitled to step over obstacles.  He acts on this philosophy by murdering an old woman, and the novel describes (among other things) this act and the breakdown of Raskolnikov's personality under the weight of secrecy and remorse thereafter.  Strangely, Nietzsche seems to have bought into Raskolnikov's personal philosophy, without irony.

On the other hand, Nietzsche is in another sense right, even unproblematically right.  There are indeed distinctions of rank (vertical) and of profession (horizontal) in life, and sometimes certain differences in morality attach to them.  Thus, unconsidered, opinionated outbursts might be a great sin for a statesman, but a small sin or even an appealing foible in a carpenter.  The same utterance might be a valiant effort from the mouth of a schoolboy, but an appalling lapse from the mouth of a professor.  To sell his services to the highest bidder is meritorious in a businessman but wicked in a judge.  All this can be quite consistent with a utilitarian meta-ethics.

They are an unassuming and fundamentally mediocre species of men, these utilitarian Englishmen, and, as already remarked, in so far as they are tedious, one cannot think highly enough of their utility. One ought even to ENCOURAGE them, as has been partially attempted in the following rhymes:--

Hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling,
"Longer--better," aye revealing,
Stiffer aye in head and knee;
Unenraptured, never jesting,
Mediocre everlasting,
SANS GENIE ET SANS ESPRIT!

Again note the mocking tone, exemplified by the word "mediocre," an odd word which superficially means merely average or moderate, but which has come to have a highly derogatory connotation.  The verse certainly makes the English utilitarians seem ridiculous, but what does it have to do with the validity of their arguments?

Mockery can be an effective form of persuasion because it makes people want to be on the side of the mocker rather than the mocked.  In sixth grade, I found myself in an environment in which mockery was the dominant mode of social competition.  Kids were always "making fun of" each other, often in new, sexual ways which they were just becoming old enough to know about.  Those who were best at it rose to the top of the cool hierarchy, because others were intimidated.  Losers and pariahs had a role to play because they were the objects on which others practiced, and demonstrated, their skills of insulting others.  One could, of course, present evidence that one is not, say, a "faggot," but in that climate of discourse, one would only be laughed at all the more. 

Nietzsche relies heavily on these schoolyard-bully tactics.  Those tempted to agree with the English utilitarians are threatened with being called "unenraptured, never jesting," "mediocre," "ponderous" and "inevitable," guilty of "cant" and "tartuffism," ethnocentric and narrow-minded "herding animals."  Those who agree with Nietzsche are enticed with the promise of being classified as "higher men," "distinguished by rank" from the "mediocre;" they are addressed elsewhere as "ye free spirits" and "philosophers of the future."  To snobs, this incentive is hard to resist.  (Might this explain why Nietzsche is overrated by academic philosophers?)

Joyless Moralist, who has some credibility because she does not agree with Nietzsche herself, writes that "I have to recognize Nietzsche as a thinker of a very high order, because he simply is. Very few have had such deep insight into the character of modern philosophy, or levied such cutting criticisms."  If such is Nietzsche's specialty, a passage like the above, where Nietzsche is levying "cutting criticisms" against an important school of modern philosophy, should represent Nietzsche at his best.  Am I suppose to believe, then, that this is a powerful critique of utilitarianism? 

But it isn't.  In the middle of Beyond Good and Evil (228), Nietzsche gestures towards an argument against utilitarianism, which he expresses in an exaggerated way that renders it untenable.  His sneer that the general welfare is "no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum" might serve as a provocation to some clarifications by utilitarians, but only a gullible and foolish reader would simply be convinced by the claim.  Granted, a related argument, subtler and less exaggerated, was made by economists of the "marginal revolution," roughly contemporary with Nietzsche, and became a point of departure for significant revisions of utilitarianism as a meta-ethics and a retreat from some of its stronger claims, but we can't give Nietzsche credit for that, since he does not indicate he could have understood, let alone originated the arguments of Pareto (or of Menger, his chronological predecessor).  A hint of mediocre argument is embedded in sentence after sentence of sneering, which account for most of the persuasive force of the paragraph, yet which must be regarded as so many wasted words unless we are ready to concede that scorn is a valid mode of philosophizing.  Should we?  (Meanwhile, a few words about "the higher man" that are thrown in may help to persuade via snob appeal.)

This is one of hundreds of paragraphs in Beyond Good and Evil, and notice how laboriously I have had to answer it.  Nietzsche is like a philosophical guerrilla warrior: he can't win a fair fight, but he can make so many sneak attacks that he might achieve a sort of victory through attrition if you try to argue with him.  His fans never have to concede defeat, because one can always respond to a rout of this or that paragraph by saying that it needs to be understood in the context of his broader work.  (One would not have to do this with a philosopher who persuades by argument, of course.  He can be attacked at any point and is obliged to defend his claims.)  That's why I think what is needed is to disqualify him ex ante by conceiving the philosophical enterprise in such a way that philosophers can refuse to let themselves be baited by Nietzsche's tactics.  Joyless Moralist challenges me:

But it does seem pretty funny to me that you want to insist that Nietzsche isn't really a philosopher when pretty much the whole philosophical world agrees that he is. Perhaps you should lay out more clearly and exactly what the guidelines are for being a philosopher.

Sure.  What is philosophy?  The paradigmatic philosophers, as I see it, are Socrates and Descartes.  Not that they are the best philosophers, but more than others they embody the spirit of inquiry.  In each case, the type of man, and the enterprise he represented, has an importance separate from the content of his thought.  Doubt everything, or question everything, is the ideal Socrates and Descartes represent, and it marks an ethic definitive of philosophy even if it is also, perhaps, an unattainable ideal.  Of course, there are things one finds one can't doubt-- cogito ergo sum-- but a good philosopher does not simply dismiss his own doubts, or those expressed by others, and he often anticipates and answers those that others might express.  A good philosopher tries not to make lots of unwarranted claims.  He relies on reason to persuade, because he does not believe or take himself to know lots of things that cannot be rationally arrived at.  Or, if he does accept some things on non-rational grounds, he accepts that he does not quite have a right to do so as a philosopher, and makes apologies and disclaimers where appropriate.  We might say, without condemnation, that he is, to that extent, not a philosopher.

This way of defining philosophy is somewhat consistent with traditional intellectual history.  Historically, Descartes' challenge is usually taken as the starting-point of modern philosophy.  Greek philosophy preceded Socrates, but the pre-Socratics were, for the most part, more like forerunners of the natural sciences than philosophers in our sense.  I get the sense that few contemporary philosophers feel they owe much to thinkers before Plato and Aristotle.  (A few might be indebted to Heraclitus or Pythagoras.)  Socrates and Descartes can thus be taken as symbols or representatives of traditions, the traditions of ancient and modern philosophy respectively.  Of course, this leaves medieval Catholic philosophy out in the cold, which won't quite do.  It seems to me that academic philosophers do tend to regard medieval Catholic philosophy a bit condescendingly or dismissively, because these philosophers were willing to accept religious authority as decisive evidence, which strikes them as morally cowardly and/or rationally invalid.  Yet the medieval scholastics were assiduous reasoners and arguers, and on the strength of that may be counted among philosophers despite a somewhat unphilosopherly epistemology.

Not surprisingly, Nietzsche, who hated Socrates and the modern philosophy that Nietzsche saw as vitiated by Platonist habits, does not fit in these traditions.  The fact that Nietzsche is demanding a change in the rules seems to make JM more willing to score him by different rules than other philosophers are scored by.  Believing in instinct, he writes by instinct like a prophet, and relies for persuasion on the instinct of his readers to side with the strong rather than the weak.  Believing in the Ubermensch and the will-to-power, he writes imperiously, dictating from above.  Seeing one morality as detrimental to "higher man," he refuses to accept one epistemological morality and to do battle on the level playing field of argument.  Perhaps it seems to JM and other philosophers unfair, even question-begging, to demand that Nietzsche play by rules which his philosophy repudiates.

But it is equally unfair to ask philosophers who rely on argument to persuade, to enter the arena against Nietzsche, who persuades mainly by the use of scorn.  Scorn is an easier weapon to use than argument, after all.  And argumentative philosophers could deploy scorn, as Bertrand Russell does to some extent in his appraisal of Nietzsche in History of Western Philosophy, for example, if it were not against their scruples.  (The bumper sticker "God is dead - Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead - God." is another example of attacking Nietzsche via his own weapon of scornful rhetoric.)  We could easily imagine a discipline of philosophy that consisted of dueling scorners satirizing and mocking each other and impugning each other's motives.  But I don't believe that a discipline like that would be likely to lead to any truth, whereas a discipline based on argument might lead to a good deal. 

If Nietzsche is to be ranked among the philosophers without the risk of legitimizing scorn as a tactic, it would really be necessary to perform a culling operation first, separating the wheat of argument from the chaff of scorn.  But I get the impression that there would be very little wheat.  Psalm 1 compares the ungoldy to "chaff which the wind blows away."  Apt.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 212:

It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a man INDISPENSABLE for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever found himself, and HAS BEEN OBLIGED to find himself, in contradiction to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his day.

"It is always obvious to me..."  But if so, he should have no trouble proving it with examples.  He would not be able to do so because the claim is false.  For example.  Locke accepted much from the schoolmen.  Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants.  Jesus sought to fulfill the Jewish law.  Aristotle borrowed many ideas from Plato.  Pick any philosopher at random and you'll find that he was largely building on his predecessors, though no doubt he will have differed in certain ways (or why write?).  As for "the ideal of his day," the concept is itself crude.  Every age, and especially the creative age, is diverse enough to have many ideals.

Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one calls philosophers--who rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators--have found their mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end, however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad conscience of their age. In putting the vivisector's knife to the breast of the very VIRTUES OF THEIR AGE, they have betrayed their own secret; it has been for the sake of a NEW greatness of man, a new untrodden path to his aggrandizement.

Prophets and philosophers have indeed often criticized much that is regarded as virtue.  But they must have some standard by which to criticize it.  And their criticism has no force unless their audience accepts, or at least sympathizes with, the standard.  Thus, Socrates accepts love of knowledge as an ideal, which his contemporary Athenians shared; but he charges them with falling short of this ideal.  Nietzsche is doing the same thing, only less honestly because he is pretending not to. 

They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality, how much virtue was OUTLIVED,

From every pulpit in Christendom are frequently heard charges that congregations are guilty of all sorts of sins, including "hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect"-- the joke is on Nietzsche that he thinks he is doing something novel when he is (for the moment at least) following the script of the Sunday morning preacher.  But for this criticism to have any force, the moral critic's audience must already believe that hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect are vices; that is, the moral critic must borrow a standard from his audience in order to blame them for falling short of it.  He may, indeed, persuade them to see more in it than they saw; but to say that the moral philosopher proposes a "NEW greatness" is to misunderstand his role and to render him incoherent.

they have always said "We must remove hence to where YOU are least at home" In the face of a world of "modern ideas," which would like to confine every one in a corner, in a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays, would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the conception of "greatness," precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he would even determine worth and rank according to the amount and variety of that which a man could bear and take upon himself, according to the EXTENT to which a man could stretch his responsibility.

But why should mere multifariousness and all-roundness be a standard of greatness?  The jack-of-all-trades as hero?  Nietzsche is proposing a standard here, and of course it is not a novel one: commonsense regards someone with many talents as better than one with few, ceteris paribus.  But it is a very inadequate one.

Nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will, nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of will

We have here, please note, what appears to be an empirical claim.  Is it true?  How would it be tested?  It does not strike me as a very astute opinion.  Even to define "weakness of the will" seems rather difficult, and seems to me also to require a prior notion of will, i.e., free will, as something separate from external/involuntary factors.  Since Nietzsche has elsewhere denied free will any such effort on his part would seem to be fatally flawed from the start.  Still, if we are to rely on the casual, intuitive connotations of the phrase "freedom of the will," the Europeans of Nietzsche's day, who were inventing, building, fighting, conquering, governing themselves and others, raising families, writing, distributing charity, worshipping, etc., abundantly and energetically, would seem to be, by historical standards and by objective measures to the extent that these can be contrived, unusually strong-willed.

 consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution, must specially be included in the conception of "greatness",

This presupposes that "strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution" are virtues; for otherwise, if we thought they were lacking, we should welcome their decline.  Obviously, commonsense does regard these (except maybe "sternness") as virtues; or in other words, they are already "included in the concept of 'greatness'," with no help from Nietzsche's new philosopher.  We might credit Nietzsche with reinventing the wheel, if he explained why these things are virtues; but he does not, so we can't.

with as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity,

Nietzsche seems to contrast "strength of will" with "renunciation" and "humility."  But of course, to practice renunciation as an ascetic requires precisely strength of will, and humility is not at all inconsistent with "capacity for prolonged resolution."

was suited to an opposite age--such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness In the time of Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go--"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated--and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly enough "Do not dissemble before me! here--we are equal!" At present, on the contrary, when throughout Europe the herding- animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when "equality of right" can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong--I mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged, against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility,

Higher, higher, higher, higher.  The extent to which leans on this physical metaphor, is, as Chesterton noticed, a mark of weakness.  Note also the use of the phrase "rare, strange, and privileged" as an expression of approval.  But of course, what is rare is not necessarily good.  Is it not only not necessary but seemingly impossible that is strange is privileged, for "privilege" implies a position of routinized respect within a social system, and social norms can relate only to the familiar.  Nietzsche likes to argue via word-association.  It is possible to dissect and eviscerate the word-associations; but it is really better to simply ignore this illegitimate and invalid argumentative tactic.

the creative plenipotence and lordliness--at present it belongs to the conception of "greatness" to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative, and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he asserts "He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of super-abundance of will; precisely this shall be called GREATNESS: as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full." And to ask once more the question: Is greatness POSSIBLE-- nowadays?

Nietzsche arrives at the phrase "the man beyond good and evil" via a stream of suggestive rhetoric.  We are supposed to approve of him, on the grounds that he is "noble," "capable of being different," and "living by personal initiative."  We approve, of course, of those who are noble, who are capable of being different, and who live by personal initiative, because we regard these things, at least tentatively and conditionally, as good.  "Noble" is a rather vague word, the content of which is more than usually dependent on situations and social conventions.  To be "capable of being different" is good because sometimes one ought to be different, i.e., sometimes it is good to be different.  To have "personal initiative" is good if we assume that people generally desire the good and lack of initiative is one reason they often fail to achieve it; but of course, a person who shows great initiative in seeking evil is not good.  So, in effect, Nietzsche throws out a bunch of phrases that we approve of because we regard them as connected with goodness, and then connects these rhetorically with "the man beyond good and evil."  To the extent that any reader is convinced by this he is merely confused.  Whether or not Nietzsche in general is, as I have said, a "trivial and incoherent thinker," he certainly is that in this passage. 

Joyless Moralist has written that:

This will never do. You cannot read Nietzsche this way; or if you insist that this is the only way you know how to read, then by all means, put him away and don't bother about him at all.

I do not insist that this is the only way I know how to read; I insist that this, or something like this-- that is, rational argument rather than mere suggestive rhetoric-- is the only legitimate way to read/evaluate an argument, at any rate by anyone claiming to be a philosopher or to be thinking and writing in a philosophical mode.  JM quotes a friend who says that "Nietzsche's love of truth was so great that he felt compelled to shower her in mud, lest the unworthy identify her and use her for sport."  I reject this defense of Nietzsche.  A lover of truth must have more scruples in his methods of persuasion than Nietzsche displays in Beyond Good and Evil (212) and elsewhere.

It is troubling that JM is willing to condone Nietzsche in the same way that it would be troubling if honorable soldiers were willing to condone terrorists.  The great merit of philosophers is that they try hard to think clearly, that they practice a certain high honesty, that they avoid merely opinionated or prejudiced claims, that they do not let the mere wish be father of the thought, that they explain themselves from first principles as much as possible, that they seek to be ojective, to give arguments for their views which can be acceptable to all regardless of their station in life or disposition.  Nietzsche practices none of these intellectual virtues.  As such he is entitled to none of the respect that the public traditionally grants to philosophers.  To admit Nietzsche to the company of great philosophers is to debase the currency of philosophy.

"Credulous"

In the enormous debate on free will that we started here last week, I was struck by something Joyless Moralist wrote:

There's no way to make this analogy that doesn't sound self-laudatory, but nonetheless it's the best way I can think of to explain what I think is going on. What we're doing here is much analogous to the situation in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. (I'll assume you're all familiar with it, though if not I'd be glad to explain.) For the people tied up watching shadows on the cave wall, talk of colors or 3-dimensional objects, or, even worse, sunlight, is simply unintelligible. It's pure nonsense-talk, and people in such a position will insist on trying to explain all intuitions or experiences through the limited vocabulary of cave-shadows.

Meanwhile, people who have explored to some degree the more metaphysically complex world outside the cave will still have some understanding (albeit perhaps a clumsier one) of the logic of the cave dwellers, but they also clearly perceive that there are some things that the cave-dwellers' vocabulary and logic cannot describe or grasp. So when their metaphysically impoverished comrades demand that they explain these other entities in cave-language, this demand simply cannot be met. The logic of this higher realm will not be intelligible to them until they've done some credulous exploration of it on their own. The skeptic will necessarily be stuck in a trap of his own making.

I don't remember hearing before the word "credulous" used with a positive connotations.  Credulous is the person who believes the advertisement, who falls prey to the conman, who believes in phrenology or astrology.  A defining feature of philosophy is to rise above the credulity of the masses, critically examining one's every belief.

And yet I found myself sympathizing with Joyless Moralist's reversal of the word's usual connotations.  For me this is the end of a road which began with Descartes, not literally with reading Meditations on First Philosophy or something but with a recognition of the moral imperative of questioning one's beliefs to the very foundations in order to be honest in one's worldview, which in my own life paralleled to some extent the history of modern philosophy.  In The Pilgrim's Regress, C.S. Lewis represents Reason as a virginal warrior woman, who appears in the hero's darkest hour and slays a giant to free him from a hideous prison.  It is a moving and inspiring scene, but unfortunately obscure, so I'll substitute a more familiar analogy: the Hebrews walking through the Red Sea.  Just as Moses led the Hebrews through the Red Sea on dry land, and then the sea drownd Phaoroh's following army, Reason can liberate us from all manner of superstitions and powerful falsehoods. 

But only into the desert of skepticism.  The Cartesian project fails in a particular way.  I think the cogito ergo sum is wise and infallible as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far at all.  It seems to be the generally accepted view that Descartes' argument fails thereafter.  I haven't read it carefully enough to say, myself, and the general outline of the argument-- first prove the existence of God, then rely on a good God not to comprehensively deceive us-- I sort of like, but that Descartes fails to apply the rigor to which he initially seemed to aspire I have little doubt.  Hume later carried the Cartesian project (or something like it; to what extent British empiricists like Locke and Berkeley, who were more influential on Hume than Descartes as far as I understand, took themselves to be continuing a project begun by Descartes, I don't know) to its climax with his demonstration of the groundlessness of our belief in inductive reasoning, in causation, and in many other concepts necessary to sanity and common sense.  Where does one go from here?  Is the Cartesian project a mistake from the beginning?  But one cannot-- morally one cannot, and in any case one cannot do so because belief is not wholly voluntary-- go back to the unexamined opinions which preceded it and which it demolished.  The lesson I draw from this is, as I think I put it in a discussion with Joyless Moralist, that we must be more "latitudinarian about what we accept as primary evidences."  She thought this made nonsense of my claim to be in the tradition of Descartes; and I would agree that it involves a considerable modification of the Cartesian project.

Anyway, the unusual way in which JM uses the word "credulous" in the passage quoted captures pretty well what I've come to think is necessary.  People who are in the grip of what they think is a well-grounded and certain worldview, whether it be Mormonism or materialism (which, by the way, Reason quickly disposes of by pointing out that there is no grounds for accepting this impoverished ontology, and plenty of grounds for not accepting it since there is much that it exhibits no tendency to be able to explain), tend to trample on the delicate intuitions which I think are essential clues on the path to truth.  Only when the false certainties have been demolished by an encounter with skepticism (symbolized by Descartes) can one realize-- like a shipwreck victim who spares every nail and every bit of cloth-- how valuable these intuitions are, because they are all we have.  Reason leads one out of the bondage of socially accepted formulae and superstitions and falsehoods into the desert of skepticism, but I think "credulous exploration" is a good description of part of what is needed to learn truth.

Continuing an earlier discussion:

A formalization might be of use. Suppose there are six relevant circumstances: A, B, C, D, and E. Person P has feasible options F and G. The determinist view is that, if A, B, C, D, and E really are ALL the relevant circumstances, then they must determine that P will choose either F or G. The free will view is that P might, in all the circumstances, choose either F or G. Naturally, if he is asked to justify choosing F, and if A, B, and D favor F over G, he will say he chose F because of A, B, and D. But he might just as well have chosen G, in which case he would say it because of C and E. There is typically no way to quantify the "strength" of the reasons for each choice and say which is "stronger." To this a determinist would say that if, confronted with circumstances A, B, C, D, and E, Person X sometimes chooses F and sometimes G, or if Person X chooses F while a not-relevantly-different Person Y chooses G, then A, B, C, D, and E must not constitute a full set of relevant circumstances. There must be some circumstances J, M, and Q (say) which are also relevant. But what if we hold J, M, and Q constant as well and still observe that when the new list of relevant circumstances are the same, the same person on different occasions, or different but relevantly-identical persons, sometimes choose F and sometimes G? In that case the determinist must search farther afield for circumstances that differed that can be suggested, plausibly or not, as possible causes for the different choices observed. No matter how often he is disproven by showing that any given list of circumstances, the determinist need not despair, for there are always more circumstances he can appeal to if need be. His position is that *some* set of circumstances is sufficient to determine choice; we may never find it, but no matter. Determinism is a leap of faith. Not being one for leaps of faith, I dismiss determinism as an irritating distraction. Of course, one can also deny free will by accepting that the choice is not determined but attributing the variation to randomness. Never mind the difficulty of defining randomness. Common sense recognizes the distinction between chance and choice but this can be put to one side if we like. And if the proponent of free will answers by saying the choice wasn't random because he had reasons for his choice, one can jump back and (forgetting the previous argument) say that that's determinism again. Choice is neither random nor determined. People have reasons for action, which makes choice different from randomness; but a person might fail to act despite having good reason to do so, as often happens. Internal deliberation is not a deterministic process; it involves choice. To ask what is the mechanism of choice is a bit like asking the mechanism by which gravity operates. We observe choice; we observe gravity. Perhaps more fundamental explanations of these phenomena exist, perhaps not, but to insist on finding a mechanism behind everything just leads to an infinite regress. For most purposes they would not be necessary or relevant in any case. There is much that is difficult to understand here, no doubt, but you can only begin to understand it when you take our one, difficult, source of evidence, introspection, seriously. We choose; that's the first fact of our mental experience; reasons play a role, but will and not circumstances ultimately decides; and it is idle to indulge in hypotheticals about whether a long enough list of circumstances could eliminate the scope for choice, for experiment can offer no corrective to intuition. So there is free will; but what is its nature? That's when you can get off the treadmill of sophistries and start to explore the really interesting questions. For example, how is character related to choice? Our character does not make our choices for us. I trust my computer not to lie because it is a deterministic system. I trust my friend not to lie because of his character. But I know that he *could* lie. Our character may help determine the choice set, however. One cannot do what one cannot imagine, and imagination depends on character. Plots of seduction may never even occur to a pure man; shrewd schemes may never occur to a stupid one. Given one's choice set-- the set of imagined feasible responses to a situation-- character may determine the ease with which one chooses certain alternatives. A virtuous man may feel great resistance to lying, while a cowardly man may feel great resistance to standing and fighting at risk of pain and death. Gratitude and blame are responses to choice, and only make sense if there is free will. If you are a robot without free will it is senseless for me to be grateful to you for your services or to blame you for any harms you do me. Of course, one may fail to feel due gratitude to a benefactor or proper blame for cheating or cruelty. One reason this is done is that one may "take someone for granted," forgetting the free will of a parent or a servant and regarding them as indifferently as one would regard a machine. Though culpable, this may be a natural response to something being reliable: If Mommy always makes me pancakes for breakfast, it might begin to seem more like a natural law than an act of will. But consistency is not decisive evidence against the operation of free will. A person may become habituated and act "automatically"-- as drivers stay between the lines of the road without thinking about it-- but a person may also make the same choice, over and over again. And this has implications for theology. Suppose I say that the sun rises every morning not because of a natural law, but because God commands it to rise, again and again, never tiring of it, but always rejoicing in the majestic splendor of its light refreshing and quickening the world. That might give you a sense of insecurity: suppose God should, one day, change His mind. But He will not, "for His mercy endureth forever." Then it doesn't matter, you might say. But it does, I think. If choice, not deterministic causation, makes the sun rise, then gratitude is an appropriate response to every dawning day. And since gratitude, particularly gratitude for something as splendid as a sunrise, is a wonderful feeling, this hypothesis of God's freedom makes the world a pleasanter place.