The Free Thinker

The Human Dignity Conspiracy by Peter Augustine Lawler (via Brothers Judd):

The thoughtful evolutionary scientist Daniel Dennett, in his very positive contribution to the Council volume, says that human beings are different enough from the other animals to need morality, and he adds, contrary to Pinker, that we even need confidence in our equal dignity. He agrees with Pinker that claims for dignity have been basically Christian, and that these claims have been refuted by the scientific discovery that everything we think and do has a material cause. Our beliefs in dignity and the soul have the same status as the discredited belief in mermaids. It is no sillier to believe in a half-woman/half-fish that no one has seen than to believe in a half-body/half-soul that no one has seen.[15]

Dennett, however, has a scientific explanation for why we need the scientifically discredited belief in dignity. We are social animals who have brains big enough to conceive of projects that will enable us to live purposeful lives, but there is no scientific basis for the freedom at the foundation of human conceptions of purpose. So we cannot live well without useful illusions—free will, love, dignity, etc. Even the idea that any particular human life matters at all is merely a fiction—but a fiction worth maintaining. We have seen that nihilism has all sorts of undesirable social consequences; therefore, we need to sustain these illusions in the face of what we know about our accidental, material, and evolutionary existences.

Dennett’s ingenious solution to the incompatibility between scientific truth and our need for dignified belief is that we should justify our allegiance to the useful fiction of equal dignity by acknowledging the good life it makes possible. It is indispensable for the habits and trust needed to perpetuate social and political institutions. We can stop all this pointless obsessing over whether the belief is actually true by just admitting that it is not, but science can still explain why we need to believe it anyway.

Dennett’s pragmatic hope that we can stop caring about whether our belief in dignity is actually true is not shared by any other author in the Council’s book. In fact, the pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty had a simpler idea: let’s call true whatever belief makes us happy. Rorty, of course, never called his approach dignified. Dennett himself is too dignified to deny the truth of what he thinks he knows, and there is some dignity, too, in his humane intention to spare us the consequences of a dignity-free world. It seems he denies the reality of the dignity he himself displays only because to do otherwise would require admitting that human beings are mysteriously free from nature or materialistic causation. Yet in Dennett’s well-­intentioned confusion, he remains stuck with acknowledging that, in some way, we are the only species that can be held responsible for perpetuating both human nature and the very conditions of life on our planet. Is there really no dignity in that?

Very interesting. The attempt to find an account of ethics based in materialism is not one to which I am sympathetic: it seems to me quite clearly doomed, and also unnecessary, since materialism is false. Still, I am surprised that Dennett concedes as much as Lawler seems to be saying that he does. I would have expected him to insist that materialism can be embraced without such a high cost in terms of the tenability of our ordinary moral intuitions and values.

Free will is foundational: we know it by introspection, with certainty. By contrast, Descartes and Hume and Popper and the skeptics are right that all scientific knowledge, i.e., knowledge derived by induction from patterns in sense-experience, is conjectural. To reject free will in favor of "science" is, at best, to reject better evidence in favor of worse. Actually, it is not even that, for the conceit that "everything" is determined by materialistic laws is fallaciously to transpose a working assumption of science into a conclusion of science, though this is not the sort of thing that science could ever validly conclude. Without free will there can be no ethics because you can't be blamed for what you can't help doing. The converse is not true, however: there could be free will without ethics, although we might not be so intensely aware that we have free will if we didn't have morality to give us a strong reason to resist our inclinations. But what an odd world Dennett conceives of, in which humans have a need to live purposeful lives, though there is no purpose in anything and "even the idea that any particular human life matters at all is a fiction!"

"Barack Obama criticizes internet censorship at meeting in China" (The Guardian):

Barack Obama criticised internet censorship as he spoke to students in Shanghai today and praised freedom of expression and political participation.

The US president told the gathering of 400 young people that his country regarded such liberties as universal values. But he stopped short of direct reference to human rights abuses in China, as some activists had urged. Aides have said that Obama, who arrived tonight in the capital, Beijing, last night, will raise them in his meetings with Chinese leaders.

He will hold a joint press conference with President Hu Jintao and visit the Forbidden City on a brief sightseeing break in the bilateral discussions. The two men met for dinner tonight.

Sinologists in the US have long encouraged Washington to reach out to the Chinese public, as well as its leaders. But yesterday's meeting underlined the difficulties of doing so.

The event had been billed as a town hall-style meeting, but Chinese officials rejected US proposals that 1,000 people should attend and that it should be broadcast live nationwide.

Instead, it was streamed on the White House site, broadcast live on a local Shanghai television channel and transmitted in text form on state news agency Xinhua's website. Most Chinese citizens will have seen only brief extracts – not including the remarks on censorship.

This is a new departure for a president who has so far been inclined to appease dictators (Ahmadinejad, Putin-Medvedev) and give democrats and human rights the cold shoulder (the Green Revolution, the Dalai Lama, Honduran constitutionalists, Poles and Czechs wanting missile shields, Georgia).  Hopefully this marks a change of direction for Obama foreign policy.

What Does MacIntyre See in Nietzsche?

After reading a bit of Nietzsche I became puzzled at his high reputation, and particularly at the respect shown him from someone I respect, Alasdair MacIntyre, of which Joyless Moralist reminded me.  JM writes:

It shouldn't be so hard to understand why people like MacIntyre see Nietzsche as one of the main (perhaps THE main) interlocutors. In a way, Nietzsche is one of the only modern thinkers who poses a *real* challenge to MacIntyre's way of thinking.

This was bewildering, since after listening to a few hours of Beyond Good and Evil I didn't see how Nietzsche could pose a challenge to anyone's way of thinking.  There are snatches of reasoning here and there, but in general he scarcely presents a shred of argument for the ethos he is advocating, preferring to thrust it out there as if we are supposed to take it as revelation or prophecy, or at least as if it should have some appeal to our intuition.  The ethos is in itself grotesque, but Nietzsche is enough of an artist to give it a certain limited aesthetic appeal, so that you can see how he continues to attract a small but dedicated following, and even, perhaps, how he might have been able to drive an entire age mad.  But what appeal Nietzsche has is based on rhetoric and insults to his opponents (thus giving us motives of cowardice and/or vanity to take his side rather than be the target of his jeers).  So it seems the best answer is to offer a sober outline the logic and foreseeable evil consequences of Nietzsche's ethos, mixed with expressions of well-earned contempt, in order to make those tempted to indulge in Nietzschean vainglory will be overcome with shame and disgust and turn away from it.  And yet MacIntyre seems to want, not only to put Nietzsche on a level with Kant and Bentham, but to put him above them.  How can this be?

So I re-read the relevant chapter, Chapter 9, entitled "Nietzsche or Aristotle?" from After Virtue, to see what MacIntyre really has to say.  First, it was a relief to see that MacIntyre has only contempt for the positive ethos Nietzsche advocates:

I have already said justifiably harsh words about Nietzsche's construction of that at once absurd and dangerous fantasy, the Ubermensch... (p. 113)  For it is in his relentlessly serious pursuit of the problem [of how to construct a new good], not in his frivolous solutions that Nietzsche's greatness lies... (p. 114)

So, MacIntyre shares my horror and contempt at Nietzsche's wicked, elitist ethos, dismissing it with casual sentences.  This is in contrast to Joyless Moralist, who plays devil's advocate, seemingly in an attempt to defend Nietzsche's status as a great philosopher even if she disagrees with him:

The kind of death he worries about (which is to his mind much worse) is the groveling, self-flagellating pitifulness of those who have been taught to loathe all that is strongest or most noble in themselves. He's thinking of the pacifist who lets himself get trampled in the mud, and then feels a self-righteous pride for doing so. Or the ascetic who forgoes all the pleasures of life but dreams greedily of the rich compensation he expects to receive in the life to come. Of course, Nietzsche doesn't believe that there's any *real* self-sacrifice or humility in the Christian sense; all of these postures are to his mind just another manifestation of the will to power, but they are a contemptible, weak, passive-aggressive sort. He would have a field day with foreign policy today, wherein America flexes its muscles around the globe, but can't stop apologizing for it, while smaller countries beg for our help, and then get prissy and aloof with us after we give it.

Joyless Moralist is being a good educator here, helping a modern mind to penetrate imaginatively into the thinking of a philosopher who, justifiably or not, is part of the canon and whom it is an educated citizen's duty to try to understand.  But of course, one can't separate "all that is... most noble" in us from mercy, advocating the former and denigrating the latter, for mercy is noble, and cruelty, ignoble.  And if Nietzsche thinks that one can't be a pacifist without feeling self-righteous pride, or that ascetics only give up the pleasures of this life for rich compensation later (as opposed to the truth, that ascetics have found a greater enjoyment in worshipping God than earthly pleasures can offer), that simply shows his stupidity and the poverty of his historical imagination.  If he is influential we may have to deal with him, but we don't have to respect him.  Here I think I am in agreement with MacIntyre, who seems to regard Nietzsche's whole Ubermensch idea as worthless nonsense.

So what does MacIntyre see in Nietzsche?  He writes:

For it was Nietzsche's historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher -- certainly more clearly than his counterparts in Anglo-Saxon emotivism and continental existentialism -- not only that what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for moral philosophy... 

In a famous passage in The Gay Science (section 335) Nietzsche jeers at the notion of basing morality on inner moral sentiments, on conscience, on the one hand, or on the Kantian categorical imperative, on universalizability, on the other.  In five swift, witty and cogent paragraphs he disposes of both what I have called the Enlightenment project to discover rational foundations for an objective morality and of the confidence of the everyday moral agent in post-Enlightenment culture that his moral practice and utterance are in good order.  But Nietzsche then goes on to confront the problem that this act of destruction has created.  The underlying structure of his argument is as follows: if there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates.  There can be no place for such fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number.  I myself must now bring into existence 'new tables of what is good.'

I'll take MacIntyre's word for it that Nietzsche is the major forerunner of MacIntyre's own conviction that the Enlightenment project to find a rational justification for morality failed.  But how is "my morality can only be what my will creates" any solution?  In early chapters, MacIntyre has knocked down the arguments of Kant and Bentham, pointing out that the categorical imperative could have almost any content you please, and that Bentham's "pleasure" and "pain" concepts are illegitimate oversimplifications of human experience.  But surely Nietzsche's argument, as MacIntyre summarizes it, can be knocked down even more easily.  Morality means something that constrains the will.  How can my will be constrained by something my will itself created?  Suppose I create morality x today, then find tomorrow that it would be more convenient to abide by morality y?  Surely if I can choose my own morality, I can re-choose it.  If my morality has no authority greater than my will, it can hardly be immoral for me to do so.  But that means morality is never binding, and therefore that it is no morality.  So the insight with which MacIntyre is crediting Nietzsche is either moral nihilism, or else it is something that stops short of moral nihilism very unwarrantedly with the incoherent suggestion that we can, as MacIntyre puts it, "make ourselves into autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will."

If moral nihilism is Nietzsche's insight, I can think of two better sources for it.  One is Dostoyevsky, specifically the theme that runs through The Brothers Karamazov: "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."  The other is J.L. Mackie, author of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.  Both of these authors seem to perceive the idea of moral nihilism (though Dostoyevsky regards the view is an adversary to be combated) more clearly than Nietzsche, who, having destroyed the basis for believing in morality, then persists in the use of morally charged words like "noble," a word which a consistent moral nihilist cannot legitimately use, without seeming to realize that he's being inconsistent. 

A comment on Nietzsche by G. K. Chesterton, in Ch. 7 of Orthodoxy, is astute:

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either.

Chesterton is cleverly hitting Nietzsche where it hurts by calling him "timid," since timidity was just what Nietzsche most held in contempt.  But Chesterton is right.  Nietzsche may be a landmark figure because he was the father of modern moral relativism-- I am not intellectual historian enough to say-- but he tried to be more than that; he wanted to be the champion of a new morality.  But his new moral vision had little content and what content it had was repugnant, so he could only make it appealing with the help of rhetoric and metaphor.  The resulting line of thought, though it had a large and insidious historical influence, is really empty and even silly, or "nonsense" as Chesterton rightly puts it.

I should mention that MacIntyre never cites Beyond Good and Evil, the only work of Nietzsche's that I have (partly) read.  Perhaps Nietzsche has better arguments elsewhere.

Nietzsche, the Manic Muddlehead

This passage from Beyond Good and Evil is typical:

To be sure--to make also the bad counter-reckoning against such religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers--the cost is always excessive and terrible when religions do NOT operate as an educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of the philosopher, but rule voluntarily and PARAMOUNTLY, when they wish to be the final end, and not a means along with other means. Among men, as among all other animals, there is a surplus of defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm, and necessarily suffering individuals; the successful cases, among men also, are always the exception;

To call men "defective," "diseased," etc. implies a standard compared to which men fall short.  If we apply a commonsense standard Nietzsche's claim is false.  Thus, most men are healthy; disease is the exception.  Or again, most of the obvious, material sufferings of humanity-- infant mortality, say, or hunger-- have been proven by economic growth not to be "necessary," for they have been overcome.   Nietzsche is trying to apply Darwinist biology as a metaphor for mankind, but the effort is misguided, for civilized man has escaped the old Malthusian trap, so that success in the merely biological sense is now the norm, not the exception.  If Nietzsche wants to define success in some other sense he is obliged to tell us what it is and defend it.  But he could not do so.  That's why he writes so cryptically, wrapping his thoughts in darkness; they could not stand up to the light.

and in view of the fact that man is THE ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT, the rare exception.

The concept of adaptation to an environment is not applicable to man, who has transcended mere dependency on an ecological niche, and makes his own environment.

But worse still. The higher the type a man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will SUCCEED; the accidental, the law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifests itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine.

What does Nietzsche mean by this physical metaphor, "the higher type?"  The metaphor will seem to some extent meaningful to readers raised in a Christian culture, because Christianity lives in the light of a lofty moral ideal, laid out in the Gospels, and compared to that standard we observe greater and lesser degrees of success which can be called "higher" or "lower."  Nietzsche wants to destroy the Gospels, and in doing so, he renders his own physical metaphor meaningless.  He is forever the woodcutter cutting off the branch he is sitting on.

What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions above-mentioned to the SURPLUS of failures in life? They endeavour to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as the religions FOR SUFFERERS, they take the part of these upon principle; they are always in favour of those who suffer from life as from a disease, and they would fain treat every other experience of life as false and impossible.

Here, Nietzsche seems to have some sort of a value standard, but he refuses to tell us what it is (because, I think, he doesn't know).  Apparently, Nietzsche ascribes negative value to the life-experience of most human beings; as he makes no case, there can be no rebuttal.  One of the absurdities here is that Nietzsche is always calling his opponents "dogmatists," as if he were the Cartesian rationalist, yet he is always making emphatic claims like this one that are at best groundless and probably meaningless as well.  But here is a question.  Nietzsche claims that the great religions "treat every other experience of life as false and impossible."  Since the word "other" must "other than" something, and since that something in this case is "suffering from life as a disease," Nietzsche is claiming that religions claim any experience of life other than suffering from it as a disease.  This claim might possibly be true of Buddhism; of Christianity it is wildly false.  If we put this to one side, however, it's true that the great religions do dismiss as "false and impossible" some "experiences of life" that some "free spirits" might aspire to, e.g., free love.  A sober philosopher might ask: Are there, in fact, some experiences of life which we can dimly imagine and can desire, which are, in fact, false and impossible, e.g., free love?  Nietzsche could have presented arguments that some lifestyles forbidden by Christianity as dangerous illusions are actually possible and happy.  But honest argument is a field which he steers clear of, knowing perhaps that he would be unhorsed there at once.

However highly we may esteem this indulgent and preservative care (inasmuch as in applying to others, it has applied, and applies also to the highest and usually the most suffering type of man), the hitherto PARAMOUNT religions--to give a general appreciation of them--are among the principal causes which have kept the type of "man" upon a lower level--they have preserved too much THAT WHICH SHOULD HAVE PERISHED.

Should have, in what sense?  Where are these repugnant value-judgments coming from?  Of course, the link between Nietzsche's thought and Nazi race policy is evident here.

One has to thank them for invaluable services; and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation of all that the "spiritual men" of Christianity have done for Europe hitherto!

Well, yes, and this line could have come from Chesterton, but what does Nietzsche mean by it?  To call for gratitude for past achievements of civilization is to appeal to some common standard of good between Nietzsche and the reader; what is that standard?

But when they had given comfort to the sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless, and when they had allured from society into convents and spiritual penitentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what else had they to do in order to work systematically in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in deed and in truth, to work for the DETERIORATION OF THE EUROPEAN RACE?

The racism of this claim-via-rhetorical-question is not only repugnant but, I believe, empirically false.  If Nietzsche meant that Europeans would have been superior in objective respects, e.g., in intelligence, strength, courage or whatever, had European civilization been less humanitarian, this theory makes a testable prediction, namely that Europeans should be genetically inferior to Tagalog, Bantu, or Amerindian peoples where the sick and suffering were allowed to die.  I do not think there is any evidence suggesting this is the case.  If there were evidence for this, of course, it would not necessarily follow, and most people nowadays would emphatically reject, the value-judgment that it would have been better to improve the race by letting the weak die.

To REVERSE all estimates of value--THAT is what they had to do!

One can't help but be bemused here.  Nietzsche is advocating that most of mankind be allowed to perish because they are "defective, diseased," etc., and yet he is accusing Christianity of "reversing all estimates of value!"  Christianity is on the side of life for all; Nietzsche, on the side of death for most.  Who is reversing estimates of value here?

And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious--all instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful type of "man"-- into uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruction;

What is one to answer to a writer who charges the civilization and faith that came to dominate (in the Age of Imperialism during which Nietzsche was writing) most of the world through its military superiority with "shattering the strong?"  That Christianity did not shatter the strong is a lesson of history that cannot be doubted; if anything, it seems to have strengthened and emboldened them.  Nietzsche seems always to start from the claim that 2+2=5.  Of course, the identification of "manly, conquering, and imperious" with "highest and most successful" is merely question-begging and dogmatic; again, no case has been made and no rebuttal can be offered.  But the identity of conscience with self-destruction is a simple falsehood.  Suicide is forbidden by the Christian conscience.

forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly things--THAT is the task the Church imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value, "unworldliness," "unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused into one sentiment.

Hmm...  Has Nietzsche given us some notion here of the origins of his otherwise mysterious "higher man" concept?  To appropriate and repurpose this notion from Christianity even while he attacks Christianity is another case of the woodcutter cutting off the branch he is sitting on.  Anyway, the charge that Christianity "hates all earthly things" is manifestly false, as is evident both from the writings of Thomas Aquinas and other Christian theologians who affirm the goodness of earthly things (Augustine even argues that evil is only a privation of good) and from the fact that Christian civilization has achieved more in producing and enjoying earthly things than any other, and that monastics in particular have contributed to advances of material civilization out of all proportion to their numbers.  Christianity does, in a sense, "hate" some earthly things-- not all, of course; does the Church hate the bread and wine that are used in its sacraments?-- that are good in themselves, to the extent that they get in the way of heavenly things.  But then, Nietzsche himself really does hate most earthly things, regarding them as "defective," "diseased," etc.  Here, as in many places, Nietzsche's arguments are worthless against their intended targets but cogent against himself.

If one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse and refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never cease marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a SUBLIME ABORTION of man?

The absurdity here becomes at once so extreme and so subtle as to be a sort of marvel.  Consider: Abortion causes death.  Christian civilization has given rise to free constitutions, market economies, and technological progress which has made possible a twenty-fold increase in the human population; that is, it has caused a great increase in life.  Nietzsche, on the other hand, is explicitly advocating that most of mankind "should have perished" because it is "defective"; that is, he is advocating death, or, as we might put to do justice to his noble-sounding tone, "a SUBLIME ABORTION of man."  As a criticism of Christianity, Nietzsche's claim is so obviously, utterly false that one feels he cannot have failed to understand its falsehood but rather exulted in it.  One feels the need for a new word which, like the words lie, joke, or fiction describes a false utterance, but which has a connotation of joy or exultation in carrying to virtuoso extremes the opposition between one's utterances and the truth, and does not so much deceive one's hearers as invite them to join in the exultation.  Meanwhile, as a criticism of Nietzsche's own philosophy, the claim is extremely astute.  Indeed, "a SUBLIME ABORTION of man" is a good description of that historic climax of Nietzscheanism, WWII.

He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in the European Christian (Pascal, for instance), would he not have to cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror: "Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous pitiful bunglers, what have you done! Was that a work for your hands? How you have hacked and botched my finest stone! What have you presumed to do!"--

This Nietzsche writes, of the civilization and the faith that built the European cathedrals, that produced Dante and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most portentous of presumptions. Men, not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning MAN; men, not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to ALLOW, with sublime self- constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail;

Note how Nietzsche bluters that the "law of the thousandfold failures and perishings" is "obvious" to mask his total inability to defend or even to define it.

men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man:--SUCH men, with their "equality before God," have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the European of the present day.

As a minor symptom of the absurdity of this passage, we may observe that the "dwarfed" Europeans of Nietzsche's day and after are, on average, about a foot taller in stature than the prehistoric men of the age before human destinies were shaped by Platonism and Christianity.  This is characteristic.  Nietzsche's ravings are usually meaningless.  When meaning can be ascribed to them they are distinctive for being the opposite of the truth.

Nietzsche's point of departure seems to be an effort to apply a Darwinian paradigm to man and human society.  But the paradigm is inapplicable to civilized man, since modern man has more or less solved the problem of scarcity in the basic biological sense if not in the economic sense, and since in any case civilization replaces biological evolution with cultural evolution as the driving force of human development.  Nietzsche uses the rhetoric of "higher man," a metaphor somewhat useful for capture the advantages, ineffable because of their complexity, of civilization, in order to advocate the opposite of civilization, a return to savagery and the law of the jungle.  This grotesquely perverse wordplay is at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy.

Yet Joyless Moralist says that Nietzsche is a "very great philosopher," "worth taking seriously," who "understands what is really at stake in Western philosophy."  If he's so smart, why does he have all his facts wrong and fail to make valid arguments for any of his claims?  Shouldn't philosophers treat Nietzsche as economists treat Marx, as a thinker to whom some attention must be paid because of his historical influence, and whom it is sometimes fun to refute, but who is understood to have been comprehensively wrong and to have contributed nothing of value to human knowledge?

Is Nietzsche Worth Answering?

I was recently reading Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and among other things I was struck by the respect that Bloom, a cultural conservative who might be expected not to like them, had for Nietzsche and Rousseau.  It is no doubt an indication of the narrowness and bias of my education and self-education in philosophy, but I don't think I've ever encountered a favorable treatment of Nietzsche or Rousseau before.  Bertrand Russell and Paul Johnson, for example, both regard both men with feelings of contempt, disapproval, and occasional horror.  I thought of Rousseau and Nietzsche more or less as sophists and enemies of civilization, philosophical forerunners of the French Revolution and Nazi Germany, respectively.  But Bloom finds it worthwhile to deal with Rousseau and Nietzsche at great length and in some ways sympathetically (especially towards Rousseau).

So I downloaded Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and have been listening to it.  It seems to me that Nietzsche is a lot like G.K. Chesterton: an unsystematic, aphoristic thinker, sometimes insightful, sometimes merely polemical, but full of unwarranted claims and lacking the scruples of a systematic philosopher.  Nietzsche's elitism may neutralize resistance to his arguments in a manner like that from the story The Emperor's New Clothes: one hesitates to say, or even think, What nonsense, this doesn't make any sense, for fear of feeling the knife-edge of Nietzsche's keen contempt.  But in fact, not only are Nietzsche's grounds for rejecting tradition inadequate, but they are parasitic on tradition.  Nietzsche is, in a thousand different ways.  Nietzsche is forever in the position of the woodcutter who cuts off the branch on which he himself is sitting.

I found this passage in the introduction striking:

The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to its “super- terrestrial” pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe- inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error—namely, Plato’s invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when

Europe

, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier—sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered.

The rhetorical force of the word "nightmare" is felt by the reader because the reader thinks of nightmares as evil, or bad.  If Nietzsche wants us to be "beyond good and evil," that force is lost.  Elsewhere Nietzsche says that "the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life," and that "the question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing?"  This seems to suggest-- but Nietzsche never deigns to express a thought so clearly-- that what matters is that ideas be useful rather than true.  By that standard, Christianity, the chrysalis in which the world's most materially successful civilization formed, would seem to be vindicated.  Of course, the real nightmare was the age following Nietzsche in which the "Will-to-Power" which he glorified seized Moscow and Rome and Berlin and burst forth to ravage Europe.  If Nietzsche wants to call two thousand years of Western civilization a "nightmare," one might wish to ask the standard by which Nietzsche judges, but he offers no ground.  My impression so far is that Nietzsche is greatly overpromoted when great thinkers like Bloom and MacIntyre make him their major interlocutor.  You see a brilliant mind at work in Nietzsche's writings, sometimes, but he wastes it on ranting.  He is an incoherent and trivial thinker.

"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.

Free Will

Bryan Caplan at EconLog started an interesting discussion about free will.  My contributions:

Now this is odd. I find myself in complete agreement with Bryan here. Both his conclusion-- that there is free will-- and his grounds for it-- introspection-- are perfectly correct. What is strange is that I first learned these arguments in the book Miracles, by C.S. Lewis, in which he makes the famous Argument from Reason which refutes materialism and affirms God...  As someone who accepts Lewis's argument more or less in full as well as his theistic and Christian conclusions, it is pleasant and strange to hear this sort of argument from an anti-religious writer like Caplan...  Since I agree with Caplan I'll contribute to the cause by answering some of his critics.

Jason writes:

"The falseness of uncaused (or 'self-caused') will has nothing to do with behavior genetics. It's not an empirical truth, it's a logical truth. 'Free will' defined as something neither random or mechanistic is simply incoherent."

As Jason makes no further defense of this claim, the answer is simply that since it is not at all self-evident, the burden of proof rests on him, and he has not discharged that burden. As an aside, the idea of randomness seems at least as logically problematic as free will, yet it is generally credited. Jason goes on to make a completely different argument:

"The anti-materialist free-will argument you are implying is identical to the Intelligent Design argument of "Irreducible complexity": Point to a hole in current understanding, suggest, erroneously, that it can't be solved, and thus the scientific answer for the puzzle is... magic!"

But Caplan is making no such argument. He makes it clear that introspection, not the existence of gaps and residuals in the data, is his basis for believing in free will. And he has also pointed out the error in the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose game the determinists like to play:

"The believer in free will can simply say, 'The good twin and the evil twin just made different choices.' The determinist, in contrast, can only ask for a blank check: 'One day, we're figure out the hidden forces that caused them to be so different. Until then, bear with us.'"

Exactly. Determinism is a sort of fideism. It illegitimately transforms a necessary postulate of scientific research (for the 'laws,' so called, of nature must exhibit a high degree of consistency for experimental or, more generally, inductive methods to be of any use) into a truth, dogmatically believed, and treated as a conclusion of science rather than, what it really is, an assumption.

A 'God in the gaps,' or 'free will in the gaps,' argument should indeed be prepared to retreat in the face of decisive evidence that the gaps are explicable. A theist who had pointed to miracles as evidence for the existence of God, and who is then confronted with a scientific explanation of the supposed miracle by natural causes, may legitimately say, "While I concede that, in light of this discovery, the evidence for God is somewhat weaker than I had supposed, I still think it is dominant." But if he is wholly unmoved by the discovery, we are justified in doubting his intellectual honesty. A believer in free will who uses the lack of deterministic explanations for some mental events as evidence should concede that his case has been weakened if deterministic explanations come to light.

But what we are faced with here is something quite different. There are still plenty of unexplained mental events, yet the determinists critique 'free will in the gaps' arguments (whether really made by or merely imputed to their opponents) on the grounds that science will presumably someday come up with deterministic explanations of such events. I am not sure what to make of the rather rare situations, e.g., hypnosis, when deterministic processes seem to operating in or at least influencing human behavior where I would have expected free will to be at work. I am not sure if a comprehensive success by science in explaining human behavior would disprove free will or not. What is certain is that science has not comprehensively explained human behavior, or come anywhere close to it.

Peter Tweig writes:

"So to me this says is that as long as there's some uncontrolled residual, that this residual provides evidence for free will."

But again, Bryan is not, I think, making this argument.

Meng writes:

"Without it, one's decisions would be held completely to chance and not to any quality of the person supposedly making the decisions. Causal determinism is not a cage and I wish that people wouldn't treat it as such."

No, free will is not the same thing as chance. This is based on introspection and commonsense: to say "he did it on purpose" or "he chose to do it" means the opposite of "he did it by accident" or "by chance."

Troy Camplin writes:

"The indeterminism of quantum physics is erased at macrophysical levels."

No, it is not. Think of a boulder exactly poised at the top of a hill. It may roll to the left or to the right, and the tiniest force can upset the balance. There is no limit to the degree with which micro causes can lead to disproportionate macro events.

Daniel recognizes this ("we expect nature to be indeterministic"), but makes a different mistake:

"But indeterminism isn't enough to get you free will--a radium atom may not be determined to decay at any particular time, but that doesn't mean that it freely chooses to decay at the time it does. Randomness is just as inimical to free will as determinism."

No, randomness is not "inimical" to free will; it is different from free will, to be sure, but there is nothing inconceivable or improbable about a universe in which both free will and randomness exist, are fundamental, and interact with each other in complex ways. In fact, that is more or less the world of commonsense.

Robin Hanson writes:

"Unless your theory is that humans somehow have some special additional free will not held by all other stuff or even all other life, it seems silly to focus on human behavior for tests. It is far easier to instead test electrons or amoebas."

But obviously the theory is that humans have free will, not that everything does. That is clear enough based on the evidence to which Bryan appeals, namely, introspection. Bryan is a human being, not an electron or an amoeba. His introspective evidence for free will pertains specifically to human free will.

Bryan presumably can't spare the time to respond fully to every commenter on his blog, but it's pretty clear he could emerge from this debate with flying colors. But I would push him farther. If there is free will, must we then reject the impoverished ontology of materialism, with its unwarranted assumption that the entities we encounter in everyday experience can be reducible to those described in physics textbooks? If we reject materialism and accept a richer ontology in which there are such things as rational wills, does it not seem likely that there are rational wills other than those attached to human bodies? In particular, does not the hypothesis that there is a supreme Rational Will which is the source of all others become plausible if not compelling?

And:

Arare Litus writes:

"The apparent fact that we have free will in no way make it seem likely there are other rational wills not attached to humans, it says nothing about this..."

In a strictly logical sense-- in the sense in which the fact that the sun has risen the past 10,000 mornings does not mean it will necessarily rise tomorrow-- I sort of agree with this.

But consider the following analogy. You describe to me a strange type of building, with a circular base and a pentagonal second story, pink covered with blue stars interspersed with pictures of animals, with fountains shooting off the top and landing in a moat roundabout, and lots of other weird details. You ask me the subjective probability that there is such a building somewhere in Los Angeles. I say the probability is pretty low.

Then you tell me that such a building exists in Fairfax, VA. I doubt you, but you drive me a few blocks down Main Street and sure enough, there it is. Now you ask, what is the probability that a similar building exists in Los Angeles? Surely my subjective probability will rise a lot. I don't know why the building is there, but if someone had some reason to build one here, it seems not terribly improbable that the same motive, whatever it was, induced someone to build one in Los Angeles.

It just so happens that intersubjectivity among humans is mediated exclusively through the physical world. If there are nonembodied rational wills, we cannot experience them intersubjectively, that is, any personal experiences that we or others have with them cannot be intersubjectively confirmed, at least not in the usual way. It does not follow that such rational wills do not exist, any more than the non-existence of the strange building in LA follows from my being unable to afford a plane ticket to get there.

Occam's Razor is at most a rule of thumb, and it is often misapplied or over-applied. Materialism is one misapplication: "Explain the facts with the most parsimonious ontology," the materialist exhorts, and then demands that we accept an ontology so sparing that he cannot even pretend it is adequate to explain the facts (at least, "not yet," he justifies himself with his inexplicable fideistic confidence). So here. Most of mankind for most of history has believed in nonembodied rational wills (e.g., pagan gods, angels, devils, etc.) and many, many people in the past and today have reported personal experiences with them. I am by no means saying that all of this should be credited; but any claim that the mere Occam's Razor principle is sufficient to dismiss it it exceedingly odd. It seems to suggest that we can fully explain mankind's preoccupation with the supernatural without conceding its existence. I submit that this is hardly the case.

One thing that occurs to me upon reflection is that the concept of free will may be more fundamental than the concept of causation.  Whether we can ever observe causation is, after all, problematic.  How can we observe "A caused B," rather than merely "A preceded B?"  Do we deduce the concept of causation from our experience of choosing and seeing consequences?  Certainly the claim that an uncaused or self-caused cause is logically incoherent seems groundless.  I'm not sure that even a world entirely without causation, where everything just happens for no reason, is especially inconceivable.

A Flaw in Dennett's Enterprise

From Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

Whenever Darwinism is the topic, the temperature rises, because more is at stake than just the empirical facts about how life on Earth evolved, or the correct logic of the theory that accounts for those facts. One of the precious things that is at stake is a vision of what it means to ask, and answer, the question "Why?" Darwin's new perspective turns several traditional assumptions upside down, undermining our standard ideas about what ought to count as satisfying answers to this ancient and inescapable question. Here science and philosophy get completely intertwined. Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. (Dennett, 21)

Dennett turns a good phrase there at the end.  But is it true?  Certainly it is true of Darwinist science, as Dennett does a good job of showing in the remainder of the book.  It is less clear that there is any "philosophical baggage" involved in ordinary physics, or chemistry.  A dropped ball falls: we all learn that by experiment/observation, and so does a physicist; and while the physicist learns many more things in the same fashion, his general approach need never depart from common sense.  Of course, a Humean skeptic might regard the inductive process by which this conclusion is arrived at as groundless; and if you want to say that all induction involves the "philosophical baggage," fine: but then it is common sense that takes its philosophical baggage on board without inspection, and science-- or at least, physics or chemistry-- is not distinctive in this regard except in that it travels especially light, and especially far.  That Darwinist theory has to take on far more philosophical baggage than other disciplines is a clue that it is not just another science, entitled to the deference we ordinarily give to Science.  Rather, it combines some brilliant insights with a special kind of ideological enterprise, namely: proving that a materialist worldview is viable, or rather, hinting at a prospectus for such a proof.

Dennett hits on exactly what is so brilliant about Darwin: his theory has contributed to the corpus of human thought a new way of asking and answering the question 'why.'  Aristotle said there were four "causes"; Darwin invented a fifth, and highly interesting and illuminating one.  But while this breakthrough has been understandably exciting for many people, Darwinism as a theory of all life is a case of jumping to conclusions.  There may be arguments-- the argument from reason of C.S. Lewis (Miracles) and others is one, I think-- that prove it is impossible for materialistic, evolutionary processes to have given rise to all life as we know it (ourselves in particular) but at any rate the best that can be justly claimed for the theory is that it might be a possibility.  The epistemology, and therefore the epistemic status, of Darwinian evolution is entirely different from that of physics, chemistry, and other proper sciences.  Not only has it not been exhaustively tested in every detail by experiment; it can probably not even be creditable with being falsifiable in the Popperian sense, or at least, to the extent that any falsification-tests can be proposed, far more parsimonious variations of the theory (making no grand claims about the origins of all life) could probably be framed for which the set of falsifiable predictions made by the theory would be the same.  Unfortunately, we have seen only hints of the needed recognition of the limits of Darwinian theory so far.  Most Darwinism continues to be the combination of brilliant insight and dogmatic table-pounding that is Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

The Concept of Equilibrium

Equilibrium is not the same concept as stasis or stagnation.  A rock lying in a particular place on the ground is stasis; water lying in a lake is equilibrium.  The rock and the water both stay still, but if the rock is kicked down the street, it will not return to its original place.  If a wind stirs or a child splashes the water, the water will settle back.  Stasis is a lack of force or motion.  In equilibrium, there are forces and motions at work, yet the structure as a whole maintains its form.

Why is equilibrium an interesting concept?  Not because we observe it empirically, I think; it would be hard to recognize equilibria in the world if the concept didn't have intuitive roots.  One may, perhaps, approach the concept of equilibrium in a roundabout way from probability theory.  Equilibrium tells us something about what state-of-the-world is probable, or presumptive.  Compare it with two alternatives, flux, or perpetual chaotic variation (believed in by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, of "you can never step into the same river twice" fame), and stasis as described above.  Flux is unpredictable.  There's no point in forming concepts or talking because past experience sheds no light on future experience.  Stasis is arbitrary.  The rock may as well be on the right side of the road as the left.  Maybe, if the rock is here today, we can predict that it will be here tomorrow, but that is no basis for general principles about what is likely.  An equilibrium, by contrast, is a state-of-the-world that other states-of-the-world tend towards; wherever you begin, equilibrium is where you're likely to end up.  Equilibrium therefore has epistemological significance, since the concept is helpful, or perhaps essential, in making probabilistic judgments, and an ontological significance, since it provides the stability needed if durable concepts are to be defined and used.

Evolution is, in a way, the opposite of equilibrium, since evolution is the story of how things change, while equilibrium is the story of how they stay the same.  Yet evolution is also parasitic on the idea of equilibrium, for evolution is not mere flux. In evolution there are orderly states-of-the-world that one can make sense of.  Evolution is a moving equilibrium; and I suspect the concept of equilibrium is more fundamental, though that's a challenging question.

Now for what I find to be a notable irony.

It is in the field of biology par excellence that the concept of equilibrium is brilliantly applicable.  We see the seasons change; we see the generations born, and breed and die; we the organisms devour each other up the food chain; we see fire and lightning and flood and infestation devastate the forests; and yet for thousands, or tens or hundreds of thousands of years, the same species live, the same basic ecological processes persist.  At the micro level, nature is full of death; at the macro level, life endures.  This is the splendid equilibrium of which even materialists often have trouble escaping the feeling that it is a kind of miracle.  Environmentalists regard nature with awe and deplore man's disruption of it.  Yet biologists are obsessed with evolution, even though they'll be the first to admit that significant evolution generally takes place over such long periods of time that neither individual observers, nor, probably, humanity as a whole, can ever hope to actually observe any of it with our own eyes. 

Meanwhile, economics is the discipline, par excellence, where the concept of evolution is applicable.  The processes of competition and survival of the fittest and mutation/technological change about which biologists spin their yarns are the day-to-day operation of capitalism.  Yet economists are enamored with the concept of equilibrium.  The idea of market clearing, where supply and demand determine price so that everyone who wants to buy or sell at the prevailing price can do so, is an equilibrium concept with some, though imperfect, empirical support.  But even models of economic growth, where it seems obvious that change is what needs to be explained, tend to look for "steady states" to which the economy will eventually "converge," and they attribute ongoing economic growth to "exogenous"-- that is, not explained by the model-- technological change.  I think, for the record, that there are some good, though not ultimately sufficient, reasons for this.

Still, it's strange.  In biology, equilibrium is a vast empirical reality, while evolution is a speculative conjecture.  In economics, evolution is the most general empirical reality, while equilibrium is at best a special case.  For some reason, each discipline is fascinated by the speculative conjecture, to the point of downplaying the observed facts.