SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI

Well, that was short. Bachmann is now toast, so I guess it no longer matters that her husband is a transparently gay gay-hater. Perry is a far more dangerous character, but he too may not last the month. I have seen a good many strange election cycles, but this is far and away the weirdest.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUME PART TEN

Hume has an elaborate account of the several innate mental propensities that, working together, lead us to believe in the continued and independent existence of objects, but over and above this story, he realizes that he must make some sense out of the very notion of the continued and independent existence of a single thing that is nonetheless spread out over space and time. What can it possibly mean to say that the face the baby sees the second time is the identically same face as the face the baby sees the first time? What, in general, does it mean to say that something that exists over time, and what is more changes as time passes, is nevertheless the same thing? Hume is quite correct in supposing that this is the most fundamental notion we employ in making sense of our experience, and he is also quite correct in supposing that it is a puzzle.

Aristotle, you will recall, dealt with this problem by distinguishing between the essence of a thing and its accidents. The girl and the woman she becomes are one substance, having a single essence, even though the accidental properties – height, weight, distribution of hair, and the rest – change as time passes. Without some notion of “the same thing,” we cannot even coherently say that “my friend returned the book she borrowed from me,” or “I am not so hot as I was yesterday, when the temperature reached 90 degrees,” or “Is this a dagger I see before me?”

Those of you who followed my tutorial on Kant’s First Critique will recall the passage I quoted from Hume, a passage from this very section we are now considering. Here it is again:

“[W]e may observe, that the view of any one object is not sufficient to convey the idea of identity. For in that proposition, an object is the same with itself, if the idea express’d by the word, object, were no ways distinguish’d from that meant by itself; we really shou’d mean nothing, nor wou’d the proposition contain a predicate and a subject, which however are imply’d in this affirmation. One single object conveys the idea of unity, not that of identity.

“On the other hand, a multiplicity of objects can never convey this idea, however resembling they may be suppos’d. The mind always pronounces the one not to be the other, and considers them as forming two, three, or any determinate number of objects, whose existence are entirely distinct and independent.”

Hume’s offers a complex and fascinating explanation for our notion of identity. [Note that he must explain the idea itself as well as our tendency to believe that we are presented with objects that are identical over time and despite changes in their properties.] It involves appeal to what he calls a “distinction of reason” and also to a new mental tendency he discovers, the tendency we have to associate together, and confuse, different actions of the mind that resemble one another. It seems that we not only associate together pairs of impressions that resemble one another [this impression of fire and this impression of heat, that impression of fire and that impression of heat, a third impression of fire and a third impression of heat, and so forth]; we also associate together pairs of mental activities that resemble one another. Here is the story, simplified as much as I am able.

First of all, when the mind is presented with a single impression, it forms the idea of a unity. When the mind is presented with a succession of perfectly resembling impressions [as when I stare at a picture fixedly for a while], we are aware only of a single unchanging object of perception, and we are not aware of any passage of time, so the notion of unity is appropriately applied. But suppose that other objects in our field of vision are changing during this succession of perfectly resembling impressions. In that case, we become aware of the passage of time as a consequence of these changes in other parts of our visual or auditory field. Now, by a “distinction of reason,” we suppose the unchanging perception to participate in the temporal succession of the series of changing perceptions that occupy the same field of perception. And so we say of that unchanging perception that it is both a unity [because considered simply in itself, there is no multiplicity in it] and also a multiplicity, because considered in relation to the surrounding changing perceptions, it continues through time, and thus is really not a single perception but a succession of perfectly resembling perceptions. So it is that by conflating these two, we arrive at the [internally contradictory but nevertheless irresistible] notion of identity, which is the unity of a multiplicity. [You see the connection here with Kant’s notion of synthesis of the manifold -- this was the idea that occurred to me when I was writing my undergraduate General Examinations at Harvard in 1953, and which eventually became central to my book, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity and my journal article “Hume’s Theory o Mental Activity.”]

The simple, universal notion of an object – which is to say, something that lasts through time, and yet is the same thing during that time, is, if Hume is right, at base a confusion, a contradiction, a logical absurdity. Hume knows that, and he means it. The mind is so constituted that it inevitably forms and employs this notion, and yet reason can give no coherent account of it.

But of course experience only rarely affords us the luxury of a sequence of perfectly resembling impressions distinguishable one from the other only because other parts of our perceptual field are changing during that sequence. In two ways, experience falls short of the ideal [which, let us always recall, gives rise to an idea of identity that is, strictly speaking, an absurdity]. Hume has a story to tell about each.

First of all, our experience even of perfectly resembling impressions is gappy, as I have already noted. I look this way and that in my study [this is Hume’s example], and I have a series of perceptions of the books on the shelves. The perceptions are perfectly resembling – nothing changes on the shelves in the few minutes that I am looking around – but the resembling perceptions are interrupted by the fact that I look now in one direction and now in another. But the action of the mind in running over an unbroken sequence resembles the action of the mind in running over a sequence in which there are gaps. Hence, by a natural propensity, the mind associates the two actions together, and confuses them, imputing to the gappy sequence the same [inherently confused] idea of identity that it had previously imputed to the unbroken sequence.

But to complete this association of, and consequent confusion of, two different actions of the mind I must now posit the continued existence of the object when I am not observing it, which, to be absolutely precise means assuming the existence of a series of intervening and unperceived perceptions that, were they perceived, would constitute an unbroken sequence of perfectly resembling impressions. In short, the baby supposes that the father’s face goes on existing when it is out of sight, looking, when it is not seen, exactly as it would look if it were seen.

This is an extraordinarily complicated mental process, all in the service of producing the simplest imaginable idea, that of an object.

But that is the very least of what is actually involved, for just as we are rarely in possession of an unbroken sequence of perfectly resembling impressions, so we are also quite often not in possession even of a broken sequence of perfectly resembling impressions. And yet we impute identity even in cases in which the impressions undergo changes. Tomorrow we shall see what Hume has to say about that.

Incidentally, this is as good a time as any to recommend an old book on this subject from which I learned a good deal. It is by the English philosopher H.H. Price and it is called Hume’s Theory of the External World.

CHARLES MILLS

Having decided to bring home the volume containing my Kant essay, I thought that perhaps I ought actually to look inside the volume and see what else is there. It turns out to contain a brilliant essay by Charles Mills called "Dark Ontology: Blacks, Jews, and White Supremacy." I have long thought that Mills is one of the two or three most important political philosophers writing in English in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the long run, I think his work will prove to be more important, though not more widely noticed, than that of Rawls. If any of you have not read his most important book, The Racial Contract, I urge you to get a copy now.

THE ABSENT MINDED PROFESSOR ASKS A QUESTION

Seven years ago, when Susie and I bought our Paris apartment, I lugged over on a series of plane trips a large number of books to fill the barren bookshelves -- my complete 40 volume set of the works of Marx and Engels in German, that sort of thing. [Always a popular favorite with people who rent the apartment.] On one trip, I brought over thirty or forty books on Kant, thinking [at that time] that I would no longer be writing about philosophy. Now I have this blog, for which I seem to be writing a very great deal about philosophy.

One of the books I brought over was a 1998 collection of new essays on Kant entitled AUTONOMY AND COMMUNITY, in which I published an essay called "The Completion of Kant's Moral Theory in the Tenets of the Rechtslehre." This obscure and little noticed effort actually contains what is, in my judgment, an extremely interesting discussion of the way in which Kant's treatment of property rights in the Rechtslehre fills a serious hole in the argument of the widely read Grundlegung ["Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals"] and also, in a very deep way, explans exactly what the relationship is between Kant's moral theory and Rawls's theory of justice.

So, here is the question: Have I already gone through all of this on my blog? I cannot remember! If not, would anyone be interested in having me essentially reprise that analysis in this venue? If the answer to the second question is yes, then I will bring the volume home when I return to Chapel Hill [I am leaving a new pair of jeans here, so I have room.]

I think this is what is called "having a senior moment."

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUME PART NINE

Yesterday I sat in Le Metro, our local café, drinking chocolat chaud a l’ancien and re-reading the Treatise, Book I, Part IV, section ii, “Of scepticism with regard to the senses.” So much is going on in those thirty-two pages that one could teach almost an entire semester course on that one section alone. In an effort to subdue this complexity to manageable proportions, I am going to try to expound the central line of argument as it can be reconstructed from Hume’s text. Once again, I urge those who are seriously interested in Hume’s philosophy to read the original itself.

The difficulty of the text stems in part from the fact that Hume is what used to be called [and perhaps still is] a direct realist, not a causal realist. Direct realism is the view that we are immediately aware of independently existing real objects in space and time. Causal realism, by contrast, asserts that we are immediately aware only of subjective perceptions that are caused to occur in our minds by the interaction of independent objects with our sense organs. As Hume says in his charmingly quaint way, “children and peasants” and the rest of us in our unreflective moments are direct realists. It is only philosophers who are causal realists. Hume’s view is that we are all led by “permanent and irresistible” principles of the mind to believe direct realism, and it is only after we have arrived at these beliefs that further reflection brings us to the causal realist position.

The broad structure of Hume’s discussion of our belief in the external world mirrors his discussion of our belief in causal inference: First, a brief demonstration that the belief can be neither explained nor justified by appeal to reason [or to the immediate evidence of the senses], Then a lengthy, complex account of the propensities and dispositions that lead us to our quite ordinary belief that we are part of a world of objects. The analysis is fundamentally different, however, because we are led by our innate propensities to believe something that mere habit can never inculcate.

We have two quite separate beliefs about objects, Hume observes. The first is that they are independent of our perceiving them. The second is that they continue to exist when we are not perceiving them. Hume suggests that each belief entails the other, but he is only half right. It is certainly true that if objects continue to exist when I am not perceiving them, then [given Hume’s view of consciousness] they must exist independently of me. But it is not quite true that if they are independent of me, then they must continue to exist when I am not perceiving them. It is, after all, logically possible that objects pop in and out of existence precisely when I happen to be perceiving them, and yet exist independently of me in the sense that they could continue to exist, but just don’t. [Such a view would bear a striking similarity to the doctrine known as Occasionalism, which arose in early Arabic philosophy and was embraced most famously in Europe by Malebranche.]

Consider, if you can, the way the world looks to a newborn infant. The infant is presented with a “buzzing, blooming confusion” of sense perceptions [to quote William James’ felicitous phrase], which come and go with great speed and variety. There are repetitions and patterns, but very little in the way of constancy. The baby looks up in its crib and has a visual impression of its father’s face [I now speak from experience]. For a few moments, there is a succession of visual impressions that quite closely resemble one another – that is to say, the father continues to look at the baby, his face turned toward the baby’s face. But then the father turns to pick up a fresh diaper, and the succession of resembling impressions is replaced by a new succession of impressions, these of the side of the father’s head. After a bit, yet another succession of impressions occurs, which strikingly resemble the first succession. The father has turned back to look again at the baby.

Now, it is all very well for us to describe the several series of impressions in this manner – first of the father’s face, then of the side of his head, then once more of his face. But there is no way that the baby can know that this is the correct description. How can it possibly arrive at the belief that the father’s face continues to exist in the interim when it is turned away And how can it form the belief that the impressions of the face and the impressions of the side of the head are the same object as seen from two different perspectives? Indeed, how can it form the idea that the multiplicity of impressions are all impressions of the identically same thing? What can it even mean to say that all of these impressions are one despite the fact that they are manifestly many?

It will not do to appeal easily to habit, as Hume did in the case of our belief in causal connexion. For, Hume points out, the propensity appealed to in the analysis of causal inference leads us to form the habit of expecting that the part of the world we have not yet observed will be relevantly like the part of the world we have observed. Fire is repeatedly conjoined with heat, and so we expect that it will be so conjoined in the future. But it is logically impossible ever to perceive a part of the world that I do not perceive. So I cannot, as it were, repeatedly observe that an object continues to exist when I am not observing it, until my innate natural propensity leads me to form the habit of believing that it will in the future go on existing when I am not observing it. Clearly, something new and rather extraordinary is going on here, and my entire fully fleshed out conception of the ordinary world of people and objects depends upon it.

I am going to do my best to summarize Hume’s account of the mental processes by which I form the conception of independently existing objects and repose belief in that conception, but before I begin, let me identify the core notion to which Hume is appealing. Briefly, it is this:

The mind has, as it were [my words, not Hume’s] a lust for regularity and order. The propensity to develop causal habits of association is one simple manifestation of this urge to impose order on its perceptual experience. But sense experience is in fact too gappy, too irregular, too lacking in reliable patterns of constant conjunction, to trigger in us a satisfying picture of a regular world order. Too often, for example, after I have observed several instances of conjunction of resembling instances, I encounter instances in which one, but not the other, is present. I can of course respond to this irregularity by weakening the habit of association. Perhaps, after all, fire does not cause heat. But instead, the mind yearns after order, and so posits the existence of the unobserved correlate. If I feel heat and do not see fire, rather than begin to doubt that fire causes heat, I assume that there is, unobserved by me, a fire causing the heat. Clearly this assumption arises out of a quite separate propensity. It cannot, in the nature of the case, be simply another instance of the propensity that led me to form the habit of associating fire with heat. So the baby lying in the crib brings greater order to its perceptions than they offer by positing the continued existence of the father’s face during its absence from the flow of perceptions. And so too, by an even more complicated mental process that we have not yet explored, it comes to suppose that the face and the side of the head of the father are two different parts of identically the same object.

HOT STOVE LEAGUE FALL VERSION

There is an old schlock movie called FORCE TEN FROM NAVARONNE with several of my favorite actors, including Edward Fox and Robert Shaw, in which Fox plays a World War II British munitions expert who at the crucial point in the film is charged with blowing up a Yugoslav dam whose destruction will release water that will destroy a bridge the Germans are going to use. [Got that?] After the charges are set off, nothing happens for a while, and Carl Weathers [an American sergeant] berates Fox for having failed. "Be patient," Fox says serenely. A tiny crack appears in the wall of the dam, allowing a trickle of water to escape. Little by little, the cracks widen, until the entire dam disintegrates, unleashing a torrent of water that knocks down the bridge.

Last night, while Susie and I were recovering from our journey, the Republicans held a debate, the first in which Perry appeared. Perry repeated his attacks on Social Security, and in general played to the worst prejudices of the Republican base. [His remarks about executing prisoners in Texas were ugly and despicable. Naturally, they were cheered to the echo by the audience.] Today, the Chattering Classes are trying to decide whether this was indeed the first tiny crack in what might be called Dam Perry. In my entirely amateur judgment, it was. Perry appears to have shown himself to be flat-footed, oddly inarticulate, and fatally ready to embrace and repeat his most extreme pronouncements. No one can win an election in America on a platform of savaging Social Security.

Bachmann is clearly yesterday's news, and the rest of the field, save Romney, is going nowhere. Romney had the good sense to defend Social Security. In the short run, that will cement the Tea Party's contempt for him, but it is early days yet, and by next February, which is when the very first caucus will be held, I predict he will be the clear front runner, unless yet another candidate enters the field.

My preference, of course, is for a candidate who is a total loser, and I think Perry is just that. But I suspect there are enough rationally self-interested people in the Republican Party to put paid to his chances.

We shall see.

FAUX FRAIS

At various points in CAPITAL, Marx refers to "faix frais." For a long time, the phrase exercised a strange fascination for me, until I discovered that it simply means "incidental costs." Having arrived in Paris, I now find myself faced with certain "faux frais." One involves internet access in my apartment. I rent the apartment from time to time when we are not staying here, and these days internet access is obviously an absolute necessity if I wish to find tenants. Over the years, this has been a constant source of difficulty. I finally thought I had solved the problem, and wrote up a guide to people staying here, complete with the password given to me by a FranceTelecom technician.

Good luck. People continue to struggle with internet access. So I called from North Carolina before coming out and set up a "rendez-vous" [nothing romantic, just the French for "appointment"] with a technician for today between 10 am and noon. Well, when Susie and I returned from the market with the food I shall cook this evening, I found a message telling me that the technician will not be here until 2-4 this afternoon.

The cost of this dead simple adjustment to the "LiveBox" that serves as a router? 110 Euros, which at today's exchange rate is roughly $154. I am absolutely certain that Susie's thirteen year old grandson, Noah, were he here, could do it in an instant. That is just one of the "faux frais" of having an apartment in Paris.