7KLVDUWLFOHZDVGRZQORDGHGE\>&XOOHQ6XVDQ@>LQIRUPDLQWHUQDOXVHUV@ 2Q-XQH $FFHVVGHWDLOV$FFHVV'HWDLOV>VXEVFULSWLRQQXPEHU@ 3XEOLVKHU5RXWOHGJH ,QIRUPD/WG5HJLVWHUHGLQ(QJODQGDQG:DOHV5HJLVWHUHG1XPEHU5HJLVWHUHGRIILFH0RUWLPHU+RXVH 0RUWLPHU6WUHHW/RQGRQ:7-+8. ,QTXLU\ 3XEOLFDWLRQGHWDLOVLQFOXGLQJLQVWUXFWLRQVIRUDXWKRUVDQGVXEVFULSWLRQLQIRUPDWLRQ KWWSZZZLQIRUPDZRUOGFRPVPSSWLWOHaFRQWHQW W ,Q :LQGRZOHVV&KDPEHUV $ELJDLO/5RVHQWKDO 2QOLQHSXEOLFDWLRQGDWH1RYHPEHU 7RFLWHWKLV$UWLFOH5RVHQWKDO$ELJDLO/   ,Q :LQGRZOHVV&KDPEHUV ,QTXLU\٢ 7ROLQNWRWKLV$UWLFOH'2, 85/KWWSG[GRLRUJ PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Inquiry, 41, 3±20 In `Windowless Chambers’ Abigail L. Rosenthal Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 Brooklyn College of the City University of New York Taking exception to Gilbert Ryle’s influentially ironical remark about introspection, that it would be like peering into a `w indowless chamber illuminated by a very peculiar sort of light, and one to which only he [the one attempting the introspecting] has access’, this essay claims that introspective awareness of one’s actions and motivations in their chronological sequence is not empty but highly informative, not trivial but inseparable from any significant life, and not hopeless but entirely feasible. It is argued that informative and significant introspective awareness is a practice which ought to be as unbroken as possible, not fetched into consciousness or dismissed therefrom at whim in discrete quanta. Philosophers of mind for whom self-awareness is a surd will, however, naturally be inclined to attend to it reluctantly, thus without the requisite persistence, and without understanding it to be a skilled practice. This essay offers a preliminary map of the territory of introspection, which it defines under the heading of `inner space and inner time.’ It shows what sorts of conceptual clarifications are to be gained by the introspective practice it recommends, what responsibilities grasped, and what missteps avoided. It is the aim of this essay to show what sort of sustained introspective process is required if one is to live a life that is aware and protective of its own intrinsic significance. To clear the decks, we begin by indicating how current discussion within the philoso phy of mind has made it likelier that selfawareness will remain either marginal or accidental. The next task will be to explain how and why a certain kind of self-awareness is something to be deliberately and intelligently cultivated. By contrast, some of the social, moral, and philoso phical pitfalls attendant on the marginalization of selfawareness will then be underscored. Finally, the method for cultivating the sort of introspective awareness here advocated will be given, and its advantages Ð for the clarification both of action and of the relation of causes to reasons Ð will again be urged. First, by way of clearing the decks, let us touch on some of the present, philoso phically-based distractions from the kind of awareness that we will here be advocating. W hile the physicalist philoso phers of mind continu e to debate how best to account for qualia , intentionality, consciousness, and the laws of reason, the problem of how to be a proper sort of human being continu es to escape even partial description in these term s. The latter problem belong s to a human life which stays on its course in the first person by detecting, and incessantly redetecting, a thin red thread of significance that (ideally) runs unbrok en throug h it, from its beginning to its end. Using Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 4 A bigai l L. Rosenthal this metaphor as a place-holder for the more discursive explanation that is to follow, let us merely note that if one is to pick up the `red thread’, hold on to it, or find it again when one has dropped it, one needs to pay nuanced and incessant attention to the question of the significance of what one is about. So one needs precisely the kind of self-awareness that cannot be sporadi c and cannot be minimal. The physicalist philoso pher, however, has little incentive to expand or make more continuous the tim e to be conceded to self-conscious experience, since he is obliged either to explain away self-awareness or else to suffer it as a surd within his normal explanatory practices. To explain anything is to set down its causes and conditions, but the m ind is an entity (if it is anythin g) within which more than causes and effects have play. W ithin the mind, as we know, reasons have play also. So the explanatory project of the physicalist must be, virtually self-subvertingly, to find the cause of the passage out of the order of causes (the material order) and into the order of reasons. W hat he has to do is find the cause of what is, for him, `causelessness’. It is a conceptually thankless task, and the natural consequence is that, if by his lights he has given a causal account of mental matters at all, he will never quite get to reasons. Or, if he gets to them, he will be inclined to make his stay with them as brief as possible. As we have indicated, for reasons that will be set down more fully below, such skittishness about self-awareness is just what is incompatible with what we are here calling a `significant life’. The explanatory problem facing the physicalist (and for that m atter, the dualist and everybody else) is very large. W e can get a better view of its largeness if we picture two columns, with entries in each, and a space between the two columns, wide enough for a third column but temporarily left blank. Over the column on the left we can put the heading, `T he Order of Causes’, and we can head the column on the right, `The Order of Reasons’. Under `T he Order of Causes’ we can put, in appropriately descending series, first, living organisms, sometimes with psychological but always with biological properties and laws; next, combinations of molecules with their chemical properties and laws; finally, physical and micro-physical entities 1 with their elusive but fundamental properties and laws. Next, under the correspondin g `Order of Reasons’, we can put Ð not necessarily in any descending or ranked series Ð values of all kinds, emotion s that span the gamut, reasons of all sorts, laws of logic, qualia , intentionality and (if it is something different) consciousness, creativity, virtues and vices, obligations, free will, and self-consciousness. (For both columns, these inventories are obviously incom plete.) The explanatory problem, then, is how to get from the Order of Causes to the Order of Reasons, and back again. So far, the third colum n, the one in between the two, has been left empty, but now we can put in it any and all theoretical efforts to close the gap between mental and physical explanation. Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 In `Windowless Chambers’ 5 For our purposes, which have to do with determining the kind of mentality that makes a human life worth living from its inception to its finale, I think we need not cite every current physicalist entry of note, nor presume to evaluate on its merits any that we do mention Ð apart, that is, from the question of what a particular view does to encourage time for unbroken introspective awareness. Currently in the third column from the physicalists, we find the following major entries, then: epiphenomenalism, supervenience, anomalous monism, something one might call `virtual anomie’, and nomic pluralism. And, not to be forgotten, there is always the blithe suggestion of eliminativism: that one simply take an eraser to the Order of Reasons. But it is doubtfu l that even the boldest of eliminativists could make the case for doing that, without steady recourse to the Order of Reasons. (Indeed, scrutinized more closely, much of what is to be found under the Order of Causes could also count as reasons Ð that is, conclusions arrived at by process of argument, supplying to intentional acts the belief part of their motivational structure. Ockham’s razor does after all cut both ways.) W e will survey the rest of these gap-closing stratagems in the order named above. 1. Epiphen om enalism. This is the view that `the mental properties of an 2 event make no difference to its causal relations’. If the mental makes no difference, then it need not be taken into one’s account of what, causally, does make a difference. Necessarily, then, it will be left outside any consequential account, as a surd, an ontolog ical embarrassment. The view we will here defend, however, is that the consequential part of a significant life is the mental part. 2. and 3. Supervenience and Anomalous Monism . Supervenience appears to be a sort of Platonism withou t Plato’s ontolog y, and I cannot pretend to have understood it. Those who employ the term do not seem to do so in mutually consistent ways, nor to be in agreement about what it has gained for them. However, all supervenientists seem to agree that any change in the left-hand column would generate a correspondin g change in the right-h and column, and that nevertheless the right-h and column can somehow be attended to on its ow n. Recently, Donald Davidson has argued that mental causation (the action of items in the right-h and column on matching items in the left-hand column) does occur, else there would be no avoidin g epiphenomenalism, but that it cannot be described , only affirmed. `It would seem’, Davidson writes, `that the [causal] efficacy of an event cannot depend 3 on how the event is described. . . .’ In the sam e essay, he later suggests that `non-strict’ laws could eventually bridge the explanatory gap between what we have named the left and the right columns. Presumably these non-strict laws would go in our column in the middle. To Davidson’s suggestion about bridge laws Jaegwon Kim has responded, however, that `an explanation is called for’ of how such non-strict laws could ever be licensed to blur the conceptual line between causes and reasons Ð the 6 A bigai l L. Rosenthal Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 4 very line Davidson’s `anomalous monism’ was set up to defend. Kim seems to be arguing that, even if we wanted to grant that causes and reasons should lie along an ontolog ical continu um , still, at some point on the continuum , we would meet with bona fide reasons rather than causes. And it would be just there that causal explanation would have to break down. In sum, if non-strict bridge laws work, they will not be working for the mental qua strictly mental. And if they fail, we’ll have the strictly mental once more unexpl ained. To conjure up Davidson’s anomalous monism for a mom ent, the picture he has given us would look roughl y like this: `I know that other fellow is not an automaton but a hum an being like me, mental like me, because like me he gives reasons for what he does, and by the same token is capable of action rather than mere response to stimuli. But I know that fact to be ineffable.’ Anomalous monism’s picture is very respectful of the mental. It is even poetic. But to discursive reason it is not encouraging. And discursive reason is what a life engaged in a realistic search for its own significance must have. 4. Virtual Anomie. This is of course my label for the positio n that bridge laws are not to be had, because our world is a lot less law-like than we’d hoped. For example, Brian P. McLaughlin salvages what he can from the (in his view unsuccessful) Davidsonian argument cited above, by suggesting that one should `take the principle of the nomological character of causality 5 to be the culprit’. Arguing along similar lines, Tyler Burge writes: `Particular wars, avalanches, thunder storms, meal-cooking s may not fall under any natural event-kind describable in any natural science. . . . Maybe 6 mental events are like that’. Maybe but probably not. W hile particular avalanches are not usually predictable, events of the avalanche kind occur at the intersection of causal laws that can themselves be abstracted out of the events. The conditions under which the laws obtain can then be replicated in a controlled environm ent, where reliable predictions can be made based on those causal laws. In general, mental events do not seem to be like that. It won’t do to make the natural world more acausal than it is, in order to make the mind seem less anomalous in that world. Alternatively, one can move toward `virtual anomie’ by conceding the nomological character of causality, but refusing to concede that human individuals have a distinctively rational purchase on these nom oi. Emphasized instead would be the cultural, natural-environmental, and neurological determinants of our concepts and the evolutio narily adaptive 7 character of our `cognitive abilities’. If what I am calling `anomic’ arguments are addressed to their readers with the intent of persuading them of the truth of what is being argued for, then the rational will have had to be presupposed in order to overthrow the rational Ð and how this might be done remains unexplained. If the arguments In `Windowless Chambers’ Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 8 7 as such are seriously meant, that fact is inexplicable. T he less said about the inexplicable the better. But a life based in serious argument requires considerable verbal elaboration. The more such a life is capable of saying seriously about its ow n coherent continu um of reasons, the better for it. So, while the `anomic’ point of view (that there either is no logos of the cosm os or else our purchase on the logos is itself irrational) doesn’t exactly rule out sustained self-awareness, it is surely discouraging for it. The needle on its compass keeps swinging . There is no true north for it. 5. Nom ic Pluralism. For our purpos es, this could be the most interesting view, were it not for the rather hasty tendency of som e propon ents to deny that in general there is a problem. By nomic pluralism, I mean the protoW ittgensteinian line that we are justified in postulating `two causal explanations . . . explaining the same physical event as the outcome of tw o very different patterns of events. The explanations of these patterns 9 answer two very different types of inquiry ’. Tyler Burge’s just-cited recommendation found an earlier advocate in Gilbert Ryle, who wrote of 10 `logically different types of law-propo sitions and law-like propositions’. Burge contends that the two kinds of explanation can run concurrently, 11 without encountering what Kim has called `jurisdictional disputes’. `W hat form an inter-level account might take seems to me’, writes Burge, `to be an 12 open question’. Let us be careful here. If the question about what goes in the third column is adm itted to be `open’, then it must have been premature for Burge, Ryle, and others to have issued their prompt assurances that the two kinds of explanation never need be competitive. In practice, they certainly are. T hat’s the whole trouble, and Ð to get out of the trouble Ð sustained introspective attention is required. To the question, whether introspection can disclose a self to us, a question that in the English-speaking philoso phical world became nearly rhetorical after David Hum e, Gilbert Ryle has given his influentially ironic reply. It purpor ts to disclose, he writes, `a windowless chamber, illuminated by a very peculiar sort of light, and one to which only he [the person in question] has 13 access’. Like the earlier assurances of his fellow nomic pluralists, Ryle’s irony about introspection seems prem ature, since it is quite simply im possible to take hold of the significance of one’s life withou t taking some deliberate steps into what he calls the `windowless chamber’ and scrutinizing what may indeed be seen by its peculiar light. It will be one of the tasks of this essay to sketch a rudimentary map for such exploratory steps into the mental realm. A decent piety now prompts recollection. From philoso phy’s ancient beginn ings, as a quest and a practice, many have taken such steps and found Ð not one dimly lit chamber Ð but many mansions, which their explorations have helped notably to illum inate. Novelists, diarists, essayists, and authors Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 8 A bigai l L. Rosenthal of confessions have, many of them, helped too. W e are hardly the first to break in upon this scene, to which, in deference to Ryle’s metaphor Ð but non-ironically Ð I shall hereafter term `inner space’. There is an inner space and an inner time within which alone the facts of significant experience can be discerned. By `inner space’ I mean the unifying context within which the reasons why one acted and acts, though t and thinks, as one did and does, are to be discerned. By `inner time’ I mean the domain in which the relation of these intelligible motivations to a sequence and to an order is worked out. I say `to a sequence and to an order’ because, as Aristotle and his successor rationalists have long noted, the sequence followed by experience and the sequence followed by explanation are not one and the same: What is last in the order of discovery may be first in the 14 order of explanation. In the effort to discern the true character of one’s own motivations, what one must do is run back over the sequence chronologically to the start of it, or to a point as close to the starting-poin t as one can get, at the same time that one is letting the play of competing explanations (W hat was I trying to do? W hat was I getting at? W hat did I believe and hope for, then?) revolve in one’s mind, and notin g which of these theses about motivation seems best to fit the facts of one’s actions in their continu ity from start to finish. So there is an interplay betw een chronological sequence and explanatory order. Explanation must fit sequence, and sequence must reflect explanation Ð and must continu e to do so even up to the present segment of the sequence that one is tracing. And the im perative here is first of all rational. If action is to be accurate, to have any degree of control or precision, this is how to go about it. But the im perative is also moral in that if one shrugs off or rejects altogether this summons to be accountable for the life story that one has lived, one is making a declaration about oneself in the present, a declaration that Ð in the first person Ð one would probably not want to put in writing. Not if one’s hono r (in the double sense of reputation and integrity) was a 15 concern. Inner space is neither `windowless’ nor incorrigible, but that is not sufficient reason to doub t its distinctiveness. Obviously, there must be actions to explain. Hence we must be able to `see out’, as it were. Furthermore, when it comes to explanations for what one has though t and done, there is a difference between good-f aith explanation (even good-f aith misunderstanding Ð of what one’s beliefs entailed, for example Ð or of what the consequences of one’s actions m ight have been) and bad-faith rationalization. If one wants to be sensitive to this distinction, one will remind oneself that there is evidence to be taken in `through the window’, and the comments of bystanders to be respected. Nevertheless, one is not a mere receptor-transmitter for the cultural encoding of one’s actions. At a certain point in self-evaluation, one has to pull down the partition, close Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 In `Windowless Chambers’ 9 oneself off from the back seat drivers, and take stock of what one thinks, oneself, to be the truth of the matter or the right of the matter Ð in the quiet of inner space and the sequence and order of inner time. It seems that, in thus briefly describing inner space and time, we have concomitantly begun to sketch certain responsibilities to be discerned there, and discerned only there. The very notio n of responsibility presupposes an Archimedean `place to stand’ within one’s subjectivity, or at least a stillness behind the partition that separates oneself from others, a refuge wherein the significance of one’s life may be grasped. Yet the consultations with oneself that take place within inner space and time are a process that has been alternatively described as a derivative of social interaction, from which amorphou s consciousness first learns to treat itself as an `other’. So, what is going on here? Is self-definition arrived at introjectively, by first watching the other and then internalizing one’s observations, or is social interaction a projective occurrence, in which one learns to discern the other by first watching oneself? Which comes first? Or could it be that personal identity is merely some confused meÂlange of the tw o Ð meÂlange of introjection and projection? And if that last is the right view, what becomes of the quiet of inner space in which moral tangles were to be responsibly unraveled? Should we not rather assume, resignedly, that what we have been calling `inner space’ is as full of outer noise and of noise coming from the mechanism as contemporary American hom es are likely to be of the noises of their TV sets? And how can these questions be sorted out? I don’t know that they have to be decisively sorted out in the present context. Our questions don’t have to do with whether personal identity is projective or introjective or both. Rather, they have to do with the sort of activity that is being projected and/or introjected. Is it an activity that is being discerned for the purposes of self-correction, or is it something that is merely termed an `activity’ by courtesy, when in fact it is a relatively passive transmission of social and biological codes? If one wants to regard introspective testimony as introjected from social relations with the peers and authority figures from whom one first learned to treat oneself as an other, that is all right Ð provided one can hold that other (wherever located) to the standard of the truth of the matter or the right of the matter Ð in sum, the highest standard that one can self-correctively discern in the situation. And provide d one can also learn to recognize that highest standard in the other from observing the struggle to meet it in oneself. If, after taking the journey throug h inner space and time, one still has intellectual spare change enough to try to redescribe that whole journey as continu ously extrapolated from social observations, and if one can show just what social observations provide d the pattern (the original pattern and its later reinforcements), and if this effort at other-directed redescription doesn’t prove so time-consum ing that one loses the time needed to carry on with the Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 10 Abigail L. Rosenthal inner monitoring of self (there being not enough time to do both), then I for one should not have the heart to produce a further rebuttal. Such a tour de force would silence me, by its very exceptionality. But, for most of us, the evidence for such an incessant copyin g activity is spotty at best; and, at 16 worst, the evidence is lacking. I don’t object to the project. Its success would surprise me. How one comes down on this question of projection versus introjection is perhaps a matter of culture and temperament, or of the angle of intersection between culture and temperament, as much as of argument. To me, it seems that, in the first instance, we judge or misjudge others by taking their measure by our ow n, projectively, rather than judgin g ourselves introjectively by first getting an estimate of others and their aims and worth. Be that as it may, the im portant thing to notice, in this chicken-and-egg controversy, is that the judgin g standpo int is presupposed. One has to judge oneself to be like another, or judge the other to be like oneself, and, either way, a 17 continu ity of the `I’ (or the cogito , if one likes) has to be presupposed. It has to be presupposed not as a mere grammatical tic, but in the mode of conscious assessment over unbrok en time. Note how familiarly, even in a judgment pertaining merely to social resemblance, the normative element comes into it. `Is this other, who is like or unlik e me, intelligible and therefore reasonable?’ W ouldn ’t one be asking that question, even if one tried not to? `Am I, who am like or unlik e the other, intelligible to myself or another, and, therefore, reasonable?’ W hat would it be like even to try not to ask that question? `Are we being fair to one another and Ð taking into account our degrees of likeness and unliken ess in respect of our needs and deserts Ð fair in equal measure?’ Are there playground s in the world, or parents and children, or group s of adults, where those questions have never in any form presented themselves? Are not the questions about norms as much givens of human life as is our sensible givenn ess? Also (and this last question would be one for the more reflectively cultivated), `What is the bearing of these present questions on similar questions that could have been put to one and the other in former times?’ No one who patrols inner space and time in a literate condition can fail to notice that none of these questions is new. So the conscious assessment of one’s resemblance to the other is both sociable and transcendent. It reckons with the other in terms of the sum of influences which that other reflects and resembles, and also refers to a relation to the other founded on a more ideal plane. So it is also a selfassessment, whichever self is meant, on the score of reasonableness, justice, and mercy. Has one received justice from the other? Has one been fair to the other? Have there been the relaxation of tensions, the consolation, the gratification (the mercy, in sum) that were also, and equally, needful? If the questions are asked at all, they ough t to be addressed intelligibly, reasonably, Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 In `W indowless Chambers’ 11 so with an eye to the relevant facts in their sequence and order. W ho did what first? W hat was believed and intended by that actor? W hat, again in sequence, was the fair and reasonable response to that deed? Although cultures do show some interesting variations with respect to their social codes, the question of who did what first is inseparable from any assessment of fairness and reasonableness within cultures, or between them for that matter. So self-assessment with reference to transcendent norms must take in both the inner and the public chronology. Sequence is one thing . Order is another. Eventually, the search for the right explanation for one’s actions must consciously and deliberately make its way throug h the web of proffered explanations in which one’s culture enmeshes its constituent members. For that is where one found oneself when one was trying to figure out what to do. Nor, in the process of this evaluative sorting and sifting throug h the culture’s explanatory web can one’s culture itself be indefinitely isolated from the macro-historical context over which hover the same normative questions, about justice, mercy, and rationality. I do not mean here to suggest that anything really `hovers’ over human history. Only of what must be presupposed in self-assessment’s domain of inner space and time. Context is what must be presupposed, and context is not, in logical or psychological fact, self-limiting. T he mental survey of a culture’s influences doesn’t necessarily (or ideally) stop at the culture’s official bounda ries in geographical space or calendar time. The question of culture, its influences and repudiations, segues at some point into the question of how dialectically to compare cultures, present and past, adjacent and distant, insofar as cultures represent claims about the way the world is 18 and ough t to be. Hovering over these dialectically structured com parisons one continu es to hear the absolutely demanding questions: W hat is fair? and W hat is true? In sum, what goes on in inner space and time is human self-description, and Ð on this level Ð `nothin g can be described at all unless it is morally 19 described’. In dealing with the topic of the origin s of the introspective process, whether projective or introjective, note that we have been talking about the introspective process only in so far as it is both self-monitori ng and self-corrective (and the first for the sake of the second). Althoug h the metaphysical question is not a trivial one, for our present purposes it scarcely matters whether the intelligible awareness we are talking about com es from `within’, from `without’, or both. In so far as it is awareness, it is by definition `within’. Once the awareness is both intelligible and selfcorrective, then the within and the without, the personal and the social, are together made intelligible by their accountability to an im personal normative sum mons Ð a summons whose provenance is obscure, which may or may not be last in the order of discovery, but which must logically be first in the order of explanation. Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 12 Abigail L. Rosenthal If enough has now been said to provid e at least a rudimentary map of inner space and tim e, and of what may be learned from their exploration, we can turn now to the promised pitfalls of inattention to these domains. From the first of these pitfalls, many others will be seen to follow. First of all, if the passage between causes and reasons is not carefully watched in introspection, one will not be able to tell under which order one’s deed falls. Does it fall under the Order of Reasons or the Order of Causes? And if, further, it has been laid down as a principle that one can never know, because the shift from one order to the other is indescribable and unintelligible, then there will be permanent license to look away, and Ð in lookin g away Ð to `assume the worst’. That is, althoug h one need not actually do so, one will retain the theoretical right to assume that the stated reasons were the cover story concealing the unstated causes. For what, except an attentive noticing of the relevant particulars, could ever bar the reductionist assumption ? Now, as everyone can feel right away, this is quite consequential socially. But what, philoso phically, is wrong with it? Isn’t it a prudently or even wisely extended license, for oneself and others? Isn’t the extension of such license indeed Sigmund Freud’s great gift to this century, a gift that may even survive the gradual dismantling of the Freudian system: that he has alerted us to the pervasiveness of the doubl e meanings decodable indefinitely 20 in social life? There are a num ber of things, having philoso phical im plications in varying degrees, that may go wrong when one uses language under this license. In ordinary face-to-face conversation among the educated, what goes wrong is that it is bad style Ð in the double sense of discourtesy and also indifference to the high calling of language. The discourtesy and the indifference to the high calling are interrelated. About the courtesies, it is sometimes overlooked, in the haste to acknowledge how the Freudian system has sensitized us to the meaningfulness of the smallest words and gestures, memories and dreams, how insulting Ð and vulgarly insulting Ð are Freud’s fundamental doctrines, hence how insulting a `meaning’ Freud has found . Social life has let itself be riddled with a theory that insults. Not by chance, the unconscious cause assumed by Freudian doctrine to be the basic one is a staple of contemporary Am erican street insult. And here the stylistic advantage is all with the street, which at least knows when it is being insulting, and does not pretend to be engaging in value-neutral diagno stic. Freudian theory aside, it is manifestly disrespectful to approach another on the assum ption that the other does not m ean what he or she has said. For this reason, one is seldom well advised to make such an approach when one’s interlocutor outranks one in power and authority. Other thing s being equal, insult travels down (or across) more safely than it travels up. By contrast, to be constrained by courtesy is to observe the larger protocols of good Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 In `W indowless Chambers’ 13 conversational style, protocols that may be applied with equal right up, down, and across the ranks of social life. How does one do that? One begins by assuming, on behalf of one’s interlocutor, that the stated reasons are the real reasons. One assumes that, unless the other has given one some particular ground to assume otherwise. One takes the other at face value, in other words, on the same basis that one takes another’s check to be valid unless and until it bounces. Bad checks are the exception not the rule. But, once again, how does one do this? Particularly, how does one set about doing it in a culture whose educated members have long since lost the habit? W hat is one supposed, literally, to do? Literally, one is supposed to listen to peoples’ actual words. If one begins to see a pattern of discrepancy between words and deeds Ð to which the speaker is apparently oblivio us Ð or a pattern of apparently deliberate hypocrisy and deception, then and only then will it be all right to descry hidden meanings, concealed intentions, or, possibly, `causes’. But it is never respectful to begin with causes before one has looked for explanations that fit the stated ones. By the same token, it is good style, it is respectful of the high calling of language, to treat oneself in the same way. If one gives weight to one’s ow n words, expecting of oneself that one will have to mean them, one is better positio ned to close the gap between deed and word, or between one batch of words and another, where there is a gap. If enough people took these old-fashioned suggestions literally, the present tendency in the culture Ð to drown the mind in incoherent noise Ð might begin to reverse itself. Conversation might become interesting again, because the being of the self could be seen engaged on the visible surface of its words. W e would not continu e to see half of what people say `remaindered’. We would not unnecessarily discount what we ourselves say. And, here a substantive philoso phical gain, the process of continuous self-assessment earlier described would begin to seem real in propor tion as people gave themselves the verbal tools to engage in it. Inner space and time would be more and more acknowledged as the domain in which that process is necessarily lodged . In brief, home truths that, as George Eliot knew, would be remembered. It will, I think , be readily admitted that people who make a practice of discounting other people’s stated reasons in favor of their own theories about unconscious causes m ay also be found engaging in this practice for illegitim ate ends. Examples come quickly to mind. For instance, an employee who complains to a boss about the unfairness of a supervisor may be told, `W ell you obviou sly don’t get along with him’. Unless the boss had some prior basis for findin g bias in the complaining employee, such a response Ð ignoring the stated reasons for the com plaint Ð would be a pretext Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 14 Abigail L. Rosenthal for refusing to hear a complaint from a subord inate. Or at least, for refusing to hear one that opened the employer’s own judgment to question. In another such instance, Simone de Beauvoir recalls disputants saying to her, in mid-argum ent, `You think that because you are a wom en’, and her (to 21 her own mind unsatisfactory) rejoinder, `I think it because it is true’. In that case, as in the previous illustration, it is not hard to see that the swerve from the order of reasons to the order of causes has been effected in order to disparage the conscious intellect that was being bypassed, and to do this disparagement (one supposes) irrelevantly, hence unfairly. This point is not a particularly controversial one. Few would dispute that the swerve from the order of reasons to the order of causes can have illegitim ate uses. Among these are the following eight or nine: It can be used to disparage unfairly. It can be used to control withou t warrant. It can be used to seduce. It can be used to evade a duty. It can be used to dodg e an accou nting. It can be used to excuse the withholding of justified condemnation or earned commendation. Or it can be used discourteously, as a pretext for not listening to the other person’s actual words, or as an excuse for one’s own failure to be attentive to what one is saying, or has said, oneself, thus for one’s own failure to respect the language. Now if these are conceded to be illegitimate swerves to the Order of Causes, then there must be a corresponding obligation to avoid them where possible. And, if one wants conscientiously to avoid abuses of that kind, then one will also want to get as precise and detailed a grasp of the transit from causes to reasons as one can, so as to know which order is actually in effect in a given operation. For, if one is able to tell reasons from causes `on location’, as it were, in one’s real life, then one will be in a better positio n to say when the move between the two orders is warranted, when unwarranted, and why. To be sure, one will never reduce all the murkiness to the vanishing-point. So these protocol mistakes remain risk factors in social and personal life. But the murkiness can be diminished. T hat is, it can be unless one is committed to the view that the very transit from causes to reasons or reasons to causes is in principle ontolog ically ungrou nded, hence `uncaused’, hence a surd within human experience. From that philoso phical commitment, introspective inattention may well follow. W hat would it be like to try to bring daylight into this murky zone? One could begin by reviewing the sorts of reasons to be found in association with human agents, and notin g the relation in which these reasons stand to causes. W hat sorts of reason are there? There are reasons that are what they claim to be and that motivate justified actions. There are also reasons that are what they claim to be and, just as sincerely, motivate villainous actions. Not everyone is well intentioned. Not every villain is so unawares or in secret. Then there are the dishonest `reasons’. T hese would not be what they claim to be, but would mislead deliberately, so as to promote some aim that, if Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 In `W indowless Chambers’ 15 exposed, could be blocked as unfair. And there are of course reasons that, while proffered sincerely, are not what they claim to be in that they have not motivated the actions in question. Rather, they have provided the cover story masking causes of which the speaker remains unconscious. Finally, there are the mixed cases, in all possible permutations. How then can one hope to sort all this out? It is a lifelong task. W e do have some guidebo oks: by Plato, Aristotle, Augustin e, Spinoza, even Hegel, Kierkegaard, and some others, well aware of the task, of its pitfalls and risks, and of the spells cast by pseudo-reasons that are the rationalizations for animality. This is hardly unbroken ground . Dialectic is indispensable here, and will take one a long way. Its method is not fundamentally different in the first-person case from what it would be in another’s. The main difference is that one has, in one’s own case, an enormous amount of evidence to sort through . In one’s own case, one can patrol the halls of inner space and time like a sentry. In the case of others, one must wait for them to present the evidence in word and deed. In one’s own case, the evidence is piling up while we speak. As one interprets it in the present, one also changes the face of memory. As one incessantly answers the first-person question, How did I get here? one also must explain how one got to wherever one went in the past. At least, one has to explain that if one does not want to cheat the essential requirement of inner space and time: that one be accountable for one’s story. If one is to be willing to be accountable, one will not be satisfied with a false accountin g. So, first of all, one will want to replace rationalizations with the true reasons. How can one tell the difference? One has to listen to one’s own stated reasons. More often than not, they will be the real reasons Ð just as they usually are with others. That does not mean that they are good reasons, or consistent ones. As philoso phers have been trained to recognize, stated reasons can contain a great many confusions, inconsistencies, and failures on the score of evidence. To reconcile inconsistencies, to consult the relevant evidence continu ously, to be willing to stand corrected by it continu ously, and to do what one can do to match words with deeds, will be taxing enough . W ith more practice, one may become more familiar with the territory and more proficient. At length, as with any such task, one may find oneself less inclined to resort to unconscious causes to explain the task’s difficulties. W hatever is in the unconscious, it should not be regarded as a storage bin for excuses. Its actual contents, and the relation of these to the operations of consciousness, are appropriate matters for further empirical inquiry . If one reduces the size of the mental space allotted to unclarity, incoherence, ignoran ce, rigidit y (educated or uneducated) and inferences to the less-than-best explanations, the mental space allotted to `the uncon- Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 16 Abigail L. Rosenthal scious’ may shrink astonishingly . T his is just what the journey through inner space and time has the task of accomplishing , dialectically and necessarily. There is also a creative side to the unconscious, and I’m not at all sure that it ough t to be classified under `causes’ on our chart. It is the aspect of inner space that mediates inspiration, we know not how. It sends us significant dreams, we know not how. It sends us clues, and courage, and curiosity. This is not psychic space that we want to shrink. So we leave it alone, ordinarily. But it may come to seem less opaque and somewhat more friendly when we have shrunk the other part of the so-called unconscious, the part given over to pseudo-causal explanation of stuff in the mental terrain that we definitely don’t need. It is time to sum up. Suppose one has patiently followed these recommendations and shrunk the domain of causes. Some of the syndro mes that one though t were `unconsciously caused’ will turn out to have been just poorly reasoned or unreflective. Som e were just being excused, and one won’t need unconscious causes once one corrects the missteps and gets rid of excuses. Or, if the missteps continu e to go uncorrected, at least they will stand unexcused Ð and that ough t to help. Som e of what has turned up on the inner journey were syndro mes of blind reaction, but they can be rendered more reasonable, or consciously retrained, by various means. E mpirical inquir y will meanwhile be continuing, and some of the contents of the unconscious will be brough t to light and reclassified by developm ental psychologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists Ð as instruments that do no harm, that we need, that belong to the software and hardware of depth perception, memory, syntax, and habit formation. The Freudians will regroup for a while and sooner or later disband. W ith our thanks for their real service, which was to remind us to go on the inner journey and pay close attention to what we found there. W hat about causes and reasons in general? Has this discussion any results to deliver to the m etaphysical or phenomenolog ical inquiries? On the score of metaphysics there is this much: physicalism is discouraging for the significant life. Consistent reductionism, if it were possible, would be disastrous for it. From the phenom enological perspective, there appears to be a continuu m of some sort between causes and reasons. There are distinct, but can be mistaken for one another. T hey can also be wrongly classified for ulterior reasons. Classification and misclassification affect the relations between the tw o orders, and are not m erely neutral acts. So `nomic pluralism’ is closer to right than the other views we canvassed, but it is too complacent, since relations between the two orders are not fixed and static. W hat was a reason can become resorbed by the order of causes. W hat was a cause can be transformed and assimilated into the order of reasons. T here is more. T he interaction between physical law and mental norm is not predictable. It demands case-by-case scrutiny, therefore. It calls for nuance, In `W indowless Chambers’ 17 Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 in attention and description , in self-management and approaches to other people. The stratagem of inexplicable swerve is hardly competent for this 22 purpos e. If we can shrink the part of our mental space given over to causal explanation shall we have thereby subdued the dram a of our lives, the chiaroscuro? Not at all. The hardships of an examined life will be quite sufficient to account for one’s accurate sense that life is a terrible struggle, and that the search for its unbroken significance will encounter grave 23 setbacks and reversals, throug h which one must just persist. NOTES 1 The list in this column is a partial paraphrase of Jaegwon Kim’s account of the `layered world’ of contemporary physicalism. See `The Non-Reductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation’, in John Heil and Alfred Mele (eds), Mental Causation (Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 190. In a footnote, Kim cites an earlier `highly useful and informative presentation of this layered picture’ by P. Oppenheim and H. Putnam in `Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis’, in H. Feigl, M. Scriven, and G. Maxwell (eds), Concepts, Theories, and the M ind-Body Problem (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958). The practice of layering for explanatory purposes has its own interesting genealogy in philosophy. 2 Donald Davidson, `Thinking Causes’, in Mental Causation, op. cit., p. 13. 3 Ibid., p. 8. 4 Jaegwon Kim, `Can Supervenience Save Anomalous Monism?’, in M ental Causation, op. cit., p. 25. 5 Brian P. McLaughlin, `On Davidson’s Response to the Charge of E piphenomenalism’, in M ental Causation, op. cit., p. 40. 6 Tyler Burge, `MindÐ Body Causation and Explanatory Practice’, in M ental Causation, op. cit., p. 113. 7 Robert Van Gulick, `Who’s in Charge Here? And Who’s Doing All the Work?’, in M ental Causation, op. cit., pp. 250Ð 1. Van Gulick writes: `And perhaps more im portantly the criteria for applying special science predicates may be anchored in our discriminatory cognitive abilities in ways that make them suf®ciently indeterminate to prevent any exact match-up with precisely speci®ed sets of physical properties. . . .’ (References deleted.) The reader who does not feel a quality of anomie settling in here has a steadier mental compass than I have. 8 After writing these lines I have seen that this point is elaborated in an extremely fresh, nuanced, and yet patiently exhaustive way in Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). I am grateful to Thomas Nagel for letting me see a copy of that book in manuscript. 9 Tyler Burge, op. cit., p. 116. 10 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of M ind (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949), p. 167, as excerpted in Quassim Cassam (ed.), Self-Knowledge (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 19. 11 Jaegwon Kim, op. cit., p. 25. 12 Tyler Burge, op. cit. 13 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of M ind, op. cit., pp. 168f.; in Cassam, op. cit., p. 20. b a 14 Aristotle M etaphysics i 1. 982 20Ð 30 982 1Ð 25. 15 That a morally responsible life has the character of a temporal narrative is a point I have argued for more exhaustively in A Good Look at Evil (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). More recently, in Conversions: A Philosophic Memoir (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), I have tried to give detailed illustration to the view that the signi®cance of one’s life emerges historically. In the context of the present argument, Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 18 Abigail L. Rosenthal however, it would probably be most persuasive to appeal to the reader’s own experience in defending against inner or outer challenges to the reader’s particular claims to have acted with integrity in a given situation. What does one do, what can one do, when one’s integrity is challenged, except run over in one’s mind what one has done, and in what order, and why? 16 Illustrative of the dif®culties one runs into when making the interior dimension a copy of the exterior is one implausible account that Ryle gives (one of many such implausible accounts). In the case I’ve picked out, Ryle is explaining how one establishes that anyone has understood a philosophic argument: `if you had stood up to cross-questioning; if you had correctly drawn further consequences from different stages of the argument and indicated points where the theory was inconsistent with other theories; if you had inferred correctly from the nature of the argument to the qualities of intellect and character of its author and predicted accurately the subsequent development of his theory, then I should have required no further evidence that you understood it perfectly [italics mine]’ (Ryle, The Concept of M ind, op. cit., p. 170; in Cassam, op. cit., p. 21). What sort of inference `from the nature of the argument to the qualities of intellect and character of its author’ can Ryle have had in mind? What would such an inference be like in the case of Descartes, for example, if it were done Ryle’s way? Could one do it? One would be going inferentially from one set of behaviors (the argument set) to another (the character set). But no paired behavior patterns of precisely this sort had ever been seen. It is really an inference going from the rational requirements of a theory, or, more precisely, from the solutions it proposes, to the problems that must have occasioned those solutions, and thence to a reconstruction of the complex soul that must have been troubled by those problems. For surely it is not enough to have had these problems. Descartes’ educated contemporaries may also have been becoming aware that `from their earliest youth’ they had entertained many beliefs that were groundless. But they were not so troubled by that problem. Some also must have been deserted by a mother’s early death and a father’s remarriage, and so felt emotionally ungrounded, but were not suf®ciently troubled by that problem. Or some may have been troubled, but could not or would not address themselves to the task of ®nding a solution. Or some could have confronted the task, but drew back from it in fear of their own scepticism, or in fear of hell, or in fear of the authorities. And some could have been visited by Descartes’ three dreams, and yet not interpreted them as he did. And some could have interpreted them as he did, yet shirked the summons of that interpretation. Could Ryle really have convinced himself that he could draw an inductive inference to the `qualities of intellect and character’ of Descartes as author of the M editations, from any strictly empirical observations of speech-acts correlated with other behavior patterns? There never was an earlier edition of Rene Descartes. No one before him had faced exactly his problems in his way. There was no pre-Cartesian consensus about how to classify the ®rst Cartesian. Only by reading one’s way back into his situation and feeling it as one’s own would one `see’ what such a man `had to do’. But here it is another’s intellectual conscience with which one may identify. It is another’s `inference to the best explanation’ of his life in its unbroken signi®cance that one recognizes. There is one connecting interior chamber after another to be discerned here. There are indeed many mansions of intellectual conscience, to which one is a stranger only if one has no analogous acts of intellectual conscience to one’s name. But it is stretching things to describe anyone else’s interior journey, or to describe one’s own, as copied from exterior models which were then patched together in the relatively passive or random processes of introjection. This process is not passive and it is not random. It may consult precedent, but it is not done on the basis of precedent. 17 Compare Thomas Nagel: `In the cogito the reliance on reason is made explicit, revealing a limit to this type of doubt. T he true philosophical point . . . is that Descartes reveals that there are some thoughts which we cannot get outside of. . . . To get outside of ourselves at all, in the way that permits some judgments to be reclassi®ed as mere appearances, there must be others which we think straight. Eventually this process takes us to a level of reasoning where, while it is possible to think that some of the thoughts might be mistaken, their correction can only be particular, and not a general rejection of this form of thought In `W indowless Chambers’ 18 19 Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 20 21 22 23 19 altogether as an illusion or a set of parochial responses’ Nagel, The Last W ord, op. cit., pp. 19±20. This is a point, learned from Hegel, that I explored more fully some years ago in `The Intelligibility of History’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, XV (1977), 1. Henry M. Rosenthal, The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s W ay, ed. and with an Intro. by Abigail L. Rosenthal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 50. So Thomas Nagel’s appreciation of Freud’s achievement: `Common sense psychology allows us to identify the experiences or deliberations that have led to a belief, or the emotions expressed by a particular reaction, or the aims and values behind a course of conduct. . . . Freud extended the range of such explanation to unheard-of lengths, to cover not only memory lapses and slips, but jokes, dreams, neurotic symptoms, and the substructure of erotic life and family ties Ð with forays into morality, politics, art and religion.’ In `Freud’s Permanent Revolution’, The New York Review of Books, 12 May, 1994, p. 34. Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxieme sexe, 1, Les faits et les mythes (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 14. She writes: `Je me suis agaceÂe parfois au cours de discussions abstraites d’entendre des hommes me dire: ``V ous pensez telle chose parce que vous eÃtes une femme’’; mais je savais que ma seule deÂfense, c’eÂtait de reÂpondre: ``Je la pense parce qu’elle est vraie’’ eÂliminant par laÁ ma subjectiviteÂ; car il est entendu que le fait d’eÃtre homme n’est pas une singulariteÂ; un homme est dans son droit en eÂtant homme, c’est la femme qui est dans son tort.’ Bertrand Russell has written, `On the question: what is true and what false in materialism? It is possible to speak with more learning and more complication than in former days, but it may be doubted whether any substantially new arguments have been invented since Greek times’. So the expedient of an uncaused swerve (in Greek, the parenklisis, in L atin the clinamen) to account for the transit from the physical to the mental appears in Lucretius, and he credits it to Epicurus as well. Lucretius writes: `W hen the atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by their ow n weight, at quite indeterminate times and places they swerve ever so little from their course, just so much that you can call it a change of direction. . . . Again . . . if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect Ð what is the source of that free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?’ Bertrand Russell, `Introdu ction: Materialism, Past and Present’, in Frederick Albert Lange, The History of Materialism (1865), trans. Chester Thomas (1877, 1890, and 1892; 1925; New York: Humanities Press, 1950), p. viii. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe , trans. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth, Middlesex/Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1951, reprinted 1967), pp. 66Ð 7. Although contemporary physicalists do not, of course, have literal swerves of poreless atoms through empty space, they do tend to harbor uncaused swerves of their own, from one logical or explanatory order to another, swerves treated as inexplicable because ontologically ungrounded. Whether physicalists are forced into this cul-de-sac by their own premises, or whether dualists can do better overall, is not a question I propose to try to resolve here. It is more properly the business of those whose theories these are. I have merely tried to issue, to any who might be concerned, something like a generalized warning: No resolution of the explanatory problem that makes it harder to live a signi®cant life can be satisfactory. A salute is due to those students at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York who worked their way through an Ancient Philosophy course with me in the fall of 1993. The central ideas of this essay grew out of our class discussions of the thought of Lucretius. I am particularly indebted to my colleague, Mary Bittner Wiseman, with whom I ®rst traced the outlines of this argument, for the guidance and encouragement she gave me. I should like also to thank John Bacon for the precision of his critical comments on the original draft of this essay, as well as Gary Stahl and my colleague Jonathan Adler for their critical reading, and informed suggestions. Finally, I am grateful for the intellectual stimulus 20 Abigail L. Rosenthal provided by the Philosophy Colloquium of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, at which an earlier draft of this paper was read on February 22, 1995. Received 25 July 1997 Downloaded By: [Cullen, Susan][informa internal users] At: 16:37 2 June 2011 Abigail L. Rosenthal, Department of Philosophy, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11210, USA