Notes, February 10, 2016

-One of the major dichotomies in Aristotelian ethics is between the active and contemplative life. The active life is the life of the politician, the man-about-town, the Athenian gentleman, the small business-owner, the socialite, the local physician, the knight, the attorney, the parish priest.  Those who chose the active life include Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Johnson, my father, and Donald Trump.

The contemplative life is life of the ascetic, the scholar, the philosopher, the monk or nun, the mystic, the drug-abuser, the mathematician, the museum curator, the landscape painter. Contemplatives include the Desert Fathers, William Bronk, and John Milton.

Here is one argument for the superiority of the active life: It is less fragile. True contemplation can only arise in very unusual circumstances -- often only with the support of religion. Most contemplatives have a strong feeling of vocation. Indeed, a life of contemplation would be unbearable to someone who needs frequent conversation and activity. A life of contemplation often requires subsisting on the most limited resources and a belief in the unimportance of material things.

Lycan on Objectivity in Ethics and Epistemology

"It's interesting that this parallel [between ethics and epistemology] goes generally unremarked. Moral subjectivism, relativism, emotivism, etc. are rife among both philosophers and ordinary people and yet very few of these same people would think even for a moment of denying the objectivity of epistemic value; that is, of attacking the reality of the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable belief. I wonder why that is?"

[William Lycan, "Epistemic Value," Synthese 1985, pg. 137, h/t to Daniel Boyd]

Notes on Hegel's Vision of Freedom

Like everything on this blog, these are the notes of an amateur, and they ought to taken with a grain of salt, if taken at all. 03/18/2016

-At first, you might think that the most fundamental conception of freedom is Selbstbestimmung, self-determination. Let's start with this hypothesis, and see what we can make of it.  Hegel calls this first pass at a definition of freedom "being-with-oneself."

What would absolute and complete full self-determination, complete being-with-oneself look like?

Well, the opposite of self-determination is dependence. Now there is metaphysical dependence: something might depend on something else to exist. Peter van Inwagen's example is a wrinkle in the carpet. The wrinkle needs the carpet to be there for it to exist as well.

And there is epistemic dependence: the way one concept could only be understood with the help of another concept. If this seems obscure, consider the idea that something might only be explained [or at least most helpfully explained] by contrasting it with another idea. If X is totally epistemically independent of Y, then X can be understood fully without recourse to comparison with Y. If X is totally epistemically independent, not just of Y, but of everything, then it could be understood without the use of any other concept. It would be self-presenting or immediate.

Something that were completely self-determining would be both metaphysically independent and epistemically independent. Hegel thinks this is impossible. Nothing has these qualities, in his view.

So any freedom or self-determination that exists has to exist with some level of dependence, either metaphysical, epistemic, or some other kind. Hegel calls this "being-with-oneself-in-another." This is our second pass at an understanding of freedom. But how does this reconciliation of self-determination with dependence-on-the-other happen? It happens because the self stops experiencing the other as an alien and alienating presence.

Now there are at least two kinds of freedom or being-with-oneself-in-another.

(A) The first is speculative or theoretical freedom. This is the free contemplation of the world, a.k.a. philosophy. It's a kind of being-with-oneself-in-another because when we do philosophy we (eventually) come to understand that the world is our home, even though it often seems hostile and foreign in the beginning.

(B) Another kind of being-with-onself-in-another is practical freedom, which is the sort of freedom we exercise by using our will in the world outside our heads. Now practical freedom must be understood in three separate phases.

(1) Personal freedom -- This is when an arbitrary will is able to choose its own ends. Note that it is the will that is doing this, not some other faculty. You have this sort of freedom when you have a bunch of will-less objects or things that you have complete control over. Many teenagers have this sort of freedom; they have their own room, they have their own things that they have complete discretion over. 

(2) Moral freedom -- This is when a will is able to choose its own ends not spontaneously but in accordance with the self's vision of the good, a vision of the good that is reflectively endorsed by the self.   

(3) Social freedom -- This is when a society has created rational social institutions that are able to both (a) help form individuals capable of exercising both personal and moral freedom and (b) give definition and particularity to the citizen's vision of the good.