This Boy
This Boy
I have a personal relationship, a history, with the song “This Boy” by the Beatles. It was released in November 1963, when I was thirteen, as the B-side of “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. I heard it then. I recall the Beatles being interviewed on the BBC’s Tonight by Cliff Mitchelmore in their first flush of success. They were asked which of their songs was their favorite: John, Paul, and George all said “This Boy” with no hesitation; only Ringo made a different choice (I forget what but it was rockier). Clearly, the decision to put it on the B-side was motivated by its relative lack of market potential—it’s a slow ballad. Many Beatles fans don’t even know the song. It was written by John Lennon, though credited to Lennon-McCartney. It starts low and slow, building to a rousing, almost hysterical, middle eight, then reverting to the low and slow. If you asked me my favorite Beatles song of all time, I would say “This Boy”. It has a hypnotic simplicity, beautiful harmony, and coiled passion unsurpassed by later work. Fifty-seven years later, when I decided to take singing lessons, my ambition was to sing this song, especially that middle eight (“Till he’s seen you cry-y-y”). I had no expectation that I would achieve this ambition: it is high-pitched, powerful, and loud. Now, five years later, I sing it all the time, almost every day; and I am here to report that I nail it. It took me about three years to start to reach the pitch and power; now I don’t find it a stretch. The moral is obvious: practice, practice, practice. I often mention this song to people I meet (as when I met a woman the other day walking her dog when I was out skateboarding). If you don’t know the song, give it a listen—and try to sing it.[1]
[1] I was amazed to discover the other day that the now-famous middle eight was initially supposed to be a guitar solo, but that was changed during recording to what we have now—John Lennon at his raucous soulful best. It is surely one of the wonders of popular music.
Seeing as Knowing
Seeing as Knowing
Knowing may or may not be a type of seeing, but seeing is a type of knowing.[1] I mean this as an identity theory: seeing is knowing. Necessarily, if you see, you know, because seeing is in itself a type of knowing. The knowing isn’t something added to the seeing; it is already present in the seeing. We might speak of visual knowing—along with auditory knowing, tactile knowing, gustatory knowing, olfactory knowing. All the senses deliver knowledge just by acting as senses. Suppose I don’t know where my phone is and undertake a search for it. I see it lying on the bed. Then I know where it is. I don’t need to reason about what I’ve seen or supplement my seeing or validate it in some way: my visual sense has informed me about where my phone is. The OED defines “know” as “be aware of through observation, inquiry, or information” and “have knowledge or information concerning”. I am aware of where my phone is through observation; I am informed of its whereabouts. This knowledge will pass immediately into my memory, there to be stored as an item of information. My senses have functioned normally and successfully to disclose a piece of information concerning reality. They did nothing wrong. I will now remember where my phone is. When I see my phone, I thereby know where it is, because to see is to know. This is primitive sense-based knowledge possessed by adult humans, animals, and children. It isn’t that we first sense and then know, as a causal consequence, perhaps aided by reason; there is no epistemic gap. If we are interested in the seeing-knowing problem, the answer is not dualism but monism: to see just is to know. Seeing is not epistemically neutral, awaiting certification by other cognitive faculties (reason, intellect); it is in itself a form of knowledge.
Why might anyone doubt this piece of elementary common sense? One reason is the alleged connection between knowledge and belief. Knowledge requires belief, but I might not believe my senses, thus undermining knowledge. Suppose I am under the impression that my senses have been deceiving me lately, perhaps because a generally reliable authority has told me so. Recalling this, I start to doubt my senses—am I under the illusion that my phone is on the bed? I now don’t believe I have found my phone, even though I have. But knowledge requires belief, so I don’t have knowledge about the location of my phone after all. The trouble with this argument is that perceptual knowledge does not require this kind of belief: I can know without believing. Suppose I am informed that my erstwhile informant is in fact a liar and my senses have been functioning perfectly; then I will revert to believing I have found my phone. But my visual sense hasn’t changed at all: it has kept on feeding me information about the whereabouts of my phone. I have known the whole time where my phone is; I just didn’t believe this for a short period. I was aware the whole time of certain information; I just doubted it for a while. Thus, I possessed knowledge. Children and animals don’t engage in this kind of belief waffling; they simply know what their senses tell them. The senses convey knowledge of the environment no matter what you believe about them; they function successfully no matter what your opinion of their functioning might be. They don’t care what your opinion of them is; they do their job even if you doubt their veracity. To see is not to believe that you see, but to see. So, the senses deliver knowledge whether you believe they do or not. They are not deterred by your possibly low opinion of them: you don’t become blind by thinking you are, because your eyes are not influenced by your thoughts.
The second reason concerns skepticism. It is important to understand that the skeptic is not claiming that we don’t sense things; his claim is only that we don’t know that we do. The senses are fallible, because of the possibility of illusion and hallucination; but if they are veridical, they convey information and hence knowledge. This the skeptic accepts: if veridical, then knowledgeable. His contention is that we don’t have justified or certain belief that they are veridical. Hence, evil demons, brains in vats, and so on. The point I am making is not intended to combat the skeptic, except in so far as he claims that the senses don’t deliver a kind of knowledge—they do when functioning normally, whether we can know this or not. For all the skeptic says, the senses are continually producing knowledge, whether or not we can justifiably assert this proposition. For the possibility of perceptual knowing is not dependent on refuting the skeptic: we don’t need to prove that they actually convey knowledge, only that their output is knowledge if they are not functioning abnormally. It is in their nature to produce knowledge; knowledge is not something that gets added to them under suitable conditions. The skeptic has no proof that they don’t produce knowledge, since their doing so does not depend on our being able to prove that we have justified belief that they do. He may be able to prove that we have no such justified belief, but that doesn’t show that they don’t actually produce knowledge. Even if reason (intellect) can’t produce knowledge, that doesn’t show that perception can’t. It may be that rational thought can never generate real knowledge but that basic perceptual experience generates it all the time. An outside observer, like God, may look down on us and think, “They are not equipped with the faculties to acquire justified belief about the universe, but they are able to form bits of perceptual knowledge and do so regularly”. Thus, there is no move from skepticism to the denial of perceptual knowledge as such (which is not the same as justified perceptual belief).
Let’s try to see the commonsense wood for the skeptical trees. When an animal uses its senses, which it does all the time, it picks up information about the perceived world. This information is aptly called knowledge. The senses are devices for acquiring knowledge of the environment; they evolved to perform this function. They don’t need to be interpreted or supplemented or processed in order to yield knowledge; they don’t need a separate faculty, typically called reason, to operate on them before knowledge comes into being. This kind of consciousness is a knowing consciousness, intrinsically and essentially. It needs no stamp of approval from a higher authority (as Descartes supposed). You don’t need God to convert the water of sensation into the wine of knowledge; nor do you need logical reasoning or scientific method. Perceptual sensation is alreadyknowledge. The concept of knowledge is not alien to it, or external, or adventitious. An animal that perceives is an animal that knows. We are such an animal (so were dinosaurs and multitudes of other species). There has been knowledge on planet Earth for millions and millions of years. It didn’t take philosophers to make knowledge possible. Knowledge is as old and basic as breathing and defecating. Knowledge must not be intellectualized, as if it is the property of only rational souls (whatever they may be). Knowledge is at least as ancient as consciousness, and both precede logical reasoning and reflection. Knowledge existed long before epistemology ever did.[2]
[1] I am influenced in what follows by the work of Michael Ayers. I skate over many contentious issues here in order to focus on the central point.
[2] I haven’t talked about what such primitive knowledge concerns. It isn’t hard to say: discrete, bounded, solid objects in space, moving about, in varying proximity to the organism’s body—precisely the things of relevance to the survival. In sensing things, the organism comes to know these kinds of facts about what is sensed. This forms the most basic kind of knowledge possessed by knowing beings. All later empirical knowledge is an extension of this basic kind (including the Cogito). We certainly don’t come to know sense-data first, still less the self.
Moral Metaphors
Moral Metaphors
A solid moral vocabulary would seem essential to sound moral judgement and action. Yet we are signally lacking in that regard. Our language doesn’t aid the cause of morality. Can it be revised and improved? Are we conceptually lacking in our moral attitudes? These are important questions, especially in a time of moral…moral what? What is the name of the state we are in when we are thinking and acting immorally (unethically)? There are two old standbys repeated with numbing frequency: “morally bankrupt” and “lacks a moral compass”. Notice immediately that the latter has the antonym “has a moral compass”, but we can’t say “is morally solvent” or “is able to pay his moral debts”. To be bankrupt is to lack money, whether through one’s own fault or by bad luck. But we don’t think that you can be morally bankrupt and yet not to blame for it (if we believe in blame at all). We don’t say, “He is morally bankrupt, but it’s not his fault, he fell on hard moral times”. Nor do we suppose that he might receive a moral windfall and return to moral solvency. The metaphor is extremely limited and mostly inapt: to be morally bad is not the same as lacking some desirable quantity of something; it isn’t like being short of food. Moreover, a person generally suffers from bankruptcy—it is not prudentially desirable—but moral bankruptcy is not invariably associated with personal catastrophe. A person can be morally bankrupt and not give a damn, even revel in it. The state of being financially bankrupt is not like the state of being a vicious psychopath. The only point of analogy is lack: the bankrupt person lacks money and the evil person lacks morals. You might as well say a bad person is morally shirtless or shoeless. The bankruptcy metaphor is singularly unapt. But we keep falling back on it, as if nothing else comes to mind. In a logically perfect language, we would have a much better description. When I use the phrase, I always feel a shudder of semantic inadequacy—is that the best you can come up with?
The talk of a “moral compass” is hardly any better. Who came up with this? Again, it is clearly metaphorical; you don’t literally have a compass in your hand or head. It suggests the idea that a person without one of these has no sense of direction morally. A moral problem is a navigation problem, a problem about getting from A to B. We need to be pointed this way not that. Is that what a moral problem is? Don’t we often know the direction we should go but lack the moral strength to go there? You can’t say, “He knew just what to do, but he didn’t have the moral compass to point him in the right direction”. He had the compass; he just didn’t have the motor. Virtue isn’t just knowing what you should do; it’s having the will to do it. Moreover, whether you have a compass is a matter of luck for which you are not responsible; you might lose your compass over the side of the ship. But to lack a moral character is not a matter of luck in this way: you can be blamed for lacking a moral compass but not for lacking a physical compass. Is lacking a moral compass like lacking a moral map or written directions? These don’t seem like good metaphors, so why is the compass metaphor any better? A good person judges rightly and acts on that judgment; he doesn’t have an instrument that helps him figure out where to go. And notice that we don’t say, “He has a moral compass” if we wish to commend a person morally; that seems much too weak, a necessary condition perhaps but not a sufficient condition. Again, the metaphor is feeble at best—and only a metaphor. What is the literal truth we are trying to capture?
The trouble is we don’t have much to fall back on. Some people like to say, “That’s not who we are” or “That’s not who you are”, but this attempt to de-normativize morality falls flat and invites the response, “That is exactly what we are, though it’s not what we should be”. We can of course say, “He is morally bad”, but it lacks in punch and descriptive power; it cries out for articulation (hence compasses and bankruptcies). Suppose I want to say in urgent terms that the country I am living in has become morally bad, seriously so: what linguistic resources can I call upon? Not much springs to mind: I can try “morally blind” but that doesn’t really cut it (like “morally blinkered”); it’s too weak and seeing-oriented. I might try “morally lobotomized”: that has the right amount of punch, but is rather recherche and lacking in accusations of culpability. Nor will it do to say “morally insane” or “morally broken” or “morally subpar” or “morally deformed”. We are faced with real lexical poverty just where we need lexical richness. There is nothing wrong with “morally corrupt”, but that only covers taking bribes and the like. We have only inadequate metaphors to express our most serious moral opinions. What were the Nazis—“morally bankrupt”, “lacking in a moral compass”? These locutions just don’t cut it. Of course, we can say they were “evil”, but that leaves us with a rather colorless term with little descriptive content (sometimes people report to animal imagery at this point, but that is obviously no use). I thus declare an emergency situation, linguistically speaking: we don’t know how to describe the things we most deplore, which lets those things get away with it linguistically. If only there was a term that hit the nail squarely on the head and conveyed a suitable sense of outrage! Vague analogies to bankruptcies and compasses land far from the mark.[1]
[1] The demise of religion has left our moral vocabulary distinctly diluted and thinned out. We can no longer deploy words like “ungodly”, “satanic”, “devilish”, “wicked”, “sinful”, “demonic”, “damnable”, “infernal”, “fallen”, etc. We don’t know how to describe serious moral badness anymore, so we resort to feeble metaphors. The time is ripe for linguistic innovation.
Letter1
Colin:
Love the piece. We resonate. MUCH busier now than ever before, even when I was running an investment banking firm with 400 employees.
Our one fundamental difference is that while table tennis is but one of your many non-philosophy endeavors, it dominates mine – 3 coaching sessions per week, 2 hours per coaching session – all coaches among top players in the U.S. My primary coach, who immigrated from Beijing, was the highest American finish in the Olympics in decades, 5th in 2008, and made the US Olympic Team in 2022 at age 48. She runs me like a teenager.
Regarding post-work WORK, we just released the Landscape of Consciousness website (LoCw) in beta version. I send it to you among the first.
About 300 Theories can be visualized and accessed/linked in four different ways (plus Search).
Warm regards,
Robert
Rebirth
Rebirth
The OED defines “retirement” as “the period of one’s life after retiring from work”. But what is work? That is defined as “activity involving mental or physical effort in order to achieve a result” and “such activity as a means of earning income”. These are very different ideas; confusing them leads to misconceptions about the period of life in question. In the latter sense I have done no work since retiring in 2013, since I have not exerted myself as a means of earning income. I don’t work at all. But in the former sense I have worked harder than ever: I think of this as WORK. WORK is a lot better than work. Let me count the ways. First, academic or intellectual work: I have read vastly more than I was ever able to do when working; this has been enormously enjoyable and beneficial. It’s like having a second education, only this time under no pressure and well equipped to undertake it. I won’t list my retirement (i.e., rebirth) reading but it has been prodigious, taking in philosophy (especially history), science, biography, fiction, and so on. Now I feel properly educated, a man in full. Then there is my writing: here I find it hard to express the expansion. So much more time to write, many fewer distractions, the benefits of prolonged concentration. One’s mind seems to stretch out to the horizon. I can’t believe how much I have written in this work-less period. And I am so much happier with the product. It has been a philosophical rebirth for me—more productive, more satisfying, more far-reaching. My WORK has been enormously expanded. This would never have happened if I had not retired. In sum: I have done much more WORK now that I don’t work.
But that is just the beginning. I have also had much more leisure, free time (good phrase). Again, I won’t go into detail: tennis, table tennis, watersports, knife throwing, motorcycling, swimming, skateboarding, trampoline, darts, strength training, golf, archery, etc. I have learned many things in these areas, improving dramatically. I am a better all-round athlete than I have ever been. Musically, it has been a revelation: I neglected this in my previous life for lack of time and other priorities. In retirement I have honed my drumming, neglected since my teenage years, learned to play guitar (not easy), and miraculously learned to sing after believing I couldn’t sing for toffee. I took lessons and diligently practiced; it took a couple of years and I am still improving. I never thought that was possible. Now it is one of the most enjoyable things I do. Learning to sing a particular song is always a thrill; I probably know a hundred songs now. I actually sing for people. In addition, I became a songwriter, again to my considerable surprise. It took some effort and trial and error, but eventually it came. This would never have happened if I were still working. It sure beats grading.
More fundamentally, my relationship to time has changed. I don’t hate time anymore. I always used to be short of it, under its thumb, fighting it. Now time is my friend, my benefactor—I have the gift of time. Time is actually good! You can do things in it—things you like to do. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Time stretches out, lots of it (I nearly said oodles, but refrained); it is now at my command. I do with it what I like. I don’t have to beanywhere at a certain time, or only have a fixed amount of time to get something done, always a bit behind, never satisfied with my life-in-time. Now I luxuriate in time, relishing its endlessness, its generosity. Working for money is bad for your relationship to time, but working for pleasure makes you appreciate time. I am sure most people need time therapy: you are married to it for life and it can be a bitch (as Heidegger would say).
I am trying to capture and convey the existential aspects of what we call retirement. It isn’t a stopping; it’s a starting. It isn’t the end of life but the beginning of a new life. Imagine if at retirement you were given a new identity, a new lease on life—perhaps a new body with a refreshed brain. People don’t even recognize you as the same (so fit, so handsome!). Retirement would then seem like rebirth, a type of metamorphosis (I see a Star Trek episode). That’s the way to think of it–like a release from slavery, a liberation. It isn’t the beginning of the end, a slow decline into uselessness; it’s like waking up to a new and brighter future. True, you still have advancing age to deal with, but now you are free to be what you want to be. The existentialist values freedom; retirement is freedom. We shouldn’t call it “retirement”, like a tennis player retiring injured from a match; it is more a kind of recrudescence, a rebirth, a becoming alive.