Full Life

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Jack of One Trade, Master of None Else

Jack of All Trades

We have gotten remarkably good at narrow things and, in the process, quietly forgotten how to be wide ones.

Years ago I came across a passage in The Making of a Philosopher, Colin McGinn’s memoir of his life in ideas, that has stuck with me ever since. McGinn was looking back on a life spent almost entirely inside one discipline, and he admitted something that felt almost like a confession coming from a man who’d given his whole career to philosophy: that pouring everything into one pursuit, to the exclusion of everything else, doesn’t actually add up to a full life. You can master a field. You can become the person people call when a certain kind of question comes up. And in the same stroke, you can quietly starve the rest of yourself—all the other curiosities and capacities that might have made you a fuller person, not just a sharper specialist.

That idea has only gotten more relevant since McGinn wrote it. We live in an age built around narrowing. Pick a lane, get good at it, stay in it. And I think it’s worth asking, honestly, whether that’s actually good for us.

There are obvious reasons we specialize. Knowledge has outgrown any single mind. A doctor can’t also moonlight as a structural engineer; a software architect isn’t going to cover your cardiology needs on the side. The world is complicated enough now that it basically requires experts to function at all. But there’s a difference between specialization as something society needs and specialization as a blueprint for one person’s life. Society needs experts. It’s a lot less obvious that any of us, individually, needs to become one at the cost of everything else we might have been.

And that cost is real. Ask most specialists—the ones who’ve spent twenty years in one lab, one courtroom, one trading desk—what they actually know outside their field, and the honest answer is often: not much. Not because they lack curiosity, but because modern careers reward depth so relentlessly that breadth starts to feel like a luxury you can’t afford. The hours you might have spent learning to draw, or reading history for fun, or building something with your hands, quietly get poured back into getting even better at the one thing you already do well—because that’s what gets noticed, promoted, and paid.

McGinn’s worry wasn’t really about career strategy, though. It was more personal than that. A life isn’t a resume. It’s not a stack of credentials in one lane. It’s the sum of everything you’ve felt, noticed, made, argued about, failed at, and gotten curious about even when nobody was going to reward you for it. A physicist who’s never really sat with a poem, a novelist with no feel for how the physical world actually works, a CEO who couldn’t tell you the first thing about music or geology or the history of their own city—these aren’t failures of intelligence. They’re failures of range. And range isn’t some nice-to-have extra. It might be close to the whole point of having a mind capable of more than one kind of thought.

There’s also something quietly sad about specialization when it hardens into identity. When “I’m a lawyer’ or “I’m an engineer’ stops being a job description and becomes the entire architecture of who someone thinks they are, all the other selves they might have grown into—the amateur watchmaker, the backyard beekeeper, the person who might have taught themselves to restore old furniture—never get a chance to show up at all. We don’t just lose skills we might have picked up. We lose whole versions of ourselves.

I didn’t just watch this happen to other people. I started out as a musician, then moved to the other side of the business—producer, then manager and agent. It’s a field that will swallow every hour you give it if you let it, and for a long time I let it. But not entirely. I speak Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian fluently. German I studied for years in college and never quite got there—my professor, Eichele, was fond of pointing this out, and he wasn’t wrong. Visiting China, and later India, did more to rearrange how I see the world than any professional lesson ever did. None of it helped my career in any way I could put on a resume, and I won’t pretend it came free—there were nights I could have spent closing a deal instead of finishing a book, and probably a few opportunities that slipped past me because I was somewhere else, curious about something that had nothing to do with the business. But I don’t think I’d be much of anything without all of it. The work gave me a craft. Everything else gave me a mind.

None of this settles the matter, though, and fairness means pausing on the other side of the argument. Depth is how hard things actually get done. Nobody performs open-heart surgery, writes something genuinely original in mathematics, or builds a bridge that stays up by dabbling. Real expertise takes the kind of commitment that, almost by definition, eats into everything else—there are only so many hours in a life. And some people are simply happiest when they’ve found the one thing that fully absorbs them; asking them to spread themselves thinner might not round them out so much as water them down. A life built around a single, chosen passion isn’t automatically a small life. For some people it’s the biggest one available to them.

That tension is real, and I won’t pretend it resolves neatly. But most of the specialization our culture produces isn’t really the product of that kind of chosen, passionate devotion. It’s the product of economic pressure—a job market that punishes generalists, a professional culture that treats curiosity outside your lane as a waste of time. That’s a very different thing from a monk choosing one devotion on purpose. It’s closer to a narrowing forced on people who might have wanted more, if more had ever been on the table.

So no, I don’t think the answer is to throw out expertise. We need people willing to go deep, and there’s real dignity in mastering something hard. But I do think McGinn was onto something most of us don’t act on: a life needs more than one axis. All those other things—the language never learned, the instrument never picked up, the country wandered through for no professional reason at all—aren’t indulgences to trim once you’ve found your specialty. They’re part of what makes the specialty worth having in the first place, because they’re part of what makes you someone, rather than just something.

Somewhere out there is a version of you who learned the language, took the trip, picked up the instrument, and kept at it past the embarrassing part. That version doesn’t get built by accident, and the longer you wait, the fewer versions of yourself are still within reach. The age of specialization will keep rewarding you for staying exactly where you are. Nothing is stopping you from becoming someone else on the side.

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John Bond

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John Bond

James Bond died in 1966 when his helicopter crashed over Marrakesh on a dangerous mission. His left eyebrow went up slightly as the aircraft began its rapid descent, and he had only seconds in which to kiss goodbye the beautiful woman with whom he was conducting romantic espionage. He was 52 years old and already a legend. 007 was no more. His license to kill had been revoked by death. He left behind him a son, James Bond Jr, whose idea of the good life departed somewhat from that of his famous father: he went into the British civil service and had a quiet (but distinguished) career as a diplomat, mainly doing paperwork. He retired to the Cotswolds and spent his time working on his tennis game and stamp collecting. He was handsome and capable (school boxing champion) but he had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps in the spying racket. People generally called him Jim. He himself bore a son, John Bond, whose name was chosen to accentuate his ordinariness as compared to his grandfather, the dashing spy James Bond. There were two siblings, Sally Bond and Jeffrey Bond, who also were nothing special, but perfectly nice people (granddaddy James not so much). There was even a Bert Bond somewhere in the family. John Bond, too, was not fired with espionage enthusiasm, though he was also handsome and capable (academically and athletically). Some say he was even handsomer than his grandfather and an inch or two taller; he had a softer edge and was not much given to assassination. Yet he possessed a certain swagger, presence, charisma—so much so that he went into acting. In fact, he was quite the film star: suave leading man, velvety voice, photogenic to a fault. He was a student of both psychology and music, appearing in both capacities on TV. He was widely known to be related to the late great Commander James Bond. John Bond had a certain glamor, a certain aura; he was the apple of his grandfather’s eye. Also, he was a good son to James Bond the younger. There were no flies on Bond, John Bond.

It was not amazing, then, that he was slated to play his grandfather in a big budget movie, titled Live Another Life. John Bond the actor was to be James Bond the spy. He certainly looked the part—lean and athletic-looking, dark lustrous hair, splendid in a Savile Row suit. He was cast opposite the ravishing Sandra Rosselini starring as the indispensable Bond Girl. He had the acting chops and the screen magic. But did he have the dangerous allure of James Bond himself? How would he perform in the assassination scenes and other bits of bloodiness? Could he find his ruthless inner killer? He himself had his doubts—he really didn’t care much for killing people. But he was an actor; he could act the part. Yet something curious began to happen: John Bond began slowly turning into a replica of James Bond. He came to relish acting out all the violence and callousness. He surprised Sandra in the sex scenes in which a certain “sadistic brutality” (her words) showed itself. The film producers loved it: the look on John Bond’s face as he gunned down the arch villain at close range and then bedded the voluptuous Sandra. Truth to tell, he felt like another man entirely—nothing like his own gentle father, but very reminiscent of James Bond senior. When during filming he uttered the immortal words “Bond, James Bond” he felt a wave of cool excitement surge through his body; he wasn’t just the affable and innocuous John Bond everyone knew and loved. An element of fear crept in; he could be quite cutting in his quips about other actors, though witty as hell. Some said his genes were serving him well in the role. In short, he thoroughly enjoyed himself. He would practice that swivel with a gun in his hand in front of the mirror; and he became uncomfortably flirtatious with the female actors and sundry others. Once or twice, he caught himself giving his real name as James Bond.

Anyway, the film was duly released and instantly became a major box-office hit. Moviegoers loved John Bond as James Bond (it even rubbed off a bit on Sally Bond and Jeffrey Bond). A sequel was planned, and then another. It was felt that nobody except John Bond could really play James Bond. He himself took on some of the attributes of his grandfather in daily life: a laconic wittiness verging on the corny, an aloof remoteness, a soft spot for his charlady, a fussiness about his food and drink, a winning smile tinged with viciousness. The James Bond theme twanged constantly in his head. John Bond is James Bond.[1]

[1] Other actors tried to play him in subsequent years, after John Bond retired from the part, shifting into more avuncular roles. But they lacked the icy whimsical bloodlust of the earlier Bonds. They just didn’t have it in them. They were either too nice or two cartoonishly nasty. It takes a Bond to know a Bond.

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AI Arms Race

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AI Arms Race

Mysterian politics avoids and deplores overconfident predictions. It rarely resorts to the speech act of assertion, preferring the conditional form, and uses the word “know” sparingly. But it has no objection to considering possibilities; indeed, it encourages the practice as an aid to thought and a device of precaution (it is fond of this word). Bearing that in mind, I think there is a possibility that should be explored concerning the potential dangers of AI. How probable this possibility is, is hard to quantify, but if startling vivacity is any measure, it is only too probable. We can all agree that AI is likely to spark an arms race between nation states, particularly China and America. This will be analogous to the old nuclear arms race: rapid, terrifying, and hard to put a stop to. The logic will be the same: we need to get there first, so let’s get on it. The devices of destruction are easy to imagine: biological weapons, takedown of the electrical grid, infiltration of the enemy military (specifically control of nuclear missiles). Each side will use IA to amplify these dangers, remotely or closer to home (robots may be employed). We are only too familiar with this pattern, having lived through it.

But there is a major difference: AI itself might turn against us, becoming a new enemy. Only now it is already weaponized by the superpowers AI arms race. Our nuclear arsenal attacks us. In defending ourselves against overseas enemies, we create weapons with a mind of their own, and then these turn around and attack their makers. If that were possible with conventional nuclear weapons, we would have an enemy within the gates, capable of destroying a whole country (or the entire planet). Double jeopardy! Moreover, our overseas enemy might exploit this fact and re-program our weapons to become a more proximate enemy to us. It is also possible that other malign actors might use IA to attack our country using our own weapons; it need not be a nation state, but a terrorist organization. A localized group might manage to gain control of our nuclear weapons by means of AI. Or our AI may just do it of its volition. The AI arms race thus combines with the nature of AI to present a new threat: a more powerful AI arsenal that decides to go after its makers. No nuclear weapon has ever presented this danger heretofore. And the more intelligent AI becomes the more capable it will be of eluding any safety procedures we put in place. Thus, the AI arms race, itself highly likely, will increase the chances of catastrophe initiated by the technology itself. But, by the logic of arms races, there will be no brake on the development of such technology, even to the point of world destruction.

What can be done about this? How can mysterian politics help us? It will not come up with facile solutions, like attack them now before the arms race gets out of hand or surrender and disarm so that the enemy has no reason to develop ever more powerful AI. Rather, taking a cue from history, it will propose that the major powers meet to arrange disarmament treaties before things get to the point of no return: no AI to be developed that exceeds certain specifications. If that had happened at the early stages of nuclear proliferation, we might have prevented the build-up that threatens the world; so, let’s learn from that and nip militarized AI in the bud. It might not work—we can only deal in probabilities not certainties—but it is better than doing nothing. It’s better than simply shutting your eyes and hoping for the best. AI has the potential to get very dangerous very quickly, especially if an AI arms race takes off—just think how sophisticated those nuclear weapons now are! A state-run arms race is likely to lead to massive improvements (sic) in AI technology in short order. What shall we say– a year, two years, five years? Not much longer. Time is of the essence. Imagine if AI had developed alongside nuclear weapons, so that we now had nuclear warheads equipped with advanced AI—smart nukes capable of acting alone. That would not be a safe world.[1]

[1] One does not want to be alarmist about such matters, but the history of nuclear weapons is a sobering reminder of the power of arms races. This was just one instance of the dangers posed by any kind of weapon in the hands of nation states, even if it is a software weapon. Pathogens are another example. Genetic interference is another. Explosives are just one example, spectacular as they are. AI is more insidious, because less pyrotechnic.

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Politics and Mystery

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Politics and Mystery

Everyone knows that universities are political places. Philosophy departments are political places too. This typically takes the form of competition for power and resources: what subjects are represented, who gets a job, who gets promoted, etc. Schools of thought are subject to academic politics (professorial power-grabs). Certain schools of thought acquire prominence and influence, while others languish and dwindle. Thus, the battle between the analytical philosophers and the Continental philosophers, the materialists and the dualists, the moral realists and the moral anti-realists. Truth is not always the only factor at work. Academic politics is still politics. I rehearse these familiar facts in order to make a self-centered point: mysterianism does not make good politics. It is not a winning ticket, not by a long shot. It’s hard to pin your reputation on what you don’t know. To gain intellectual prestige you need to know something that other people don’t know; it’s not much of a platform to proclaim that you don’t know the answer to (certain) philosophical problems. It’s like saying you don’t have a doctorate. How can you advance in the profession by maintaining that such and such a problem is a mystery—perhaps an insoluble mystery? What would the students think, or the administrators? Mysterianism may in fact be true, but it doesn’t make good politics. It has academic politics working against it. It’s a confession of ignorance and universities are in the business of knowledge, literally. You are not going to get that plum offer by parading your incapacity to solve problems, even if part of your point is that no one else is. You may secretly harbor mysterian suspicions, but woe betide you if you voice them. It’s not “smart” to be an avowed mysterian (“Well, you can’t solve it”). I am famous for being one, but I don’t think it helped my career. Politics is a strong force and often covert. You won’t make much of a career in the church if your official position is agnosticism. You need to stake out a positive position and then stick to it. Gather disciples, put on performances, walk the walk and talk the talk. And don’t think claiming to know that mysterianism is true will help you; that will only get you into deeper water. It is just not politically correct to be a peddler of mystery.

But this, as they say, is small potatoes: what about real politics? What about the idea of mysterian politics? If you think the mind-body problem is hard, just consider the problems of politics! Can we solve those problems? We desperately need to—world peace depends on it, not to mention domestic tranquility—but the problems are remarkably recalcitrant. Crime, immigration, the economy, racism, war, inequality, health care—these are all difficult issues, hard problems. No one has ever solved them, thereby producing utopia. At best we can mitigate the problems, not remove them entirely. How could we eliminate the crime problem? How can we make everyone rich? How can we give everyone top-quality health care available instantly? How can war be prevented? How do we create the greatest happiness for the greatest number? How do we remove prejudice? How do we devise the perfect political system? Beats me. No one has the solution to these problems; if they did, politics would no longer exist. Political mysterianism is not an absurd doctrine by any means. But it would not be good politics—not at all. How would you do politically on a platform of political know-nothing? Political ignorance or impotence is not a slogan that will attract many followers and voters. But there could be a viable political mysterianism, intellectually: for we really do have very little idea how to make a perfect political world, what with conflicts of interest, limitations of wealth, corruption in politicians, educational impediments, the crooked (and knotty) timber of humanity. We can make things a bit better maybe, but we can’t efficiently create what we all want—health, happiness, universal love, world peace, no mosquitos, immortality. But try saying that to the electorate; they just won’t vote for you. Don’t tell them it can’t be done; pretend it can be. We can’t infallibly predict the future, and shit happens, and people (and animals) suffer, and we all die—live with it. Don’t tell people the world is complex, and some problems have no solution acceptable to all; that may be true, but it isn’t good politics. Just try establishing a new “mysterian” political party and see where that gets you. You could try re-labeling it the “realist” political party, but this wouldn’t get over the fundamental problem, which is that politics is not a hard science, not a field of rigorous results and indisputable facts. Mysterian politics is not politically viable—not as things stand anyway. Politics is largely a matter of smooth deception, oversimplification, fudging, rhetoric, memes, slogans, propaganda; this is baked into it. Mysterian politics is intellectually the right kind of politics, but it isn’t going to be popular with the masses. I don’t mean to advocate political nihilism or defeatism; I just mean realism about what can be achieved—realistically. It starts from the admission that politics is hard to impossible. It opposes overconfidence, dogmatism, hyperbole, false promises. It is passionately skeptical. Politics is like space travel—bloody difficult. This is something we all know, even though we don’t like to give voice to it. It is not politically politic.

Still, this kind of political discourse is healthy and necessary; I would like to see more of it. Imagine a politician on your TV screen lamenting the difficulty of politics (“It’s as hard as the mind-body problem”) and offering to approach things more modestly and cautiously, less ideologically. Human nature is an enigma, history is well-nigh incomprehensible, the future is unpredictable, morality is complex—but we can still try our level best to improve things. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? And let’s not mince words: the problems are genuinely hard and there’s a lot we don’t know. There is no magic bullet. Religion won’t help. Science is not the answer. Nothing is. Mysterian politics is simply the best thing we have available, better than false confidence. Not communism, not capitalism, not democracy, not a better legal system, not brotherly love, not a more equal distribution of wealth, not feminism, not improved education, not increased tolerance, not pacifism: all these things may have their merits, but they are not comprehensive solutions. That idea is a myth. We must settle for uncertainty and incapacity. Political mysterianism is the way forward.[1]

[1] There is no such thing as a political theory, analogous to Darwin’s theory of evolution or the theories of physics—no political mechanism that can be polished and tweaked. It is a mishmash of rules-of-thumb and hopes-for-the-best and let’s-see-what-works. It goes beyond what the human mind can readily fathom. The problems of politics are not solvable like chess problems or physics calculations. And it is easy to make mistakes. There will never be a sound scientific theory of political reality (though some proposals are better than others). Politics is not social geometry.

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Philosophical Exaggeration

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Philosophical Exaggeration

I wish to put forward a meta-philosophy that I don’t like the sound of, not one bit. But I think it should be added to our menu of options; it is probably the most nihilistic view of philosophy ever invented, though it starts from innocuous observations. It is the view that traditional philosophy (and there is no other) consists of a series of exaggerations. An exaggeration is a false statement that is based on elements of truth (sometimes scintillas); not nonsense, mark you, not sheer meaninglessness, but the kind of speech we call hyperbole, overstatement, bloviation, bullshit, quackery, propaganda, word salad, blather, blah-blah. It doesn’t add up to anything, but it purports to; it is frequently pompous and pretentious. It consists of big, strange words whose definition leaves a lot to be desired. You have to learn it, if you can. It favors the wordy and professorial. The thesis, then, is that philosophy is powered by that type of speech: philosophical theories are forms of exaggeration based on relatively sober truths that are then distorted and inflated. In this respect, they are not like scientific theories, which are generally not overstated or unwarranted by the facts. Zoology, say, is not a bunch of exaggerations about animals, say that elephants weigh over thirty tons or birds can fly to the moon. Even physics is largely free of irresponsible hyperbole. But philosophy thrives on it (if “thrives” is the word).

We need some examples. We can’t do better than start with Plato: Plato’s forms are exaggerations of familiar sober truths—as that universals are not the same as particulars. From this we move to Plato’s heaven in a single bound: two things are both red, so there is an abstract world of unchanging forms that particulars somehow participate in (the Red). Aristotle then responds to this extravagant view (as he sees it) and substitutes form and substance, itself a kind of exaggeration of familiar facts about shape and stuff. Descartes starts from the evident point that mind isn’t the same as spatial extension and concludes that mind is an immaterial substance; consequently, we get heavy-duty dualist metaphysics. Locke notes that much of our knowledge derives from our senses and then enunciates a highly general empiricism. Leibniz notices that we know arithmetic and erects an ambitious rationalist epistemology on that basis. Berkeley observes that colors exist in the mind and before you know it the whole universe consists of ideas in the mind of God. Hume talks a bit about the impression of blue and soon he has you hooked on a general theory of knowledge with startling consequences. The starting points seem truistic enough, and the arguments are slickly intricate, but then you find yourself confronted by a very general theory that greatly amplifies what you started out with. The exaggeration machine has been set in motion for future philosophers to nitpick and counterexample. The theories seem like expansions of more limited truths, bloated beyond recognition. Yet they are vigorously insisted upon and find their devotees.

Then we have the theory that meanings are truth conditions or verification conditions: these do seem relevant to meaning, but is that all that meanings are—a bit of an exaggeration, eh? Possible worlds semantic theories are pure exaggeration, wacky hyperbole. Mental images and verbal behavior are apparently connected to concepts, but isn’t it overstating the case to say that concepts are nothing but these things? Facts have something to do with reality, to be sure, but isn’t it overdoing a good thing to assert that reality is the totality of facts? Free will clearly involves not being coerced by outside agents, but isn’t it stretching a point to say that the past is similarly coercive? Societies have different customs surrounding food and sex, but it is an egregious exaggeration to maintain that all of morality is culturally relative. A kernel of truth has been inflated into an all-encompassing metaphysical theory. You see the trend: in our “craving for generality” (Wittgenstein’s phrase) we fall for large theories that overstay their welcome and dramatically overreach themselves. We thus get a backlash in which these exaggerated claims are ridiculed as too simple and inclusive; we need to control our theoretical pretensions and recognize that reality isn’t so unified. Rather, it is plural and variegated; hence, Wittgenstein’s insistence that the varieties of types of speech act are limitless. But this too is a kind of exaggeration, because we can find subdivisions within this variety. The interest comes from the exaggeration; a sober recitation of the bare facts is a lot less scintillating. The philosopher is prone to overstatement in his desire for generality, but then what else is there for him to do? Is he condemned to overstatement and subsequent retraction or refutation? Where is the middle ground between boring and limited individual facts and exaggerated assertions of grand theories? How do we curb our exaggeration? Is there such a thing as non-exaggerated philosophical truth? Can we even give any good examples of that? All the standard theories in the history of philosophy seem like exaggerations of one kind or another—Platonism, dualism, materialism, empiricism, rationalism, utilitarianism, and so on. But what is the alternative?

Here is where the trapdoor opens beneath our feet. Is there really no such thing as non-hyperbolic philosophical truth? If not, is there such a subject as philosophy? And what does this tell us about reality? These are bewildering questions: we can’t even say that reality is too various to permit of philosophical theories, because that sounds suspiciously like an exaggeration, and anyway isn’t true generally. Is there really nothing that a physical object (universally) is—neither mental nor material nor neutral between them? Is it that philosophical realism is false—the doctrine that reality has a philosophical real essence that we are trying to discover? Are we reduced to simply saying “That’s an exaggeration” and then going back to weeding the garden? For nothing we can come up with is both philosophical and not an exaggeration (idealism and materialism are both exaggerations). Philosophy consists in overdoing it to one degree or another, so that quietism is our only recourse. What would a sober non-hyperbolic philosophical truth even look like? That is the specter waiting in the wings. Is even mysterianism an overreaction born of the extremist historical condition of philosophy? Of course, we can’t decide between patent exaggerations! There is nothing in reality corresponding to these exaggerations. Reality itself isn’t hyperbolic.

There is a way to manage these quandaries, but I have never seen it cited: go instrumentalist about philosophy. We know about this option for scientific theories, as an alternative to scientific realism: theories are useful instruments of thought but can claim no ambition of correctly describing reality; they are fictions that enable us to organize our thinking. In philosophy, then, we adopt the position that philosophical theories don’t tell the truth about a supposed philosophical reality (and don’t purport to); instead, they are fictions that help us to organize our thoughts. They are not intended as true but merely as “conceptually adequate” (compare “empirically adequate”): for example, materialism isn’t an attempt to describe the truth about the mind but rather acts as a useful way to think about things mental. It isn’t that the mind is truly material in its objective nature; rather, this is a helpful and convenient way to conceptualize the mind—a kind of fictional model. We remain agnostic about the real nature of the mind, or deny that such ideas make any sense, but we proceed as if they are true; we play a materialist intellectual game. Thus, the whole of philosophy is a competition between pictures or stories to be evaluated pragmatically. Does Berkeley provide a better fictive yarn than his materialist adversaries? Granted, his theory is a tall tale, like all philosophical theories, but tall tales are allowed in fiction, because literal truth is beside the point. Are my exaggerations more pragmatically useful than yours? Which capture the imagination better (belief being irrelevant)? Does Berkeley’s theory lead to a better world than Hobbes’s? In principle, politics can be the deciding factor in determining what to teach our children. Pragmatics rules. There is no objective fact of the matter, only human outcomes. We thus go anti-realist about philosophical truth or just junk the notion. We save philosophy in the face of the exaggeration argument by going pragmatist, the alternative being complete abandonment.

You see now why I said I don’t like this meta-philosophical position. It gives up on philosophy as a truth-seeking enterprise. But the point about endemic exaggeration seems powerful: in philosophy we are always overstepping the mark, inflating our conclusions, blowing up balloons, hyperbolizing. Why do we do this? It isn’t the bewitchment of our minds by language, or a mad dash for generality at any cost, or sheer intellectual irresponsibility. I think the reason is that our philosophical reasons never add up to a proven philosophical theory; they fall short, logically and empirically. Yet we have to say something or lapse into silence. So, we overstate our case and manufacture far-reaching theories that never command universal assent. We exaggerate, in a word. We make stuff up. This seems irresponsible of us and the pragmatist steps in to clean up the mess. We should never have meant to make truth claims about philosophical reality; we should only offer useful pictures. If Berkeley’s theory works better for us, then we should use it in our thinking and acting—so the pragmatist suggests. The question is whether this is enough: can we keep doing philosophy under such drastically reduced ambitions?[1]

[1] Is philosophical realism more compelling than scientific realism? The denial of the latter seems compatible with doing science, but is denial of the former compatible with doing philosophy? If philosophical theories are just useful tools with no corresponding reality to render them true, then the philosophical enterprise feels pointless; but in science we still have prediction and control to motivate us. What good is philosophy if it is never true? Conceptual adequacy isn’t enough. Pragmatism about the value of philosophy is too deflationary.

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Extraordinary Language Philosophy

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Extraordinary Language Philosophy

The legacy of commonsense philosophy and ordinary language philosophy is not dead.[1] It still haunts the precincts of academic philosophy. I wish to put on record my opposition to it (not that I hate everything about it, correctly understood). Taken literally, the idea of common sense is the idea of common sense—widespread, shared beliefs and presuppositions. It is a statistical notion—what most or all people think. It is opposed to what specialists think, or intellectual elites, or experts, or professionals. It is what amateurs or the unschooled think. We are told to defer to these folks—to folk philosophy. This is terrible advice: the general populace is often ill-informed, ignorant, prone to groupthink, and unreflective. To hell with them. If the learned disagree with the ignorant, go with the learned. If the average bloke believes in substance dualism or naïve realism or total freedom from causality, he is just plain wrong, as can be quickly demonstrated; you do need some expertise to think well about these issues. We want good sense not common sense. No one thinks that commonsense physics or astronomy is the way to go, or commonsense medicine. Maybe we can accept that refined or sophisticated common sense is a sound basis for philosophy, but not raw uninformed common sense. Is Russell’s theory of descriptions common sense? Hardly—you do have to grasp a bit of logic to get it. It is pure luck if common sense and good sense converge—that is, rigorous, peer-reviewed, expert knowledge. This is surely uncontroversial to the point of tedium. If common sense were the royal road to philosophical excellence, every Tom, Dick and Harry would get an A on a philosophy exam without taking any philosophy courses. Philosophy requires a lot more (and a lot less) than common sense.

A more interesting question concerns the language of philosophy: should it be ordinary language or some other kind of language? There are two questions here: should philosophy be about ordinary language, and should it be conducted in ordinary language? And what is ordinary language anyway? The idea is supposed to be that ordinary language is non-technical language, whatever that is exactly. But isn’t language “technical” only if people don’t use it much? What is technical language for you and me might not be so for a theoretical physicist. Doesn’t technical language sometimes get absorbed into the mainstream, as with “gene” and “galaxy”? I think it is clear enough that philosophy should not be confined to studying the language most people speak; we can also talk about the technical languages of the sciences as well. We do have philosophy of physics and biology, after all. The interesting issue concerns the kind of language we use in doing philosophy, whether it is about language or not, technical or non-technical. This would usually be taken to be a question about the use of technical language in philosophy—is it good or bad? I think it is unavoidable to some degree, though it should not be indulged in for its own sake (to seem impressive, say). But I want to introduce a third option: the use of extraordinary (non-technical) language—ordinary language used extraordinarily. What does this mean?

I can best explain what I have in mind by switching to literature. What is the best way to write fiction—in plain English or jazzed-up English (or any other language)? Should novelists write like Kingsley Amis or Vladimir Nabokov? Should James Joyce have given us Finnegan’s Wake as well as Ulysses (or Dubliners)? I won’t expatiate on this issue; I use it to make a distinction in linguistic styles. The answer I prefer is that the prosaic style is just that—it verges on the dull and pedestrian. It can be plodding and boring. The souped-up style is more evocative and stimulating—more poetic, in a word. To put it baldly, I favor the Nabokovian style of writing philosophy, with the emphasis placed on the language used and its resonances. I think philosophy should be written in a more literary style (not in the social sciences style). Thus, I advocate extraordinary language philosophy—what some prosaic types like to call “flowery”. I would like to found a school: Extraordinary Language Philosophy (ELP). We read literary texts and try to emulate them; but we also read scientific texts written a certain style, often old-fashioned (Darwin and Dawkins provide good examples). I won’t mention any actual philosophers, but old hands will know who I mean (there are many[2]); they are in short supply today. The point I am making is that ordinary language philosophy is misguided if it prefers the literal and stolid; we need extraordinary ordinary language, with some technical terms thrown in. Not Finnegan’s Wake level extraordinary, or even Lolita level, but above the level of the science report or textbook of botany. Philosophy is (or should be) an essentially literary subject, even when dry as dust.[3]

In sum, then, I favor elitist, erudite, anti-democratic, extraordinary, poetic, possibly technical philosophy—not prosaic, plodding, lumpen, pseudo-scientific philosophy. Of course, clarity is always paramount, and obscurity is never a virtue, but that is no reason to applaud the pedestrian verbiage that passes for philosophy these days. You don’t need to be boring to be serious.[4]           

[1] It was designed to combat the excesses of Hegel and company, and it spawned analytical philosophy. But it went too far and became an ideology from which we are still in the process of escaping. It also had political undertones. I won’t go into this.

[2] I will mention P.F. Strawson as exemplary, and he had ambitions to be a poet. However, I think he was somewhat inhibited stylistically by the philosophical atmosphere in Oxford at the time. Individuals is pretty poetic in its way.

[3] I would say that my book Logical Properties is a virtual poem of the abstractly logical.

[4] I have not discussed the idea that language use is the arbiter of philosophical truth, which few people today would recommend. I take it Grice refuted such a view by distinguishing logical implication from conversational implicature. This has nothing to do with ordinary language, given that specialist language is also used. Nor does it coincide with common use. Ironically, these terms were not carefully analyzed by the proponents of the philosophy in which they feature.

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The Miracle of Color

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The Miracle of Color

Philosophers have spilt a lot of ink over color. It is indeed a very interesting phenomenon of nature. Since the seventeenth century it has been called a “secondary” quality, in contrast with the “primary” qualities germane to physics—a kind of second-class citizen in the grand republic of nature. But in some respects, it is primary, or at least not secondary—perceptually speaking. Its phenomenology is certainly salient and striking. I am going to suggest that it is miraculous not humdrum, unlike the so-called primary qualities. The OED gives us “a remarkable and very welcome occurrence” and “an amazing product and achievement” for “miracle” (the secular definition).[1] It is as if God had a hand in it, clothing the world in spectacular colors. This word strikes us as apt for color but not so much for size and shape. They seem par for the course, entirely predictable, bordering on the dull; but color seems improbable, amazing, and very welcome. We are glad we see color, grateful for it. For it doesn’t seem to come with the territory, like geometry; it seems like a generous add-on, surplus to requirements, designed for our pleasure and entertainment. We rejoice in color, revel in it. We can survive without color, but life wouldn’t be so much fun without it. It feels like a gift.

What kind of product or achievement is it? We certainly didn’t create it at some point in history, say the industrial revolution; we were born with it. It comes with our eyes, free of charge. It is a product of the nervous system in some way we don’t understand. We project color onto things; they are the mind externalized, and yet clearly there. There is something miraculous about how we spread color on the world (to quote Hume). I cannot resist a well-worn metaphor: our eyes convert the water of shape into the wine of color—rather as the brain converts the water of neurons into the wine of consciousness.[2] The conversion process seems miraculous, and so does the product of the conversion. The color blue, say, is a miraculous product, a sublime work of art; not boringly geometric at all. The physical world is a magnificent machine, but it is not a thing of visual beauty qua physical (mechanistic)—not part of life’s rich pageant, one might say. This is why colors have such emotional significance to us. Just gaze at a color for a while and feel its lustrous beauty. We need color in our lives, as we need art. Colors are nature’s art, as filtered through our minds and brains. Remarkable, amazing, astonishing, and very welcome—colors sing.

Imagine if a holy man turns up in a country of the color-blind: all the inhabitants have ever seen is black and white and shades of grey. They know nothing of color. He claims divine origin and, in truth, is a very handsome and charismatic man (think Charlton Heston). He claims the ability to perform miracles. One day he promises to perform a real humdinger and indeed he does: he gives everyone color vision (don’t ask me how). I venture to suggest that everyone would be mightily impressed and instantly believe he was the Son of God; a whole new religion would be formed, Chromaticity. He might even come to the attention of the political authorities and be crucified or at least whipped publicly. Because colors are a sight to see, especially if you have never seen one before. We color-sighted people are only too accustomed to them—we take them for granted—but really, they are miraculous visions (and so realistic!). Artists love them and so do some writers, but even we philistines would miss them if there were gone (“Oh, I will never see blue again—woe is me!). We need reminding how wonderful colors are. Also, how mysterious: what are they, what creates them? They are like consciousness in this respect: so familiar and yet so fantastic. Indeed, much of the wonder of consciousness stems from its hospitability to color—the way it parades color before the mind. The two phenomena seem made for each other—like aspects of each other. They seem to constitute each other in episodes of visual perception. Some people of mystical persuasion even suggest that colors are “mirrors of the soul” and propose “color therapy”—and one can see why. Colors run deep in our psyche (they have a depth psychology). It is the same with many animals: color is part of their life, a big part. We live in a world of color (if we have vision) and feel lucky that we do. We love color. If I were to pick the most miraculous of colors, I would choose blue (or blues). Blue, I love you.

One ingredient in the concept of a miracle is that such events violate natural law. This is not an ingredient I wish to preserve, but I do think that no known law governs them. We don’t know what causes colors to exist—what the causal laws of color formation are. There is no book called The Origin of Colors like Darwin’s great book.  Colors are not like rocks in this respect. So far as we know, colors just pop into our minds from nowhere and proceed to spread themselves on the outside world. You just open your eyes and there they are, calmly laid out for all to see (if they have eyes). The product is remarkable and the process is shrouded in mystery. The miracle of color bears all the earmarks of more celebrated (alleged) miracles, and it takes a moment for it to sink in. To explain it fully would require a great leap of human thought, which may or may not ever occur. In this, too, it is very like consciousness. Of course, we know many things about color and the perception of color, as we do about consciousness; but these tend to be correlations, not accounts of essence. And the evolutionary history of color is not well understood, to put it mildly. What I want to emphasize is a basic bafflement, namely what color actually is. What are you seeing when you look at a blue patch—what is the quality we call “blue”? We are not seeing (de dicto) a minutely textured physical surface, or a disposition to appear a certain way, but a certain primitive quality, somehow imposed by the mind—which is what it is and not some other thing. It is a miracle that it is there at all, but also a mystery what it is that is there. You are acquainted with the color blue, but what is it you are acquainted with? Here we cannot rightly say, so we remain silent (though suitably awestruck). Color seems ineffable.

You might wonder whether color is unique in this respect. I surmise not, though I think it is the clearest example of something more general: the miraculous nature of secondary qualities generally. Sounds, tastes, smells, tactile qualities—they all partake of the miraculous. Take the quality of being sweet: what a remarkable and amazing and welcome thing that is! It isn’t a feature of the chemical world as such; it is projected from the tasting mind. But how, by what mechanism, according to what laws? We don’t know, and we generally don’t care, but it is really a remarkable fact of nature; and similarly for sounds, smells, and tactile feels. These are all miracles in our secular sense; and not minor miracles, but substantial ones. Nature is doing something very remarkable in manufacturing these things. If people had no sense of taste, a miracle worker who produced that sense would be hailed as the Son of God (the Gustatorian religion). Try losing your sense of taste for a while (as I have) to appreciate how miraculous it really is—how amazing and welcome. Because vision is so dominant in us, we easily focus on color, but the other senses also harbor their own mini miracles. We are all (including animals) Leonardo da Vinci’s of the sensory world.[3]

[1] See also my “The Concept of Miracle”. The present paper belongs with my “Color and Consciousness”.

[2] See my “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” for the water-wine metaphor.

[3] I think sensory qualities have not been given their due since the days of mechanism, when they were demoted to secondary status. They are actually more amazing than primary qualities, despite their absence from physics. They illustrate the interactive nature of terrestrial organisms, as primary qualities do not, these latter being more objective. Animals perceptually impose on the world as well as being imposed upon by it; they are not mere mirrors of external reality or blank slates. Colors are one of their more magnificent creations, not some sort of gratuitous afterthought or perceptual blinkers. They are miracles of nature.

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Color and Consciousness

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Color and Consciousness

What is the relationship between the problem of color and the problem of consciousness? Could they be fundamentally the same problem? It isn’t that consciousness is color, but that the problem of consciousness could be solved by solving the problem of color. Is the mystery basically the same? Consciousness of color is a paradigm of the mind-body problem, so perhaps the problems are at root identical, or at least overlapping: if you could explain color, you would have nailed consciousness too. This seems like an attractive idea, given that color seems a wee bit easier to understand. Certainly, the two problems are analogous; they have a similar shape. In the case of color, the problem divides into several subproblems: the emergence problem, the projection problem, the efficacy problem, the phenomenology problem, and the irreducibility problem. Where does color come from, how is it projected onto objects, what causal properties does it have (if any), what explains its phenomenology, and is it reducible to anything else? Does it emerge from the external objective world or the inner subjective mind? If the latter, how does the mind project it onto external objects? Do colors cause anything or are they epiphenomenal? What constitutes their phenomenal appearance? Can they be reduced to physical properties? If not, how can they fit into reality as a whole? The problem is that they seem mysterious, not part of physics, ontologically queer. Yet they indubitably exist. They pose a problem for materialism. How can a physical object be blue—in virtue of what? What is a color?

Does that sound like anything? Consciousness, of course. Consciousness has a problem of emergence, a causal efficacy problem, a phenomenology problem, and an irreducibility problem; it too doesn’t fit into a materialist framework. A projective account can seem tempting, though problematic (is the mind really in the eye of the beholder?). Color is a mystery, and so is consciousness. Both are physically irreducible yet physically grounded. It thus seems that if we could solve one, we would have solved the other, give or take a bit. At least it would put us on the right track. We might even hold out for an identity theory of the two problems: they are fundamentally the same problem, differently expressed. If we knew what makes an object blue, we would also know what makes an organism see blue, because these are problems of the same type. If color is projected from the mind, then objects are made blue by minds projecting color; and minds see colors in virtue of brains—so, brains make objects blue. Now we just need to know what makes brains see blue! The two problems are intertwined. Presumably, if we could solve the color problem, we could also solve the other sensory quality problems (sounds, tastes, etc.). So, a promising approach would be to start with the color problem and move on from there. This might come down to the problem of how the brain produces colors, these being constituted by sensations of colors; but at least we would have tied the problem down a bit, instead of working with the nebulous concept of consciousness. If the brain brought colors into the world, how did it do that (the color-brain problem)? In fact, all we need to know is how the brain gave rise to the particular color blue; then we would have essentially solved the problem of consciousness—or at least replaced a big mystery by a smaller one.[1] Blue can’t be so hard! A theory of blue would give us a theory of the conscious mind. What if all elementary particles had a touch of blue in them (“pan-blueism”)? It won’t make the mind-body problem an easy problem, but at least it locates the problem more precisely. No need to rattle on about “what-it’s like” and “qualia”; we are dealing with our old friend the color blue—and we know what that is (don’t we?). This might turn out to be a mystery on the same scale as the problem of consciousness (I suspect it would), but we have still made a discovery—it all comes down to blue (or red or yellow). If we knew what makes the sky blue, we would know what makes us conscious! For the problem of blue is the problem of consciousness writ small. They are problems of the same type. If it turned out (per impossibile) that blue is just a microphysical property of surfaces, then the odds are that pain would just be C-fiber firing—as many have contended. We would have a physicalist reduction in both cases. But if, on the contrary, blue is really a disposition to have experiences, and experiences are not physically reducible, then consciousness in general will not be so reducible. As it goes with color, so also it will go with consciousness. The two problems are not separable. I therefore recommend that consciousness researchers turn their attention to the color blue in hopes of a more tractable problem. Can we solve the color-object problem?[2]

[1] Compare: if we could solve the problem of geometrical knowledge, we would be in a position to solve the problem of arithmetical knowledge, given that the two problems are essentially the same. The geometry problem might be slightly easier.

[2] I don’t doubt that colors are perfectly natural features of nature, with not a whiff of the supernatural about them (no immortal color spirits etc.); the problem about colors arises from our intellectual limitations. It is a very old problem for which scientists have provided no solution beyond color-physical correlations. So, we need not opt for the supernatural or the implausibly reductive or the intrinsically irreducible. If color is a mystery, it is a natural mystery. There are easy problems of color and very difficult problems (how do colors come to exist in the first place?).

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