The Structure of Moral Thinking

 

 

How do we actually think when we think morally? What is the psychological reality of reasoning about moral questions? How do we arrive at moral knowledge? I propose to answer this question by considering an imaginary example designed to separate out the several components of moral reasoning and intended as a model of how we in fact reason morally.

            Our imaginary being begins with various kinds of experiences and other psychological states: contentment, calm, comfort, elation, enjoyment, fulfillment, relaxation, tranquility, inspiration, understanding, and so on through an extensive range; but also disquiet, anxiety, discomfort, depression, disappointment, annoyance, frustration, boredom, ignorance, and so on through an equally extensive range. At this stage there is no evaluation of these feelings and states by the subject, merely the undergoing of them. The subject is so far just a repository of psychological facts with no evaluative attitude towards these facts. Then a degree of self-reflection sets in: the subject starts to evaluate her psychological states. Some she deems “good”, others “bad”: she adopts an evaluative attitude with respect to her inner life. But this attitude is completely passive—she merely notes a distinction in how she reacts to her first-order psychological states, mainly her emotions. She has ventured beyond the merely factual to the evaluative, but there is no thought yet of action. In due time she makes an interesting discovery: she has the power to affect the course of her psychological life. Previously she was passive in the face of her experiences, but now she realizes that she can do something about how she feels. She discovers that she has the power of action to shape the course of her emotions: she can actively avoid some things while actively promoting others. For instance, if she eats food she can produce a pleasant sensation of satiation, and if she stays indoors she can avoid getting cold. Now she has discovered prudence: she can act so as to avoid the bad states and bring about the good ones. This is a practical discovery not an evaluative one; any value prudence has wholly depends upon the value of the states of affairs it brings about. Our imaginary being has become the captain of her destiny—partially at least (some things she can do nothing about). She now makes judgments of the form: I ought to do such-and-such in order to bring about, or avoid, psychological state X. First, she consults her evaluation metric; and second, she determines how best to avoid the bad states and promote the good ones—so far as she is concerned. There is no thought yet of other people and of morality—everything is egoistic (as we might say from the outside).

            Let us then introduce other people into our solitary subject’s world—people with whom she interacts. How will she deal with them? From the point of view of prudence they are mere instruments for affecting her own psychological states—just like the inanimate objects of her environment. Nothing in her reasoning hitherto has prepared her for morality; the step from it to that is impassable. So how does she make the leap? The answer is clear: she must recognize that others are like her in a certain crucial respect—they too have evaluation metrics and prudential practicality. That is, other people have emotions like hers, evaluations of these emotions, and the ability to act on this information so as to promote the good and avoid the bad in their own lives. This is not an easy piece of knowledge to acquire; we can easily imagine beings that never acquire it (most animals, say). One needs to be able to appreciate the psychological reality of others, as well as their distinctness from oneself—solipsism must be transcended. But once our subject grasps this important fact about the world she possesses a reason to act in ways she has not recognized heretofore: this reason is that her actions will help or harm the other people she has come to know exist. She acknowledges the existence of others and this provides a reason to act towards them in certain ways. Moreover, those ways need not coincide with the ways of acting recommended by her purely prudential reasons: there may be conflict between the reasons she has. Call the basic fact she recognizes equality: other individuals are equal to her in being a source of reasons for action. She might judge, possibly truly, that others are not equal to her—that their psychological states don’t matter as much as hers. Compared to her they are mere insects (they might actually be insects). Then she will not rate the reasons deriving from their psychology as equal to her reasons, and she will act accordingly. Or she might judge others to be superior to her, possibly truly, treating the reasons for her actions stemming from them as stronger than the reasons stemming from her own psychology—she regards them as gods (they might be gods). But in the situation we are imagining there is equality between them and her, so it is rational for her to take this equality into account in her deliberations. Her reason for acting morally towards them is that they are her equals in the relevant sense. She thus conjoins this last consideration with what she has already concluded concerning evaluation and action. Now she makes judgments of the form: I ought to do such-and-such for others. She has arrived at the moral ought.

            We have then three separate elements in the origin of moral reasoning: first- person evaluation of psychological states; recognition of reasons for action deriving from that evaluation (practical prudence); and extending this conceptual apparatus to others by virtue of a judgment of equality (morality). Distilling it down still further, we can say that moral reasoning consists of evaluation, practicality, and equality—each element necessary and jointly sufficient. That is the basic structure of moral thinking as we find it. Perhaps the order of acquisition in humans mirrors what I have expressed chronologically for my imaginary being; in any case, that is the architecture of moral reasoning. The whole thing is powered by a first-person recognition that human psychology consists (partly) of emotional states that admit of division into the good and the bad. It would be too simple to say that pain and pleasure provide the basis of moral judgment, since the disagreeable emotions don’t always involve pain (anxiety, boredom, ignorance) and the agreeable ones are only pleasurable in a wide sense (is understanding a type of pleasure?). But there exists a way of dividing the emotions that corresponds to a natural evaluation, and without that neither prudence nor morality could get off the ground.

You might object that other ways of classifying emotions would work just as well for grounding prudence and morality: what if the subject judges that certain emotions are approved by God or by members of his own family and society? That would provide a reason for action different from the kind of evaluative judgment I have cited. But for familiar reasons this kind of suggestion goes nowhere: for (a) it raises the question of why God or other people regard certain emotions as good and other emotions as bad if not precisely that some are intrinsically good and some are intrinsically bad; and (b) such a basis would be unable to power prudence and morality without being itself based on something more than mere positive regard by others—so what if they think boredom is OK, Idon’t! At some point a basic evaluation is necessary or else there is nothing good or bad to be concerned about. If (per impossibile) people were simply indifferent to their emotions, not seeing why some are deemed good and others bad, there would be no reason to be concerned about what emotions they had—they would accept the ones we regard as bad with equanimity. Neutrality about what you feel is the death of prudence and morality; an evaluation is essential in order that action be prescribed or proscribed.

            You might wonder whether the step through prudence to morality could be skipped: why not go straight from evaluation to moral judgment? That is, if a subject judges that others will have disagreeable psychological states unless he does X he might immediately conclude that he ought morally to do X with no thought of prudence. I think this is possible in principle, but my aim was to describe how we think morally not how it is logically possible to think morally. And in our case we take a detour through ourselves: we put ourselves in the position of the other and ask what prudence would require in that circumstance. This is encapsulated in the Golden Rule: treat other people as you would wish to be treated (assuming you are being prudent). We could simply say, “Treat others as they wish to be treated”, but that doesn’t carry the same psychological punch, because we prefer to think in terms of ourselves and of what we want. Thus we urge people to act towards others so as to produce the psychological states that we would like to have if we were in their position. This convoluted way of putting it embeds our grasp of how we conceive of our own good when acting prudently. In our case we think first in prudential terms and then we generalize; we don’t just jump from evaluation of our psychological states to a judgment about how we should treat others. We use our conception of prudent action to generate a moral judgment by taking ourselves as model: I should behave towards others as I would like them to behave towards me (when I am being prudent). In principle, I suppose, a person could have no grasp of prudence and still be motivated by the moral ought, but that does not appear to be true of humans—we weave prudence and morality together. I treat other people’s psyches as I would treat my own, in effect. It is not merely that morality and prudence are parallel forms of reasoning; the latter is embedded in the former—its prototype, as it were. Morality is what happens when prudence extends to others by way of a judgment of equality.

 

 

 

The Problem of Deduction

 

 

The problem of deduction can be stated as follows: in virtue of what does one proposition logically necessitate another proposition? Propositions have logical powers of entailment, but what is the nature of those powers? Compare Hume’s question: what is the nature of causal power? Events necessitate other events, but it is question how they do that—what does causal power consist in? Entailment is a relation between distinct propositions, a relation that holds necessarily, and we want to know what constitutes it. There are two sides to the problem: metaphysical and epistemological. What is the objective nature of the relation of logical consequence, and what kind of knowledge do we have of that relation? And it is a problem because there seems to be nothing for logical necessity to be. Like causal necessity it is undetectable by the senses—we have no “impression” of it (internal or external). We make logical inferences, as we make causal inferences, but we are at a loss to see what grounds them. Is this just a matter of habit with no rational foundation? Just as there is a problem of induction, so there is a problem of deduction; and in both cases necessity is the problematic notion. It seems impossible to locate the necessity that is required for deduction. Logical powers are as elusive as causal powers.

            This difficulty gives rise to skeptical scenarios. What if we encounter aliens who reason very differently from us, taking as logical consequences what we deem to be a palpable non-sequiturs? What if they accept modus ponens as we do except when the subject matter of the propositions concerns (say) psychological states? What if they deduce as we do except after time t at which point they do something completely different (as we would describe it)? How can we demonstrate that they are reasoning incorrectly? What can we point to in their mind that shows that they are not reasoning as they used to? And how can we justify our own belief that we are reasoning correctly? What is it about our grasp of propositions that explains and justifies how we deductively reason? What if someone just doesn’t find the normal inferences self-evident and questions our habitual certainty? What fact about a proposition establishes that it has certain logical consequences and not others?  [1] How do we even get the idea of logical inference (compare Hume on the origin of the idea of causation)? What does the necessitating that we talk so glibly about? Has anyone ever seen it? Examine a proposition on all sides and you will not find logical necessity lurking in it. A proposition is a string of concepts (or possibly objects), but where is the relation of logical necessitation there? How does a proposition reach outside of itself to another proposition that allegedly follows from it? This seems like a mysterious joining of distinct existences.

            Nothing about the linguistic form of a proposition can explain the logical powers of the proposition: phonetics and syntax are not the basis of entailment. Meaning is what must play the role of logical necessitation, but what is it about meaning that plays this role? The problem goes beyond questions of indeterminacy: even if meaning is determinate we still don’t know how it manages to generate entailments. We lamely say “truth in virtue of meaning”: but what does that mean? What is it about meaning (whatever it is) that explains how one proposition can entail another? Complex structured entities don’t generally have entailments, so what is it about complex structured meanings that suits them to give rise to entailments? Meanings have constituent structure, but that doesn’t by itself explain how they generate inter-propositional relations of logical consequence. Lots of things have constituent structure. It is quite possible to do linguistics and not worry about entailment at all. Nor does psychology help: nothing in the mind or behavior can add up to logical entailment—not contents of consciousness or dispositions to infer. We think we can “see” that one proposition entails another, but we can’t say what we are seeing. Is it that we somehow see the shadow of the entailed proposition in the entailing proposition? Do entailments somehow lurk in the crevices of a proposition? What if you were entailment-blind and simply couldn’t see what a proposition entails—would you thereby be blind to the proposition? How can what is inside a proposition determine what is outside it? Can we picture the entailments of a proposition—see them with our mind’s eye? It is not that the given proposition literally contains the propositions it entails, so that in seeing it you see them; the idea is rather that your grasp of a proposition leads you to grasp its logical consequences. But how does a proposition lead you thus? Does it whisper those propositions to you? The entailments are forced on you, we feel, but the force that forces you is elusive. Propositions are complete in themselves (to paraphrase Hume on cause and effect), so how can they make reference to other propositions that lie outside of them? Yet they do in the sense that they have logical entailments; we just can’t see what enables them to. Our deductive practices thus seem devoid of a foundation, as if they hang in thin air. Even in the simplest of cases, such as conjunction elimination, we can’t see how entailment works: how does “and” contrive to produce the consequences it does? Not by its form but by its meaning: but how does its meaning license its entailments? Don’t say its meaning is defined by its entailments, because the question is how meaning and entailments are related: how can the meaning of “and” generate the entailments of propositions containing it? What kind of thing could that meaning be? The problem concerns the metaphysics of meaning (propositions) and we lack a conception of meaning that explains how deductive consequence works (just as we lack a conception of causation that explains how causation works). What is meaning such that logical consequences flow from it?

            The temptation is to adopt a “constant conjunction” view of entailment: there are no intrinsic necessary connections between propositions (compare the regularity theory of causation) but we find that truth-values are constantly conjoined, and that is all there is to it. Whenever one proposition is true certain others are, but it is not that the former proposition has the power to produce truth in other propositions; there is no such inter-propositional necessitation, merely a general coincidence of truth-value. We mistake this coincidence for an actual connection or linkage or dependence. Propositions don’t entail each other; they simply agree in truth-value in regular ways. It is just that whenever a proposition of the form “p and q” is true p is true and q is true, but the former proposition doesn’t make the other propositions true. What we call entailment is just a word for regular agreement in truth-value (there is no consequence). But this kind of position, though tempting, is massively implausible and only attracts us because we find it hard to ground deduction in anything substantial. As so often in philosophy a common sense platitude is challenged by a type of skepticism that undermines our habitual confidence. Deduction is no more immune from this than anything else.

 

  [1] I am alluding here to Wittgenstein’s discussion of meaning and rule following in Philosophical Investigations and Kripke’s treatment of it in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I assume this as background to my remarks here. Doubts about deduction arise naturally from more general doubts about meaning. See also my “Knowledge of Entailment”.

                                               

 

The Nature of Things

 

 

Long ago there lived a pre-Socratic philosopher named Kryptos. Kryptos was interested in change and he had noticed an interesting fact about change: some changes leave an object in existence while other changes put an object out of existence. If you bend a stick or move it from one place to another, you effect a change in it, but it remains in existence, while if you cut it into pieces or burn it in a fire it goes out of existence. Kryptos named these types of change “preservative change” and “destructive change”, and was pleased to have hit upon such an important distinction. Further reflection led him to the idea that things have two sorts of properties: those that are required for the thing to exist and those that are not required for the thing to exist. He had no name for this distinction, but his vague thought was that some properties are more central to a thing’s identity than others. In line with this he made an observation that struck him as significant—a discovery about the nature of things: color is never central to a thing’s identity, but shape can be. Things can always change their color without going out of existence, no matter how extreme the change, but if you change a thing’s shape enough you will destroy it. That is what happens with fire: a burning leaf, for example, goes from its leaf shape to an amorphous pile of ash after undergoing a series of shape changes. Kryptos’ theory was that color change is always preservative but shape change can be destructive (yet it was puzzling to him that some shape change is preservative—what’s the difference?). He had discovered a general truth about things, change, properties, and existence. He felt he was onto something.

            He struggled to find a verbal formulation for his discoveries; he needed a good label for the distinction he had unearthed. He decided to call the properties that were central to a thing’s existence “inherent attributes” and properties that were peripheral “extraneous attributes”. His crude thought was that the former are in the object while the latter are outside of it (the Athens Greek Dictionary defined “inherent” as “existing in something as a permanent or essential attribute”). The shape of a thing—its geometrical form–was inherent in it, while the spatial location of a thing was extraneous to it (as was its color). Clearly, not every aspect of shape was thus inherent, but it seemed to Kryptos that there is a sharp limit on how much change of shape a thing could undergo before ceasing to exist (a chariot, say, could not assume the shape of a quill pen and still exist). This was very obvious in the case of geometrical objects themselves: if you change the shape of a circle to that of a square, you put the circle out of existence. In geometry form is identity. He took to speaking of the “inherent-extraneous distinction” and explaining it to interested parties. He thought of it as an ontological distinction because it concerned the nature of being, i.e. what is involved in something’s existence. The attributes of things partitioned into those that were inherent and those that were extraneous, those that formed the core of an object and those that hung more loosely on the object. It would be possible to examine the object and determine which attributes fall where. He toyed with other labels for the distinction he had discovered: sometimes he spoke of “constitutive attributes” and “circumstantial attributes”, or of what was “intrinsic” and what was “extrinsic”, or of “internal properties” and “external properties”. These labels all had their merits and he was reluctant to be tied down. The distinction itself was what mattered.

            A pupil of Kryptos suggested a simplification: call the cluster of attributes that form the core of a thing its “nature”, defined by the dictionary as “the basic or inherent features, qualities, or character of a person or thing”. True, everything about a thing is part of nature (more or less), but it seemed right to single some attributes out as constituting the specific nature of a thing; the others could be described as “accidental”. Kryptos adopted the suggestion and added something to it: he maintained that it is possible to analyze the nature of a thing—break it down into its constituents. Things were generally complex and could be analyzed into simpler things. Thus some facts about a thing could be revealed by analyzing it, while others could not be arrived at in this way—those that were extraneous. We can analyze the nature of a thing and produce inherent truths about it, but we can also investigate it and discover extraneous truths about it. All this flowed from Kryptos’ initial insight about preservative and destructive change. He had identified a deep ontological distinction: the distinction between what is integral to a thing’s existence and what is peripheral to it—what is built into a thing and what is merely conjoined with it.

            Before long Kryptos added to his basic theory: he noticed that what was inherent was (as he put it) “indispensable”, while what was extraneous was “dispensable”. He saw this as implicit in his original conception, though it now needed to be spelled out. We can say that some attributes could not be removed from a thing without destroying it, while others could be so removed: some are necessary and some are not. He had no established terminology for this distinction, so he adopted the Greek word for mode; that enabled him to speak of a “modal” distinction. Thus he announced the “indispensable-dispensable distinction” and added it to the inherent-extraneous distinction. Then he made the following claim: the modal distinction mirrors the ontological distinction. What is inherent is indispensable and what is extraneous is dispensable. You couldn’t have a thing without its inherent properties, but you could have a thing without its extraneous properties. Another way to put the point was this: the properties that are discovered by analyzing the nature of a thing are indispensable, while those that are discovered by investigating the circumstances of a thing are dispensable. The two distinctions coincide; indeed, the modal distinction seems like a good way to articulate the ontological distinction. In any case, they were glued together. Things have an inherent nature that is essential to them (as Kryptos started saying), while also having extraneous properties that are merely accidental.

            So far Kryptos had said nothing about knowledge of things, only about things themselves. But he eventually began to see the epistemological implications. If a thing’s nature could be discovered by analysis, while learning of its circumstances required going beyond analyzing it, then there were two types of knowledge we could have of a thing—analytic knowledge and circumstantial knowledge. Again, he struggled with terminology (he was a conceptual trailblazer after all), since nothing in colloquial Greek quite supplied what he needed. After intense thought he hit upon what he took to be another insight: some knowledge of things is more basic than other knowledge of things. That is, some knowledge of things presupposes other knowledge of things—and hence is conceptually dependent on such knowledge. Specifically, knowledge of what a thing is is more basic than knowledge of how it is: for we can’t have the latter without the former. We first have to identify things before we can investigate them; or refer to them before we can predicate things of them; or form an adequate conception of them before we try to find out what is true of them (their laws etc). Thus knowledge of a thing’s nature comes before knowledge of its circumstances—knowledge of its inherent attributes precedes knowledge of its extraneous attributes. Analytic knowledge of a thing is prior to other knowledge of it; we find out the latter after we already possess the former. You first form an inventory of the things in the world, in which inherent attributes are specified (nature, essence, conditions of existence), and then you set about discovering the laws and accidental facts about these things. You couldn’t do the reverse. Kryptos christened this epistemological distinction the “prior-subsequent distinction”, for lack of better words (the intuitive idea seemed clear enough). He then took the obvious next step and announced that this distinction coincides with the other two: we have prior knowledge of the inherent indispensable attributes of a thing, while having subsequent knowledge of the extraneous dispensable attributes. The three distinctions—ontological, modal, and epistemological–all line up. Moreover, the ontological distinction is basic, since the others follow from it quite naturally. We can say, in Kryptos’ terminology, that analytic facts about a thing are both indispensable to it and known prior to extraneous facts. For example, we can say that facts about the chemical analysis of a substance are both modally indispensable and epistemologically prior. Likewise, the analysis of a triangle as a three-sided closed figure involves modal indispensability and epistemological priority, in contrast to the fact that (say) triangles are popular in Vladivostok.

Having established all of this Kryptos composed a treatise entitled Fundamental Distinctions of Nature, only fragments of which survive. In it he made gnomic pronouncements like, “Nature divides into the what it is and the how it is”, and “Some attributes are guaranteed by the existence of a thing while others are left to chance”, and “Some knowledge results from labor while some is in the knowing”. One of his main propositions was what came to be called among his disciples the Convergence Thesis, namely that his three distinctions converge: the ontological, the modal, and the epistemological map onto each other. We should observe that he never said anything about sentences or meanings or propositions; he spoke only of things and facts, natures and attributes. His dualisms were resolutely de re: they concerned existence, things, change, attributes, natures, essences, and ways of knowing. How any of this might be expressed in language and thought was not his concern—Kryptos cared only about reality and its divisions. His achievement was to identify these distinctions in reality and demonstrate their interrelatedness. Ontology, modality, and epistemology form a tightly connected package, not to be sundered.

Later philosophers introduced other terminology, intended to capture other distinctions, though reminiscent of Kryptos’ groundbreaking work. Thus we have the analytic-synthetic distinction, the necessary-contingent distinction, and the a priori-a posteriori distinction. Each of these has been much contested and their interrelations subject to controversy. Interestingly enough, one recent group of philosophers agreed with the Convergence Thesis, even accepting that something like Kryptos’ ontological distinction is fundamental. The logical positivists took it that the analytic-synthetic distinction is fundamental, with the modal and epistemological distinctions emerging as consequences. Kant had referred to this distinction as the “explicative-ampliative” distinction, and there are echoes in this of Kryptos’ distinction between the intrinsic nature of a thing and what holds of it as a matter of extrinsic fact. The difference is that Kant was thinking of the explication or analysis of concepts or meanings whereas Kryptos was interested in the explication or analysis of things—geometric forms, substances, species, persons, etc. To him the interesting distinction is between water being H2O (this being its chemical analysis) and the fact that there is water in this glass (an extrinsic non-analytic fact about water). He had no interest in “truth in virtue of meaning”, only in what belongs to the nature of a thing: for him “water is H2O” is an analytic truth because it gives the (chemical) analysis of water.  [1]

Nor did he link the concept of prior knowledge to the concept of experience: his notion of priority is not that of knowledge a person has independently of all sense experience, since we know the nature of substances by sense experience. We could say that his notion of subsequent knowledge coincides with another use of the word “experience”, as when we say that someone has had a lot of experience of the world. Here we are referring to the person’s observing and interacting with many things over a substantial period of time, not to the state of consciousness called “sense experience”—as in a doctor saying, “I’ve had a lot of experience with malaria”. In this sense we can say that subsequent knowledge involves experience while prior knowledge does not, since you can know what something is while having very little experience of how it behaves. I might know what an octopus is by once seeing one (or reading a zoology text) but have had very little experience of octopuses and know nothing of their ways.  The contemporary modal distinction between necessary and contingent truths bears an obvious relation to Kryptos’ distinction between indispensable and dispensable attributes, though it too concerns language not things, and carries other baggage. So there is no simple mapping of Kryptos’ distinctions onto these later distinctions; they are certainly not different ways of saying the same thing, despite some overlap.

What is interesting from Kryptos’ point of view is the recent contention that the Convergence Thesis is false (mainly due to Kripke). He would have no particular objection to the rejection of that thesis for the modern distinctions, but he would no doubt be anxious to point out that the kinds of examples produced by Kripke have no bearing on his distinctions. What are today called analytic truths contain no analysis at all by Kryptos’ standards: truth in virtue of meaning is not analytic truth in the literal sense, which requires breaking something down into constituents (consider “a is identical to a”).  [2] Nor are his extraneous truths aptly described as “synthetic” in any meaningful sense: they don’t involve assembling parts into a whole (i.e. synthesis), as chemical parts can be combined to produce a composite substance. In his sense of “analytic truth” prior knowledge is of analytic truth and all necessity is analytic, since both concern the constitutive structure of a thing as opposed to what is extraneous to it and therefore known subsequently. Knowing what a hexagon is, for example, involves analyzing it into its essential components. Similarly, knowing what water is involves analyzing it into its chemical constituents (or grasping its superficial properties). So “water is H2O” is an analytic truth, a necessary truth, and a prior truth (in the sense that it can be known just by knowing what water is prior to any knowledge of further extraneous facts about water).  But Kryptos has no wish to argue over words: he wishes rather to insist that his distinctions are real, important, and convergent. In his opinion the later distinctions are distorted and misleading versions of his original ideas; but, be that as it may, his distinctions are solid, and they converge. There is no “necessary a posteriori” or “contingent a priori”, as he would interpret these phrases. If an attribute is necessary it is part of a thing’s nature, in which case it is known prior to other facts about the thing; and if an attribute is contingent it is not part of a thing’s nature, in which case it must be known subsequently. Moreover, the necessary and the a priori, as he interprets these terms, coincide with the analytic, as he interprets that term—just as the contingent and the a posteriori coincide with the extraneous (“synthetic” if you must). Thus the three deep distinctions written into the nature of things line up according to the Convergence Thesis, whatever may be true of the newfangled notions. Those notions look like a mess to Kryptos, as he gazes down from his seat in Platonic heaven, while his notions have stood the test of time (none of the other philosophers up there with him have managed to make a dent in them in the last 3,000 years).  People should never have taken the linguistic turn to begin with, he thinks; that was never going to end well. Also, they became too obsessed with epistemology and what is certain (that was the fault of those later Greek skeptics, not to mention that parvenu Descartes). They liked their concept of a priori knowledge because it seemed to grant them certainty in at least one area, but the concept of prior knowledge in Kryptos’ sense affords nothing of the kind. We cannot be certain of the essence or nature of empirical things, but we can know these things well enough to be getting on with. Questions of doubt and certainty are beside the point when it comes to the nature of things. What matters is (a) that things have intrinsic natures and extraneous circumstances (ontological), (b) that some of their attributes are guaranteed by their nature while some are not (modal), and (c) that knowledge of their nature is more basic than, and prior to, knowledge of their other characteristics. We should not lose sight of these fundamental distinctions and their interrelatedness, whatever may be said of more recent distinctions.

 

Colin McGinn

 

              

 

 

  [1] This is what might be called a “deep analysis” of water, but there is also the possibility of a “superficial analysis”, as when we determine the cluster of properties that belong to the appearance of water (transparent, tasteless, liquid, etc). Both may be said to constitute the nature of water. Neither concerns the meaning of the word “water”.

  [2] It is an interesting question whether the modern notion of analytic truth can be assimilated to something like Kryptos’ notion. Consider “bachelors are unmarried men”: this can be interpreted as providing a de re analysis of the attribute of being a bachelor, not as an analysis of meaning as such. Then a statement like “bachelors are happy” is not an analytic truth in this sense, but rather involves facts extraneous to the very nature of a bachelor. So Kryptos would agree that analytic truths in the modern sense coincide with analytic truths in his sense, at least in certain cases.

                                               

 

 

The Murder of Quilty

 

 

The enthralled and stricken reader of Lolita reaches chapter 35 of the book, the penultimate chapter, in a tragic state of mind, weeping hot tears. This is the chapter in which Clare Quilty is brutally murdered by a drunk and deranged Humbert Humbert. Yet the chapter unfolds as farce, played for laughs, and featuring a pair of clownish combatants—jet-black farce, to be sure, but farce nonetheless. What is going on here? Why does Nabokov engineer such an abrupt and startling change of mood and style? We know that Humbert is a murderer from the first chapter (“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), but we are not prepared for the revelation that he murders comically. This is the only chapter of Lolita that veers into farcical territory, though the book is hilarious throughout, and it cries out for explanation, or at least puzzled attention.

            We get a hint that the rules will be different early on: “A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road, but when I reached Pavor Manor, the sun was visible again, burning like a man, and the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees.” We are told explicitly that the door “swung open as in a medieval fairy tale”, placing our hero at the center of a tale by Grimm. As if to emphasize the fictitious world we have entered, Humbert describes himself as “a familiar and innocuous hallucination” and a “raincoated phantasm”—at least in the eyes of the purple-robed Quilty, himself characterized as a “sleepwalker”. These are two literary men, men of fiction, and this is to be a fairy tale murder, though of the grotesque and fantastical kind. But it also takes place in a real place with a real gun and real blood. That gun has been bathed in oil by Humbert and is “black and awfully messy” (he thinks he got the “wrong product”): it is a filthy and vile object, not gleaming and ideal. This duality runs through the entire chapter: fiction and fact, the ideal and the real. As Humbert’s “heart pounded with tiger joy” at the prospect of killing his rival he accidentally “crunched a cocktail glass underfoot”—not the stuff of fairy tale but of dull irksome fact.

            Confronting Quilty (“Master met me in the Oriental parlor”) Humbert is interrogated “in a high hoarse voice” about who he is: “Are you by any chance Brewster?” That is not the reception Humbert was expecting as an avenging angel. But he rouses himself with the thought of the imminent execution: “foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain”—“oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!” Quilty, for his part, “cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever”. Humbert’s revenge narrative is being subverted by Quilty, who is refusing to play the cornered victim, denying Humbert the authorial power he craves. There then follows some tedious rigmarole from Quilty about long-distance telephone calls and who is to pay for them, again not very fairy-tale-like. Humbert interrupts him to force the story back to his punitive purposes, mentioning “a little girl called Dolores Haze”. He declares himself to be her father, to which Quilty responds that he is not her father but rather “some foreign literary agent” (not a very powerful one apparently). The preamble to the crowning act is not going as Humbert had hoped and envisaged, because Quilty is refusing to play his assigned part. Even when Humbert solemnly warns him that he is about to die he declines to take his would-be murderer seriously, pulling a cigarette apart and munching on bits of it, then bizarrely suggesting that Humbert is “either Australian, or a German refugee”. When he finally fires at Quilty’s foot the gun goes off “with a ridiculously feeble and juvenile sound”, the bullet entering the rug not the foot. He gloomily confides to us that “the rich joy was waning” and that “the weapon felt limp and clumsy in my hand”. This is not how the story was supposed to unfold.

            Quilty remarks pari passu that he had “no fun with your Dolly”, being “practically impotent, to tell the melancholy truth”.  Again, this is not part of Humbert’s preferred narrative, just a miserable medical fact about an ailing middle-aged man. When they commence to fighting, or at least sloppily tussling, Humbert addresses the reader directly: “Elderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much gin.” This is not a grand revenge epic but a suburban front-room farce, inspiring amusement not awe. Quilty himself describes the proceedings as a “pistol-packing farce” and then proceeds to deliver a meandering and bizarre monologue, offering Humbert “a house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy”, calling him Brewster again, promising him the royalties from his next play, drawing his attention to an upstairs collection of rare erotica, and promising that he can arrange for him to attend executions. Humbert interrupts this rambling litany with a gunshot; and now things turn nasty—shifting from the farcical to the murderous—though not before Quilty hunkers down at an obliging piano and plays “several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering”. The comedy will not stop just because bullets are flying and puncturing. Death will not put an end to farce.

As Quilty walks up the stairs, already shot twice, Humbert shoots him three or four times (who’s counting?), “and every time I did it to him, that horrible thing to him, his face would twitch in an absurd clowning manner, as if he were exaggerating the pain”, all the while speaking in a phony British accent and “smirking”. It was as if “the bullets had been capsules wherein a heady elixir danced”. Still, the man is mortally wounded, multiply punctured, and not long for this earth. Humbert coolly informs us that he “reloaded the thing with hands that were black and bloody”. He finds Quilty wrapped up in bed: “I hit him at very close range through the blankets”. He then watches a pink bubble of blood with “juvenile connotations” form on his victim’s lips. But with the deed done Humbert’s feelings are not those of jubilation but of disappointment: “The whole sad business had taken more than an hour. He was quiet at last. Far from feeling any relief, a burden even weightier than the one I had hoped to get rid of was with me, upon me, over me. I could not bring myself to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead. He looked it: a quarter of his face gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck.” This is a grisly image (the phrase “dawning sense” is particularly nasty), reminding the reader that for all the farce and fun this was a true-life honest-to-God murder—not a fictitious murder, not a fairy tale murder.

            But the pitch-black humor has not quite come to an end: downstairs a few of Quilty’s friends have arrived and are busy drinking in the kitchen. Humbert tells them that he has just killed Quilty, which triggers much jocularity about how it was about time, should have been done long ago, etc. So Humbert can’t even bask in the reality of his murderous act—his narrative is still being subverted. At this point Quilty himself crawls out onto the balcony, “flapping and heaving, and then subsiding, forever this time, in a purple heap”. Even then the visitors still don’t believe he is dead, just exceptionally hung over. Humbert glumly concludes that this was “the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”, adding: “With a heavy heart I left the house and walked through the spotted blaze of the sun to my car.” He has some trouble squeezing out between two other cars. Reality has resumed its leaden hold after the farcical fairy tale, with its real-life accompaniments.

            Two general themes stand out for me in this challenging material, aside from the interweaving of fiction and fact. Both strike me as specifically American, and the novel certainly takes America as one of its central topics. The first is the romantic idea of the singular cleansing act of violence, especially gun violence. Terrible things are done in this novel, both by Quilty and Humbert, and it is natural to desire some rectification, some justice, some payback. Humbert decides he will execute Quilty for his crimes, thus restoring the moral order, cleansing the world of sin and sordidness. He will also feel good about annihilating his rival (male competition being another American theme). It is to be expected then that American popular culture will come into play—the gunslinger, the gangster, the armed cop. But once the deed is done—and it was a bloody and clumsy deed—Humbert feels only languor and disappointment, a heavy sense of bathos. Quilty is dead, the world has been cleansed of him, but nothing has fundamentally changed—Lolita, in particular, remains as damaged and ravaged as ever. The cleansing act of violence was gory, chaotic and messy, and ultimately ineffective. Quilty’s death does nothing to expiate Lolita’s suffering, or Humbert’s. The violence was essentially pointless (and does Quilty really deserve to be executed for his sins, real as they were?). The fantasy of violent justice is exposed as precisely that, a fantasy. Humbert is a European, but in this chapter he takes on an American persona—the holy killer. The result is ugly and absurd, formless and pointless. This is capital punishment at its direst. The gun (“Chum”) is not romanticized; it is denigrated, with its coating of black filth. The “bliss” of righteous murder turns to dull and dismal banality (those happy flies!). Humbert is no glamorous avenging angel, just a pathetic drunk madman carrying a foul weapon. In this chapter the myth of cleansing violence (celebrated in much American fiction) is revealed as a kind of self-deception, a dark moral illusion.   

            The second theme I detect has to do with the influence of fiction on reality. Humbert cannot carry out his act of violence without placing it in a fictional context: he sees himself as a character in fiction—of the hardboiled variety. Quilty too cannot help seeing himself as a character in fiction; this is why he keeps playing fictional characters. They are both involved in a scene they have witnessed many times before—the murder scene. They cannot help adopting the roles they have observed so often; they have been penetrated by these fictional roles. There is real violence and there is the fictional representation of violence, and the two interact. But they are not the same, so Humbert’s fantasy of violence is not matched by the reality of it. In this theatrical chapter he and Quilty cannot help but act out a fiction—a dominant fiction of American culture. Is it not true that any American murderer must see himself through the lens of fictional murderers? He will have these before his mind as he murders: the gangster has seen himself on the cinema screen; the serial killer has seen his fictional likeness; the gun-wielding policeman has seen his TV image. The American imagination is accordingly alive with gunfire, fictional and other. In America violence is bound up with the representation of violence; there is no escaping it. So Humbert is not really himself in this chapter; or rather, he is refracted through the lens of his adopted country. He is Americanized for the duration. He becomes a stock American character: the man with a gun bent on justice and not too fussy about how he achieves it. He sometimes refers to his movie-star good looks; here he appears in a murder movie (a “thriller”).  [1] Quilty is American all along and in every way, but Humbert becomes temporarily American in his capacity as killer, though not completely so. Hence the switch of tone in this chapter: for a while the novel becomes a different kind of book (“American farce-gothic”). Nabokov decided to play the murder of Quilty as a kind of parody of America, which accounts for its stylistic discontinuity. Thus the chapter is a mishmash of forms and a cacophony of voices. Nabokov has staged an American murder in the psychological precincts of Europe. The result is a mixture of fact and fiction, genre and case study. In the end Quilty is indisputably and literally a dead man, but he has been fictionalized in the process.

 

Colin McGinn

 

   

  [1] It will be recalled that in Stanley Kubrick’s film of Lolita the murder of Quilty is the first scene of the film not placed somewhere toward the end. It is indeed a strongly cinematic scene with much spectacle and bravura performances by the actors. It alludes to other movie genres; it contains action sequences and loud noises, as well as broad comedy. It is conscious of itself as fiction. We think we know what we are watching, but really we don’t. James Mason plays Humbert straight with nary a wink or nudge, but Peter Sellers gives Quilty the full thespian treatment—the wild accents, the physical comedy, the twitches and grimaces, the actorly brilliance. This Quilty is a quilt of roles, a patchwork of fictional characters—just as he is in the rest of the film. While no one could describe Humbert as just an empty shell of a man that description seems apt for Quilty—the playwright composed of a cast of characters. In the murder scene he cycles through a series of roles, never finding the authentic individual; he ends as an empty bubble about to burst.