Are Women Men?

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Are Women Men?

The answer is a categorical no, but the question is interesting in itself. Men are women, but women are not men.[1] To establish this, we need to know the essence of men or male organisms generally. The essence of maleness is depositing sperm in the female body and not containing the resulting fetus. The female, by contrast, receives the sperm and contains the fetus. The female does not deposit sperm and keep an empty belly. Therefore, the female does not have the essence of the male and is thus not a male. Women are not men. True, both share reproductive duties and are subject to pregnancy, but that is not the essence of the male, so the woman is not male by sharing this property with the male. Accordingly, men are members of the opposite sex, but women are not. It might be different if women had some characteristic possessed by males that has a specifically male nature, analogous to nipples; but that appears not to be so. Imagine if women had some sort of reduced scrotum between their legs serving no reproductive function, some sort of remnant of an earlier male identity; that might incline us to assign them to the male category in addition to their own. But no such thing appears to be the case—they have no distinctively male characteristics analogous to (functionless) nipples. (The clitoris is not a small penis.)  They don’t even have beards or deep voices. They are all woman. By no stretch of the imagination are women a breed of men. If women contained relics of Adam’s rib, we might spot maleness lurking within them, but that is clearly false. Men are not exclusively men, but women are exclusively women. Men are bisexual but women are unisexual. Womanhood is more universal than manhood, being possessed by men and women alike. A man is a type of woman, but a woman is not a type of man. This is because a man is defined by his sexual physiology whereas a woman is defined by her sexual role—getting pregnant and giving birth. The concept male is a physiological concept whereas the concept female is a functional concept, i.e., what does the job of becoming pregnant and giving birth.  The two sexes have different kinds of essence. The male has the property of getting pregnant and contributing to child-rearing, but this is not his essence, whereas it is the essence of the female. If this entails rewriting our whole conception of the sexes, so be it.[2]

[1] See my “Are Men Women?”

[2] What does this do to feminism?

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Are Men Women?

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Are Men Women?

I mean this question literally: are men really women? Are they deep down, biologically, women in disguise—and a thin disguise at that? When you meet a man are you actually meeting a woman? I will give a quick proof that they are: men have nipples; anyone with nipples is a woman; therefore, men are women. If you see the point immediately, you need not bother to read on; if you are slow on the uptake, keep reading (and prepare to be surprised). We are told in the Bible that Eve was made from a rib of Adam, so she is a kind of honorary man; well, men have a similar relation to women, so they are really women. The natural kind Woman includes the natural kind Man; or better, there are no men (in the exclusive sense) only women. There aren’t two sexes but one, and it’s female. I am talking here about all species that are conventionally divided into male and female specimens: there are only female animals and subclasses of them. It is a pre-scientific myth that male (non-female) animals exist (like the myth of the unicorn or centaur). This is just not a sound way to carve up the biological universe. If you think I am going to present recondite genetic evidence to this effect, then think again—I am going to establish the point by means of imaginary thought experiments. It follows from basic principles of biological classification.

What is a woman? A woman is a human being that gets pregnant and gives birth; a man doesn’t get pregnant and give birth, though he contributes to procreation in his own secondary way. But is that really true? The woman carries the baby in her womb and it exits her body at birth; these things are not true of the man. But the man is also pregnant in his own way and also gives birth: he carries the burden of the baby, ensuring that it reaches maturity safely, by feeding it (via the mother) and protecting the vessel in which it resides, sometimes with his life; and he also gives birth to it in the sense that he enables this event to happen by providing the necessary aid and comfort. If he does neither of these things, he is not pregnant and not involved in giving birth; but if he does, he is. Indeed, this is the way people have recently come to talk of pregnancy and birth: the couple is said to be pregnant, including the man; the couple is the biological unit of pregnancy. Having the fetus spatially inside you is not the only way of being pregnant. If you are skeptical, consider the following thought experiment: on another planet the so-called male is attached to the female by something like an umbilical cord through which nutrients pass to the fetus. He has no say in this; it just happens by biological necessity. He feeds the fetus just like the mother; indeed, we can suppose that only he feeds the fetus—the mother is not even connected to it by an umbilical cord. The man is thus pregnant with the baby, though it doesn’t live inside his body. But then, by the definition of a woman, he is a woman. We can also suppose that in addition to nipples he has functioning breasts and takes part in feeding the baby post-partum. He has a penis, naturally, but this doesn’t prevent him playing the biological roles in question. If this isn’t enough to prove the point, imagine that after three months the fetus is transferred into a chamber inside the man where it lives for the next three months; surely then he is pregnant! He might even give birth to the baby in due course. He is a woman as well as a man (what with the penis and all). If an animal with a penis could impregnate itself and carry the baby to term, thereupon giving birth, it would be a female according to the standard definition; and what other kind of definition could there be? But this kind of imaginary case is no different conceptually from the ordinary human case, except that the man is not physically conjoined with the baby. We might even say that he is the pregnant one, not the female, if he carries the full responsibility for ensuring the healthy birth of the baby—while the female merely acts as a holding cell for the fetus (it might not even cause her much inconvenience). What if the male of the species has a body very like that of a human female, with breasts and no penis to speak of, passing his sperm to the female body in some other way, which looks just like a human male body, wherein the fetus resides for the next few months and then slips painlessly out? Wouldn’t we say the “man” is really a woman, since he does the lion’s share of the procreative work and looks like a woman? Where the fetus happens to spend its time is beside the point. The man has gotten (in effect) pregnant by inserting sperm into a female helper, so he is really a woman: he is also a woman. An ordinary human father-to-be is a woman in that he plays the biological role played by a woman, viz. donating resources to the baby he has fathered. His life is now one of expecting: he is about to have a baby: he is pregnant. We might say he has an external uterus, or that the mother’s uterus has now extended to include him. He is part of the environment in which the fetus develops—the sustaining biological environment. The mother’s reproductive phenotype is extended in his direction. The couple copulate, get pregnant, and give birth; it’s not solely the job of the mother. But then, the father is also the mother and hence a woman. If an organism had both a penis and a vagina (a not impossible arrangement), it would be both male and female by our usual rough criteria; well, the human male is also a human female, because of his role in reproduction. He is a baby vehicle. And given that every male has the potential to get pregnant in this sense, they are all women too. If surgery could install a womb inside a man, then we would not hesitate to say that he is now a woman (as well as a man); but functionally this has already happened, since the man performs the same function as the womb in respect of keeping the fetus safe and fed. Deep down, a man is a woman.

This is like saying humans are apes: we fall under the same natural zoological kind. The contrastive use of “human” and “ape” should not fool us; it is entirely pragmatic. Similarly, we use “man” and “woman” contrastively in ordinary discourse, but that doesn’t show that the natural kind Woman does not include men—men are simply a subspecies of women. This is something we have discovered by logical reasoning plus elementary biology. It’s a bit like discovering that all white people are brown because every so-called white person is apt to turn a shade of brown in the sun (a browner shade of pale). The labels can be useful, but they don’t map exactly onto biological reality. Let’s add another thought experiment: suppose there were once only female humans and that the so-called males evolved from them (the converse of the Adam and Eve story) by various tweaks and accidents. Then it would be natural to say that the males are just variants on the females and are really a special case of them; they are not some independent natural kind. The male nipples provide evidence for this, but it is clear from many anatomical facts. The primary specimens are the females because they came first and do the main work of reproduction; the females were the prototype, the males merely parvenus. They are females with penises, that’s all. If their psychology and anatomy are very like those of the original females, then we may as well classify them together. The nipples are just the tip of the iceberg taxonomically. Biologically speaking, men and women are of the same basic natural kind: anatomically, psychologically, reproductively. The differences are minor and can be removed in thought experiments—there could in principle be child-bearing penis-wielding hunks of manliness and non-child-bearing vagina-hosting (but sperm-releasing) slices of femininity. The former would qualify as women according to the usual definition, while the latter would count as men. As it is, we humans have the opposite suite of traits; but men still share the trait of fetus-supporting and child-rearing, thus qualifying them as women. In imaginary worlds we could move the two sexes closer together so as to equalize the roles. Male nipples remind us that biologically we are of the same natural kind as women. Under the skin we are all female. Really, we are both of the same sex, since we both participate in the reproductive process in roughly equivalent ways: women get pregnant, but so do men. It is the same with the birds and bees: from a biological perspective the sexes are fundamentally the same—both are offspring-producing machines spending their hard-earned resources. Things are not as objectively binary as our linguistic practices would suggest. Nature doesn’t think in this binary way (the genes don’t care who is male and who is female so long as they get into the next generation).

Imagine if the male and female physically merged during the reproductive process so that only one body moved about the place. Then the male would be indistinguishable from the female and would be rightly described as female for the duration. Imagine too that the male does not survive the merging and perishes once the job is done, leaving the female behind. Wouldn’t we then say that the male had become a female in the process of reproducing? We don’t physically merge with each other when reproducing, but we do get tightly bonded; the man becomes more like a woman when acting as father. Men are women waiting to happen, and nothing wrong with that (it’s not a “sex change”). Men have a feminine side, literally. If men grew breasts during the pregnancy of their partners and used them to feed the baby, wouldn’t this be sufficiently womanly as to demand the label “woman”? But men functionally do much the same thing when they go out hunting for food to feed the baby. So, lads, let’s all agree, we are really women at heart (as well as men); we are just very macho women, or feminine men. Nature is procreative so we all do what women do, create and care for babies. Nature made two types of women: big slobby hairy ones with penises and petite neat smooth ones with vaginas.[1]

[1] Actually, the phenotypic differences are not that marked, with large individual variation; still, the basic point remains. It’s a woman’s world (to paraphrase James Brown).

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Is Philosophy an Ethical Subject?

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Is Philosophy an Ethical Subject?

To hear it from Plato, you would think so. The ultimate form is The Good and we are admonished to seek it. We should search for beauty, truth, and goodness; this is our duty, our solemn obligation. Happiness will inevitably result. We should (morally) avoid the seductions of art and sophistry. We must elevate our souls in the quest for wisdom. Philosophy is thus shot through with ethical content, according to Plato; it is an ethical discipline. Then there is the period following Plato in which religion and philosophy are intertwined and ethics paramount. Meanwhile eastern philosophy is largely occupied with ethical questions—how to live, etc. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have strong ethical concerns and write on ethics; they urge the virtues of empiricism (Berkeley wants to combat the evils of materialistic atheism). In the twentieth century Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein strike ethical poses of one kind or another (skeptical or anti-skeptical). Clarity is commended; obscurity condemned. There is a moralistic streak to the proceedings. All philosophy departments have ethics on the curriculum, and intellectual virtues are preached and practiced. There is a kind of philosophical church—a whiff of the monastery. The atmosphere is thick with moralizing, chiefly intellectual. It is not difficult to see why: logic is central (how one ought to reason), the moral necessity of clarity, the supreme good of Reason, honesty of argument, contempt for fallacy and non-sequitur. True, the ethics mainly concerns intellectual ethics, but it is no less intense for that. Many philosophers fancy themselves moral exemplars and parade as such (fair enough). We philosophers believe in the right and the good and think of ourselves as improving mankind. We are thoroughly normative in our attitudes. We may feel morally superior to others, rightly or wrongly. It might even be contended that philosophy is a branch of ethics; the subject is steeped in ethical concerns—all of it. Hence the susurration of disapproval that hangs in the air at philosophy colloquia when the speaker (or questioner) is thought to be not quite up to our high intellectual-moral standards (“Didn’t he just beg the question?”). We are expert philosophical moralizers, or we take ourselves to be (I plead guilty).

But is this rosy picture really true anymore? Is a modern philosophy department as morally sensitive as all that? I will forgive you if you express skepticism. Has philosophy shed its obsolete quasi-religious fervor in favor of something more like a science department? I think we might reasonably reply that academic philosophy today has become professionalized and corporatized; it is more like a regular work-place in which self-advancement is the prevailing ethos. There are remnants of the old monastery, but we have become scientized and sanitized; we are all business these days (promotions, publications, grants, conferences, etc.). But—and this is the biggest of buts—we have left the essence of philosophy behind. Philosophy is dyingbecause of it; indeed, it is pretty much dead. People are not so much interested in philosophy as in what it can do for them career-wise. The love of the subject as such has gone, or is in retreat, or is on life-support. The purity of philosophy has dwindled to the impurity of the marketplace—capitalist philosophy, in a word. That is why so many philosophers want to get rid of philosophy proper and replace it with psychology or physics or politics. The ethical dimension has been eclipsed and the soul (the spirit) has gone out of it, or is in the process of going out of it. In the end this may kill the discipline. Certainly, the moral quality of actual philosophers has greatly diminished, as witness the moral posturing to which we have been subjected for some time now. Intellectual standards have slipped horribly. Crude politics has taken over–plus crude scientism and crude ideological rhetoric. This is part of a culture-wide depreciation of ethics in general, which has many sources, not the least of which is a misplaced worship of the empirical sciences. In any case, philosophy is in its death-throes, in large part because it has forgotten its ethical mission. Psychology and physics don’t have this mission, but the inculcation of good intellectual ethics is central to philosophy and necessary for it to thrive. Plato was basically right.

Is philosophy also an aesthetic subject, like art history or pottery class? Here matters are less clearly etched in the history of the subject, but I think the signs are unmistakable: elegance of prose, clarity of argument, beauty of theory. Like mathematics, we don’t have empirical findings to fall back on, but we do have aesthetic appreciation—the thrill of a good proof. Not for nothing did Plato include beauty in his list of primary forms. A philosopher can look shabby (as Socrates did) but his arguments had better not be. Peter Strawson was a perfect example of this ideal: elegance of clothing, voice, and prose. I think we underestimate the appeal of the beautiful in philosophy, especially in the matter of writing (Plato was a great stylist as well as a great philosopher). Russell was a consummate stylist and I could mention many others. Thus, beauty and goodness are part of the stuff of philosophy, and long may they remain so. As things are going, however, they may not last much longer and the field will become an aesthetic and moral wilderness full of self-serving corporate types obsessed with the bottom-line. The signs are ominous.[1]

[1] Philosophy as it exists on the internet is largely devoid of moral or aesthetic qualities, being a cesspool of vulgar politics and careerism. I don’t think the minds of your typical philosopher today are much better. I recall happier days when philosophy was philosophy.

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On Imagination, Belief, and Action

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On Imagination, Belief, and Action

I was reminded recently of the importance of my book Mindsight (2004), because it brings the imagination into the center of the philosophy of mind.[1] In that book I make the point that belief presupposes imagination (chapter 10): for you can’t believe something without entertaining it first—imagining the state of affairs that makes it true. Imagination is thus prior to cognition: the cognitive step of belief formation builds on the antecedent formation of an imagined state of affairs. Imagination thus precedes and conditions reason. It isn’t somehow independent of reason and possibly at odds with it, as the rationalist tradition supposes; it is foundational to reason. The theory of belief (and hence reasoning) must include a theory of imagination. In the beginning was the image (in a broad sense). Representing a possibility precedes accepting an actuality.

The point I want to add to this is that imagination is also vital to agency: you can’t act (in the full sense) unless you envisage possibilities, because that’s what choice is—selecting from among imagined possibilities.[2]Action, like belief, is imagination-dependent. The will presupposes imagination, as does the ability to believe (and hence reason). Conation and cognition are thus up to their neck in imagination. The old opposition between rational action and rational belief, on the one hand, and imagination, on the other, is mistaken. Imagination is foundational in both areas. Thus, romanticism is true, after all. The human mind is fundamentally an imagining mind; it uses the same faculty as art and literature. We choose and believe because we imagine.

In addition, imagination is indispensable to freedom, since freedom is choice among possibilities; no imagination, no freedom.[3] True, a creature can be free of constraints hampering its free expression of desire; but unless it can imagine, it cannot choose from among alternatives. Many animals presumably lack an imagination capable of generating alternative possibilities, so they are not free in the way we are (though they can still be free to do what they want). Thus, freedom presupposes imagination. We can conclude that three of our most precious attributes—willed action, rational belief, and freedom—are predicated on the existence of imagination. We would do well to explore imagination further.[4]

[1] I happened upon a talk by Dr. Richard Ogle at the Bath Royal in 2005 (I had not seen it before), which celebrates the publication of Mindsight as reintroducing the imagination into the study of mind. It used to be regarded with suspicion (Plato, Christianity, etc.).

[2] See my “Agency and Imagination”.

[3] See my “Imagination and Free Will”.

[4] The higher flights of imagination, in art and science and philosophy, are based on a faculty universal in our species—presumably one that is biologically grounded. Language itself is made possible by the imagination, because meaning is a matter of grasping possibilities (see chapter 12 of Mindsight).

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Action Explanation

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Action Explanation

The orthodox view of action explanation goes as follows: a desire combines with a belief to cause a bodily movement; citing these explains the action in question.[1] I desire a beer and I believe that moving my body into the kitchen will get me a beer, and these together cause me to act in a certain way, i.e., I go to the kitchen. The desire alone will not do the trick, and neither will the belief, but if we conjoin them the action is the causal upshot. This is belief-desire psychology. I will pour cold water on this idea: these conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient to bring about the action, though in certain circumstances they could. Possible agents could work this way (just about).

The reason they are not necessary is this: you could act without having either a belief or a desire. Some agents have no beliefs at all, others act without forming instrumental beliefs; and not all action is prompted by desire. It is too intellectualist to suppose that all action is backed by a belief about what bodily movements would lead to a certain outcome—consider animals, babies, and unreflective adults. Is it to be supposed that I consciously believe that putting my foot forward will lead me to get to the other room? I don’t even think about it, let alone form a belief to that effect—a rational, justified, true belief. Rather, my body is programmed to act that way; I don’t consider the various ways I can get to the other room and arrive at the belief that putting one foot in front of another will get the job done. Nor do I always desire to do what I do; I often desire not to do it. The concept of desire is being used in a highly promiscuous manner in these formulations (so sometimes people resort to “pro-attitude”). But even if we allow this dubious move, it is not true that people always act on their desires, even their carefully considered desires—because there is such a thing as weakness of will. People find themselves doing what they do not, and ought not, want to do. Desire is bypassed, bracketed. And the conditions are not sufficient because causation by belief and desire is not sufficient for intentional action, as in cases of deviant causal chains. Further, a desire is basically impotent without the consent of the will; I have a great many desires I don’t act on. I can desire a beer and believe I can get one from the kitchen but I don’t act on it, because I’m too lazy or am trying to drink less or because I get distracted. In order to act the will must be engaged—whatever that may be. The belief-desire story is intended as a substitute for direct appeal to the will, this being deemed mysterious. It is indeed a mystery, but the belief-desire story is a myth. The correct explanation of my action is that I willed it, but we can’t say what this amounts to. Beliefs and desires are lame substitutes, being neither necessary not sufficient for willed action.

The fact is that action can result from, and be explained by, almost anything. It can be explained by a moral judgement, or a momentary perception, or a vivid mental image, or a pang of hunger, or a fit of jealousy, or a creative breakthrough—so long as the will is engaged. But we don’t know what the will is and how it works; it seems like a sudden upsurge from the deep. It has unconscious roots and a peculiar kind of creativity. It seems to emerge from nowhere, inexplicably, miraculously. It is like consciousness in this respect—an emergent puzzling phenomenon. A mental impetus, a mysterious trigger. It is easily aroused and not always rational. It isn’t fussy about what triggers it. If I imagine myself jumping off a high building, I may find myself with an urge to do it, though nothing in my psyche recommends that rash move; my will is being tickled and aroused. I may spit or kick or scream just for the hell of it. The will is like a separate faculty with a mind of its own; it isn’t the obedient servant of belief and desire. The will looks askance at belief and desire—too passive, too leaden, too stuck in their ways. They are conservative and docile; it is bold and adventurous. The right view, then, is that we have no adequate theory of action explanation, beyond the truism that some bodily movements are the result of will and some are not. Why did I jump off the bridge or tap my finger? Because I willed it; that’s the basic psychological fact, though correlated with other such facts (beliefs and desires, moods and feelings). The action was unlike unwilled “acts” like accidentally tripping up or falling down. The will is influenced by belief and desire, but it isn’t identical to them—they are not what it consists in. The will is a mystery, as has long been recognized.[2]

[1] The locus classicus is Davidson’s “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” (1963).

[2] Take sleep-walking, for example: clearly an action, but where are the beliefs and desires supposed necessary for action? Or hypnotically induced action, or obsessive-compulsive action, or shifting in bed while asleep, or humming, or pursing one’s lips, or involuntarily mimicking someone else, or pulling one’s ear lobe, or swearing under one’s breath. The model of an antecedent desire coupled with an instrumental belief about how to satisfy it has no application in these cases—yet they are actively willed. It is another thing entirely.

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Imagination and Free Will

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Imagination and Free Will

Discussions of free will typically focus on bodily action, trivial or momentous. Is such action compatible with determinism? Is it free in the ordinary compatibilist sense? But that is not the only kind of action that can be described as free: there are also acts of the imagination. About this kind of action, I would say two things: (a) such actions are not free from the past, and (b) they are free from coercion.[1] For causation by the past (and present) is not a kind of coercion. You are free to do things if you are not coerced and wish to do them, but you are not free from your own mental and physical nature—it determines what do you, down to the last detail. You are free to imagine what you want to imagine, even though your wants (etc.) determine what you choose to imagine. I think the case of imagination brings out clearly the truth of these two propositions. First, you are clearly not free from your own nature in your imaginative life: what you imagine is uniquely fixed by the totality of impinging physical and mental causes—your brain and your mind. In particular, your imaginings are a function of your desires and experiences; and of course, you are not free from those—why would you want to be? No one ever imagines things wildly at variance with everything they know, desire, and have experienced. No two brains could be exactly alike and yet one has an imaginative life quite different from the other. If they did, it would be random and pointless—like having a belief completely unrelated to everything else about you. This kind of “freedom” is a fanciful myth. Yet you are perfectly free to imagine whatever you feel like imagining—what you feel like imagining being part of your antecedent nature. No one is stopping you—and no illness or brain failure either. Your imagination is working perfectly, and it follows your general (and detailed) psychology (and physiology). You have all the freedom of imagination you could ever want; specifically, you can imagine whatever you desire. Indeed, your freedom in this respect is greater than your bodily freedom, since the body is far more subject to coercion and malfunction. Other people can force you to act against your will by causing your body to move (or not move) in certain ways, but they can’t do that to your imagination. They can imprison your body but not your mind: in jail you can imagine not being in jail—you can perform this act (but not the act of bodily escape). Also, your body can fail you in your desired projects and often does, but your imagination is a reliable partner—it goes where you tell it. You can be in imaginary heaven while stuck in bodily hell. Other people can’t even tell what you are imagining, as they can tell what your body is up to. Thus, the imagination is a haven of freedom, unlike the body which must cope with the physical world. I think few people would deny that this is a case of genuine freedom, and it is perfectly compatible with psychophysical determinism. That is, they would accept a compatibilist account of imaginative freedom: the imagination is clearly free to do as it pleases, though just as clearly not free from the past, because determined by it. The body, by contrast, is not generally free of coercion or constraint—we can’t do whatever we want with it. We are not free to move about as we wish and we are not free to flout natural laws and we are not free to defy our bodily state: but we can do all these things with our imagination. It is paradigmatically free. Compatibilism is true of it, clearly. Freedom is manifest in it. The body acts as a kind of burden, limiting our freedom to do as we desire, but the imaginative mind is anything but. Intuitively, acts of imagining are genuinely free—as free as a bird. There is no impediment to enjoying the freedom inherent in imagination—the indulging of wishes. The imagination says yes to desire, however forbidden or suppressed by external forces. In the light of this, there should be no sense of tension between the freedom of the imagination and its determination by the past, except an equivocation on the word “free”. Freedom of the imagination is in no whit undermined by its dependence on the past.[2]

[1] See my “Two Concepts of Freedom” and other essays on free will on this blog.

[2] Only if our imagination were controlled by some external power and detached from our actual desires (etc.) would we not have freedom of the imagination. But this is not actually the case, barring some exotic tale about mind control from elsewhere. Normally, we imagine what we genuinely desire not what someone else has brainwashed us into thinking we desire. To the extent that this is not true, we are not free. Sheer determinism, however, does not undermine our status as free agents.

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On Trump, Nukes, and Satan

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On Trump, Nukes, and Satan

The reason Trump gives for his war and threat of annihilation is that the Iranians are “sick” and “disturbed” people, i.e., insane. This is why they must never have a nuclear weapon, though other countries may, some of which are antagonistic towards us. The thought is that the Iranians are too psychologically unbalanced to be a trusted with a nuclear bomb, so we must do anything in our power to prevent them obtaining one, even to the point of annihilation. The trouble with this rationale is simply that it is false—the Iranians are not insane or unbalanced or “sick” (though they may be very bad). So, Trump is waging war against them based on bad psychology, endangering the entire world thereby. He is a lousy psychologist on top of everything else.

I used to think that Trump disproves the existence of God. I don’t think I need to explain why I say this (so many times God could have stopped him from gaining power, but did nothing). Recently I have started to think that he proves the existence of the Devil, because of his demonic power; Satan would love him. He personifies evil. But this may not go far enough: he is Satan—the hair, the voice, the insidious racism, the cruelty, the absence of a moral center. But I now think this hypothesis must be rejected, because the Devil is never funny and Trump is. His saving grace is that he is hilarious. I don’t mean this metaphorically; he makes me laugh out loud all the time. Perhaps we need a new theology—no God, no Devil, just a funny Force. Or else it’s all just us with our pettiness, nastiness, and absurdity.

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Agency and Imagination

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Agency and Imagination

The topics of agency and imagination are generally treated separately in contemporary philosophy, but they are closely connected. Imagination is implicated in agency and agency is part of imagination. This is not difficult to see: we often imagine what we intend to do, and imagining is an act in its own right. We act imaginatively and we imagine actively. The philosophy of action needs to incorporate the imagination, and the philosophy of imagination needs to bring in agency.  This may change both action theory and imagination theory. The details, however, are not simple. It is clear that I may imagine a future action before performing it, this playing a role in how I act (or whether I act), but how widespread is this phenomenon? Is it rare or common, even universal? Does it characterize a distinctive class of actions (imagination-driven actions)? It is true that I am constantly imagining many actions that I might end up performing, but is every action I perform preceded by an act of imagination? That seems like stretching a point, since many of my actions are quite unreflective and automatic—and what about animal actions? But maybe imagination is less conscious and deliberate than we think—we don’t always notice it, pay attention to it. Don’t we somehow envisage every action we perform—anticipate it, plan it, mentally represent it? Doesn’t the brain have to form some sort of picture of it, a model, a schema? Maybe what we call imagination comes in many forms, from the subconscious and routine to the conscious and creative. I reach for my cup enacting a mind-brain motor representation of the act that controls how my hand moves; I can also carry out a series of actions intended to bring about a future I have consciously planned and seen in my mind’s eye (say, a trip to a foreign land). These are both acts of imagination, but they differ in their degree of presence to introspective awareness. I don’t think we should preclude this view of things, and it does offer a nicely uniform account of how imagination and action relate. The question is empirical; conceptually, it seems like a feasible theory. Action is always the result of a prior (and perhaps simultaneous) imaginative construction; the cognitive science of action is imagination-based. The organism mentally represents what it is about to do, and the name of this faculty is “imagination”. When training yourself to perform a certain type of action, you are training your brain to form an accurate and usable picture of the action, this being causally involved in producing the action (the competence behind the performance). Your brain doesn’t just brutely cause the action without any kind of internal guidance—how could it? The action is controlled and fine-tuned by the internal picture (sketch, image, blueprint). In any case, a great many human actions are the result of clearly imaginative acts, as when you picture yourself going to the supermarket and then go. If this is true, then we need to include imagination in our philosophy of action, not just desires, beliefs, and intentions. Actions are imaginings realized.

What about imagination as a species of action? Here things are more straightforward: imagining is a type of action like bodily action. It is therefore subject to the same principles as action generally. It is motivated, rational (though not always), intentional, known about directly not inferentially, skilled or unskilled, habitual or novel, done self-consciously or absent-mindedly, etc. However, certain features of bodily action are less obviously present in acts of imagination, and we should highlight these. First, are there such things as sub-intentional imaginative actions analogous to rolling the tongue around the mouth or finger-tapping or head-bobbing? You can do these things without knowing you are, but can you imagine things without knowing you are? That seems difficult to comprehend because you typically know your mental images, while bodily events can escape your attention (they are outside your mind). Could you repeatedly imagine someone’s face and not be aware of it? On the other hand, not all imagining is intentional in the sense that it is deliberate or planned; an image can suddenly pop into your consciousness seemingly from nowhere—you didn’t intend to form it. But it sounds funny to say that an action popped into your body when you did it without thinking. The bodily act and the imaginative act don’t map neatly onto each other here. Second, how are trying and acting related in the two cases? You can try to move your finger and fail because of paralysis, but can you try to imagine a red patch and fail? Is there such a thing as paralysis of the imagination, permanent or temporary? Have you ever tried to imagine passing a test and not been able to—yet you can try to pass a test and fail to. Trying to move your body is up you but succeeding isn’t, but trying to move you mind and succeeding are inseparable. How could you try to imagine a cube and fail? If this is right, then we can’t analyze imagining as consisting of two components: a trying component and a succeeding component. The body may fail to implement the trying, but the mind always obliges—you just have to try and hey presto. There is no counterpart to the bodily movement in the case of imaginative action, so not all action is analyzable into a trying part and a succeeding part—a sort of mental body that may or may not be up to the job. Third, weakness of will: is it applicable to both? It is true that I might imagine things I wish not to imagine, as I can physically do things I wish not to do, but the cases are dissimilar in that morality and prudence don’t apply to both equally. You can’t act immorally in the imagination, since no one is affected thereby, and imagining taking a drink while sworn off alcohol will not get you drunk. Even if there is such a thing as weakness of the imaginative will, it isn’t consequential in the way bodily action is. So what if I can’t stop imagining boozing and hitting people, no one is suffering harm. No amount of weakness of will purely in the sphere of imagination will amount to doing anything bad, but the body is another matter. You can let your imagination run amok and nothing untoward happen—that is one of its great virtues. It may even be a good thing to have a weak imaginative will, an escape valve. Fourth, are there breakdowns of imaginative action like breakdowns of bodily action? Is there a Tourette’s syndrome of the imagining mind? Apparently not: the imagination isn’t subject to these chaotic motor oddities; it doesn’t have tics and spasms. It may be deranged or insane, but it isn’t detached from the will. Nor does it suffer from muscular fatigue or cold weather or laziness or numbness or broken bones. Bodily action is fraught with danger and prone to injury, but mental action is free of these impediments and risks. We never need the analogue of physiotherapy. Imaginative action is more godlike, less vulnerable to malfunction. In sum, imagination is like bodily action in some important respects but unlike it in others; accordingly, the general principles enunciated by orthodox philosophy of action only partially apply to it.

Which came first? You might think it must be bodily action because organisms acted before they had anything deserving to be called imagination. Imagining must be some sort of internalization of this (moving in the head, as it were). But this is not clearly correct because such early forms of bodily movement may not be actions in any real sense, as movements of inanimate objects are not. Actions proper have traces of mind in them—desires, intentions, the will. If we take that view, then mental actions came first—acts of will occasioned by mental states. We call certain bodily movements (not all) actions because of their close relation to inner actions such as reasoning and deciding. It may be that imagination came before properly intentional external action; it was when organisms began to imagine possibilities that they began to choose and therefore act in the full sense of the word (before that they were just bending with the breeze, loafing basically). Action is selecting from among envisaged alternatives, and imagination does the envisaging. If so, the philosophy of mental action is basic and prior, temporally and conceptually. The bodily movement considered in itself was never a type of action; only in combination with intending and trying does it count as an action (a deed, a doing, an expression of will). The philosophy of action should thus start with the imagination and only then extend to the realm of bodily behavior—first the spirit, then the flesh. Our very idea of the animal body is actually infused with mental concepts; considered just as flesh and bone it isn’t an animal body at all. A dead body isn’t a body, just a carcass or ex-body. It is a relic of materialist behaviorism to suppose that the human and animal body is the same as the lump of matter that composes it. Philosophy of action is not the study of this but of the mind-infused agent, and this includes the agent’s imagination. In the beginning was the mentaldeed.[1]

[1] The aphorism “In the beginning was the deed” is commonly taken to encapsulate a behaviorist philosophy, but properly understood it is independent of that viewpoint and expresses the centrality of the active, best exemplified by the will (Schopenhauer not J.B. Watson). Energy not matter, change not static forms. Doing not being. The imagination is the epitome of the active—fast, mutable, spontaneous, energetic, untiring.

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