Susan Haack Etc.

I recently learned that Susan Haack has just died. During my six years in the University of Miami philosophy department I never once set eyes on her. Nor did I have any communication with her. I did email her when I arrived to suggest a meeting, but got no reply. I was told she was alienated from the department and had as little to do with it as possible; the rupture occurred before I arrived and the nature of the dispute was never made clear to me. That was a shame as I would have been happy to get to know her. As it happens, I had met her in England years earlier when she gave a paper to my department there, and she had written to me when I was at Rutgers apropos of a review I’d written (warmly not critically). Not a good situation (I cast no aspersions). Anyway, this got me thinking: the department has lost most of its senior members since I was there—me, her, Risto Hilpenen, Harvey Siegel, and Ed Erwin (who was ostracized during his last years there, according to him). No one senior of comparable stature has been brought in to replace us. The only senior member that remains is Michael Slote, now 85 (according to Google). The people that remain are (what shall I say?) not exactly household names. The department wasn’t bad when I was there, though not top tier; now it’s…well, it is what it is. Is it dying? That remains to be seen, but it is hard to see how it can be very attractive to prospective graduate students. I don’t think there was any necessity about this, but my departure can’t have helped. It is not a department I would have joined from my previous post at Rutgers. I will leave my opinion of the philosophical abilities of the people now there unspoken. Suffice it to say that the label “star” does not spring to mind. What I will say is that the dearth of senior people does not bode well for the department. I see no solution to the problem and the prospects do not look good. There was already a problem about recruiting able graduate students in the good old days (there are many better places to go) and the situation cannot have improved. I don’t think things would have reached this point had I not left (unwillingly). Actions have consequences. I have no contact with anyone now in the UM philosophy department (their decision not mine), despite living only a mile away, and I am banned from the campus (no reason given). All round, it seems like a bad state of affairs, and entirely avoidable.

Amatory Knowledge

We have heard a lot about different kinds of knowledge in epistemology courses; I want to add a new kind of knowledge and explore its contours and characteristics. I call it “amatory knowledge”, which belongs to the family including carnal knowledge, erotic knowledge, sexual knowledge, sensual knowledge, libidinal knowledge, romantic knowledge, and marital knowledge. It is the kind we associate with normal adult marriage-type relationships, or what can lead up to them. It involves knowledge of another person’s body, particularly the so-called erogenous zones, centering on the genitals. It includes many components: where, how, sensations, actions, foreplay, and aftermath. Sexual intercourse is the typical core of it. This kind of knowledge is acquired by having certain experiences of an individual of an intimate nature, not usually had by people in general. The five senses are crucially implicated—sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste. You know what I am talking about. I am especially concerned with the cognitive aspect of these kinds of relationship, not the affective and conative; not the drive but the steering, so to speak. It comprises knowledge of another person from a sexual point of view—knowing him or her sexually. And the question I am interested in is how this relates to knowledge in general—that is, general epistemology. How is amatory knowledge related to other types of knowledge, e.g., scientific knowledge?

Let’s start with my preferred definition of knowledge: does amatory knowledge fit this definition?[1] The definition is captured in a formula or slogan, which needs careful unpacking: knowledge consists in the world impinging on the soul. The world is just existing reality, including souls themselves; the soul is the mind or self or person or conscious subject or ego. The soul is the human being considered holistically and centrally—the I I care most about. Myself most deeply. But what is this impingement business—what is it for the world to impinge on the soul? The Concise OED gives us simply “have an effect, come into contact, encroach”. The Shorter OED expands on this slightly: “fasten or fix on forcibly, strike, come into forcible contact, collide”. Here the idea of force comes into play, accentuating the coercive aspect of the concept—to be impinged on is not to choose but to be compelled. Roget’s Thesaurus helpfully offers as synonyms, “disturb, encroach, intrude, invade, influence, make inroads, pry, touch, violate”. These strike the right note: to impinge on is to affect or impact from outside, invasively, intrusively, effecting a change within, possibly violating. To impinge on the soul the world must break down its boundaries, perturb it, alter it, shake it up, spear it, transform it. A bullet or arrow impinges on a target. A cold wind impinges on flesh. One person may impinge on another, for good or ill. The picture is that the soul is inherently empty, sealed off, untouched, innocent—and then the world imposes its imprint on it, shaping it, informing it. That is what knowledge essentially is, according to the definition. The theory is in the spirit of the causal theory of knowledge, though more generalized (it has nothing to do with physicalism or naturalism). It is intended to capture the way knowledge features in our lives as conscious subjects—what knowledge means to us. Then, we can ask how amatory knowledge fits this general conception. And the answer is obvious: like a glove. The body and soul of the other impinges big-time on my body and soul. Amatory knowledge is the effect of this strong impingement. The world of the other intrudes or encroaches on my world, the objective on the subjective: the body, obviously, but also the soul. And it reaches my soul, because it is experienced as deeply affecting—touching one to the core (even casual sex isn’t “casual”). The impingement is strong and deep, forcible, insistent, culminating in orgasm (itself a type of knowledge). The knowledge involved in this kind of relationship leaves a powerful mark; it can transform a person. People can change identity completely as a result. The knowledge isn’t like knowing it’s raining or who wrote Moby Dick. It is profound.

We should note that animals also have this kind of knowledge; indeed, it is paramount in the life of most animals. They need to know who or what to mate with, how to do it, and what to do afterwards. This kind of knowledge clearly goes back millions of years. Our sexual knowledge (in the broad sense) no doubt evolved from it. Children don’t have it, save potentially, but every normal adult human has it, with any luck. It is vital to species survival (as well as human happiness). It exists deep inside us. We are sexual savants, amatory experts. We had better be. It is closely connected to pleasure, which should not surprise us. Freud postulated the oral, anal, and genital phases, each with its own characteristic type of pleasure; each also with its characteristic type of knowledge. The erotic is commingled with the epistemic. As the appetitive self develops and grows, so does the epistemic self. A steady state is reached, at which the organism is said to be mature, equipped with amatory know-how and know-that. The soul is ready to be impinged upon by the world in such a way as to produce knowledge of a certain sort (“This is a potential mate”). Such knowledge is primordial and primal. Freud and Piaget join hands in their theories of psychological development. There is a whole package. And all the senses are in on it: vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. All are activated in the sexual act and its antecedents. The soul is well and truly impinged upon (happily for the most part, though sometimes not). Kissing is only the beginning of this epistemological expedition. Mutual body and soul impingement is the sought-after state, as if the barriers to the soul are breached.

A natural question arises: is all knowledge tacitly amatory? Do we see the general aptness of my definitional formula because we recognize the affinity of all knowledge with the amatory kind? Is all epistemology silently sexualized? Is the desire for knowledge an outgrowth of the desire for sex and its accompanying amatory knowledge? Such an idea is not unheard of—indeed, it is something of a cliché (Freud again). First, sexual knowledge; then, and derivatively, scientific knowledge. That’s where the underlying cognitive equipment originates. Not the science of sex but the sex of science. The imagination in general may owe its origins to the sexual imagination, and knowledge in general may owe its origins to sexual knowledge. The concept of knowledge gets its initial grip in coping with the facts of copulation, pair bonding, and cohabitation; and then it extends out to the rest of the world. We tacitly conceive the known world as a quasi-sexual world—the world of courtship and copulation. Our theories are thus like our babies. Our scientific partners are like our romantic partners. Our learned societies are like our families. The heady experience of romantic love prefigures our intellectual adventures and triumphs. Amatory knowledge is the paradigm case of knowledge—of soul-world impingement—and may be its progenitor. We open up our soul to the world (we can’t help it) because we opened it up to our mates. Sexual experience enables sexual knowledge and experience in general enables knowledge in general. This is a kind of sexual empiricism; and it is notable that a priori knowledge is the least sensuous of our knowledge systems (the most endogenous). According to this view, all knowledge derives fundamentally from sexual experience—putting it very roughly. It is like having sex with the world (think of the excited explorer). Not literally, but metaphorically; we have extended this way of thinking from its original home to the far reaches of knowledge. This explains why we value knowledge so highly: for we value amatory relations highly (the genes like it that way). Epistemology is thus the study of sex-based knowledge ultimately. Without sex our epistemology would be a very different animal (a pale simulacrum). Sex gives it its oomph.

As if I haven’t smashed enough taboos and shocked many an epistemological vicar, I must put in a word about masturbation, that much misunderstood form of education. Doesn’t masturbation produce (and require) sexual knowledge, albeit of a primitive and solitary kind? It calls upon knowledge of one’s own body sexually not someone else’s. How does that fit the impingent theory? Quite handily, in fact: it is your proprietary chunk of the physical world impinging on your own soul. Masturbatory knowledge is your own body impinging on your soul—self-impingement. You know that masturbation leads to orgasm precisely because your own body has told you so—inserted this piece of knowledge into you. It has made contact with your mind in order to inform it of something. The basic mechanism is the same as in partnered sex, or in sensing the environment. So, strictly, you don’t need interpersonal sex in order to get knowledge off the ground; self-impingement is possible solo.

Some may find the amatory theory implausible—a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. Surely, there is no necessity connecting knowledge in general with this particular branch of knowledge—couldn’t we have knowledge of physics and be completely devoid of libido? But I am not claiming logical necessity, only biological probability. Probably, our concept of knowledge evolved in the way described (it wasn’t knowledge of physics ab initio); this is a promising hypothesis. The concept had to come from somewhere, and not all in one go (concepts evolve too). The naturalness of the impingement theory for amatory knowledge suggests that it is a prime candidate for that status, with other knowledge piggybacking on it. Let’s see if it can be refuted. Also, we can always fall back on a dual level theory of knowledge—distinguishing primary knowledge from secondary knowledge.[2] The primary types of knowledge include the sexual kind and those types very similar to it; the secondary types depart from the paradigm and earn the label only by loose analogy (e.g., knowledge of the future or speculative science). Knowledge is by definition the impingement of the world on the soul, and sexual knowledge fits that definition to a tee, so it is the basic case of knowledge—that to which all knowledge aspires. Let’s not reject the theory for distinguishing paradigmatic cases from peripheral cases. Sex, surely, is a central fact of biological nature (Freud wasn’t wrong about that and nor was Darwin); we are just catching up with them in our epistemology (hitherto far too mired in religious conceptions—knowledge is what God has a lot of). It is not too far-fetched to connect knowledge-as-a-biological-phenomenon with sex-as-a-biological-phenomenon. Sex is what makes the biological world go round—that’s why it is so prevalent—and knowledge feeds off that. Knowledge is the biological product that results from the world impinging on the organism in its mental compartment—as if world and soul were copulating. Knowledge formation is a kind of cosmic copulation. The world is the male and the soul is the female, in effect. At any rate, this is an agreeable image to ponder.[3]

[1] See my “A New Theory of Knowledge”.

[2] See my “Perceptual Knowledge” and “Non-Perceptual Knowledge”.

[3] Or not, as the case may be. If you prefer, think of a bee bringing pollen to a flower. I am well aware that the paradigm-shift in epistemology that I am advocating is more of an upheaval than a mere shift. Epistemology naturalized is one thing; epistemology sexualized is another. Knowledge is the sexual impingement of the world on the soul! Not necessarily human sex, you understand, but sex as a general biological category, including plants and platypuses. It is interesting to ask what epistemology would look like on another planet in which sex is implemented quite differently from on Earth, perhaps involving no soul impingement. What is true is that in the human case sexual psychology is uppermost in people’s minds, especially during their formative epistemic years, so that it wouldn’t be surprising if it colored their understanding of the concept of knowledge. Amatory knowledge is clearly important and salient to us; it might well set the standard for knowledge in general. Our knowledge is indelibly human.

Edward St Aubyn and Me

I met Edward St Aubyn, author of the Patrick Melrose Trilogy, at a conference on consciousness in Tucson about twenty years ago. He was writing a book centering on the problem of consciousness.  Tall, handsome, witty, refined—I took to him immediately. We became friends. I came to know him as Teddy. I knew nothing of his soon-to-be-famous first book Never Mind. We met later several times, in London and New York. On one occasion he gave me a copy of the trilogy—he actually threw it out of a window to me in the street because I’d forgotten it (rather symbolic). I read it and was astounded by its brilliance—the writing, the humor, the emotional depth. We kept in touch by phone. When the novel he was writing came out (A Clue to the Exit) I was tickled to find that I was in it, called simply “a man named McGinn”; evidently, I had solved the problem of consciousness so far as the author (and lead character) were concerned. Then, sometime later, the trilogy was dramatized with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. It ran on Showtime and I watched it zealously, conveying my reactions to Teddy pari passu. Benedict was terrific and the whole series excellent, though I did have a couple of minor misgivings about some of the acting. More recently, I read his Double Blind in which science comes in for fictionalized treatment, and here again my imprint is felt in a couple of chapters (he sent me a copy of the book along with a thank you note). I think I have read all his books now, always with great enjoyment and admiration. If I had never gone to that conference, none of this would have happened. I thoroughly recommend his books.

Martin Amis and Me

I first met Martin Amis in the late 1970s. We were the same height and build, though he had a wider mouth. Of course, I had read several of his father’s novels. At this time, I had read Martin’s The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Success (which I particularly liked), and had just finished his fourth novel Other People. I decided to write to him at his publishers, Jonathan Cape (with whom I later had a brush in the person of the estimable Liz Calder—she rejected my first novel though she encouraged me to go on). A few days later my friend Antonia Phillips (wife to the late Gareth Evans and then Martin Amis) handed me a note written by Martin, thanking me for my complimentary letter and telling me he himself had no belief in the afterlife. Soon I had an invitation to meet Martin at his flat in Notting Hill Gate. I showed up with Antonia one evening to meet the man. We played pinball in his kitchen (he had a full-sized machine there). We talked about his novels and I asked which was his favorite; he hesitated and said probably his next, which turned out to be Money. It was all very agreeable.

Sometime later I decided I wanted to write some fiction myself, no doubt stimulated by Martin’s work (we were of the same generation). You could say my own effort Bad Patches was in the same vein. However, I saw little of Martin after our first meeting, though I tried to go to his book signings when they were nearby. I felt disappointed about this and I don’t really know why it happened (he was getting ridiculously famous and in demand). We remained friendly but didn’t hang out together. He invited me to his fortieth birthday party in London, but by this time I was living in New York (he remarked to me that this wasn’t much of an excuse). I continued to read his publications, all of them, always with enjoyment and admiration (the book on Stalin the least). I went to readings of his in New York and said a quick hello. When I moved to Miami, he gave a reading at my local bookstore and I trotted along (it was from The Zone of Interest).

Some years ago, I asked him if he’d like to come to George Soros’s house in Southampton along with his then wife Isobel Fonseca. They came and Martin and I played some tennis on George’s court and then had dinner. It was a delightful evening. By this time Martin was living in America himself, but not near me (though he later bought a house in Florida). I would say we were good friends by then, though not able to spend much time together. I had known him and read him assiduously for over forty years; he was part of my mental landscape. I felt very fond of him. We also both loved Lolita (the book not the girl, though we felt for little Dolores Haze). We had a powerful affinity. He smoked a lot, though, and I didn’t. He was incredibly funny. He was the Martin Amis.

Two and a half years ago, I was receiving radiation therapy for cancer, delivered to my neck and part of my face (there is still no hair on most of the right side). It is grueling stuff; I don’t recommend it. One morning I opened the New York Times to read on the front page that Martin Amis had just died. Throat cancer. The old affinity persisted. I had known nothing about this, so it was a complete surprise. A part of my life dropped out. I told my cancer doctor (skinny, six foot three) about it in our weekly chat. At this time, I had no idea whether I would pull through. I recall that moment in Martin’s kitchen playing pinball together. Pity about the afterlife.