When worldviews collide

Just watched the 2009 documentary “Collision,” in which pastor Doug Wilson and pundit Christopher Hitchens duke it out on the question of whether Christianity is good or bad for the world.  The question sets up a sort of public-policy debate, as if some government agency might mandate either Christianity or atheism for all.  Not that this sort of thing hasn’t been attempted, but the focus of religious debates is usually more ontological than pragmatic:  Does God exist?

The existence of God does figure in this debate, but it doesn’t take center stage, and with good reason.  The question of existence doesn’t touch on the most interesting consequences of our belief in the God described by scripture.  Even if God exists, what could this possibly tell us about His nature?  What moral authority, apart from the self-certifying imprimatur of scripture, would He command?  What should be our relation to an omnipotent being, anyway?  Assuming He exists, why does God hide himself?  Why should God care whether we worship or believe in Him?  These are all questions asked in the philosophy of religion, and for many religious people they never get asked.  I had never considered many of them until I took a course in the subject.

The debate within “Collision” struck me as a near miss or at best a grazing blow, not the flush whomp of two conflicting worldviews that have come to understand each other deeply.  The film is worth watching mainly for its illumination of the two combatants.  Wilson comes across as an autodidact country parson, humble in self-portrait but clearly pleased with his range of knowledge.  In a voice-over, he terms the mastery of theology, scripture, and philosophy needed to face the mighty Hitchens “copiousness.”  There is something Victorian about him.  No less smug is Hitchens, who wields a databaseful of lectern-ready prose on his pet topic of why “God is not Great.”  Hitchens is slicker, more academic, better rehearsed.  He, too, possesses the copiousness the battle demands.

I must confess to having a soft spot for Hitchens, despite his retrograde politics, his ironic self-description as a “contrarian,” and his distinctly non-ironic righteousness in the crusade against religion.  I have known and sympathized before with the schoolyard prodigy who could fight his way out of any scrape using words alone.  To be such a person requires unfathomable fortitude and energy due perhaps to equal parts vanity and fear.  But Hitchens at least searches and makes his search public.  His written and spoken record seems a kind of vanity project, but the same could be said of any engaging body of published work.  His bears his stamp.

Unfortunately for the dialectic conveyed in the film, being smarter, better-spoken, and even right do not guarantee Hitchens a slam-dunk.  Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to keep the contest “close” in order to maintain tension or to focus on the amity between Wilson and Hitchens, which appears to be held together by a shared love of Wodehouse.  Maybe the aim was merely to whet the viewer’s appetite for the meat of the debate itself, toward other dramatic ends.  In any event, Hitchens is portrayed as losing some of his decisive edge about two-thirds through the film.

That’s when Wilson seems to draw Hitchens onto his turf by pressing the issue of how one is supposed to ground one’s morality if not by God’s authority.  Wilson hammers away at the assertion that Hitchens has “helped himself” to the Judeo-Christian ethic in order to wage a (self-defeating) war against Christianity.  The Judeo-Christian ethic is not the only source of moral conviction, of course, and to reason from its primacy is both obtuse and circular.  Wilson seems comfortable with the position this leaves him in.  His strikingly postmodern defense is that participants in such a fundamental debate can only ground their arguments on certain axioms, to which they must return again and again.  If one must argue in the round, best to start and end one’s circle with God’s word.

My preferred response at this point would have been for Hitchens to “go Socratic” (not a bad motto generally) and press the Euthyphro question:  Is the good loved by the gods because it is good, or is it good because it is loved by the gods?  Hitchens eschews this line, perhaps because he himself holds that morality is innate, and, if morality is merely instinctive (or the equivalent for rational beings), it has no independent theoretical foundation that would render the Euthyphro question rhetorical in the desired way.  But by hewing to the Euthyphro line without foundationalism (as I imagine Socrates would have preferred), Hitchens could have held that God’s moral authority can be only as well-founded as morality itself—however well-founded that may be—and that the difficult course of questioning and refining and coming to grips with moral theory is preferable to checking one’s conscience at the chapel doors.  One finds oneself arguing in circles only when one stops trying to improve one’s position.

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Contradiction and Unity

Graham Priest gave a colloquium presentation 9/8/2010 on “Contradiction and Unity.”  He offered a theoretical construct called a “gluon” which serves the role of unifier, accounting for the constitution of wholes by parts.  The presentation was divided into three parts:  the problem, gluon theory, and the application of Priest’s solution to Aristotle’s metaphysical problematic of unity.

The problem is that wholes made up of parts must be unified (“bound”) somehow, otherwise they are just congeries of the simples that compose them.  In answering the question, “What does the trick?” of unification,  we find ourselves responding with something entitative, noun-like.  E.g., when asked what makes a group of bricks a house instead of just a pile of bricks, we want to say, “Their form.”  Or their arrangement or configuration or principle or relation to one another, etc.  But this form is a thing of some kind; if it is not, we have gained nothing, since we find ourselves incapable of characterizing them otherwise.  If the form is a thing, however, we have a regress problem, since the form-thing just gets added to the list of things (parts) comprising the whole, and we need to postulate some other thing that unifies the larger set comprising all the original parts plus the form (a “metaform”).

The problem, for Priest, arises from the fact that the extra principle contains a “metaphysical gap.”  The gap is the requirement that the principle lacks instantiation; forms must be instantiated by particular objects, generally comprising parts, and instantiation of an object of a certain kind is exactly the problem he is trying to solve:  What unifies an object?  The motivation he presents first is not physical.  Frege’s scheme for the unification of a proposition is just as prone to this metaphysical quandary.  For Frege, a term (“Socrates,” say) serves to complete an unsaturated formula (“is mortal,” e.g.), but the nature of this completion or saturation is never addressed.  The concept of mortality awaits instantiation in the subject of a proposition of which “is mortal” is the predicate.  Together they make a unity, a proposition, but how?  So in Frege’s scheme the parts are subject and predicate, and the metaphysical gap is the need for saturation of predicate-mapping functions.  Priest’s point in starting with this example is to note that the ontological status of the parts in question, as being either concrete or abstract, is irrelevant to the more general problem of unification.

Priest’s solution is to offer a binding object that is free of the problems outlined above.  He is clearly in favor of a realism that conceives of simples, complex objects, physical objects, and nonphysical objects such as forms, tropes, configurations, and the like as bona fide objects.  Objects all the way up, objects all the way down.  Note that there still can be collections of objects that do not constitute composite objects, that is, bunches of items, or congeries.  He just wants to embrace objecthood for abstract as well as physical objects.

Well, what sort of object can unify a group of other objects without introducing a metaphysical gap?  Priest’s solution is a special kind of object called a “gluon,” which requires no saturation by the object it unifies.  The only way it can manage this is to introduce no difference, no non-identity, with any of the object’s parts.  The only way it can do this is to be identical to each of the object’s parts.  The only way it can do this is under a logic that permits contradiction, because each part of the object is taken to be non-identical to every other part.  The contradiction is that the gluon will be identical to a bunch of distinct items.

Priest’s scheme for the gluon relies on a paraconsistent logic in which some propositions are taken to be true, some false, and some both true and false.  The Venn diagram of this arrangement of logical space is two overlapping circles.  If the lefthand circle is the set of true statements, and the righthand the set of false ones, the intersection is the set of statements that are both true and false.  The region in which gluons operate is this intersection, because the gluons must possess mutually contradictory properties.  The reason they need to do this is so that they can be identical to each of the parts.  The metaphysical gap, for Priest, is removed if the gluon can be identical to each part (and of course it is identical to itself).

Take an object O with parts A and B, the simplest case of unification.  Part A may possess properties that B possesses, and vice versa.  In fact the two objects may be qualitatively identical.  But they are not numerically identical, and if they are physical objects they are not identical as to location, perhaps among other properties.  O’s gluon G must be identical to both A and B.  How can it be?

This depends on how one treats identity.  Priest’s suggestion is Leibniz’s identity of indiscernibles:  x = y iff (AP) P(x) iff P(y).  So two things are identical just if they share all and only the same set of properties.  This brings in the biconditional as a way of representing in quantified logic the nature of identity.

The interesting properties of parts of an object will be those that differ.  If all the bricks in a house are red, we’re not so much interested in the predicate ‘red’, since for the gluon to share redness with any part does not conflict with the non-redness of any other part.  But if we take another predicate, such as location or microscopically precise shape, every brick will have different properties.  For the gluon G to maintain its identity with A and B by sharing unique properties with both A and B, it must itself possess contradictory properties, e.g., both Thislocation and !Thislocation.  Hence Thislocation(G) will be both true and false, as will its negation, so we can see various predications to G occupying the overlap in our paraconsistent logical space.

It’s important to keep in mind that, for Priest, the embrace of contradiction, at least within the paraconsistent limbo, is essential to overcoming the regress problem that arises from postulating a glue element such as a form or arrangement.  But is it also important that the system allow the parts of an object besides the gluon to differ from one another. They must differ, or else the scheme would not show how different parts come together to make a unity.  The paraconsistent logic works out nicely in this regard, since the biconditional definition of identity Priest uses renders identity reflexive and commutative but crucially not transitive.  That is, objects are still identical to themselves (a = a), and if an object a is identical to some object b, then b is identical to a, but a = b and b = c do not imply a = c.  As we have seen, if a gluon G plays the role of b in the transitive  scheme, two objects with which G is identical need not share all properties with each other, and therefore need not be identical to each other.

That’s the gist.  I may make another entry to discuss Priest’s claim about how historical versions of the problem of unity are covered by his gluon approach and to mention some objections raised during Q&A.

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Being philosophical about philosophy

I’m taking three courses this semester. In one of them, I experienced a harsh epiphany: I saw in my professor, a man about ten years my junior, the philosopher I might have become had I continued to study after college: fluid in argument, supreme in his specialty yet well-versed in all the peripheral arts his interlocutors might bring to bear on his Fortress of Cogitude. I’m sure this was not just counterfactual thinking on my part but wishful counterfactual thinking. (I wouldn’t put it past me. I do have an unreasonably high opinion of myself.) Maybe even with best tutelage and constant practice I couldn’t have gotten as good as this guy. Wishful or not, my reverie gave me cold comfort, because it reminded me that my chance of becoming a virtuoso in philosophy has passed me by. My brain just doesn’t track information or form associations as seamlessly as it used to. (Maybe if I eat more flax.) At least now I understand why people go to graduate school right out of college. Life is really, really short, and it traces a dispiriting arc for all but the most gifted and best prepared.

Mediocrity is the acid test of devotion. I’m going to have to think philosophy worth doing for its own sake if I’m to trudge through a belated career in the trenches, scrounging for scraps of insight. Maybe I’ll leave behind a little formula, like Ohm’s Law, or a thought experiment, or a “result” in logic that will pop up in geekish cocktail-party conversation. Maybe I’ll write a book, or get “anthologized.” Ugh, I’m losing interest in entering into the history of philosophy even as I talk about it. Something else will have to keep me going. The thrill of the hunt minus the kill, I guess—that, and making a career out of a favorite pastime. I no longer think Sidney Morgenbesser was being flip when he answered a layperson’s question about what philosophers do: “You clarify a few concepts. You make a few distinctions. It’s a living.”

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One P

I haven’t been in the habit of pulling all-nighters since college, aside from a couple of late-night vacation drives when no motel could be found. But since I returned to school after two decades off, I’ve gone far into the wee hours at least half a dozen times. Now I can go without sleep practically on demand, and sometimes without intending to. In a fit of insomnia a couple of weeks ago, I used Netflix’s instant viewing feature to screen “The Paper Chase,” the slightly self-important dramedy about “one Ls” (first-year law students) at Harvard.

Fiction about the Academy has always been a fringe genre best suited to the novel. Occasionally it becomes the theme of an author’s career (David Lodge), more often an indulgence that “serious writers” enjoy once or twice, their chance to imagine a cloister in which writing is the summum bonum (Saul Bellow and many others). I was going to suggest that this urge is a byway on the prep-school lad’s essentially masculine journey into donhood, but Iris Murdoch has written novels on academic themes (The Philosopher’s Pupil, The Book and the Brotherhood), and I’m sure she’s not alone.

There are a handful of academia-themed movies: Besides “Chase,” I can think of “A Beautiful Mind,” “Good Will Hunting,” “The Dead Poets Society,” “Little Man Tate,” and “Finding Forrester.” I don’t think “Breaking Away” and “Animal House” count, though we should probably include “True Genius.” I love watching films set on university campuses. Father Karras’s jog around the track (was it at Georgetown?) in “The Exorcist” struck a warm chord of comfort and normalcy for me, just before the projectile vomit hit the fan. (Not to get too far off topic, but college campuses make superb hunting grounds in teensploitation horror flicks. Now there’s an education you can’t get at any price.)

I saw “Chase” when it first came out. I was 13, and it made me want to become a lawyer. That was before I learned that being a lawyer is what unscrupulous philosophers do to make money. After I learned that, I learned that philosophers who stay philosophers don’t make money, so maybe lawyers have chosen the lesser of two evils. At any rate, the intellectual skill-sets are similar, at least if you’re comparing the law to analytic philosophy. The curricula and tone of presentation appear to differ greatly, however. First-year law courses aren’t seminars, from what I can make out. They’re attended by hordes of students in amphitheater classrooms otherwise used for undergraduate chemistry and psychology. The one Ls sit at tiny desk-chairs or benches, waiting to be called on by the professor. The atmosphere of competition is electric. The very best jobs will be waiting for the students who run this gauntlet with the greatest aplomb.

In philosophy, on the other hand, you would think the competition would be even keener, since getting any job at all will be a coup, but in a way it takes the pressure off. Philosophers tend not to be all that convinced that they must be philosophy instructors, although some do feel called to teach. Graduate philosophy courses generally are seminars, or they end up being more like seminars than lecture classes. At CUNY,  courses tend to carry about a dozen enrolled students and three or four audits and sit-ins. Not as intimate a kaffeeklatsch as one might wish for, but hardly impersonal.

In “Chase,” apart from the rather wooden central character, the prime mover is Professor Kingsfield, the impassive blowhard who employs the “Socratic method” in his contracts course. There is indeed question and answer in his classroom, but in spirit nothing could be further from the elenchus of Socrates. The aim of Kingsfield’s technique is not engagement of sundry interlocutors in an endlessly rewarding discourse fit for any citizen of Athens—and even for a slave—but rather the motivation of legal thinking through fear. In fairness to the fictionalized Harvard Law (never mind the real thing), I should add that “Chase” portrays Kingsfield as a bigger SOB than anyone else on the faculty. I still got the feeling that the instructors of torts and Constitutional law, etc. would not be far behind him in their unwillingness to suffer fools gladly.

Philosophy programs do have characters like these around, but, like autocratic orchestra conductors, their day in the sun has probably passed. No doubt the same is true in law schools, which are no more immune to student grievances than any other department of corporate academia. I’ve taken philosophy courses with professors who confront students “Socratically.” At my school, the one who makes the biggest show of this turns out to be the opposite of Kingsfield: intently concerned with students as individuals, humorous beneath the gruff mask, willing to befriend.

I for one am glad to live now, in the age of student consumerism and political correctness, if it means avoiding the old-school pedagogy of pressure and shame. It’s hard enough being a One P, without the extra agita.

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