Aletheia: Texas A&M's Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy---Spring 2022 Edition

ἀ Aletheia

Texas A&M Journal of Undergraduate Philosophy Spring 2022

Contents

N OTE F ROM T HE E DITOR - IN -C HIEF

5

N OTE F ROM T HE E XECTUIVE E DITOR

6

E DITORS

8

A UTHORS

12

The Best of All Possible Histories: Hegel’s Racism and his Philosophy of Right Aidan Farmer, North Carolina State University

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1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

16

2

Philosophical History and Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

3

Hegel’s Racial System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

18

3.1

Antropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

18

3.2

Geographical Basics of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

19

Race Issues in Philosophy of Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

22

4.1

Cultural Essentialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

22

4.2

Genocide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23

4.3

Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

24

4.4

Orientalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

26

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27

4

5

The McDowell-Travis Debate Oliver Bates, Haverford College

30

1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

32

2

McDowell’s Picture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

32

3

Charles Travis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4

The Myth of the Given and Idealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33

5

Wittgenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

34

6

The Confusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35

3

7

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman Explored Through a Feminine Minor Literature Maggie Hynes, Memorial University of Newfoundland

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Being, World, and Loneliness: Understanding Loneliness as Phenomenological Attunement Christopher Chiasera, Trinity College

53

1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

54

2

A Formal Definition of Loneliness in General: Loneliness as Opposed to Solitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

56

3

The Problem of Loneliness as Attunement or Mood (Stimmung) . . .

58

4

The Being-alone-in-the-world of Loneliness as Attunement: Being-

5

alone-in-the-world as a Fleeing in the Face of Being . . . . . . . . . .

60

Conclusion and Considerations for Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . .

64

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation Aubrey Dean Smith, University of Kentucky

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N OTE F ROM T HE E DITOR - IN -C HIEF

I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to my editorial team and the supervisor for the journal, Dr. Dwayne Raymond, for all of their help throughout the semester to publish this edition of Aletheia. Without any of them, this would not have been possible. Special thanks are in order for Matthew Deane, the Executive Editor for this edition of Aletheia, for all of his hard work and editing to make this edition of Aletheia one of our best. It was an honor to serve as the Editor-in-Chief for Aletheia’s 2021-2022 year.

In particular, I also want to thank the previous Editor-in-Chief for Aletheia, Eric Nash, for his support and guidance throughout the year whenever we needed it. I know I speak for everyone when I say we are all grateful for your help. Moreover, I want to thank Dr. Robert Garcia, Dr. Roger Sansom, and Dr. Christopher Menzel all of whom have been superb professors of mine and edified me to find my passion for philosophy that I have today. My sincere gratitude is with you all.

This was a very interesting semester for all of us at Texas A&M and, for the most part, the rest of universities here in the United States. It was our first semester where everything was starting to get back to “normal” during the COVID-19 pandemic. We had in-person classes again and many, if not all, of the activities at the university resumed as before. Of course, this was after a two year hiatus of doing classes online and being isolated from one another; thus, being able to meet with people again face to face was a jovial experience. Something so quotidian will, or should, not be taken for granted anymore.

Finally, this journal would not have been possible without the brilliant scholars that attributed to this journal. Each one of them worked very hard to bring the final versions of the papers you will find in the forthcoming pages of this journal. It was an immense pleasure to work with each of them and to read their insightful papers.

I hope you, the reader, will find them as enlightening and riveting as we did.

Daniel Lightsey B.A. Philosophy B.S. Physics Class of 2022 5

N OTE F ROM T HE E XECTUIVE E DITOR

I would like to start by thanking Daniel Lightsey; from letting me on as an editor to making me executive editor as a freshman, he has been a huge support in furthering my love of philosophy. Every editor deserves a shout out for enduring the sometimes heavy and unequal workload that comes from getting rushes of submissions and selecting the papers that will be published. It can be a difficult process at times, but none of you faltered. Lastly, I would like to thank all of the fantastic scholars who submitted their work. It has been a joy to read through all of these papers that they have clearly poured themselves into. Aletheia as a whole has helped me to grow so much as a writer, critic, and as a person through the wonderful submissions that we get each edition. I hope that you, our readers, are touched by these wonderful students’ writing as much as we are.

Matthew Deane B.A. Society, Ethics, and Law (SEAL) Class of 2025

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E DITORS Daniel Lightsey Daniel Lightsey is a senior Physics and Philosophy double major. He is interested in metaphysics (particular in causation and dispositions), philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and mathematical logic/philosophy of logic. He plans on taking a year off before going to graduate school to pursue a PhD in philosophy which will (hopefully!) lead him to teach philosophy one day.

Matthew Deane Matthew Deane is a freshman Society, Ethics, and Law major with a double minor in philosophy and business from Cypress, Texas. He is interested in social philosophy, moral philosophy, and theology. Currently, he is doing research on aesthetics in China during the Ming and early Qing dynasties. He enjoys traveling and reading in his free time and plans on attending law school.

Emma Smith Emma Smith is a rising sophomore pursuing a major in psychology and minors in philosophy and neuroscience. Her areas of philosophical interest include epistemology and aesthetics. Emma is involved in many activities in College Station including the Comparing Beauty research team, Ags REACH, MSC FLI, and Aggieland Humane Society. In her free time, she reads, draws, and plays video games with friends. She plans to pursue graduate school and become a psychologist.

America Jimenez America Jimenez is a freshman Philosophy major from El Paso, Texas. She is curious about all areas of philosophy but has a particular interest in philosophy of law, philosophy of the mind, ethics, axiology, and human rights. She is a member of the freshman leaders establishing excellence organization, the Pre Law Society, and a women’s organization titled “Maggies.” In her free time she enjoys running, reading, painting, and spending time with friends. After graduating, America plans to attend law school and pursue a career in immigration law.

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Kate Girvin Kate Girvin is a junior University and Departmental Honors philosophy pre-law student from El Paso, Texas. Girvin is a second-year editor for Aletheia and will be chairing Aletheia’s International Virtual Conference of Undergraduate Philosophy (IV-CUP) alongside her peer, Emma Smith in Spring 2022. Continental philosophy, decolonial feminist theory, and existentialism are her main philsophical interests.

Girvin is currently drafting an Honors undergraduate thesis in decolonial feminist theory with Dr. Omar Rivera. Aside from academics, Girvin’s campus organizational involvement includes serving as a director for Sophomore Leaders Impacting, Developing, and Educating (SLIDE), in which she accompanies sophomores in mental health and sexual assault awareness advocacy in the Bryan College Station community. She is also a member of the Liberal Arts Student Council’s programs committee and TAMU Legacies, a women’s organization that strives to create a legacy of service and leadership through the empowerment of women. Girvin serves as the undergraduate apprentice at the Glasscock Center, fostering and celebrating humanities research among the community of scholars at Texas A&M University.

After graduation, she plans to pursue a law degree and teach philosophy at the university level.

Laura Stoicoviciu Laura Stoicoviciu is a Senior philosophy major from South Austin. Her particular philosophical interests are in social political theory, existentialism and Eastern philosophies. After graduating in May, Laura plans on attending law school in the fall to study intellectual property. While she aspires a career in law, she intends on continuing to study, read, and write philosophy. Her interests include rowing, hiking, and going to concerts. In her spare time, Laura hosts a radio show for KANM which focuses on the intersection between philosophical schools of thought and the messages behind musical albums.

Alexis Roa Alexis Roa is a senior Society, Ethics, and Law major with minors in Philosophy and Sports Management. His philosophy interests include political philosophy, philosophy of law, and ethics. After graduation he plans on attending law school and pursuing a career in criminal or contract law. In his spare time, he enjoys watching science fiction movies and training in various martial arts.

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Kathryn Payne Katie Payne is a Texas A&M senior from Austin, Texas. She is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in University Studies: Society, Ethics and Law and minors in both Philosophy and Leadership. She is interested in philosophy of jurisprudence, philosophy of the mind, and ethical theory. In addition to serving as an editor for Aletheia, Katie is currently the Director of External Communication on Texas A&M’s Panhellenic Executive Board. She is a member of Pre-Law Society and Delta Delta Delta at Texas A&M. Katie has also worked as a legal intern at both Eastman Meyler, PC and Walters Balido and Crain, LLP. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her friends and family, playing with her dog, and cooking. After graduation, Katie plans to attend law school to pursue a career in civil or criminal law.

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A UTHORS Aidan Farmer My name is Aidan Farmer, I’m a senior in Philosophy and History at North Carolina State University. My primary areas of interest are in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of law, with additional coursework in ethics and metamathematics.

My proudest academic achievements at NC State are the Robert S. Bryan prize in philosophy and the history honors college. I plan on attending law school in the future and pursuing a career as a lawyer and academic.

Oliver Bates My name is Oliver Bates and I am a philosophy major, international studies minor.

My hometown is Washington DC and I am class of 2022. My interests mainly focus on metaphysics and ontology– trying to understand who and how we are in the world. In terms of future aspirations, I view them as trying to drain the ocean with a sieve. My goal in life is to do the best I can with what I have– and make a few people smile along the way.

Maggie Hynes Maggie Hynes is a 4th-year undergraduate student at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. She is currently pursuing a major in Philosophy and a minor in Communications Studies, with a philosophical focus on feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and social and political philosophy. In 2019 and 2020 she received the Joseph and Joyce Dawson Memorial Bursary in Philosophy and in 2020, she won the Peter Harris Essay Prize in Metaphysics, the Peter Harris Essay Prize in Medieval Philosophy, and the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences Book Prize. After graduating she plans on continuing her studies at the graduate-level.

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Christopher Chiasera Christopher Chiasera is a junior (Class of 2024) currently enrolled at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and originally from Long Island, New York. He is a double major in Philosophy and Political Science, 2020 recipient of the 1823 Scholarship, 2022 recipient of the Blanchard W. Means Prize in Philosophy, and leading member/social media coordinator of the Trinity College Philosophy Club.

His philosophical interests include phenomenology (particularly that of Martin Heidegger), epistemology, and Marxism. This summer, he plans to work closely with Trinity College faculty to conduct research on the philosophy of color perception and relevant phenomenological insights. In the future, he hopes to attend graduate school for Philosophy and someday teach the subject at the college level.

Aubrey Dean Smith My name is Aubrey Dean Smith and I am a philosophy major and English minor going into my Senior year at the University of Kentucky. My main areas of interest are free will, conceptual ethics, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of punishment.

I was awarded the UKY Philosophy Department Undergraduate Award for the 2020-2021 academic year, featured in the 2022 Undergraduate English Showcase, and am a member of the Philosophy Club leadership committee. I plan on attending law school following graduation to work as a prison-reform advocate.

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The Best of All Possible Histories: Hegel’s Racism and his Philosophy of Right Aidan Farmer North Carolina State University

A BSTRACT This paper is a textual analysis of racism in Hegel’s published lectures. The foundations of Hegel’s racism are explored in both his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and the “Anthropology” section of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Textual analysis reveals that Hegel’s racial framework divides human beings along geographic lines. Each geographic region is correlated with distinct psychological features that form his core judgments about each race. Core principles guiding Hegel’s treatment of each presupposed race are identified as cultural essentialism, genocide, slavery, and Orientalism. In light of Hegel’s systematic approach to philosophy, each of these issues are traced to his Philosophy of Right, and it is argued that while the text is mostly lacking in overtly racist claims, the principles that lead Hegel to his objectionable conclusions are nonetheless present in his legal and political philosophy. This analysis of the Philosophy of Right is used to generate more wholistic critiques of Hegel’s philosophy. Specific criticisms include an exclusionary conception of personality, overly rigid dialectical logic, and Eurocentric conceptions of family and the state

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The Best of All Possible Histories

1

Introduction

Hegel’s philosophical system embraces history, both as subject matter, and as method. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel narrated the progression of world history through the framework of absolute idealism, showing the ways in which reason presented itself through the seemingly random actions of human beings throughout history. Furthermore, his full philosophical system embraces historicism in methodology as well, as he views the world as dynamic and ever progressing. Therefore, Hegel’s conception if history is important to understanding his broader philosophical project. History presents both Hegel’s method and his vision of a progressive dynamic universe in a digestible fashion.

However, Hegel’s writings on history also present a unique challenge to students of his philosophy. His Lectures on the Philosophy of World History deals in empirical claims and substantive beliefs, often false ones, and so it makes explicit some pernicious subtexts of his main philosophical system. Among the most unacceptable aspects of Hegel’s historical system to contemporary readers is his treatment of race, where he demonstrates an inarguably racist attitude towards Non-white people.

In addressing Hegel’s racism, it is tempting to merely disregard the objectionable passages and move on, but this is a flawed approach. The idealist project is inherently systematic, each part is interdependent. Hegel’s Eurocentrism is not merely a surface detail, but a structural problem. Also of note is the commitment to Hegel by many black American philosophers, from W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King Jr.,1 who were particularly drawn to his progressive philosophical vision. This apparent tension in Hegel’s reception between condemnation for his racism and praise for his value in illuminating racial justice indicates a need for further study.

Rather than attempting to repair Hegel’s philosophy, this paper shall seek to understand the systematic basis for his racist claims. I will attempt to move beyond the simple description of objectionable passages or texts and will instead place these claims in the context of the broader system and will uncover subtler problems in Hegel’s less overtly racist texts. This mission will lead to the analysis of the Philosophy of Right as this is Hegel’s most extensive statement on the philosophy of objective spirit.2 For ease of analysis, Hegel’s racism will be explained in terms of 1. Frank Kirkland, "Hegel on Race and Devlopment," in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, ed. Paul C. Taylor, Linda Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2018), 43-44. & Andrea Long Chu, "Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel’s Africa," Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2018): 415.

2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. S.W. Dyde, Dover

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The Best of All Possible Histories philosophical “issues” already identified in the contemporary literature on Hegel, namely cultural essentialism, genocide, slavery, and Orientalism. These issues are present in the lectures, as well as the anthropology section of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. I will show that these issues can have their origins and effects traced to the Philosophy of Right and will use this process to create tangible criticisms of that text. The analysis will demonstrate deep problems with Hegel’s concept of wrong, his exclusionary construction of personhood, and his philosophical system’s inability to account for cultural pluralism.

2

Philosophical History and Anthropology

An understanding of Hegel’s Eurocentrism must begin with an understanding of his historical theory. For Hegel, history consists of three very separate practices.

The first two, only briefly mentioned, constitute the modern discipline of empirical history. The third, titled ‘Philosophical History’ is a more interpretive science, and Hegel’s primary focus. The philosopher must explicate the evolution of rationality throughout the known history of the world, showing how rationality evolves from the chaos of human passions and private ends.3 However, the historian should not force historical data into an a priori framework. The point here is to illuminate the rationality already present in all things by studying historical events.4 To Hegel, this goal only assumed what was plainly evident from the rest of his philosophical system, making philosophical history into an act of pure interpretation, belonging entirely to the field of philosophy, not to empirical history.5 Philosophical history is concerned primarily with the spirit,6 tracking the development and actualization of human culture. However, in order to realize its idea, the spirit must become actual, and contemplate itself in concrete form.7 Thus, world history is under the domain of objective spirit in Hegel’s philosophical system, because it deals with the realization of human freedom. This creates a link between history and the Philosophy of Right, which is his more formal discussion of actualized freedom.8 History shows the realization of human freedom across the ages, and Philosophical Classics, (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896), vii-xi.

3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. J. Sibree, Dover Philosophical Classics, (Boston: The Colonial Press, 1899), 37.

4. Ibid., 10.

5. Ibid., 16-17.

6. Ibid., 16.

7. Ibid., 25.

8. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface: xii & xx.

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The Best of All Possible Histories so each different era, and each modern culture, will find itself at a particular place in Hegel’s system of Right.

As noted earlier, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History contains the bulk of Hegel’s racist claims. However, in the logical progression of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, it is not the first instance of racism. That dubious honor goes to Hegel’s discussion of Anthropology, which is found in the philosophy of subjective spirit.

Subjective spirit and philosophical history bookend the Philosophy of Right, meaning the text proceeds from some assumptions found only in his approach to Anthropology.

For brevity and clarity’s sake, I will focus entirely on the discussion of Anthropology in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, rather than his posthumous lectures, as this will provide adequate context for the Philosophy of Right.

3

Hegel’s Racial System

3.1

Antropology

There are two ways of approaching racism in Hegel’s Encyclopedia Anthropology.

The first is to acknowledge Hegel’s roots in the anthropology of Kant, and to read Hegel as either dutifully repeating Kant’s position, or as trying unsuccessfully to distance himself from contemporary racialized thought.9 However, there are a few problems with this view. The first is that Hegel was anything but an uncritical parrot of Kantian philosophy, especially regarding anthropology and psychology.

Hegel’s philosophy of the mind a view is indeed influenced by Kant, but also takes inspiration from Aristotle and others, demonstrating an original synthesis that cannot be blamed on one source.10 Hegel attributes racial difference to the alienation of cognitive features into a person’s physical being, a departure from Kant’s treatment where racial biology determines the mind. For Kant, the supposed anatomical differences between the races extend to neurological differences, a region where Europeans were presumed superior.11 Casting Hegel as substantially less racist than his contemporaries solely from a positive comparison to Kant is also inaccurate. Kant’s racism was atypical enough to draw heavy criticism at the, especially from Johann Herder, who called the very 9. Jean-Yves Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 44 (2019).

10. Kenneth Westphal, "Hegel’s Critique of Theoretical Spirit," in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, ed. Marina Bykova (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 61.

11. Michael Hoffheimer, "Hegel Race Genocide," Journal of Southern Philosophy 39 (2001): 41.

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The Best of All Possible Histories use of the term “race” by Kant as “das unedle Wort.”12 German thinkers as recently as Leibniz were committed Sinophiles, viewing China as the oldest civilization, endowed with the original language of humanity.13 While Kant’s position would eventually become the mainstream consensus in the mid nineteenth century, biological determinism was still a fringe position in Hegel’s time. Given this context, it is implausible to assume Hegel was simply going with the flow on race. We must regard racism in his Encyclopedia Anthropology as an active choice.14 Another view, espoused by older Hegel scholars such as Peter Hodgson and Duncan Forbes,15 , is to explain Hegel’s Encyclopedia Anthropology as culturally essentialist rather than biologically essentialist, and to then defend that cultural essentialism. This view is supported by the fact that, in Hegel, human beings are historical actors creating the Zeitgeist that in turn, acts on them.16 However, as scholar Jean-Yves Heurtebise points out “the Hegelian principle that natural origins matter less than cultural productions did not prevent Hegel from hierarchizing human cultures at the expense of non-European cultures.”17 Hegel’s philosophy was still, in a real sense, racist, even if he did not attribute cognitive inequality to biological race.

Because cultural essentialism is established prior to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, it is argued for explicitly in that text. Therefore, the analysis of this first issue will seek to trace its introduction and functional role in the early parts of the text, rather than finding its origins in the philosophy of objective spirit.

3.2

Geographical Basics of History

Hegel’s understanding of race is further clarified in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Most relevant is the section ‘The Geographical Basis of History’ where Hegel gives racial categories a geographical mirror. He is careful to avoid geographic determinism,18 but this section still gives a good impression of Hegel’s particular thoughts on each race. We shall now discus each of his proposed racial categories in 12. Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy." & (German) Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, trans.

Carl Hanser (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002), 120.

13. Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy."

14. Eric Nelson, "Hegel, Difference, Multiplicity," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 44 (2019).

15. Chu, "Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel’s Africa."

16. Marina Bykova, The Cunning of Reason in Hegel’s Philosophy of History, 2021, Unpublished manuscript. Cited with the author’s permission. 10-11.

17. Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy."

18. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 79.

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The Best of All Possible Histories isolation and identify aspects that can later be traced to his Philosophy of Right.

3.2.1

America

First, shortest, and most heinous is Hegel’s treatment of Native Americans and Pacific Aborigines. Here, Hegel begins by explicitly declaring “the inferiority of [Native Americans] in all respects, even in regard to size, is manifest.”19 While such outright derogatory comments are plentiful, the subtext is considerably more troubling. Hegel argues that indigenous people are not engaged in the Weltgeist in any respect, and crucially, that they are constitutionally incapable of joining world history ever in the future. They are merely “obstructive” to the conquest of the New World by Europeans.20 In Hegel’s philosophy, where participation in a cultural community is the goal of mankind, these claims are tantamount to a denial of even basic humanity.21 This reduction of Native people to mere objects without personality is what allows Hegel to merely brush aside their massacre, saying little more on the matter than, “the population, for the most part, has vanished.”22 Thus, the issue to be traced to the Philosophy of Right is genocide.

3.2.2

Africa

Less essentialist, but still extremely brief, is Hegel’s treatment of African peoples.

While Hegel still asserts the inferiority of black people outright, he treats them as having some potential for development. According to his lectures, he believed “the Negroes are far more susceptible to European culture than the Indians,”23 and as a result, he gives sub-Saharan Africa a more careful, but no more accurate, historical analysis. Hegel sees African people and society as stuck at the lowest stage of development, abstract right, possessing an essentially selfish culture. Hegel holds that African folk religions “hold man as the highest power,”24 because God is expressed through a material fetish, which is the property of an individual who can use and destroy it. Similarly, political bonds are subject to the whim of the masses, as kings are deposed by their subjects relatively freely.25 The historical basis of these assertions is highly questionable, but more important for the present 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

Ibid., 81.

Ibid., 82-84.

Hoffheimer, "Hegel Race Genocide," 47.

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 81-82.

Ibid., 82.

Ibid., 91.

Ibid., 97.

20

The Best of All Possible Histories discussion is the systematic basis and implications of Hegel’s claims. In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right these personally mutable forms of religion and government belong to the domain of mere possession and use of property, where the subjective will is first made concrete.26 Hegel is particularly interested in the institution of Atlantic slavery, and this will be the issue most relevant to his Philosophy of Right. The reason for Hegel’s interest is that the existence of a slave caste on the fringes of European society is an apparent contradiction. As he states, “the Germanic world knows all are free,”27 in contrast to the Orient or Greco-Roman period. To overcome this, Hegel draws an analogy between slavery and serfdom, arguing that at “every intermediate grade between [a natural condition] and the realization of a rational state retains- as might be expected- elements and aspects of injustice.”28 Thus, it seems Hegel does not entirely defend slavery. The question then, will be how Hegel differentiates Atlantic slavery from ancient or feudal slavery on the basis of race.

3.2.3

Asia

Finally, there is Hegel’s treatment of the so-called ‘Orient’ which is the most sympathetic of all his non-Western histories. For Hegel, the East is within the domain of the Weltgeist, and the origin of self-consciousness.29 However, despite Hegel’s relative willingness to afford humanity to Asian people, his recognition is still limited. While the “sun of Self-Consciousness” may rise in the East, progress never proceeded beyond the stage of individual actualization. The Orient remains despotic and undeveloped, “it the Childhood of History.”30 Hegel’s vision of Asia fits snugly within cultural attitudes of his day, but his systematic rationalization is unique. Scholars like Eric Nelson and the above mentioned Jean-Yves Heurtebise recognize Hegel’s philosophical assessment of Asia as a part of broader nineteenth century Orientalism.31 Orientalism, in the context of philosophy, consists of two main assumptions: the East and West are wholly separate spheres with the West corresponding to freedom and the East to despotism, and that rationality and science are entirely products of the West.32 Therefore, the 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. §6.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §40.

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 104.

Ibid., 99.

Ibid., 103.

Ibid., 105.

Nelson, "Hegel, Difference, Multiplicity."

Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy,"

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The Best of All Possible Histories issue to be traced in Hegel’s Asian history is Orientalism.

All four of these issues— cultural essentialism, genocide, slavery, and Orientalism— can be found and analyzed in Hegel’s Lectures on World History. This is the context in which prior scholars have addressed the issue.33 However, Hegel’s philosophy is a system of interconnected, logically consequential, parts, so problems in his history or anthropology will have causes and aftershocks radiating in either direction. History is the final phase of the philosophy of objective spirit as “its development issuing solely out of the conception of freedom is a necessary development of the elements of reason.”34 Similarly, Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit will bleed into the discussion of objective spirit immediately thereafter. Therefore, we must follow the trail of Hegel’s racism into his objective spirit, that is, into his Philosophy of Right.

Race Issues in Philosophy of Right

4 4.1

Cultural Essentialism

While the cultural essentialism of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Anthropology is obviously established prior to the philosophy of objective spirit, it still plays an important role. The principle is first advanced in the preface of Philosophy of Right with the infamous Doppelsatz “what is rational is actual; what is actual is rational.”35 Competing readings of the Doppelsatz abound, Hegel’s critics see it as a normative justification of all that is, while his defenders insist on a more progressive reading.36 An absolute position on this controversy is beyond the present scope however, as both readings agree on the relevant facts.

A progressive reading argues that “actual” as a term, refers only to that which conforms to its own rational nature.37 Such a reading agrees with the conservative reading that Hegel is making a normative justification of apparent conditions only when the thing in question is rationally conceived, leaving the door open for social progress towards a rational end goal. So, the question becomes, are culturally “inferior” nations acting withing their own rational nature by refusing freedom’s 33. Hoffheimer, "Hegel Race Genocide." Kirkland, "Hegel on Race and Devlopment." & Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy."

34. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §342.

35. Ibid., xix.

36. Robert Stern, "Hegel’s Doppelsatz: A Neutral Reading," Journal of the History of Philosophy 44, no. 2 (2006).

37. Ibid., 237-8.

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The Best of All Possible Histories realization? The answer is assuredly yes, as the cultural principle of a nation is in direct correspondence to unchangeable inner features, “hence, to each nation is to be ascribed a single principle, compromised under its geographical and anthropological existence.”38 This does not mean that an uncivilized nation will never develop, as it is the nature of history for nations to interact and develop cooperatively. However, taken in conjunction with the Doppelsatz, we can see that Hegel does not conceive of the West’s perfection as historical accident or a transient phase, because it is the national idea of the Eastern nations to organize themselves as despots.39 Cultural essentialism is an actual and rational phenomenon.

4.2

Genocide

Hegel’s indifference to the genocide of Native Americans is justified by the earliest sections of his Philosophy of Right. The basis for right is the possession a completely free will, for it is this will that allows man his first “bare abstract reference of itself to itself.”40 To follow Hegel’s logic closely, we then say that “personality does not arise until the subject has not merely a general concept of himself in some determinate mode. . . but a consciousness of himself as completely abstract.”41 The final step is that “personality implies, in general a capacity to possess rights.”42 Therefore, the use of a will is a hard requirement for the possession of rights.

A will, in this context, is understood with reference to an object, as when there is “no distinction between the will and its content,” the will remains entirely indefinite and abstract.43 It is this utilization of the will in reference to an object that grants personality, as personality begins only when the subject is conscious of both their subjective and objective existence.44 Thus, Hegel does not need to prove indigenous people lack will at the most basic level of individual freedom and self-determination, only that this will remains entirely abstract, and that no effort will ever prompt native peoples to develop personality. This unutilized will is sufficient to justify genocide, as it would deny Native Americans the capacity for rights.

Hegel’s preoccupation with the imagined laziness and sloth of indigenous people 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §346.

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 105-06.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §34.

Ibid., §35N. Ibid., §37.

Ibid., §34A. Ibid., §35N.

23

The Best of All Possible Histories in Lectures on World History seems confusing at first blush, but it is the implication that they do utilize their will that makes this feature important. The imagined lack of will is brought in even to physical wants, as “at Midnight a bell had to remind them even of their matrimonial duties.”45 This is a unique feature of Amerindians as Hegel directly contrasts them with Africans, saying “negroes [have] become competent clergymen. . . while only a single native was known whose intellect was sufficiently developed to enable him to study, but who died soon after the beginning through excessive brandy-drinking.”46 The implication being that no civilizing effort on the part of Europeans is able to make indigenous peoples’ will develop an objective reality. Due to the extreme brevity of his discussion of the Americas, it is slightly unclear whether Hegel believes indigenous people have even an abstract will though he justifies their genocide regardless of this detail. The lack of a finitely determined will is sufficient in Hegel’s eyes to reduce Native people to the level of animals and places no restrictions on their extermination.47

4.3

Slavery

Hegel’s defense of Atlantic slavery is confounding for a few reasons. First is that Hegel is generally hostile to blatant disregard for a person’s freedom and natural rights. His discussion of Rome in particular hinges on his contempt for slavery and inequality, he says of Roman caste divisions and slavery “the consecrated inequality of will and private property. . . involves a duplicate power, the sternness and malevolent isolation whose components can only be mastered and bound together by a still greater sternness, into a unity maintained by force.”48 From this, one might expect Hegel to differentiate Atlantic and pre-modern slavery, as that would give him a basis to justify one rather than the other. Hegel, however, chooses the opposite course, likening slavery to other institutions he resented, such as serfdom, saying “slavery is in and for itself injustice,” while still stubbornly arguing that slavery “is the cause for the increase in human feelings among Negroes.”49 The key to unraveling Hegel’s seemingly contradictory conception of slavery lies in his Philosophy of Right, specifically his conception of wrong. Criminal wrong is the final stage of abstract right in the text and is the element that draws pure right 45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 82.

Ibid.

Hoffheimer, "Hegel Race Genocide."

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 295 Ibid., 98-99.

24

The Best of All Possible Histories out of itself and brings about genuine morality.50 The term is roughly equivalent to its everyday definition, comprising any violation of the rights of another or the violation of contractual relations between people. Wrong elevates the individual’s understanding of their own will from mere personality to subjectivity, it is what negates personality, and when double negated, wrong brings about subjectivity.51 Hegel’s historical treatment of Africa frames the region as essentially egoistic, with both state and religion ultimately mutable by the will of the individual.52 This style of social organization is firmly planted in the realm of abstract right, as Hegel says of this stage, “uncivilized man, in general, holds fast to rights, while a more generous disposition is alert to see all sides of the question.”53 Therefore, we can see Hegel’s logical next step for Africa by merely moving one step further on the progression towards wrong. In the context of Africa, wrong is slavery, which “is itself a phase of advancement from the merely isolated state of sensual experience.”54 Slavery is thus justified paternalistically and progressively, it is for the moral good of African people, even if the means are a criminal wrong, “the gradual abolition of slavery is therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal.”55 This restoration through double negation is typical of Hegel’s dialectical logic, but what is atypical is the way Hegel works backwards through the progression for moral justification. Slavery is not justified as a response to prior material conditions, but as a means to a hypothetical future end of realizing freedom.56 In most contexts, Hegel does not equate the dialectical necessity of an action with moral justification. The less concrete discussion of Wrong in the Philosophy of Right makes clear that Hegel does not endorse crime or violence solely on the basis that it negates right and thus creates progress. In fact, it is the inadequacy of right as a concept that necessitates criminality, as the individual’s insistence on their own right without self-legislation leads them to violate the right of others.57 Hegel’s application reverses the blame however, assuming it was Africans’ lack of civility that caused them to be enslaved, when in the context of the Philosophy of Right, wrong implies uncivility on the part of the perpetrator, not the victim.58 50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §82.

Ibid., §104.

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 91 & 97.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §37A. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 98-99.

Ibid., 99.

Chu, "Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel’s Africa."

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §83.

Ibid., §90

25

The Best of All Possible Histories The charitable reading here is that Hegel worked backwards from a preset conclusion and did not consider the systematic implications. The alternative would be a peculiar kind of theodicy, where wrong always has the purpose of moral education for the victim, spontaneously appearing as if by divine providence whenever someone fails to achieve subjectivity, as is supposedly the case for Atlantic slavery.59 Atlantic slavery must be the irrational exception rather than the rule, for Hegel’s same logic could be used to justify any wrong committed to “uncivilized” people no matter how extreme.

4.4

Orientalism

The origins of Hegel’s Orientalism are twofold. First, noted by prior scholars and present throughout his Lectures on the Philosophy of History is the reduction of Asia to a monolith that remains historically static after the birth of the Weltgeist.60 The static nature of the east ties back to the discussion of cultural essentialism, “for outside the One Power- before which nothing can maintain an outside existencethere is only revolting caprice.”61 There is no motion or contradiction within, say, China because the whole of the nation is reduced to the characteristically Oriental Despot.62 Thus, progress can only result externally, only by its endless dialect with the West can the East hope to progress, it has no independence.

More relevant to the Philosophy of Right, however, is the Eurocentric structure underlying Hegel’s ethical system. The ethical system, comprising the third chapter of Philosophy of Right is, according to Hegel, the first section exclusively applying to modern Europe.63 The sections, including family, civic community, and the state, do away with the abstraction of abstract right and morality, concerning the proper relationship among individuals and society. The set of distortions Hegel places on the East, that it is essentially egoistic and patriarchal,64 that it has no civic community,65 that its state is indivisible,66 are empirically wrong, but they are falsehoods that serve to estrange Eastern cultures from the customs characteristic to family, civic community, and the proper state respectively. Hegel’s system has one valid progression towards the realization of freedom, and that is the historical path 59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 99.

Heurtebise, "Hegel’s Orientalist Philosophy of History and its Kantian Anthropological Legacy."

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 105.

Ibid., 120.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §335.

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 101.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §335.

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 112-13.

26

The Best of All Possible Histories of Western Europe.

Why then, is Hegel so afraid of pluralism? The answer may lie in part with his dialectical logic. Hegel’s dialectical has a cyclical aspect, but reflection always brings us linearly forward to a new Concept.67 The existence of other legitimate paths towards the realization of the freedom, paths that other cultures may have been on, would violate the stringent rules for progression in the Hegelian system.68

5

Conclusion

Hegel’s racism, like the rest of his philosophy is systematic. While racist attitudes appear in a relatively small minority of his texts, mostly confined to posthumously published texts, no aspect of Hegel’s philosophy can be taken in isolation. The root issues of cultural essentialism, genocide based on dehumanization, perpetual wrongs like enslavement, and the distorted lens of Orientalism, once identified, can be assigned causes and consequences throughout his philosophical system.

This study has focused primarily on tracing the implications of Hegel’s racism to the philosophy of objective spirit. Cultural essentialism is a significant background assumption to the Philosophy of Right, as it helps frame the assumption that societal progression is the realization of a national idea. Slavery helps us to identify the problems with Hegel’s concept of wrong, showing how making moral wrong a necessary evil can justify clearly horrendous actions as long as they serve the realization of freedom. The tacit indifference to genocide demonstrates how Hegel’s concept of personality excludes people from the category of human on the grounds of cultural and biological features. Finally, Hegel’s Orientalism reveals that his philosophical system struggles with any form of pluralism.

While these results are interesting, they leave many questions unanswered.

There is still considerable ambiguity about whether Hegel’s racism is internally consistent with the rest of his system. To put it another way, would Hegel’s system be made more rational by removing the racist conclusions, or does the structure of his system necessitate these conclusions? Certainly, Hegel’s philosophy would appear more agreeable if racist passages were disregarded, but whether this can be done while preserving the cohesion of the full system is best left to scholars with a broader background in Hegel’s philosophy. Similarly, scholars with strong knowledge of other 67. Paul Redding, "The Logic of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit," in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, ed. Marina Bykova (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 18-19.

68. Nelson, "Hegel, Difference, Multiplicity."

27

The Best of All Possible Histories sections of the system might try to trace the racial issues identified here to other sections of the philosophy of spirit, or to even earlier sections of the Encyclopedia.

The question remains though, what is a more general audience to do with this knowledge? One impulse might be to take an all or nothing approach, to simply throw Hegel out with the bathwater and move on, but this is a slightly immature reaction. As the tension between Hegel’s progressive vision and his conceptions of race and slavery demonstrate, the brilliant rationality of the Hegelian system often chafes against its creator’s more unflattering assumptions. The sheer leaps of logic and empirical falsehoods Hegel had to perpetuate to reach racist conclusions, if nothing else, demonstrate the irrationality of racism as a concept.

And more optimistically, the generations of commitment to Hegel by black leaders and intellectuals suggest that perhaps Hegel’s system is worth saving, even if takes some considerable effort to get there.

28

19

Bibliography Bykova, Marina. The Cunning of Reason in Hegel's Philosophy of History. 2021. Unpublished manuscript. Cited with the author's permission.

Chu, Andrea Long. "Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel's Africa." Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2018): 414-25.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by S.W. Dyde.

Dover Philosophical Classics. London: George Bell & Sons, 1896.

———. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Translated by J. Sibree. Dover Philosophical Classics. Boston: The Colonial Press, 1899.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen Zur Philosophie Der Geschichte Der Menschheit. Translated by Carl Hanser. Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002.

Heurtebise, Jean-Yves. "Hegel's Orientalist Philosophy of History and Its Kantian Anthropological Legacy." Journal of Chinese Philosophy 44 (2019): 175-92.

Hoffheimer, Michael. "Hegel Race Genocide." Journal of Southern Philosophy 39 (2001): 3562.

Kirkland, Frank. "Hegel on Race and Devlopment." In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, edited by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Alcoff and Luvell Anderson, 43-60. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Nelson, Eric. "Hegel, Difference, Multiplicity." Journal of Chinese Philosophy 44 (2019): 12126.

Redding, Paul. "The Logic of Hegel's Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit." In Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, edited by Marina Bykova, 11-28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Stern, Robert. "Hegel's Doppelsatz: A Neutral Reading." Journal of the History of Philosophy 44, no. 2 (2006): 235-66.

Westphal, Kenneth. "Hegel's Critique of Theoretical Spirit." In Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, edited by Marina Bykova, 57-82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

The McDowell-Travis Debate Oliver Bates Haverford College

A BSTRACT This paper looks at John McDowell’s account of perception and its relation to conceptual understanding and experience. It unpacks a long-standing and seemingly unsolvable debate between John McDowell and Charles Travis. It posits a new way of looking at the origin of this debate and a way to reconcile their positions. The core of the paper is McDowell’s claim that the conceptual, as thought of by Kant, extends—as he puts it— passively all the way out to the edge of perception. The combination of the perceptual and the conceptual gives experience. The reason McDowell concerns himself with this is to avoid what Wilfrid Sellars called the Myth of the Given. The Myth of the Given states that when perception and the conceptual are melded together outside the moment of perception, there must be some awareness of the content of the perception outside the conceptual awareness.

Travis thinks this is not an issue, and that saying the conceptual extends as far out as possible lands McDowell in Idealism.

31

The McDowell-Travis Debate

1

Introduction

When I look my boyfriend in the eyes, I see him. But how do I see him? I am not talking mechanically here. What I am discussing is: how do I know it is him? I see his eyes, his rumpled hair, his jawline, his nose, and his mouth— but at what point do I know it is him? Other people have the characteristics described, where is the knowledge that he is my boyfriend, that his name is Stephen? How do I know it is Stephen?

The goal of this paper is to examine how both John McDowell and Charles Travis answer this question—focusing on where the two disagree and why they disagree. It will use a selection of their works, including John McDowell’s Mind and World and his essay Avoiding the Myth of the Given and Charles Travis’s 2013 The Silences of the Senses. This essay will posit that they disagree because they do not understand what the other is saying. First, it will quickly go over each standpoint—focusing on where each misunderstands the other. Next, it will use a Wittgensteinian example of reading to illuminate the facilitation of the kind of awareness they speak about and where the two start to misunderstand each other. Finally, it will put the two back in conversation with their confusions explained.

2

McDowell’s Picture

For McDowell, for me to know Stephen is to have my concepts intertwined with the receptivity. He argues for the passive application of concepts in experience in his book Mind and World.1 He says that perception and the conceptual extend, as he puts it, as far out into the world as possible. The contribution of the conceptual and the perceptual are indistinguishable in experience. For McDowell, this contribution of the conceptual is not active—it does not shape perception but adds to it to give rise to experience. This marks the only way in which the world can rationally constrain thought2 —the conceptual sphere (all things of which we are aware) does not exceed the rational sphere (what we can have reason to do). By having concepts extend as far out as possible, so there exists no discernable distinction between the contribution from concepts and perception, experience can rationally constrain 1. John Henry McDowell, Mind and World: With a New Introduction by the Author (Harvard University Press, 1996), 12.

2. To rationally constrain is to give reason for thinking something where the reason is my own and not merely the product of external forces. Think here of reason as why a person is vegetarian vs something like the stars which are caused to act in a particular way but do not have reason to do so.

32

The McDowell-Travis Debate judgment.

Consider non-rational animals and their perception of the world for comparison.

They perceive the world; they experience it as opportunities and hazards—to use McDowell’s terms. When looking at a tree, a rational being sees it with meaning as engrained for a rational being. When a pig looks at the same tree as the rational being, they see it as leading to truffles—they see it as an opportunity for food.

Neither is wrong in how the tree is viewed (wrong as in perceiving qualities of the tree that the tree lacks). Neither act of perceiving bears any effect on the tree as an object in the world. Yet the rational being’s perception of the tree is uniquely different from the pigs—this is the role of the concept. McDowell views the rational being as having a unique kind of being from that of other animals in that our experience of the world is fundamentally transformed by concepts.

3

Charles Travis

Travis has other ideas. Travis’s view centers around unfettered access to the world where experiential intake is not conceptually formed. For Travis, experiential intake becomes conceptual in the form of judgments that are made about the experience itself—perception cannot tell us whether something is true or false but our claims about the experience can be true or false.3 Perception does not have any form of face value.4 Any errors in judgment arise from the individual and their use of concepts— not the perception itself.5 Most importantly, perceivers have unmediated access to the world.6 The part McDowell takes issue with is experiential intake becoming conceptual in and only in judgments. For him, this necessitates a form of purely given awareness of the experiential intake—this is the Myth of the Given.

4

The Myth of the Given and Idealism

The snare that McDowell tries to avoid is called the Myth of the Given. Conceived

by Wilfrid Sellars, the Myth of the Given says if concepts and intuitions (as seen in Kant) are bound together outside the moment of the experience (as in the Transcendental Aesthetic), then the experience must already have conceptual content so that the correct concept can be applied to the correct experience. In this way, our 3.

4.

5.

6.

Charles Travis, The Silences of the Senses Perception: Essays After Frege (OUP Oxford, 2013), 30.

Travis, 25.

Travis, 30.

Travis, 30.

33

The McDowell-Travis Debate awareness of the experience is primal to our knowledge of it and is somehow given to us before our understanding of it.

The snare that Travis tries to avoid is Idealism. In Idealism, objects of knowledge are dependent on the person perceiving them. The lamp, as an object I know, is completely dependent on there being a figure that can know the lamp as a lamp— it is dependent on me. Travis thinks the Myth of the Given is not a myth and cannot be avoided.

McDowell says Travis’s idea is impossible for it falls into the Myth of the Given— this is no surprise. Travis says McDowell’s idea is impossible, for it creates a representationalism picture of understanding that removes itself from the world—it is another form of idealism. The justification for their respective ideas comes from demolishing each other.

5

Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein proposed the following paraphrased idea. When learning to read, the letters first appear on the page as random squiggles punctuating the space of the page. Their meaning to the new reader is only a barrier to understanding. As the reader gains familiarity with the symbols and eventually words, their experience of the page transforms and infuses with new meaning. This is the role of concepts within understanding. The issue these two philosophers disagree on consists of where the meaning of the word is located. For McDowell the two experiences of the page are fundamentally different, the person who can’t read has a different experience of the page vs those who can. These experiences constitute different mental states and beings in the world. For Travis, the intake of squiggles on a page is the same in both cases—it is only after the reader has learned their meaning and taken in the squiggles that concepts are then applied. The perception of the page has not changed for either philosopher.

It is worth noting the difference between experience and perception. Experience does not equal perception. In both instances (before the ability to read vs after) the perception of the page has not changed in that the mechanical way in which the agent sees the page is the same. The light hits their eyes and transmits signals to the brain etc. The experience of the page changes in these two instances. Perception does not necessitate the use of concepts—and this is what Travis is getting at in a circuitous way. A person can perceive that which they do not have concepts for—such as body language before concepts of body language. A person can tell intent to harm 34

The McDowell-Travis Debate regardless of any conceptual knowledge of body language. Yet, perception, in this form, can never give reason to act or judge. It can provide cause to act (see footnote 1 for an explanation of cause and reason).

For both, the experience is different, but the perception is the same. The confusion comes in how concepts relate to perception and then experience. For McDowell, concepts are as close to perception as possible. McDowell sees the concepts of letters as contributing to perception in an indistinguishable way that gives experience.

Travis says if that is true, then concepts must shape perception so that experience is just in the mind and untied from the objects as they are in the world. It is here that Travis has misunderstood McDowell and McDowell has not been able to correct him. For McDowell, perception and the conceptual give experience, experience then allows for judgments that can be true or false. For Travis, there is the perception that is our experience and judgments that come when we add concepts to experience.

They both agree that perception gives things for which rational beings have the capacity to respond. Both philosophers seek to understand how rational beings have access to the world as the basis for judgments. Both seek to answer the questions about the relationship between subject and object. Travis says McDowell falls short in this for he falls into idealism—the world depends on and exists only in the mind.

McDowell says Travis falls short for he falls into the Myth of the Given—he allows for something unquestionable and given to guide and constrain rational thought.

6

The Confusion

This debate starts with Travis’s response to Mind and World. Neither wants to fall into Idealism and only McDowell wants to avoid the Myth of the Given. McDowell thinks he avoids Idealism by saying that our awareness of reality is dependent on the conceptual, but reality is not dependent on our experience or perception of it.7 What avoids idealism is his passive use of the conceptual with perception and therefore in experience—the conceptual shapes nothing. Therefore, we can get at the world as it is, not just how we think of it. Travis has mistaken passive application as having a shaping role in experience; McDowell means it differently. Influenced

by Gilbert Ryle of Oxford University, the passive application of concepts is a way of being in the world. Perception occurs with or without concepts, yet concepts tune experience. The world does not fit into our concepts—instead, our concepts must fit into the world. This is what McDowell means.

7. McDowell, “Mind and World,” 42.

35

The McDowell-Travis Debate Flipping how concepts fit into the world helps alleviate their issues. Tuning a radio to a specific channel puts the receiver in the position to pick up a specific frequency. Concepts guide the receiver of experience to the frequency of the understanding of the world. They do not shape the form of perception but angle (not physically) it in a specific direction—they alter without affecting. This is an extremely difficult conceptualization of McDowell’s to understand and is natural to fall into old thinking patterns of acting on, meaning shaping of. This is not the case.

The case of reading provides the perfect example of this phenomenon. Learning the concepts of letters and words and such does not alter how they are perceived in the sense of mechanics or intake. What it does alter is the immediate experience of those letters.

The root of the confusion is that concepts do not shape perception but give meaning to experience alongside perception in the same way a plant gives meaning to water. Concepts offer tuning to a view of an object with infinite representations— they do not alter a view such that it exists only in the mind but offer a window into the world. They open the floodgates to understand the world. They offer unencumbered access to the world via one route. They are answerable to the tribunal of experience through the interactions between the rational being and the world. They are passive in the way that they do not stand between the being and the world.

In The Silences of the Senses, Travis describes the idea of face value in experiences. This is the idea that the world presents something to the subject with a face value that the person can judge—it can be accepted or rejected.8 To have face value leads to the thing being judged to be there as thus and so. Travis says this is McDowell’s picture. We experience face value. Travis points out that if this were true, all that is constitutive of a being, to tell its existence, would be its face value.9 To reject a concept applied to the perception of face value says nothing about the object in itself. Travis then goes on to mention how this way of thinking does not work in cases of identical twins where the face value of one does not necessitate the other’s existence. My seeing Joe, who is identical to Jim, does not necessitate Jim’s existence— even if they have the same face value. Therefore, face value is not enough to tell Jim’s existence.

It is this claim that McDowell responds to by saying that the conceptual, as he laid out, must be present in proper and common sensibles10 but not incidental 8. Travis, 29.

9. Travis, 35.

10. These terms and concepts come from Aristotle’s, De Anima.

36

The McDowell-Travis Debate objects.11 Proper sensibles are qualities experienced by one sensory intake method; these include color, and size. Common sensibles need multiple sensory inputs; these include shape and volume. Incidental objects are not known merely through the sensory intake. To know Stephen as a boyfriend has nothing to do with the perception of his features but with the concepts that are placed with him in experience.

They are incidental to the perception. McDowell’s original claim was that, when experiencing proper, common, and incidental sensibles, the conceptual must extend as far out as perception. He backtracks to the position that proper and common sense must still be enmeshed with concepts but that incidental objects cannot be understood solely through this form of experience. McDowell’s reason for this now becomes clear with the confusion alleviated.

There is nothing more to the experience of red than there being a red object— think here of an observation report from Wilfrid Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. For Sellars, an observation report, the correct identification of the color red is both necessary and sufficient to judge the existence of red. For McDowell, because concepts do not shape anything, to have the experience of red, with the concepts of red, is enough to have a direct experience of the world with a red object that is neither idealism nor the Myth of the Given. His reason for backing off incidental objects is Travis’s exact point. My seeing the characteristics of Stephen cannot give me reason to know Stephen is in front of me. Stephen is incidental to his perceptible qualities. I can judge the color of Stephen’s hair as it is represented to me in experience with the conceptual content, but I cannot make claims about the incidental perception12 of Stephen. Travis is right that experience is not enough to give incidental objects, but McDowell affirms that to see the proper and common sensibles is enough to make judgments about them.13

7

Conclusion

The McDowell-Travis debate stems from a misunderstanding as to the nature of the passive application of concepts with experience. Experience and perception are different. The former requires concepts that the latter does not. Perception takes the world. We are aware of what perception takes in and that which we have 11. McDowell, John. Avoiding the Myth of the Given (University of Pittsburgh, 17 March 2008), 260.

12. Incidental perception is another term for incidental objects, it is just a style choice here—to not call Stephen an object.

13. For further information on this claim, please read Wilfrid Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.

37

The McDowell-Travis Debate the capacity to respond to. The articulable reality, or that which provides reason to act, needs perceptual intake and passive conceptual input. The only instance where we can make judgments—or have reason to think something—about the existential qualities of an object are about its proper and common sensibles. When a rational being has concepts that are non-shaping and combined with perception, they articulate. experience. Travis misunderstood this and resigned McDowell to idealism in the form of representationalism. When understanding McDowell’s intentions of the passive application of concepts, this debate boils down to two people speaking different languages at each other.

In responding to claims of face value, the two are once again not speaking the same language. Face value is predicated on a representationalist picture, where the face value of an object stands between the object and the subject. Yet this is not how McDowell views his ideas of awareness. For him, concepts do not stand in the way of the object or subject. They add to perception to give experience. To defend his view, McDowell takes a step away from incidental objects to try and highlight Travis’s mistake. McDowell does not quell Travis’ worry for he does not articulate the kind of role concepts play in experience other than they are passive.

The lack of annunciation of the kind of passivity that concepts play in experience leads Travis to these worries. Yet once clarified, the worries subside, and a stronger picture emerges.

38

Bibliography McDowell, John. Avoiding the Myth of the Given. University of Pittsburgh, 17 March 2008.

McDowell, John. Mind and World: With a New Introduction by the Author. Harvard University Press, 1996.

Travis, Charles. The Silences of the Senses Perception: Essays After Frege. OUP Oxford, 2013, pp. 23-58.

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman Explored Through a Feminine Minor Literature Maggie Hynes Memorial University of Newfoundland A BSTRACT In this essay, I will critically examine the concepts of becoming-woman and becominganimal as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari. I will explore them in terms of lines of flight and reterritorialization and how these might be realized differently through literature and art, namely écriture feminine (Cixous), a writing that destabilizes the molar phallogocentric tradition. More specifically, I will discuss Clarice Lispector’s literary work The Passion According to G.H. and Leonora Carrington’s short stories. Femininity has been historically linked with chaos, the body and animality rather than reason, in order to exclude women from logocentric disciplines of knowledge; I will propose that this oppressive association might be reclaimed and re-territorialized to offer liberatory possibilities towards becoming. I do not aim to offer a structuralist or literary interpretation of these works, but rather to illuminate how these stories might function mechanically according to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept creations in the way D and G do with Kafka as a minor literature. In G.H., the eponymous character experiences her domesticity and bourgeois femininity as a confining rigid identity but experiences a deterritorialization and ontological interruption of her bounded everyday experience once she unexpectedly discovers a cockroach on her floor. She begins an ongoing line of flight towards becoming-cockroach, therefore creating a better understanding of the being of this primordial creature, one that most humans experience as other, invader and/or disgusting. Carrington’s surrealist stories offer darkly comic tales of transformation, of hoards of animals, of hybrids (both animal and sexual), and of becoming-animal, becoming-human and becoming-woman. I will use Cixous’ and Braidotti’s writings on Lispector and Elizabeth Grosz’ readings of Deleuze and Guattari to aid my exploration into how the notions of becoming-animal and becoming-woman open new liberatory positions hitherto unavailable.

41

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of non-signifying signs. Kafka’s animals never refer to a mythology or to archetypes but correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from their expressions, from the signifier that formalized them. There is no longer anything but movements, vibrations, thresholds in a deserted matter: animals, mice, dogs, apes, cockroaches are distinguished only by this or that threshold, this or that vibration, by the particular underground tunnel in the rhizome or the burrow (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: A Minor Literature 13).

Becoming is a concept explored by Deleuze and Guattari in the plateau “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible. . . ” Becoming-animal is a liberatory line of flight away from the rigid molar assemblages of “human” and “reason” towards rhizomatic movements, packs and multiplicities, and reterritorialization. Like animals, women have historically been linked to the body, the Earth, and the chaos that accompanies them. This association between women and the chaotic, material body has formerly been harnessed as a tool of oppression— materiality that must be bound within form—but I suggest that it may be reclaimed to create a freeing line of flight towards becomings. As Deleuze and Guattari use Kafka’s works to show the functionings of becomings, I will use Hélène Cixous’ notion of écriture feminine, a literature centered around the feminine ways of knowing and experiencing, to illustrate becomings within and through the works of both Clarice Lispector and Leonora Carrington. In Clarice Lispector’s 1964 novel The Passion According to G.H., the title character, a bourgeois sculptress living in Brazil experiences an “absolute molecular deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: A Minor Literature 58) of her world and identity through a transformative encounter with a cockroach on her apartment floor. This leads her to a series of openings and becomings, ultimately leading her to lose her humanity altogether.

Similarly, in Leonora Carrington’s short stories, her characters, largely women, undergo animal transformations, joining packs and abandoning humanity. These two writers exemplify becomings in differing ways; while Lispector’s “G.H.” is unexpectedly affected by a series of becomings after an encounter with another kind of being (an insect), Carrington’s characters freely choose to renounce and challenge the stifling molarities around them to join pack animals and nomadic creatures instead. These becomings testify to the ecofeminist conception of the importance of all beings and ways of existing to destabilize the oppressive binary-machines of the State.

Since Platonic dualism was founded in Ancient Greece, women have been linked 42

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman to the body and the chaos and animality of nature. While men are endowed with reason, women are essentially confined to their bodies, unable to reflect on Platonic ideals or concepts such as truth, justice, or beauty. This grouping has served to justify the reproductive exploitation of women, as well as the claim that women’s minds are inherently inferior or deficient. Although historically, this association of women with bodily matter has been oppressive, I believe that women, and those who desire moments of becomings-woman, might harness this link as a power for hitherto unknown becomings. In experimenting with the body, we can affect and be affected in unforeseen courses, and recognize our inherent connectedness to other strata of beings. Or, as Lispector writes, realize that: “I too, who was slowly reducing myself to whatever in me was irreducible, I too had thousands of blinking cilia, and with my cilia I move forward, I protozoan, pure protein” (Lispector 54). This appreciation for molecular beings, not just human molar subjects, might open up new relations of becoming that recognize the value of all ways of existing, both becoming-woman and becoming-animal or insect.

Creating art is one of the many ways in which one might initiate becomings. In the act of writing, one takes on the identity of the characters and beings described, not imitating or acting “like” them but becoming them (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP 238). Deleuze and Guattari use literature, particularly the works of Franz Kafka, to explore their concept-creations through minor literature—literary works that exemplify becoming-minoritarian, a social and political process in which one releases and reterritorializes one’s molar identities and instead moves toward the molecular.

Kafka, a Jewish Czech man who spoke German, unformed and reterritorialized the standard or “major” German language into a minor language (Deleuze and Guattari Kafka: A Minor Literature 16). Through his artful iteration of the language in his destabilizing and marginal voice, he blurred the limiting territorialities of the language and expressed impossible new identities or ways of being. Kafka evades interpretation and over codification, instead expressing a radically free, flowing form of writing. Kafka also brilliantly illustrates becoming in his tales of becominganimal, in the becoming-cockroach in Metamorphosis, as well as in other stories with less explicit becomings-animal, such as the becoming-fish or becoming-sea monster of Lena in The Trial or the becoming-mole or mouse within the endless rhizomes of offices in The Castle and Amerika. Kafka is effective in illustrating becoming because his animals, according to Deleuze and Guattari, do not at any time refer to archetypes or mythologies, but to new freer forms of molecular movement and deterritorializations (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: A Minor Literature 13). Kafka’s 43

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman worlds subvert strict significations, interpretations, and subjectifications equally, permitting instead lines of flight away from the molar and into the burrow or the pack.

Like Kafka, Cixous’ écriture feminine is a minor literature, revolutionary in both the political sense and radical in creating space for new lines of flight within the literary medium. In Hélène Cixous’ famous essay “Le Rire de la Meduse,” she argues that the history of writing has been masculinist and centred around male subjectivity—the naturalization of their hierarchized values, desires, and sociality, minimizing the importance of women’s perspectives and experiences. Further, language is structured in the form of binary opposites, rigid structures, and linear timelines; therefore, undermining experimentation and creativity, especially when the body is involved because it centralizes the masculinist focus on unitary identities and withholds recognition of other ways of engaging, desiring, or knowing.

Cixous calls for a form of writing that is not confined to patriarchal norms, a new medium that exists outside of the phallogocentric tradition, one which allows for women to freely express themselves in every sense, not merely in the conventional written fashion privileged by history. This unique type of writing is baptized as écriture feminine, for it encourages using the body, and like Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari, it calls for an ethics of discovering “what a body can do” (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP 256). Cixous creates a new language that allows for a plurality of becomings-woman, not just of women themselves, but of anyone who desires becoming-woman. Cixous does not call for an écriture feminine in the molar, rigid sense, nor for a mere inclusion of women to be subsumed by a totalizing dialectic, but for the undoing of strict significations and formations, allowing for re territorializations and for one to “carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” (Cixous 6). Écriture feminine allows for the fluid experimentations that make becomings possible, the becoming-woman and becoming-Medusa of Cixous are among such examples. I propose that Lispector and Carrington’s works constitute écritures feminines that illustrate becoming-minoritarian through becoming-woman and becoming-animal both.

The Passion According to G.H. is a story of becoming-insect in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense: G.H. does not grow antennae or a shell as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, she does not even scurry on the floor, but she rather experiences the affects, the very real feelings and perceptions of the cockroach and the bodily intensities of the non-human. Lispector introduces the novel with the narrator experiencing a cataclysmic disruption of her privileged everyday life when her maid moves out 44

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman of her apartment, inducing an ontological and spiritual crisis. After her maid, a working class indigenous Brazilian woman, quits, G.H begins to clean her old room and, in doing so, crosses a threshold into the living space of someone she experiences as alien to her privileged, sheltered world, beginning a transformation into becoming-minoritarian (Braidotti, Metamorphoses 160). In the maid’s closet, G.H notices drawings of three figures outlined in charcoal: a man, a woman, and a dog.

These drawings do not touch each other, they are discrete and limited to their own milieus, as are the rigid binaries of man-woman and human-animal, leading G.H to question her comfortable molar assumptions of gender, class, and species. Describing the outlines, G.H says: “It was a violation of my quotation marks, the quotation marks that made me a citation of myself” (Lispector 34). When G.H suddenly notices a cockroach on the floor of the wardrobe, she is arrested by a feeling of visceral disgust at this primordial, abject creature. G.H is filled with hatred, loathing the fact that cockroaches are so ancient and invasive.

The cockroach is a challenge or foil to human subjectivity—it does not think like us or individuate itself; it cannot pretend to transcend the matter it is composed of in the way human subjects do, it is rather a disrupting line of flight from the arborescent moral stabilities of human identity. Becoming-insect is a common theme in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work; insects, unlike certain other animals, are difficult to anthropomorphize—they escape human understanding. They buzz, vibrate, and drum instead of speaking, singing, or barking, disrupting the signifying regime. Insects are most repulsive to humans when they travel in packs, for it is within these multiplicitous groups that the loss of the individual subject is so apparent: “the blackness of hundreds of bedbugs, crowded together one atop the other” (Lispector 40). These pack animals remind G.H. of her childhood poverty, of “leaky roofs, cockroaches and rats” (Lispector 40). G.H. also describes the roach in terms of her revulsion towards darker peoples like her maid, identifying the roach as appearing like “a dying mulatto woman” (Lispector 49). Like cockroaches, G.H implicitly perceives other classes and races as invasive and filthy vermin, causing G.H to uncomfortably confront her own molar identities as an affluent light-skinned Brazilian woman. G.H feels that her privileged humanity is threatened by this cockroach, and thus crushes it with the wardrobe door, leading the cockroach to spit a foamy white discharge of its insides. Like women, a cockroach is inseparable from “the awareness of living, inextricable from its body” (Lispector 43). The discharge of the roach is the abject feminine, inducing G.H. to “abject herself” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 5), experiencing a transformation so bodily she feels as though she had 45

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman vomited. The disgust that G.H feels causes an “upheaval” (Deleuze and Guattari ATP 240) of the self and “an inhumanity immediately experienced in the body as such” (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP 273). She finds her-“self” becoming a non-self, becomingimperceptible-with the insect. G.H. claims “it was a mud in which the roots of my identity were shifting” (Lispector 51). Here, G.H.’s stable arborescent organization is interrupted and thrown into an escaping line of flight with G.H. finding her humanity deterritorialized, becoming instead an indiscernible flux of movement.

Hoping to hold on to her stable humanity, G.H. wishes that someone would call her telephone so to interrupt the process of deterritorialization she is continually undergoing, but it is no use. G.H. reaches the plane of consistency of becomingcockroach once she puts the insect’s insides in her mouth, further developing her becomings in actualizing them through direct actions. G.H.’s mouth enters into compositions and relations with the particles of the insect matter. Insects that walk close to the ground are seen by humans as filthy and lowly beasts, described by the Bible as unclean forbidden animals unfit for human consumption. In “committing the forbidding act of touching the unclean” (Lispector 67), G.H releases herself from the last remaining arborescent roots of her humanity—her reason and Christian morality—and gives her-“self” over to becoming. This forms an ecstatic joy that G.H reaches a complete and utter deterritorialization in becoming-imperceptible along with the cockroach, where G.H and the cockroach produce something altogether new, not quite human and not quite cockroach. Through this series of becomings, G.H. further understands the struggles and experiences of the Other, of the insect as well as the minority, recognizing the interconnectedness of all strata and species.

In addition to becoming-insect, G.H undergoes becoming-woman. As a middleclass, financially independent woman with her own apartment, G.H. is in a unique situation for a woman of the mid-20th century, she is neither man nor woman in the strict sense—she is what escapes, the “in-between” that disrupts dualisms (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP 277). Like the abject insect, G.H. is minoritarian, ambiguous, but she understands herself in terms of the masculine—as an independent, rational subject. As she becomes-cockroach, G.H. feels connected to abject matter, to the mucus of the insect and the discharge linked to the feminine. When she reflects on a time when she was pregnant and decided to have an abortion, she feels linked to her body and begins becoming in a way she has never felt before. Time becomes non-linear, and the patriarchal molar conception of her subjectivity is altered. The eyes of the cockroach evoke images of ovum, inducing G.H. to become moving, living matter, emitting her particles with the ovum particles of the insect. In becoming46

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman insect, G.H. undergoes a liberatory line of flight that allows her to become-bodily, something which has been historically associated with the feminine. In reclaiming this embodiment as deterritorializing, G.H. transforms what was once an oppressive association into something liberatory.

Deleuze uses Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical worlds of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to illustrate their philosophy of contradictions and paradox (Deleuze The Logic of Sense). Another notable surrealist, Leonora Carrington, also effectively demonstrates paradox in the forms of becomings in her hybrid-creation characters. Carrington’s works commonly feature humans undergoing becomings-animal along with animals becoming-human through relationships and friendships. Her characters are often bourgeois young women who renounce the molar pillars of human identity—their well-to-do families, expensive clothing, and manners—to join packs of animals. These women renounce the despotic orderwords of their families to become nomadic, destabilizing the powers of the State and the Oedipal family. Packs, as well as their well-dressed heads of the herds, often make appearances in these stories, equally experiencing becomings-human and becomings-woman along with the young women protagonists. These relationships form new, ambiguous forms of being, indiscernible in terms of molar categories.

Leonora Carrington’s short story “As They Rode Along the Edge” features a woman in the process of becoming-cat. While Deleuze and Guattari argue that becominganimal is nearly impossible with our Oedipalized domesticated animals, Carrington shows that when cats undergo their own becoming-animal in taking lines of flight from domesticity, humans are rendered capable of “becoming-with” them (Haraway When Species Meet 38). In the story, a woman named Virginia Fur joins a pack of feral cats, of “fifty black cats and as many yellow ones,” mixing her particles with theirs in such a way that her smell becomes “a mixture of spices and game, the stables, fur, and grasses” (Carrington 39). ). Virginia not only grows a mane of fur, but more crucial for her becoming she joins the “customs” of the glaring by hunting, ceasing to bathe herself in the human fashion, and abandoning human society to instead enjoy the company of the cats, living as just one cat among many. The citizens of the mountain in which Virginia lives respect her but only because “the people up there were plants, animals, birds; otherwise things wouldn’t have been the same” (Carrington 40). Virginia is a kind of ambiguous, marginal hybrid, a deviant from both molar human and animal classifications, challenging the rigid binary-machines of the State. Not only do humans undergo becomings in Carrington’s phantasmagorical world, but plants 47

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman do as well¬¬–while the cats are hunting on the mountain, “the brambles drew back their thorns like cats retracting their claws” (Carrington 39). The plants do not imitate the cats, they rather enter into a relationship with the surrounding cats by joining their “herd” activity. Carrington demonstrates that everything is in an endless process of becomings towards molecular transformations, and that this is not simply limited to the human or anthropomorphized animals. Virginia furthers her becomings-animal with bestialism, by becoming lovers with a wild boar, facilitating a series of becomings, including the becoming-human and becoming-woman of the boar. In another story entitled “Pigeon, Fly!,” Carrington chronicles the experiences of a young woman invited by a musical sheep-human androgyne named Ferdinand to paint for an important man named Celestin des Airlines-Drues. When she arrives at his home, she notices a horse-drawn carriage carrying a coffin. In a clearing, there appears a large flock of sheep-humans bleating together, preparing for a funeral procession.

In their collective bleating, the sheep form a trance-like collective and facilitate the transformation of the young woman. The woman has been called there to paint a portrait of the deceased, but once she finishes, she notices that the face she has painted is her own. In this story, the woman joins the sheep herd, and as a result, the lines separating her and the dead woman grow imperceptible, the binaries of subject-object, human-animal, and dead-alive become indiscernible. In another story entitled “Jemima and the Wolf,” a young woman, Jemima, challenges the molarities of the Oedipal family, class, and gender through her becoming-animal and becoming-woman. Jemima ignores her State-prescribed duty of attending class and refuses to act “ladylike” or mannerly to the horror of her mother. Jemima’s mother, a haughty aristocrat, commands her daughter to stop being “difficult,” using order-words, claiming Jemima’s conduct is not natural for “a little girl of a good family” (Carrington 193). Her mother gives her a doll, the ideal of femininity: frail, beautiful, silent, but Jemima despises what this toy represent and thus breaks the doll’s head against a rock exclaiming: “Isn’t it enough that the world is full of ugly human beings without making copies of them?” (Carrington 193). Jemima takes a line of flight from her family’s rules, preferring instead the company of stray cats and bats, eating insects and dancing with them in ecstasy. She meets the head of a wolf pack, and falls in love with him, promoting her becoming-wolf in new ways, following his lead. In fleeing their humanity and rigid womanhood, Carrington’s characters show the nomadic becomings that can be made possible through relations to animals. Both the sexual and animal becomings in these works 48

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman exemplify Deleuze’s and Guattari’s characterization of becoming as destabilizing and deterritorializing, allowing for freer ways of being and relating to one another.

Deleuze and Guattari use Virginia Woolf’s novels to illustrate the ways in which writing can induce zones of proximity between different molarities. The rhizomatic lines of flight within Woolf’s modernist prose show many possible modes of becoming, the becoming-other among the many characters of The Waves, or the becoming-other of Mrs. Dalloway. Carrington’s writing passes in-between molarities of species and gender, like Woolf producing “a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming. Very soft particles—but also very hard and obstinate, irreducible, indomitable” (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP 276). Carrington narrates the interwoven immanence of all identities, evoking Virginia Woolf’s “I am this, I am that” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 11). In the act of writing, Carrington must undergo molecular transformations herself in order to understand these multiplicitous ways of being and becoming.

These accounts of becoming illuminate new means of connecting with other ways of being and undo the oppressive molar identities that separate us. While Deleuze and Guattari might conceive of feminism as a molar endeavor that considers women and minorities as molar collectives as opposed to molecular becomings, I believe their notion of becoming has potential to guide eco-feminist projects. I do not mean to conflate the issues of women and minorities with those of animals and the environment, but rather to demonstrate how one might understand them together through becomings, or in Donna Haraway’s terms, “becoming-with” (Haraway When Species Meet 38). Minoritarian groups, with their understandings of molecular becomings and their unique ontologies, might offer guidance on how to treat other marginalized molecular beings, guiding an ecology to come. The interconnectivity of all matter is highlighted by the various forms of becoming within both Carrington and Lispector’s works. Through becoming-animal, our molar differences are effaced to form new molecularities, creating an improved recognition of the value of all living, flowing matter. This allows for a recognition that all life upon Earth is important, driving the imperative to recognize and treat all matter with respect, including women, minorities, animals, and the Earth equally. The minoritarian status of woman is mirrored by the insect and the rat. While these animals might be large in number, they are still a minority in relation to the despotic rule of humanity. These animals are molecular pack animals, challenging rigid institutions and identities.

Women, like insects, compose much of the population, but are subjected to the regime 49

Becoming-Animal and Becoming-Woman of Man, where society is centred around the white, male, heterosexual experience.

In becoming-woman and becoming-animal, one is rendered capable of releasing oneself from human exceptionalisms and molar boundaries of species and gender to instead recognize the symbiotic, transformative relations we might form. As Donna Haraway argues of interactions with animals: “Touch does not make one small; it peppers its partners with attachment sites for world making. Touch, regard, looking back, becoming with—all these make us responsible in unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape. In touch and regard, partners willy nilly are in the miscegenous mud that infuses our bodies with all that brought that contact into being” (Haraway, When Species Meet 36). In experiences with varying ways of existing, such as those in Carrington and Lispector’s works, we come to understand the need to recognize and respect difference, in the domains of the sexual and species, but also in an infinity of molecular forms.

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Bibliography Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body 2nd ed., University of California Press, 2004.

Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Polity, 2002.

Carrington, Leonora. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan and Kathrine Talbot, Dorothy, 2017.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa”: Signs, vol.1, no.4. Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Chicago UP, 1976.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas, and translated by Mark Lester. Columbia UP, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2 nd ed. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Duke UP, 2011.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Kafka, Franz. Amerika. Translated by Michael Hoffman, Penguin, 2007.

---. The Metamorphosis. Translated by Stanley Corngold, Penguin, 2013.

---. The Trial. Translated by Mike Mitchell, Oxford UP, 2009.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982.

Lispector, Clarice. The Passion According to G.H. Translated by Idra Novey, New Directions, 2012.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Edited by Stella Mcnichol, Penguin, 2019.

Being, World, and Loneliness: Understanding Loneliness as Phenomenological Attunement Christopher Chiasera Trinity College

A BSTRACT Though a number of great thinkers (for the purposes of this paper, namely, Hannah Arendt and Hans-Georg Gadamer) have subjected the matter to thorough philosophical analysis, I believe that more can be said about what it is like to experience loneliness. Employing the phenomenological methodology of Martin Heidegger, I seek to reconsider loneliness: not, as others have done, as an emotional state or psychical phenomenon, but rather as a mood/attunement (Stimmung) that discloses the world to human beings in a particular way. Ultimately, I find “loneliness as mood”/”loneliness as attunement” to be quite characteristically distinct from what philosophers and phenomenologists have heretofore considered “loneliness.” What is more, I find my ideas about loneliness to be exceptionally helpful in our efforts to understand how modern society and social arrangements affect the way we experience sociality and otherness.

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Being, World, and Loneliness

1

Introduction

Insofar as our shared social world has profoundly and increasingly been marked by an irresistible pull towards digitalization, bureaucratic depersonalization, and generalized social alienation, the strength and stability of relationships between human beings have suffered to a tremendous degree. The accuracy of this assessment is nowhere so evident as in the everyday content of our personal lives: many of us find our time filled more and more by social media, work, and entertainment, with little room left over for friends, family, and dialogue. We are so caught up in what is digital, material, and financial that we entirely overlook community and human warmth—so much so that we often do not detect our own social privations as our own.

Such first-personal observations, though certainly sufficient by themselves, are further corroborated when we turn from ourselves to others, i.e., to empirical evidence: a recent report by the Harvard-based project Making Caring Common found that 36% of all Americans experience “serious loneliness.”1 These concrete findings, in conjunction with our own subjective reflections, highlight the need for a serious treatment of loneliness as it appears in modern times. Among the viable avenues of scrutinizing the nature of loneliness, philosophical analysis stands out as a particularly promising methodological strategy.

Of course, philosophical considerations of loneliness are nothing new: many prominent figures in modern philosophy have turned their attention toward this phenomenon. Hannah Arendt, in her seminal book The Origins of Totalitarianism, finds that loneliness was an essential prerequisite to the construction of Nazi- and Soviet-style totalitarian government.2 In his essay titled “Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation,” Hans-Georg Gadamer understands loneliness as our no longer belonging to ourselves as a result of a sophisticated capitalist division of labor and rationalization of society.3 In contemporary times, philosophers such as Lars Svendsen4 and Ben Lazare Mijuskovic5 have written extensively about the topic.

Needless to say, considerations of loneliness take up substantive philosophical space.

1. Weissbourd, Richard, Milena Batanova, Virginia Lovison, and Eric Torres. Rep. Loneliness in America, February 8, 2021. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america.

2. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego, NY, London : Harcourt Brace, 1985.

3. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, and Chris Dawson. “Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation.” Essay. In Praise of Theory Speeches and Essays, 101–13. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

4. Svendsen, Lars, Lars Svendsen, and Kerri A. Pierce. A Philosophy of Loneliness. London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2017.

5. Mijuskovic, Ben Lazare. Feeling Lonesome: The Philosophy and Psychology of Loneliness. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015.

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Being, World, and Loneliness However, such considerations seem seriously far from complete. What is problematic about prior philosophical evaluations is that they investigate loneliness and its consequences while ignoring the implications that loneliness has on us as human beings, i.e., as beings who have the existential quality of Being-there (what Martin Heidegger calls Dasein). Philosophers have considered the potential totalitarian implications of widespread loneliness and the evolution of loneliness into a political tool, as well as its psychological and social consequences (in the case of Arendt); they have traced the roots of loneliness as a phenomenon to the particular class and material conditions under which we live (in the case of Gadamer). But in all cases, they have failed entirely to acknowledge what it means to feel “lonely” in the most originary sense, with regards to our Being. How does loneliness make us attuned; how does it determine the way in which we are in-the-world? These questions, unfortunately, go unanswered.

To hopefully mend this gap in the literature, I propose an alternative approach to accessing loneliness heavily inspired by the phenomenological methodology of Martin Heidegger.6 In taking such an approach, after Heidegger, I conceive of loneliness as an attunement or mood (Stimmung) as opposed to a mere affective state and utilize a Heideggerian framework to gain insight into the existentialphenomenal implications of loneliness on humans, i.e., how loneliness grounds our mode of Being-in-the-world. I shall approach these insights successively and gradually, providing a robust description of the phenomenon and its structural moments while remaining true to the phenomenological tradition. First, for the purpose of terminological clarity, I will construct a formal definition of loneliness in a more general sense. Next, I will explain Heideggerian mood and its relation to loneliness. After, I will further interrogate this phenomenological interpretation of loneliness as mood—which I call “Being-alone-in-the-world”—for its phenomenal content, revealing the way in which loneliness entails a flight in the face of Dasein’s 6. Although perhaps slightly unorthodox, I maintain that there is no better-suited method for philosophical inquiry into loneliness than phenomenology. I could very well spend this paper discussing and evaluating the assortment of already existing philosophical arguments regarding the nature of loneliness, weighing one against another, treating them in the critical abstract of passive and impersonal academic analysis—but the topic with which this paper is most immediately concerned is subjective human experience as relates to loneliness itself. To adopt any other investigative framework, then, would seem highly counterproductive. Though I of course intend to engage thoroughly with various philosophers’ conceptions of loneliness over the course of my essay, insofar as I strive to contribute something original to the literature, I am confident that the most promising results will come from an original application of Heideggerian phenomenological thought. Again, this may not be the most popular or conventional style of paper-writing, but I nonetheless argue that, for my purposes, it is the most appropriate.

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Being, World, and Loneliness immutable structure of Being. Finally, I will reflect on possibilities for future work.

Piece-by-piece, I aim to construct a holistic picture of the mood of loneliness, namely how it conditions Being and world.

Our first step is to consider a formal definition of loneliness in its more general signification, so as to contrast it with loneliness as mood. I will begin with this leg of our project below.

2

A Formal Definition of Loneliness in General: Loneliness as Opposed to Solitude

In order to properly grasp loneliness, it will be helpful to distinguish it from another phenomenon with which it is likely to be confused: solitude. This definitional rift is what I shall use as the starting point for our investigation. Of the philosophers already mentioned, Hannah Arendt and Hans-Georg Gadamer are careful to make an explicit distinction between these two concepts.7 By understanding this difference between loneliness and solitude, insights into the nature of the former will hopefully become evident.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt describes solitude as something quite apart from loneliness. To her, solitude is essentially a being by oneself together with oneself. She explains, “The solitary man . . . is alone and therefore ‘can be together with himself’ since men have the capacity of ‘talking with themselves.’ In solitude, in other words, I am ‘by myself,’ together with myself, and therefore two-in-one. . . .”8 Arendt’s conception of solitude is strikingly discordant with what comes to mind when we imagine being alone. However, this sort of “being alone,” she contends, is 7. The absence of Heidegger’s voice in the discussion to follow might initially strike the reader as curious: if I purport to undertake a Heideggerian analysis of loneliness, then why would I leave Heidegger’s own contributions to the phenomenology of loneliness undiscussed? I offer the underwhelming reply that Heidegger simply does not have an explicit phenomenology of loneliness anywhere in his work: the closest he gets to this is in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, where he considers the phenomenon of solitude (but not loneliness) at length (Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Indiana University Press, 2012). Why not, then, at least include his remarks on solitude (especially since, as is about to become evident, a close reading of the solitary experience constitutes a significant move in my own investigation into loneliness)? This in turn is because, when Heidegger refers to “solitude,” he and I have far from the same thing in mind: while he would characterize solitude as a man’s individuation with respect to Dasein (i.e., man’s constitution as a unique, determinate individual), I—in the company of Arendt and Gadamer—conceive of normal loneliness as an affective (in the sense of psychical or psychological “feeling”) social experience. But this distinction is to be properly elaborated in the considerations that proceed.

8. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 476.

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Being, World, and Loneliness a healthy and productive part of human life, and is not the same thing as “being lonely.” Hans-Georg Gadamer agrees when he writes: In many German towns there is a Philosophenweg, a “philosophers’ path:” there’s an especially famous one in Heidelberg. For those with an ear for history, this “philosophers’ path” is not named after the philosophy professors. We should rather understand a “philosopher” as someone who has a remarkable inclination for walking through the area alone. . . Now, what is sought in the quest for solitude is not actually solitude, but “abiding” with something else, undisturbed by anyone or anything else. So what one is looking for on the philosophers’ path is not really solitude at all, but the soft breathing of nature that takes one up into his life as if through a gesture of sympathy.9

Both Arendt and Gadamer seem to allude to a latent connection between man, self, and world that is recognized in solitude. When in solitude, men are permitted the opportunity to entertain themselves with their curiosities and introspections, all while also grounding themselves in their environment. The solitary person is reflexively cognizant of his self and habitat; moreover, in a representative way, although “alone,” he is also still connected with others. Arendt makes this apparent when she writes, “this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought.” Man in solitude is nonetheless a social man, a product of socialization and society, who is in contact with others even when by himself.10 Furthermore, it would appear still that Arendt and Gadamer understand solitude as a voluntary or self-inflicted condition: one is in solitude because one wants to be, and nonetheless retains autonomy over oneself and at least a limited ability to move between the private and the public domains. Solitude, then, is a contemplative and willful tarrying alongside oneself, where one is able to attend to matters important or close to them and remain in the presence of the other.

This definition of solitude contrasts starkly with the account given of loneliness.

Loneliness, Arendt specifies, unlike solitude, is an isolating and confining experience.

Whereas man in solitude is in the company of peers in the mode of being with himself, the man in loneliness is “actually one, deserted by all others,” including himself.11 Where there is loneliness, there can be no tarrying alongside oneself, for there is no one to tarry alongside. Man, furthermore, is deserted by, as opposed to voluntarily 9. Gadamer, “Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation,” 102-3.

10. A quote from Max Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy echoes this idea: “Robinson Crusoe would never think: ‘There is no community and I belong to none : I am alone in the world. He would not only possess the notion and idea of community, but would also think: ‘I know that there is a community, and that I belong to one (or several such); but I am unacquainted with the individuals comprising them, and with the empirical groups of such individuals which constitute the community as it actually exists.’” Scheler, Max. The Nature of Sympathy (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017.

11. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 476.

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Being, World, and Loneliness separated from, others. Gadamer, too, apprehends this dismal character of true loneliness: the lonely person “can no longer extricate himself from [loneliness] and approach other people, but instead seems to have drowned in it.” They have not renounced, but have lost.12 The path back to public life has been obstructed, and the hell of perpetual privacy is all that remains. The split of the self into the two has been affected, but the half of the self with which correspondence in thought and introspection is possible, and in which others reside, is obfuscated. There is only, truly, the one—the lonely subject, robbed of any semblance of belonging to the common, social world.

Synthesizing Arendt’s and Gadamer’s conceptualizations of loneliness as a distinctive phenomenon, I define loneliness in terms of a confining, coercive severance from himself by way of being severed from others. In her phenomenological study entitled “The Enigmatic Phenomenon of Loneliness,” Karin Dahlberg echoes my findings when she describes involuntary loneliness13 as a keen sense of “not belonging to anyone” in the form of “lack[ing] . . . context and connectedness” and “participation in the world.”14 To put it as simply as possible: loneliness is disconnection from the world, a mode of “being alone” in which there is no contact with others and one is by oneself —not as two-in-one, but as one and only.

3 The Problem of Loneliness as Attunement or Mood (Stimmung) Now that we have successfully articulated a formal signification of loneliness, we may begin to understand loneliness as attunement or mood (Stimmung). In Being and Time15 , Martin Heidegger conceives of attunement as “a basic existential way in which Dasein [the quality of Being that belongs distinctly to humans] is its ‘there’” which “implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something that matters to us.”16 According to Heidegger, human beings can never exist neutrally in the world: we are always oriented towards it in some 12. Gadamer, “Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation,” 104-5.

13. Dahlberg’s understanding of “voluntary loneliness” is roughly equivalent to how Arendt, Gadamer, and I understand solitude. Thus, I take her distinction between voluntary and involuntary loneliness to follow my demarcation between solitude and loneliness. In other words, according to Arendt and Gadamer, there is no “voluntary loneliness,” only solitude.

14. Dahlberg, Karin. “The Enigmatic Phenomenon of Loneliness.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being 2, no. 4 (2007): 195–207. https://doi.org/10.3402/qhw.v2i4.4960.

15. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.

Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2019.

16. Heidegger, Being and Time, 177-8.

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Being, World, and Loneliness way, and our particular orientation discloses it, i.e., renders it possible for discovery, accordingly. What I encounter in my environment, for instance, when I am content (e.g., when I am going for a walk, I might notice that the sky is especially clear, that the songs of the birds are particularly enjoyable, that the acorns at my feet are for cheerily kicking, that the squirrels scurrying across front yards of my neighbors are entertaining to sit and watch, etc. etc.) is much different when I am feeling unhappy or depressed (e.g., I pay no attention to the clarity of the sky or the weather, I have no interest in doing the activities or interacting with the equipment in which I am typically involved, I am generally unmotivated and shut myself off from noticing things that would otherwise strike me, and so on). Unlike the colloquial use of the term, Heideggerian mood is not psychical, nor does it originate from “within,” as in mere emotion. Rather, it determines what is available to us in our Being-in-the-world.

What, then, do I mean by “loneliness as attunement or mood”? Perhaps more importantly: what is it that we have missed regarding loneliness as a mood until now? Have we not already sufficiently characterized it? Have the elucidations provided to us by Arendt and Gadamer fallen short of loneliness as mood, in the Heideggerian sense?

As for this latter question, my answer is yes. We have thus far constructed a formal definition of loneliness on the basis of the philosophy of Arendt and Gadamer; this is a good and necessary start. But these two reveal through their respective analyses that they consider loneliness a social or psychological experience, as opposed to an existential experience that originates from a state of ontological Being (i.e., not just feeling or experiencing, but Being, lonely). Of course, loneliness as an affective type of “feeling” deriving from social conditions is entirely possible—but this, I suggest, is not the only form of it that we encounter. In this paper, we ultimately wish to apprehend loneliness not just as something that is experienced by humans, but as something that interacts with the fundamental structure of Dasein and constitutes human reality. In loneliness, one is disconnected from the context of the world and others; but this description alone does not explain how such disconnectedness grounds one’s Being-there in the world. We know what loneliness is, and how it feels, though nonetheless lack an explicit relationship between the Being of man and the Being of loneliness. Until now, our description of loneliness has been almost exclusively psychical, playing out on the stage of a distinctive type of Being (i.e., Dasein) that itself has not been properly thematized. It is not “profound,” not “deep,” enough. It is time to rectify this shortcoming.

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Being, World, and Loneliness Loneliness as attunement, like all attunements, discloses the world in a certain way to us, makes certain aspects of the world available for us to encounter. In solitude, we are two-in-one, free to move between the domain of the self and of others. In loneliness, we are simply one, yet still acknowledge, even if implicitly, the presence of others: they are wholly out of reach, they may even be hostile to us, but they are still there for us; we may feel alone, but in a strange way we know that we are not. In the mood of loneliness, however, the world discloses itself to us as a place in which we are alone. It is not a fleeting emotional state, nor an extended one, wherein we comprehend others as beings in existence who happen to be inaccessible to us. We are not a “one” who can, as Arendt describes, “find himself and [start] the thinking dialogue of solitude.”17 Others appear to us not as others, but as foreign things wholly unlike us in Being, as mere tools for utilitarian exploitation or obstacles impeding our productivity. Otherness is replaced by material objectification, and so others, as Heidegger might say, have consequently been nihilated—“made Nothing.”18 We are existentially alone. Thus, loneliness as attunement can be defined as such: a submissive mode of Being-alone-in-the-world in which all others are nihilated.

4 The Being-alone-in-the-world of Loneliness as Attunement: Being-alone-in-the-world as a Fleeing in the Face of Being Being-alone-in-the-world. This is the phenomenal face of the mood of loneliness. But we cannot now say that our investigation is complete, or even nearing completion, for we have not yet articulated the character of this “Being-alone-in-the-world,” nor its existential implications for Dasein. Only by continuing down this line of inquiry can we formulate a suitable understanding of what it means for Dasein to Be, ontologically, lonely.

When Dasein is in the mood of loneliness, it encounters the world as a place in which it is alone. This is only possible for Dasein, however, insofar as it flees in the face of itself : it must hide from, be oblivious to, part of its own Being. Dasein, according to its Being, cannot ever be alone, as Being-there inextricably possesses the character of Being-with (Mitsein) Others. Heidegger writes: 17. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 477.

18. Heidegger, Martin. What Is Metaphysics? (Jovian Press, 2019).

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Being, World, and Loneliness By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me—those over whom the “I” stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too. This Being-there-too [Auch-da-sein] with them does not have the ontological character of a Being-present-at-hand-along-‘with’ them within a world. This ‘with’ is something of the character of Dasein; the ‘too’ means a sameness of Being as circumspectively concernful Being-in-the-world. . . . Being-in is Being-with Others.19

When Dasein is attuned in a “lonely” manner, all others are nihilated. But what is vital to remember, and what the term “nihilation” partly implies, is that others do not actually “go” anywhere in loneliness. Others are not annihilated, or destroyed; they do not literally cease to exist. Heidegger acknowledges this when he speaks of the nihilative capacity of anxiety in What Is Metaphysics?20 In terms of what is disclosed to Dasein, however, others are simply nowhere to be found. They are not present as “others,” who are us, i.e., who share our Being (Dasein), but instead are encountered as so unlike us and distant from us that we no longer understand ourselves as “among them,” even though we must be in order to Be-ourselves at all.

This revelation might initially strike us as implicative of one of two things, or both: (i) we have inadvertently reverted to our original definition of loneliness, in which we retain an implicit awareness of others (since we admit that the presence of others is integral to our own ontological constitution), and/or (ii) we have arrived at a blatant contradiction in our analysis, where Dasein exists in an “other-less” world of others (since we have posited that Dasein is both wholly alienated from others, yet somehow still inextricably among them). I contend that each of these conclusions is shortsighted, and before we move forward with our investigation it is necessary to address them both. As for (i), I simply do not believe that this is what we have done. In our original conception of loneliness, it could be said that Dasein is itself aware of others, but left in want of their presence. In our current conception of loneliness as a mood, Dasein does not interpret others as others. It cannot possibly have even a latent understanding of the persistence of their Being; nonetheless, others are still very much there, physically and materially. They just do not show up for Dasein within the scope of its phenomenal world. As for (ii), I agree: there is certainly a contradiction here. But this is not indicative of fault on our part, nor the fruitlessness of our analysis. Rather, it refers to something distinct about the character of Being-alone-in-the-world: namely, that it entails Dasein’s fleeing in the face of its own Being.

In his analysis of anxiety in Being and Time, Heidegger writes that “Dasein’s 19. Heidegger, Being and Time, 154-5.

20. Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics?

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Being, World, and Loneliness absorption in the ‘they’ and its absorption in the ‘world’ of its concern, make manifest something like a fleeing of Dasein in the face of itself. . . .”21 Dasein “flees in the face of itself,” in the face of its own Being. This is because Dasein finds itself lost in the “world” of the “they.” To clarify what this means: for Heidegger, “the they” (das Man) is not a definite being, nor is it a sort of “genus” to which any individual Dasein can belong. It is instead an existential quality of Dasein, a “no one” that is in fact everyone, which comes to light in statements such as “one reads newspapers on public transportation” or “one judges about literature and art.”22 The “they” is that constitutive aspect of Dasein that dictates what it is “one” does, shaped by society and its normative expectations. Even without others, even when Dasein is Being-alone-in-the-world, it cannot help but also fundamentally possess the characteristic that is Being-with. In the mood of loneliness, one is wrenched completely from others, but their scent does not leave him, metaphysically speaking.

Dasein has already been imprinted by the conventions of society and can never be rid of them, even when alone-in-the-world and totally turned away from them.

When Dasein flees in the face of itself in loneliness, it refuses to grasp its own Being: namely, its inexorable existential character of Being-with. But it only does this in the assumption of its “they-self”: the everyday mode of Being in which Dasein is dispersed into the “they.”23 To apprehend how the “they” get represented in the mood of loneliness, we must first figure out what “one” is to do when alone-in-the-world. When there is no opportunity for us with others, when we fail to recognize ourselves as among others in failing to recognize others as others who are like us, how does “one” react? One does not go running out into the world to “find” the others whom he has lost. One is alone-in-the-world, and so there is simply no way by which one might approach otherness. Instead, in the phenomenal absence of others, one turns inward to console and to preoccupy oneself: one burrows deeper into his phenomenally “other-less” world. One works alone; one studies alone; one builds alone. One pours himself into his career, his work, his worldly affairs—not for others, nor for the sake of pleasure, but because it is just “what one does.” It is all that one has left to do. In a world devoid of others, all that remains is oneself and one’s tools. Yet without others, there is nothing (no one) meaningful for which to provide, to construct, to create.

One toils endlessly and aimlessly, drowns himself in his distractions and calls it 21. Heidegger, Being and Time, 229.

22. Ibid, 164-5.

23. Ibid, 167.

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Being, World, and Loneliness “living a life.” One refuses to acknowledge himself as having the kind of Being such that he, in order to have his Being—which he must always—is necessarily with others; and this is accomplished as he, in affirmation of the they-self, orients himself towards material equipment for the sake of productivity itself.

One looks at the clock mounted on the wall: he did not produce the clock, the clock was not tailored specifically for him: an other (as in, another determinate, individual Dasein) built the clock, somewhere off in a factory, and the clock was made for others who reside in the world. But one does not notice this. One looks at the clock and announces “I’m late for work!” or “the game is about to come on!”

And when one then arrives at work, or turns on the game, all those others he encounters—coworkers, team members—do not show up as such. One does not look at them and proclaim, “Others! Here they are: beings like me!” But rather one tells himself that “here is my work” or “here is my entertainment,” and nothing more. Otherness is thus denigrated to the status of, at best, utility; at worst, pure inconspicuousness.

Loneliness as mood, I contend, is the predominant mode of Being involved in each of the modern man’s “social” (to use the word so loosely that it signifies nothing of the sort) affairs. Let us more explicitly contemplate some occasions for entry into the realm of society that crop up intermittently, for most of us, in our own lives: social media; emails; text messages; type-written letters; newspapers; news outlets; television shows. Each of these mediums of social exchange is almost always bound up in a context of engagement that obliterates whatever about them might be taken as genuinely “social.” We scroll through social media as a way to pass the time, totally ignorant of the interpersonal opportunities implicit in our activity; other users do not show up for us qua social others, but as objects of entertainment, stimulation, levity, envy, desire, etc.—as means to ends, from which we hope to derive personal satisfaction. Through email, we encounter others as mere acquaintances, with whom we interact by necessity or obligation, stripped from the context of human companionship. In text, our socialization takes on a casual and detached character, lacking both sophisticated expression and genuine human connection. This characterization is, we quickly find, applicable to each of the aforementioned “social” ventures. No matter the particular content, the form of our modern social lives has been purged of all sociality via the nihilation of others in loneliness.

In loneliness as an attunement, Dasein discloses a world in which it is alone.

But what is more, we now find, is that Dasein discovers things within this world 63

Being, World, and Loneliness as its they-self, wherein it is weighed down into the lonely mood by refusing others as such, and judging them instead as practically useful objects. In solitude, we acknowledge that others are there and that we are among them; in loneliness, we acknowledge that others are there and that we are apart from them; in the mood of loneliness, we do not acknowledge that others are there at all, because we are so completely submerged in the material (and digital) world of equipmental things.

Others lose their “otherness” and manifest to us as hollow shells. This peculiar appearance of “otherless” others is a sign of Dasein’s fleeing from itself, because it is contradictory—Dasein is also always Mitsein, so can never really be alone.

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Conclusion and Considerations for Future Work

To finally bring our investigation of loneliness to a close: I posit that loneliness, perceived through such a lens and understood in the Heideggerian sense of attunement, is Dasein’s Being-alone-in-the-world, marked by a fleeing in the face of its own existential quality of Being-with that arises through dispersal into the “they.” This conceptualization differs starkly from that of both Hannah Arendt and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who describe loneliness as something that happens to the individual rather than something that the individual is.

I feel as though there is considerable room for further clarifying some of the ideas I have presented in this paper. Most striking to me are two in particular: firstly, it seems that there is room for further interpretation of my conception of loneliness as attunement in the context of Heidegger’s notion of the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), i.e., of the utility-oriented way in which Dasein proximally and for the most part discovers and relates to objects in the world. (In this view, we do not usually encounter objects in the mode of detached, scientific contemplation/observation, but instead as pieces of equipment for us to use alongside other equipment in order to achieve our goals.) It appears that, in loneliness, this readiness-to-hand is exaggerated to the point of compulsivity; it is no longer a point of description that human beings are involved in equipment for the carrying out of objectives, but an ideological norm that this ought to be the case with all things, including other humans. This coincidence between readiness-to-hand and the transformation of others into equipmental objects under loneliness is not something that has fully been fleshed out here, but the trappings of a more thematic connection are surely evident.

Secondly, there is the apparent connection between the mood of loneliness and 64

Being, World, and Loneliness the capitalistic orientation of society; in retrospect, we might say that Gadamer was on the right track when he understood loneliness in relation to structures of the division of labor and class. The “they,” as I conceive it with regards to loneliness, demands that we envelop ourselves entirely in our pragmatic activities, refuse our intrinsic relation to others, concern ourselves strictly with objects and tools, (possibly?) as a product of the alienating conditions and expectations associated with contemporary late-stage-capitalist milieu. But this thesis, of course, is only speculative. Substantial elaboration would be necessary to make it worth taking seriously.

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Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation Aubrey Dean Smith University of Kentucky

A BSTRACT Although some metaphysicians conceive of their proper roles as discoverers and disputants of the literal, fundamental facts of the world, there are numerous reasons to be skeptical of this conception. The apparent inability of metaphysicians to make progress on resolving their debates is one such reason. In the free will debate, this inability to resolve is the result of incompatibilist free will theorists proposing semantically incompatible theories which rely on modal facts. It is unclear whether these modal facts are accessible or even relevant to the free will debate, and thus we may be skeptical that incompatibilists are engaged in a productive dispute. Compatibilism seemingly provides a way around this obstacle by grounding the truth of free will in concepts such as “free” and “compelled” rather than potentially inaccessible modal facts, allowing compatibilist theories to be evaluated in terms of broader normative conceptual schemes. Metalinguistic negotiation provides guidance for this move away from epistemically metaphysical questions by distinguishing between canonical and non-canonical disputes, revealing that not only can non-canonical disputes provide guidance for normative schemes generally, they also may be more suited to this task than their canonical counterparts. When the canonical content of disputants’ utterances hinge on potentially inaccessible modal facts, it may be advantageous to reframe these disputes as metalinguistic negotiations and thus evaluate competing metaphysical theories as part of a broader normative conceptual scheme.

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Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation

Introduction To the participants engaged in a metaphysical debate, it may seem as though they are disputing the literal, fundamental facts of reality. Hard determinists and libertarians, for example, make very different claims about the modal facts of action and free will. While hard determinists claim that our actions are necessitated by past conditions and thus we do not have free will, libertarians reject this assertion and maintain that, in virtue of having “regulative control” (Fischer) when we act, meaning “the ability to do otherwise,” we do in fact have free will. These two incompatibilist views seem to agree that whether we have free will is dependent upon the modal facts of action, and so it may be tempting to describe the proper role of free will disputants as discovering and interpreting these modal facts in order to reach a decisive conclusion.

However, as Amie Thomasson (2016) points out, metaphysical questions (and questions of modality and ontology in particular) are often “epistemically metaphysical,” or epistemically mysterious, in the sense they “can be answered neither by direct empirical methods nor by conceptual analysis” (2). It may be, then, that viewing the task of metaphysicians as “discovering especially deep or fundamental facts about the world,” a conception which Thomasson dubs “heavyweight metaphysics,” is misguided (1). If Thomasson’s conception of heavyweight metaphysics is accurate, and incompatibilist theories are predicated upon epistemically metaphysical (and thus inaccessible) modal facts of action, then we may have stronger reasons to be skeptical of the incompatibilist foundation than we do for believing either side of the incompatibilist debate.

Does this mean that all hope is lost for the free will debate and that disputants are simply wasting their time? Likely not. Although incompatibilist theories appear to rely on epistemically metaphysical (and specifically modal) facts, compatibilist theories reject the incompatibilist scheme and propose that free will ought to be evaluated independently of modal facts. I see this step from incompatibilism to compatibilism as potentially moving away from heavyweight metaphysics, but also similar to the move that Plunkett & Sundell make in their paper, “Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms” (2013), to assert that noncanonical disputes can express genuine disagreement as metalinguistic negotiations.

Metalinguistic negotiations are non-canonical disputes in which participants tacitly advocate for a particular “deployment of linguistic representations” (3) rather than expressing incompatible semantic content. I argue that since compatibilist theories 68

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation ground the truth of the free will debate in concepts such as “free” or “compelled,” metalinguistic negotiation is exemplified by the compatibilist debate. Conversely, since incompatibilists propose theories which appear to rely on incompatible semantic content, they appear to engage in a canonical dispute. If we are right to be skeptical of heavyweight metaphysics’ ability to decisively conclude what the relevant modal facts are, then we ought to consider reframing the free will debate as a metalinguistic negotiation. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that, by reframing the free will debate in terms of metalinguistic negotiation, it may be more philosophically productive to shift the free will debate away from incompatibilism and towards compatibilism, exploring free will issues explicitly through the lens of normative conceptual theories.

In Section I, I give a broad overview of the free will debate, summarizing the basic positions of hard determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. In Section II, I discuss the role of modal facts in the free will debate, arguing that certain epistemic mysteries surrounding modal facts seem to challenge the legitimacy of heavyweight metaphysics-style free will theories, i.e incompatibilist theories.

Given this, I argue in Section III that since compatibilist theories do not require making the epistemically problematic commitments required by incompatibilist theories, compatibilism allows us to coherently shift the free will debate away from epistemically metaphysical modal facts and towards a more fruitful conceptual analysis by reconceptualizing disputants as engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation.

Section I Sider (2005) gives a general overview of the free will debate, summarizing three basic positions: hard determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. First, he identifies the tension between two seemingly incompatible (but not obviously unreasonable) theses: (1) causal determinism and (2) free will. For this essay I borrow Plunkett’s (2015) broad definition of hard determinism. He describes causal determinism as “roughly the thesis that the facts about the way the world is, in combination with the facts about the laws of nature, fully determine all of the facts about the future” (855). Causal determinism is generally taken by incompatibilists to mean that if our actions are necessitated by prior events then we cannot have free will; this is the core position of hard determinism.

Additionally, as incompatibilists, hard determinists believe that causal determinism prevents us from making cogent ascriptions of responsibility. If it turns out 69

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation that human actions are events similar to falling dominoes, merely the inevitable result of prior conditions, then libertarian beliefs about choice and free will must be incorrect. If true, the implications of causal determinism are potentially worrisome for our moral schemes, particularly in relation to ascriptions of moral responsibility.

As Sider points out, it seems strange to blame Hitler for the 1939 invasion of Poland if we accept that his actions were necessitated by prior conditions, but we probably want to retain our ability to blame people for their destructive behavior. Of course, this is not a metaphysical argument against hard determinism, but rather a pragmatic consideration we ought to be aware of. After all, if we are deeply committed to our moral intuitions but they seem incompatible with hard determinism, then it may be pragmatically sound to advance a theory of free will that allows us to maintain ascriptions of moral responsibility.

The libertarian view, often described as the antithesis to hard determinism, claims to allow ascriptions of moral responsibility by positing the free will thesis.

The basic claim of libertarianism is as follows: whereas the external laws of nature are the sole mechanism of causality in cases involving dumb objects (like a falling domino), free will allows people to choose how they act such that they are responsible for their own actions. Sider points out that this has potentially worrisome conceptual implications as well, insofar as the libertarian view seems to exclude the possibility of a “complete” psychology or theory of the mind which can fully predict human behavior. Additionally, libertarianism may also exclude the possibility of an “all encompassing physics” (a physical theory that can fully predict particle behavior), and it may be hasty to assume that human minds and action are (or rather, would be) exempt from such a physical theory.

The third basic view that Sider describes, compatibilism, rejects that the causal determinism thesis and the free will thesis are incompatible (127). Sider describes compatibilism as allowing that deterministic or necessitated actions are free if caused “in the right way,” but he acknowledges the difficulty in articulating what exactly this means (130). Compatibilism may be conceptually valuable if it allows us to preserve both causal determinism and free will, but it also seems to invite a problem of vagueness. For example, are my actions still caused “in the right way” if I would have acted differently in a marginally distinct, counterfactual scenario? Even if we grant that a free action is one appropriately caused by the person and ignore questions of context or extent, it seems that we run into definitional woes. After all, the notion of being caused “in the right way” seems to rely on what does and does not constitute being “compelled,” but how we ought to answer the question of what 70

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation constitutes compulsion seems to rely on an unclear conceptual distinction between compulsion and necessity. If compatibilists accept the causal determinism thesis then they accept that all actions are necessitated. But if uncompelled actions are free on the compatibilist view and compelled ones are not, the distinction between free necessitated action and unfree compelled action may seem arbitrary.

In other words, compatibilism may have us drawing lines in the sand. Sider gives the example of brainwashing and moral transformation to illustrate this problem (134). Take a good person (whatever this means to you) and imagine them placed in two scenarios: in the first, they are brainwashed into becoming evil (again, whatever this means to you) by a mad scientist, and in the second, through no fault of their own, they fall in with the wrong crowd and naturally become evil. Can responsibility be similarly ascribed to the evil actions of the brainwashed person and the “wrong crowd” person? Both seem to act according to prior conditions, but Sider suspects that compatibilist accounts of free will might ascribe responsibility differently in these two cases based on competing notions of compulsion and freedom.

Section II Having outlined these three basic positions in the free will debate - hard determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism - I will now discuss the metaphysical commitments required by the two incompatibilist positions, hard determinism and libertarianism. In his essay, “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism” (1974), Peter Van Inwagen states the following: “the concept of free will should be understood in terms of the power or ability of agents to act otherwise than they in fact do. To deny that men have free will is to assert that what a man does do and what he can do coincide.” This “power or ability” is known as “regulative control,” and on Van Inwagen’s incompatibilist conception, whether we have free will is determined by the modal facts of action or the “truth of” regulative control: the libertarian view, “I freely chose my own actions because it is a basic fact that I could have acted differently,” or hard determinism, “I did not freely choose my own actions because it is a basic fact that I could not have acted differently.” Regardless of whether Van Inwagen’s conception is the metaphysically correct one, it grounds the truth of free will and thus the incompatibilist free will debate in the modal facts of action.

Because hard determinism and libertarianism are both incompatibilist views, it seems the incompatibilist free will debate would be settled by the discovery of 71

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation relevant modal facts. If it were demonstrated that human action is completely determinate or, despite our best predictive efforts, still at times indeterminate, we could reject hard determinism or libertarianism in favor of its counterpart. If we could “test” for regulative control then we could determine the relevant modal facts and settle the free will debate. However, as Thomasson (2016) points out, we may have reasons to be skeptical of grounding the free will debate in the modal facts of action. For one, there appear to be “familiar and formidable epistemic problems” that prevent us from really knowing what the modal facts are. After all, we are not actually able to test for regulative control, at least not yet. We can make speculations about what such a test might consist of or reveal, but if our best method of exploring modal facts is considering how well different theories handle thought experiments and imagined cases, we should probably be skeptical that these theories really communicate “deep or fundamental facts about the world” (2). Thus, viewing the modal facts of action as especially relevant to the free will debate may be theoretically unproductive, and in doing so disputants may render themselves incapable of making epistemically sound claims.

Furthermore, while science generally makes progress on convergence and thus seems like it’s really engaged in truth discovery, the theories of disputing metaphysicians instead tend to diverge. So instead of ever being settled, metaphysical debates seem to grow increasingly complex, “with no agreement even on what might resolve [them]” (Thomasson, 2017). Thus, at least part of the problem with incompatibilism is made clear by Thomasson’s critique of heavyweight metaphysics: incompatibilist free will theories seemingly rely on unknowable facts, and attempts to ground these facts appear speculative at best, with no consensus as to how we might actually discover them. So, if the modal facts of action are potentially inaccessible and perhaps not even relevant to the free will debate, then what are our other options?

One potential answer is given by compatibilists, who propose that free will theories need not rely upon facts like whether we have regulative control, but instead in a conception of agency compatible with causal determinism. Glannon (1999) gives an account of such a theory, writing that the crucial feature of free will is “not that we have the ability to choose and do otherwise, but that we acquire our reasons [for acting] autonomously and act on them in an ... uncompelled way” (188). Glannon (in light of the theory’s original authors, Fischer and Ravizza) refers to this notion as “guidance control.” Guidance control theorists claim to have a distinct advantage over regulative control theorists insofar as they conceive of “what explains and justifies attributions of responsibility to persons” independently of the modal 72

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation facts of action. And, given our skepticism that metaphysicians have access to the relevant modal facts, guidance control may indeed be theoretically advantageous.

Although I do not argue for or against guidance control theory on its metaphysical merits, I believe Glannon makes the right move in shifting the free will debate away from modality since doing so allows free will disputants to move away from an epistemically metaphysical, heavyweight metaphysics-style debate and towards a metalinguistic negotiation.

Section III Having discussed the tenuous relationship between incompatibilism and modality, it seems appropriate to turn this discussion towards what we want a free will theory to do. This may help articulate why the compatibilist free will debate should be evaluated as a metalinguistic negotiation. On the incompatibilist scheme, the truth of free will seems to function as little more than a reflection of modal facts like whether we have regulative control. However, in addition to accurately reflecting certain modal facts, a free will theory ought to provide a normative scheme, or provide guidelines for “how we should treat people (including ourselves)—when and to what extent we should hold people responsible, punish, praise or blame them, feel guilt, regret or pride, and so on” (Thomasson, 2017). Free will disputants generally share the view that if we have free will, then we are morally responsible agents, which I won’t dispute. Thus, incompatibilist/regulative control theories ask what the modal facts are and then attempt to provide a normative scheme based on these facts - if we have the ability to act otherwise, then we have free will and are morally responsible agents; without regulative control, we do not have free will and therefore cannot be morally responsible agents.

However, as Thomasson (2016) demonstrates with her critique of heavyweight metaphysics, we have good reasons to be skeptical that we can ever really know the relevant modal facts. It seems unfruitful, then, for free will disputants to engage in a dispute involving these modal facts if we want a free will theory to provide us with a normative theory. This is where the compatibilist debate as a metalinguistic negotiation may avoid going in the same epistemically worrisome direction as incompatibilists: instead of asking a free will theory to reflect the modal facts and provide a yes/no answer on questions of free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism may position us to formulate a free will theory which appropriately reflects our intuitions about human agency while preserving causal determinism.

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Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation Recall that participants in a metalinguistic negotiation are said to advocate for a particular “deployment of linguistic representations,” meaning roughly that, rather than advancing competing logically incompatible propositions or disputing via the literally expressed content of their words (which Plunkett & Sundell call a canonical dispute [3]), disputants in a metalinguistic negotiation tacitly advocate for competing normative conceptual theories, or how and when we should use our words and concepts (3). If I understand them correctly, Plunkett & Sundell would describe the two major incompatibilist camps of the free will debate, libertarians and hard determinists, as engaged in a canonical dispute. After all, if incompatibilists agree that free will is a direct function of whether we have regulative control, the disagreement among them is on the literal “facts of the matter,” i.e, whether we in fact have regulative control.

Plunkett & Sundell offer the following case as an example of metalinguistic negotiation in their paper, “Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms.” Imagine two people disputing whether the racehorse Secretariat is an athlete. Speaker A might say to speaker B, “Secretariat is an athlete,” eliciting the response from speaker B, “No, Secretariat is not an athlete.” Should this interaction be described as a “genuine disagreement”? Plunkett & Sundell point out that there is “little reason to think that [this dispute] concerns straightforward factual matters about the topic at hand,” since the actual features of Secretariat (physical qualities, accomplishments, etc.) are mutually understood (16). So, rather than describing the conversation between speakers A and B as expressing a genuine disagreement, we might be tempted to describe their dispute as “merely verbal,” “in the sense that each disputant can be charitably interpreted as speaking a language in which what she says is true” (Thomasson, 2017). Since the literal semantic content that speaker A expresses when uttering the term ‘athlete’ differs from the literal semantic content uttered by speaker B, we might conceive of them not really disagreeing over anything substantive, and instead uttering trivial truths based on their conception of the term “athlete.” Since speakers A and B appear to “mean different things” by their words, there may be a question of whether they can even express a genuine disagreement. This formulation that disagreement requires speakers to “mean the same things” by their words may seem initially compelling - after all, we might want to describe genuine disagreements in terms of “incompatible contents,” or literal expressions which directly, logically contradict one another (Plunkett & Sundell call disputes of this kind canonical), and it is hard to see how “merely verbal” disputes (which Plunkett & Sundell call non-canonical) 74

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation involve this kind of contradiction (12).

But something about this picture seems wrong: if speakers engaged in noncanonical disputes perceived themselves as doing nothing more than uttering trivial truths in their own language, it is hard to see what would motivate such a dispute in the first place. Yet this type of dispute is incredibly common (4), and whether we believe that one speaker employs a “better concept” than the other (whatever this may mean) seems to have real consequences. For instance, if two people dispute what really counts as “murder” as part of a broader moral discussion, the conception of “murder” that prevails may inform the basis of legal proceedings, legislation, human rights, etc. Plunkett & Sundell account for the ubiquity and felt-depth of some non-canonical disputes by reconceptualizing certain non-canonical disputes as metalinguistic negotiations (3). In a metalinguistic negotiation, speakers engaged in a non-canonical dispute genuinely disagree about the proper metalinguistic usage of an expression (what should or should not count as an “athlete,” or “murder,” etc.).

Thus, contrary to the view that non-canonical disputes are merely verbal and thus do not express genuine disagreement, participants in a metalinguistic negotiation appear to evince genuine disagreement via their incompatible beliefs regarding how and when certain concepts ought to be deployed.

I will now discuss how metalinguistic negotiation might provide guidance for evaluating competing positions within the free will debate. As previously noted, there are potential conceptual advantages and disadvantages for each free will theory discussed in this paper. Hard determinism, while preserving the causal determinism thesis, seemingly precludes our ability to make cogent ascriptions of moral responsibility; libertarianism, while preserving our ability to make cogent ascriptions of moral responsibility, seemingly excludes the logical possibilities of “complete” psychological and physical theories, and thus potentially rivalizes itself with science. Furthermore, as incompatibilist theories, both hard determinism and libertarianism fail to escape the epistemic worries of heavyweight metaphysics. By grounding the truth of free will in the seemingly inaccessible modal facts of action, we are left skeptical that incompatibilist theories are capable of taking the next step to provide a normative scheme. Compatibilist theories, conversely, ground the truth of free will in terms of whether or not a person’s actions result from the reasons that caused them in the right way. This shift away from the modality of action potentially allows us to avoid the epistemic problems of incompatibilism, but it also appears to invite a different sort of conceptual challenge - that of pervasive vagueness.

While outlining compatibilism in the first section of this paper, I suggested that 75

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation the vagueness of guidance control was a potential downside of compatibilism. I repeat this suggestion here: a notion of being caused in the right way seems to rely on what does and does not constitute compulsion, but the distinction between which actions are compelled (not free) and which actions are merely necessitated (free) may be hard to locate. If compatibilists accept the causal determinism thesis, they accept that a person’s actions are necessitated by whatever prior events caused them. But, if uncompelled actions are free on the compatibilist view and compelled ones are not, the distinction between which actions are necessitated without being compelled so as to preclude free will may seem arbitrary.

Lacking a clear method as to how we ought to differentiate between free and compelled actions given that all actions are necessitated, I stated that compatibilism asks us to draw lines in the sand. However, I now admit that I am not convinced this vagueness is a conceptual weakness, and, considering Plunkett & Sundell’s conception of metalinguistic negotiation, it may even be a conceptual strength, especially if we want a free will theory to provide a normative scheme.

Recall the epistemic problems of heavyweight metaphysics: since certain metaphysical questions (especially within the realms of ontology and modality) rely on seemingly inaccessible facts, it is unclear if making progress on these questions is possible. The debate between incompatibilist theories, then, in virtue of the “truth of the matter” relying on currently unknown (and possibly unknowable) modal facts of action, seems to have gone wrong at the very start. Can metalinguistic negotiation save the incompatibilist debate? In the following section I attempt to demonstrate that the incompatibilist debate is a canonical dispute while the compatibilist debate, in addition to being non-canonical, is a metalinguistic negotiation. I borrow heavily from David Plunkett’s Which Concepts Should We Use? (2015) to guide this demonstration. Following this, I discuss how the incompatibilist debate gets “stuck” and thus fails to provide a normative theory while the compatibilist debate avoids this obstacle. Plunkett’s aim in this section of What Concepts Should We Use? is to demonstrate that the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists is a metalinguistic negotiation, which is distinct from my goal to show that the debate among compatibilists is a metalinguistic negotiation. However, I believe that his formulation of the evidence as to whether a dispute is a metalinguistic negotiation is nonetheless applicable. First, let’s look at Plunkett’s four features or pieces of evidence (A-D) for a dispute being a metalinguistic negotiation, edited for concision:

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Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation (A) There is good evidence that the linguistic exchange is a dispute. That is: there is good evidence that it is a linguistic exchange that appears to express a disagreement.

(B) There is good evidence that the dispute really does express a disagreement.

(C) There is good evidence that speakers in the dispute mean different things by (at least) one of the terms in that dispute. There are different things that might provide such evidence for a given term.

(D) There is good evidence that the disagreement expressed in the dispute, insofar as there is one, isn’t just about descriptive information about what a word does mean, or how it is used (847).

Next, let’s look at Plunkett’s imagined dispute between an incompatibilist (speaker A) and a compatibilist (speaker B), which I’ll call interaction X: (A) It is part of the essence of free will that only agents that are capable of fully causing their own actions have free will. This means that their actions cannot be fully determined by events over which they have no control, such as the events of the past.

(B) No, that is wrong. The nature of free will is such that agents can have free will even if they are not capable of that kind of self-determination. What matters is that we can hold them morally responsible in the right way, which we can do even if they don’t have that kind of capacity for self-determination that you just described. And that is a good thing, given that we in fact don’t have that kind of self-determination (855).

Plunkett evaluates the preceding interaction step by step, considering features A-D. He says of features A and B that interaction X appears to be a dispute which evinces genuine disagreement, which I’ll take for granted. There seems to be clear evidence that interaction X satisfies feature C, that speakers “mean different things” by their words. If speaker A uses the term “free will” to describe something of which incompatibilism is true while speaker B uses the same term to describe something of which compatibilism is true, then it seems that the two speakers necessarily mean different things by their words. Regarding feature D, it seems that the disagreement in interaction X does not concern merely descriptive information about what a term means or how it is used, since we can imagine the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists persisting in spite of broad agreement that “free will” refers to the human capacity to perform free/uncompelled action. Thus, in virtue of appearing to satisfy features A-D, there is strong evidence that interaction X is a metalinguistic negotiation.

I will now attempt to formulate two interactions similar to Plunkett’s, the first between two incompatibilist disputants (interaction Y) and the second between two compatibilist disputants (Interaction Z). I will evaluate each of these interactions using Plunkett’s features, A-D, to determine whether they appear to be metalinguistic negotiations.

In interaction Y, libertarian speaker A and hard determinist speaker B dispute the truth of free will and its implications: 77

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation (A) In virtue of having regulative control over our actions, we are capable of freely choosing how to act. Thus, we have free will and are morally responsible agents.

(B) It is not the case that we have regulative control over our actions. Since our actions are necessitated by facts about the present world and past conditions, we cannot have free will and thus are not morally responsible agents.

This interaction does appear to be a dispute that evinces genuine disagreement, satisfying features A and B. Regarding feature C, it does not seem as though speakers mean different things by their words. When speaker A says we do have free will, it is the precise inverse of speaker B’s assertion that we do not have free will. If “regulative control” is P and “free will” is Q, then speakers A and B agree that P ⊃ Q as well as ∼ P ⊃ ∼ Q, the difference in their assertions being what truth values P and Q actually possess. Since this dispute does not satisfy feature C, it is irrelevant to evaluate feature D. Therefore, since speakers appear to mean the same thing by their words, this dispute appears to be canonical and thus cannot be a metalinguistic negotiation.

In interaction Z, two compatibilists dispute whether the behavior of person S is compelled or free. Assume that speakers A and B have the same level of knowledge regarding person S: (A) Since person S fell in with the wrong crowd through no fault of their own, their actions are not free. Rather, their actions were compelled through conditioning in a violent environment and thus cannot be judged as evil.

(B) No, although it wasn’t the fault of person S that they fell in with the wrong crowd, they identified with the causes of their subsequent actions and understood their effects.

They were not compelled by a brain disorder, for example, and so not only are their actions free, they are evil.

In interaction Z, speakers A and B appear to engage in a dispute which evinces genuine disagreement, satisfying features A and B. Regarding feature C, speakers A and B do appear to mean different things by their words. There are three terms that are deployed differently in this interaction: “free,” “compelled,” and “evil.” Since speakers A and B have the same level of knowledge about person S, interaction Z appears to satisfy feature D as well; there is seemingly no reason to believe that speakers A and B would consider their dispute resolved if they came to a descriptive consensus about the meanings of “free,” “compelled,” and “evil.” Thus, since interaction Z satisfies features A-D, there is especially strong evidence that it is a metalinguistic negotiation.

I chose to include the terms “free,” “compelled,” and “evil” in my formulation of interaction Z because I believe these terms help demonstrate how the compatibilist debate avoids the obstacle that incompatibilism faces when attempting to 78

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation provide a normative scheme. In interaction Y, it is not clear whether speaker A or speaker B should be believed, as audiences to this dispute do not have access to the truth value of P, i.e whether we have regulative control. Therefore, speaker A and speaker B’s assertions that we are/are not morally responsible agents cannot be evaluated on their conceptual merits. However, looking at interaction Z, there does not appear to be a similar obstacle. While audiences may not know whether to believe speaker A or B based on interaction Z alone, one can imagine two different sets of features of person S, one on which speaker A’s formulation would turn out true and another on which speaker B’s formulation would turn out true. Thus, how we ought to respond to the actions of person S, whether person S is imprisoned, blamed, provided counseling, etc., is based on how the terms “free,” “compelled,” and “evil” appear to relate to person S and their actions. On the incompatibilist scheme, the truth of moral responsibility cannot be evaluated because the truth value of P is inaccessible. On the compatibilist scheme, conversely, whether speaker A or speaker B’s deployment of terminology is more appropriate for informing how we ought to respond to the actions of person S determines the normative course. Furthermore, while the incompatibilist scheme asks us to start with modality and move towards a normative theory, compatibilism reveals that there is another option: we can begin with normative intuitions, develop terms which allow us to appropriately describes these intuitions, and then decide how to use these terms as part of a broad and ever-evolving dialectic. Thus, compatibilism allows us to preserve both causal determinism and our moral intuitions as a metalinguistic negotiation.

Earlier, I identified the problem of heavyweight metaphysics-style debates as requiring that disputes be canonical to express genuine disagreement, I now argue that some metaphysical debates can be “fixed” by rejecting this requirement. The problem of heavyweight metaphysics-style debates, which I take to be the tendency for metaphysicians to engage in canonical debates relying upon potentially inaccessible modal facts, should be understood in terms of how to progress when a dispute seems “merely verbal.” As I have mentioned, it may be one’s intuition to dismiss merely verbal disputes as not expressing a genuine disagreement due to speaker’s utterances being semantically compatible. As Plunkett (2015) mentions, “Philosophers often tend to privilege canonical disputes when thinking about how disagreements are expressed (including, crucially, when thinking about their own disputes” [836]). However, due to the ubiquity, felt-depth, and real consequences borne of some non-canonical disputes, it is more accurate to conceive of some noncanonical disputes as metalinguistic negotiations. This reconception reveals that 79

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation non-canonical disputants can express genuine disagreement, not by the literal semantic content of their utterances, but rather in their tacit prescriptions of how a term ought to be used. Since incompatibilist theories assert literal incompatible semantic contents in the form of theories based on seemingly inaccessible facts (i.e, whether we do/do not have regulative control), we can describe the incompatibilist debate as canonical, but philosophically unproductive. However, despite being non-canonical, the compatibilist debate allows the preservation of the causal determinism thesis and the development of normative theories.

Thus, our intuition on which metaphysical disputes are worth having reverses: non-canonical disputes initially appear unproductive as “merely verbal” and therefore trivial, but metalinguistic negotiation reveals that these interactions can be highly fruitful by revealing disputant’s incompatible beliefs regarding how to properly use certain words and concepts. Meanwhile, canonical metaphysical disputes initially appear productive on the heavyweight metaphysics conception, but Thomasson’s critique of heavyweight metaphysics reveals the difficulty of evaluating epistemically metaphysical theories. It is revealed, then, that the apparent vagueness of compatibilist theories may be viewed as a conceptual strength: compatibilist theories, in virtue of grounding the “truth” of free will in concepts independent from modality, are theoretically flexible. I have argued that compatibilism demonstrates the following: free will theories need not preclude our metaphysical commitments nor our moral intuitions, and not only can the free will debate be non-canonical, it may be advantageous to pursue free will issues explicitly through competing normative conceptual schemes.

Section IV: Conclusion Although some metaphysicians conceive of their proper roles as discoverers and disputants of the literal, fundamental facts of the world, there are numerous reasons to be skeptical of this conception. The apparent inability of metaphysicians to make progress on resolving their debates is one such reason. In the free will debate, this inability to resolve is the result of incompatibilists proposing semantically incompatible theories which rely on potentially inaccessible modal facts. Thus, we may be skeptical that incompatibilists are engaged in a productive dispute. Compatibilism seemingly provides a way around this obstacle by grounding the truth of free will in concepts such as “free” and “compelled” rather than potentially inaccessible modal facts, allowing compatibilist theories to be evaluated in terms of broader normative 80

Reconceptualizing the Free Will Debate as a Metalinguistic Negotiation conceptual schemes. Metalinguistic negotiation provides guidance for this move away from epistemically metaphysical questions by distinguishing between canonical and non-canonical disputes, revealing that not only can non-canonical disputes provide guidance for normative schemes generally, but they may be more suited to this task than their canonical counterparts. When the content of disputants’ claims hinges on potentially inaccessible or irrelevant modal facts, it may be advantageous to reframe these disputes as metalinguistic negotiations and thus evaluate competing metaphysical theories as part of a broader normative conceptual scheme.

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References:

Conee, Earl, and Theodore Cider. Essay. In Riddles of Existence: a Guided Tour of Metaphysics.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.

Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Glannon, Walter. “RESPONSIBILITY AND CONTROL: FISCHER’S AND RAVIZZA’S THEORY OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY.” Law and Philosophy 18, no. 2 (1999): 187–213.

Plunkett, David, and Timothy Sundell. “Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms.” Philosopher's Imprint 13, no. 23 (n.d.): 1–37.

Thomasson, Amie L. “Metaphysical Disputes and Metalinguistic Negotiation.” Analytic Philosophy 58, no. 1 (2016): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/phib.12087.

Thomasson, Amie L. “What Can We Do, When We Do Metaphysics?” The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, 2017, 101–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316344118.007.

ἀ λ ή θ ε ι α

Cover design by: Eris Donohue Image credit: Forrest Bess, Untitled (1957)