Plato was good at wrestling
The name “Plato” means “broad-shouldered” 1.
Diogenes Laertius claims that “Plato” was a nickname, given by his wrestling coach. He probably made that up 2, but all sources seem to agree that Plato excelled at physical exercise and was well known for his wrestling ability.
Ruth Chang on parity, agency and rational identity
What is it to be a rational agent? The orthodox answer to this question can be summarized by a slogan: Rationality is a matter of recognizing and responding to reasons. But is the orthodoxy correct? In this paper, I explore an alternative way of thinking about what it is to be a rational agent according to which a central activity of rational agency is the creation of reasons. I explain how the idea of metaphysical grounding can help make sense of the idea that as rational agents we can, quite literally, create reasons. I end by suggesting a reason to take this alternative view of rational agency seriously. The orthodoxy faces a challenge: how do rational agents make choices within ‘well-formed choice situations’? By allowing that we have the power to create reasons, we have a satisfying and attractive solution to this question.
When a hard choice is substantively hard, the right thing to say, I think, is that the alternatives are comparable, but related by some relation beyond ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’ — I dub this relation ‘on a par’.
[…]
‘On a par’ and ‘equally good’ are different relations because they have different formal properties. ‘Equally good’ is reflexive — a is as equally good as a — and transitive — if a is as equally as good as b which is as equally good as c, then a is as equally as good as c. ‘On a par’ is irreflexive — a isn’t on a par with itself — a is as equally as good as itself — and nontransitive — if a is on a par with b which is on a par with c, it doesn’t follow that a is on a par with c. But they are both ways in which items can be compared.
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If someone asked me to say what it is for things to be better or equally good, I’d try to describe what those relations involve by describing features of the evaluative differences they denote. If A is better than B, then the evaluative difference between them favors A. If A and B are equally good, then there is a zero evaluative difference between them. If A and B are on a par, there is a non-zero evaluative difference between them, but that difference doesn’t favor one over the other. One reason it’s hard to wrap our minds around the idea of parity — or non-zero, non-favoring evaluative differences — is that we’re so used to understanding value on the model of the reals. Once you assume that value behaves like mass or length, you’re stuck with the view that one value has got to be more, less or equal to another since mass and length can be measured by real numbers, and real numbers must stand in one of those three relations. One of the upshots of entertaining the possibility of parity is that we begin to question at a really fundamental level understanding value in the same way we understand most nonevaluative properties in the world.
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Besides its inviting us to give up our deeply held, implicit conception of value as akin to mass or length with respect to measurability, the most important difference between ‘on a par’ and ‘equally good’ shows up in what we should do, practically speaking, when faced with such alternatives. If alternatives are equally good with respect to what matters in the choice between them, it’s always permissible to flip a coin between them. Not so when things are on a par.
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[Parity] opens up a new way of understanding rational agency that is a substitute for the usual Enlightenment conception according to which we are essentially creatures who discover and respond to reasons. On that view, our agency is essentially passive — our reasons are ones given to us and not made by us. Our freedom as rational agents consists in the discovery of and appropriate response to reasons given to us and not created by us. Parity allows us to see that our agency may have a role in determining what reasons we have in the first place.
The idea instead is that when our reasons are on a par, we have the normative power to create new, ‘will-based’ reasons in favor of one alternative as opposed to another. Take a toy example. You can have the banana split or the chocolate mousse for dessert. They are on a par with respect to deliciousness, which is what matters in the choice between them. You have the normative power to put your agency behind — to ‘will’ — the chocolateyness of the chocolate mousse to be a reason for you to have it, thereby, perhaps, giving yourself most all-things-considered reasons to choose the chocolate mousse. Your act of agency is what makes it the case that you now have most reason to choose the mousse. This is an active view of rational agency because instead of sitting back and discovering what reasons we have, we can create reasons — when our non-will-based reasons — what I call our ‘given’ reasons — are on a par. It’s in this way, I suggest, that we forge our own identities as, say, chocoholics or people who love extreme sports or care about the environment or work to alleviate poverty or any number of things that help define each of us as distinctive rational agents with particular concerns and projects. This is, I think the most interesting way in which we are– as philosophers like to say — the ‘authors of our lives’.
One way to get an intuitive handle on this alternative view of agency is by considering the way you spend your Saturday afternoons. Say you spend yours interviewing philosophers. Could it be true that you have most reason to spend your Saturdays this way, rather than, say, going for walks, learning the piano, or working in a soup kitchen? Probably not. Could it be true that you have sufficient reason to interview philosophers as well as many other things, and you just arbitrarily plump for interviewing philosophers, where this plumping isn’t an exercise of rational agency but the agential equivalent of flipping a coin? Our choices of how to spend our free time don’t always feel that deeply random. What we do instead, on the view I believe parity makes possible, is put ourselves behind one activity rather than another — we identify with it, we commit to it — for the time being perhaps — we take it on as something we’ll do. When we put our agency behind something, it feels like we have most reason to do what we’re doing. And that’s because we have conferred normativity on that activity. Putting your agency behind spending your Saturdays interviewing philosophers is how you make yourself into the distinctive rational agent that you are — someone curious about things philosophical.
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[Kant and Sartre] were each partly right. Some reasons — the will-based ones — have their source in the will but others — the ones that are on a par when will-based reasons can kick in — are ‘given’ to us just as the Enlightenment view says. And only some choices are a matter of agential fiat — for example, ones where our ‘given’ reasons are on a par. Crucially, the existentialists eschewed any possibility of normativity before the act of agential fiat. When we make ourselves into chocoholics or do-gooders or philosophical explorers, we do so in an already-existing normative landscape. Or so I think. So that’s another way my view differs from existentialism.
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-existentialist-of-hard-choices/
Rational agents have the normative power to create will-based reasons to be in one choice situation rather than another. By creating a reason to be in one among many eligible choice situations, you create the justification for being in that choice situation rather than the others. And as a rational agent who responds to reasons, you can thereby get yourself into that choice situation since you have most reason to be in it. And as we’ve suggested, when you create a reason for yourself to be in one choice situation among others, you put yourself behind that reason. By putting yourself behind that reason, you make yourself into the kind of person who now has most reason to be in that choice situation rather than any others. In this way, the activity of your will allows you to become one kind of agent rather than another, namely, an agent who faces these choice situations and not those. You are the driver of which choice situations — and consequently which reasons — make up the story of your life. 20 By creating reasons for yourself, you form what I have elsewhere called your ‘rational identity’ (Chang 2009, 2013a).
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Return to you lounging on your living room couch. There are a range of eligible choice situations you could be in right now. This range is determined by agential values like autonomy, well-being, and meaning in life. In choice situation A, what matters is getting your homework done well, and your choice is between continuing to read or getting yourself a coffee. In choice situation B, what matters is the suffering of others, and your choice is between writing a check to Oxfam or hopping a plane to volunteer your aid. In choice situation C, what matters is having fun, and your choice is between going to a movie or calling up some friends for a party. All three choice situations are eligible to you right now.
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Which choice situation should you be in? The Passivist orthodoxy has only this to say: you have sufficient reasons to be in any of the three, so just choose. By hypothesis, there is no reason to be in one over the others. But the reasons that render the choice situations eligible on the Passivist View are given reasons. As far as your given reasons are concerned, there is no further justification to be had for being in one choice situation over any others. The Activist View, by contrast, allows that you might create a will-based reason to be in situation A, which then justifies your being in that choice situation. By creating a will-based reason to be in situation A, you thereby make yourself into the sort of person for whom it is true that he has most reason to be in situation A. Your friend, similarly situated, might create a will-based reason for herself to be in situation C. She thereby makes it true of herself that she has most reason to be in situation C. Iterated across a lifetime, you may create a rational identity for yourself as a nerd, and your friend, a party animal. The Activist View gives rational agents the power to craft their own identities as individuals who justifiably face certain sets of choice situations rather than others.
The path we cut through life, among the myriad choice situations rationally open to us, is justified by the will-based reasons we create. Those who champion effective altruism have cut one such path. Those who spend their hours on Wall Street, making as much money as they can in order to live the high life, have cut another. It is only by allowing that there is more to rational agency than recognizing and responding to reasons that we can make sense of how we can be justified in crafting ourselves into the distinctive rational agents we are. Central to being a rational agent is creating reasons for ourselves to be in one choice situation rather than another. By doing so, we can determine for ourselves the reasons we have.
quote ruth chang rationality normativity subjectivism existentialism
Holden Karnofsky on visualising utopia
We should believe that a glorious future for humanity is possible, and that losing it is a special kind of tragedy.
When every attempt to describe that glorious future sounds unappealing, it’s tempting to write off the whole exercise and turn one’s attention to nearer-term and/or less ambitious goals.
We may not be able to describe it satisfyingly now, or to agree on it now, and we may have to get there one step at a time - but it is a real possibility, and we should care a lot about things that threaten to cut off that possibility.
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Personally, I don’t consider myself able to imagine a utopia very effectively. But I do feel convinced at a gut level that with time and incremental steps, we can build one. I think this particular “faith in the unseen” is ultimately rational and correct.
Richard Rorty on Proust and Hegel
For quite a while after I read Hegel, I thought that the two greatest achievements of the species to which I belonged were The Phenomenology of Spirit and Remembrance of Things Past (the book which took the place of the wild orchids once I left Flatbrookville for Chicago). Proust’s ability to weave intellectual and social snobbery together with the hawthorns around Combray, his grandmother’s selfless love, Odette’s orchidaceous embraces of Swann and Jupien’s of Charlus, and with everything else he encountered — to give each of these its due without feeling the need to bundle them together with the help of a religious faith or a philosophical theory - seemed to me as astonishing as Hegel’s ability to throw himself successively into empiricism, Greek tragedy, Stoicism, Christianity and Newtonian physics, and to emerge from each, ready and eager for something completely different. It was the cheerful commitment to irreducible temporality which Hegel and Proust shared — the specifically anti-Platonic element in their work — that seemed so wonderful. They both seemed able to weave everything they encountered into a narrative without asking that that narrative have a moral, and without asking how that narrative would appear under the aspect of eternity.
Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992) https://cdclv.unlv.edu/pragmatism/rorty_orchids.html
Richard Rorty on his path from Plato to Hegel to Dewey
About 20 years or so after I decided that the young Hegel’s willingness to stop trying for eternity, and just be the child of his time, was the appropriate response to disillusionment with Plato, I found myself being led back to Dewey. Dewey now seemed to me a philosopher who had learned all that Hegel had to teach about how to eschew certainty and eternity, while immunizing himself against pantheism by taking Darwin seriously.
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I decided to write a book about what intellectual life might be like if one could manage to give up the Platonic attempt to hold reality and justice in a single vision. That book - Contingency, Irony and Solidarity — argues that there is no need to weave one’s personal equivalent of Trotsky and one’s personal equivalent of my wild orchids together. Rather, one should try to abjure the temptation to tie in one’s moral responsibilities to other people with one’s relation to whatever idiosyncratic things or persons one loves with all one’s heart and soul and mind (or, if you like, the things or persons one is obsessed with). The two will, for some people, coincide — as they do in those lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other human beings are inseparable, or revolutionaries who are moved by nothing save the thought of social justice. But they need not coincide, and one should not try too hard to make them do so. So for example, Jean-Paul Sartre seemed to me right when he denounced Kant’s self-deceptive quest for certainty, but wrong when he denounced Proust as a useless bourgeois wimp, a man whose life and writings were equally irrelevant to the only thing that really mattered, the struggle to overthrow capitalism.
Proust’s life and work were, in fact, irrelevant to that struggle. But that is a silly reason to despise Proust. It is as wrong-headed as Savonarola’s contempt for the works of art he called ‘vanities’. Singlemindedness of this Sartrean or Savonarolan sort is the quest for purity of heart — the attempt to will one thing — gone rancid. It is the attempt to see yourself as an incarnation of something larger than yourself (the Movement, Reason, the Good, the Holy) rather than accepting your finitude. The latter means, among other things, accepting that what matters most to you may well be something that may never matter much to most people. Your equivalent of my orchids may always seem merely weird, merely idiosyncratic, to practically everybody else. But that is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthian moments, your lover, your family, your pet, your favourite lines of verse, or your quaint religious faith. There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared. There is no automatic privilege of what you can get everybody to agree to (the universal) over what you cannot (the idiosyncratic).
This means that the fact that you have obligations to other people (not to bully them, to join them in overthrowing tyrants, to feed them when they are hungry) does not entail that what you share with other people is more important than anything else. What you share with them, when you are aware of such moral obligations, is not, I argued in Contingency, ‘rationality’ or ‘human nature’ or ‘the fatherhood of God’ or ‘a knowledge of the Moral Law’, or anything other than ability to sympathize with the pain of others. There is no particular reason to expect that your sensitivity to that pain, and your idiosyncratic loves, are going to fit within one big overall account of how everything hangs together. There is, in short, not much reason to hope for the sort of single vision that I went to college hoping to get.
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If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls ‘a full presence beyond the reach of play’, for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision.
By now I am pretty sure that looking for such a presence and such a vision is a bad idea. The main trouble is that you might succeed and your success might let you imagine that you have something more to rely on than the tolerance and decency of your fellow human beings. The democratic community of Dewey’s dreams is a community in which nobody imagines that. It is a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters. The actually existing approximations to such a fully democratic, fully secular community now seem to me the greatest achievements of our species. In comparison, even Hegel’s and Proust’s books seem optional, orchidaceous extras.
Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992) https://cdclv.unlv.edu/pragmatism/rorty_orchids.html
Bernard Williams reviews Nagel on reason
Who, in these discussions, are “we”? Is every claim to the effect that our understandings are relative to “us” equally threatening? When we reflect on what “we” believe, particularly in cultural and ethical matters, we often have in mind (as the relativists do) ourselves as members of modern industrial societies, or of some yet more restricted group, as contrasted with other human beings at other times or places. Such a “we” is, as linguists put it, “contrastive”—it picks out “us” as opposed to others. But “we” can be understood inclusively, to embrace anyone who does, or who might, share in the business of investigating the world. Some philosophers have suggested that in our thought there is always an implied “we” of this inclusive kind; according to them, when cosmologists make claims about what the universe is like “in itself,” they are not abstracting from possible experience altogether, but are implicitly talking about the way things would seem to investigators who were at least enough like us for us to recognize them, in principle, as investigators.
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What is really disturbing […] about the relativists and subjectivists is […] their insistence on understanding “us” in such a very local and parochial way. […] They suggest that there are no shared standards on the basis of which we as human beings can understand each other—that there is no inclusive, but only a contrastive, “we.”
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Nagel’s basic idea is that whatever kind of claim is said to be only locally valid and to be the product of particular social forces—whether it is morality that is being criticized in this way, or history, or science—the relativist or subjectivist who offers this critique will have to make some other claim, which itself has to be understood as not merely local but objectively valid. Moreover, in all the cases that matter, this further claim will have to be of the same type as those that are being criticized: the relativists’ critique of morality must commit them to claims of objective morality, their attempts to show that science consists of local prejudice must appeal to objective science, and so on.
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The basic idea that we see things as we do because of our historical situation has become […] so deeply embedded in our outlook that it is rather Nagel’s universalistic assumption which may look strange, the idea that, self-evidently, moral judgment must take everyone everywhere as equally its object.
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We should not forget that the style of philosophy to which Kant self-consciously opposed his critique he called dogmatic philosophy, meaning that it took the supposed deliverances of reason at their face value, without asking how they were grounded in the structure of human thought and experience. […] In the spirit of Kant’s distinction, [Nagel’s approach] is dogmatic, because it is not interested enough in explanations. It draws, as it seems to me, arbitrary limits to the reflective questions that philosophy is allowed to ask.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/11/19/the-end-of-explanation/
quote bernard williams thomas nagel rationality metaphilosophy naturalism pragmatism