ISSUE 152 OCTOBER / NOVEMBER 2022

Philosophy Now
a magazine of ideas

The
Nature
of Time

GOD
and the
Philosophers
Kierkegaard • Spinoza
Anselm • Augustine
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God and the
Philosophers
Napoleon: “Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large
book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its
Creator.”
Pierre-Simon Laplace: “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”
(“I had no need of that hypothesis.”)”
T
he guttering, smoky candle dripped wax onto the desk
as the grizzled, grey-haired monk toiled late into the
night on yet another treatise proving God’s existence
and discoursing upon His essential nature. His tired eyes
narrowed as he tested the logic of arguments ontological and
cosmological, and of how God could be both three and one at
the same time. Faith seeking understanding? He already stood
in a very long tradition.
“Is there a God?” has been a central philosophical question
since the earliest times. Don’t roll your eyes! These
arguments should interest you too, and I’ll try to explain why.
The Philosophy Now editorial team includes both humanists
and religious believers, but we agree that questions about God
are tied up with a whole series of philosophical concerns of
the deepest and most personal kind – questions which keep
honest folk awake at night. How should we live our lives?
How should we treat one another? What’s the point of it all?
What happens when we die? Where did this world come
from? Some say that the idea of God arises from our need to
answer such questions. Others retort that without God we’d
never have had the wit to ask such questions in the first place.
The questions are difficult and the question of whether God
exists – and what we mean by God – particularly so, which is
why Benedict O’Connell’s agnostic article on ‘God and
Humility’ is well worth a read.
There are – heaven knows! – many ways to divide religious
believers, but one useful way to categorise them is into
Theists and Deists. Those who believe in a personal God who
knows each of us, and wants us to be our best selves, and
perhaps is angry or disappointed if we are not, are Theists.
Most Christians, Jews and Muslims are Theists. A question
for Theists is, how can we live in relationship to a personal
God, while unable to prove His existence? Read Stuart
Hannabuss’s article on Danish philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard, who conceived of the religious as a life stage,
one requiring an existential leap of faith to enter. But what if
the God in whom we are asked to place our trust appears to
us untrustworthy? Patrick Wilson in his short essay suggests
Editorial
that it would be unwise to believe in any deity who didn’t
share our core values.
Those who, by contrast, do not believe in a personal God,
but who on some basis of reason and science believe in a God
who created the universe, set its rules and perhaps sustains it
in existence, are known as Deists. They have included
Jefferson, Voltaire and Thomas Paine, and you can read more
about traditional and contemporary Deism in Robert
Griffiths’ article. Can anyone really prove God’s existence
using only reason and observed facts about nature?
Theologians in the Middle Ages and many later philosophers
certainly tried, with numerous variations on the ontological
proof (see Peter Mullen’s piece to learn more) and the cosmo-
logical proof among others. Their occasionally mind-bending
cogitations have gradually acquired wider relevance for
cosmologists, philosophers and astronomers, for they wrestled
with questions such as: “Why is there something rather than
nothing?”; “What do we mean by infinite?”; “Does the
universe have a first cause or does the chain of cause and effect
stretch backwards in time for ever?” and “What came before
time?”
You have to be careful where such trains of thought may pull
you. The brilliant and pious Baruch Spinoza argued that since,
by definition, there can be nothing greater than God, it follows
that all things in nature must be part of God – or else an even
greater God could be conceived who did include them.
Therefore God is identical with Nature. Spinoza called this
Deus sive Natura, ‘God or Nature’. But then a few centuries
down the line, writes Lesley Chamberlain, this resulted in some
nervous Spinoza scholars attempting to convince Stalin that
Spinoza was a materialist and an atheist. It didn’t go well.
No doubt the medieval theologians and philosophers so
earnestly disputing about God’s nature had some preconcep-
tions and preoccupations that seem quaint today, but many of
them were penetrating, subtle, patient thinkers. The logical
nets they wove might catch other fish too. Tony McKenna’s
article gives several startling examples of metaphysical
arguments by later philosophers including Hegel, Fichte and
Descartes whose form had been anticipated by theologians
centuries before. This makes you want to ask, what other
clever moves lurking unregarded in the obscurer works of
medieval monks might turn out to be exactly what philosophy
needs right now? Quick, everyone – let’s get digging!
Rick Lewis
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 3
Philosophy Now ISSUE 152
October/November 2022

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News Anja Steinbauer
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7 Shorts Matt Qvortrup: Sport
Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley
US Editorial Board
General Articles
Prof. Timothy J. Madigan (St John 27 The Strange Story of the Soviet Spinoza
Fisher Univ.), Prof. Teresa Britton
(Eastern Illinois Univ.), Prof. Peter Knowing God, or Not Lesley Chamberlain on a dangerous dance
Adamson, Prof. Massimo Pigliucci 32 The Horror of Relations
(CUNY City College) 8 The Ontological Argument Revisited
Contributing Editors Jonathan Beever on bad connections
Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) Peter Mullen reconsiders a famous proof
34 The Bataillean-Freudian Cat
Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) 10 God & Humility
David Boersema (Pacific University) Ansu Louis studies cat-human bonding
Benedict O’Connell says, don’t claim certainty
UK Editorial Advisors
Piers Benn, Constantine Sandis, Gordon
Giles, Paul Gregory, John Heawood
14 Deism: Traditional & Contemporary
Focus on Time
Robert Griffiths goes beyond for God
US Editorial Advisors 36 Calling Time
Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni 18 How Theology Pre-Empts Philosophy
Vogel Carey, Prof. Harvey Siegel, Anthony Proctor calls for a reconciliation
Prof. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Tony McKenna travels back to find origins
39 The Phenomenology of Time in Memento
Cover Image by Stephen Lillie 22 A Theological Self
Printed by Acorn Web Offset Ltd
Becca Turcotte dives into the experience of time
Stuart Hannabuss journeys into
Loscoe Close, Normanton Ind. Estate,
Normanton, W. Yorks WF6 1TW Kierkegaard’s identity theory Reviews
Worldwide newstrade distribution: 26 Faith & An Unreliable God 50 Book: The Enigma of Reason
Select PS (+44 1202 586848)
contact@selectps.com Patrick Wilson is against ungrounded trust by Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber
Australian newstrade distribution: reviewed by Peter Stone
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The opinions expressed in this
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reviewed by Stephen Alexander
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4 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022

 some of our
Contributors
Tony McKenna
is a writer and philoso-
pher who has battled a
childhood addiction to
water parks, without success. In
his spare time, he enjoys the novels
of Dostoevsky, the films of Roberto
Benigni, and the classic UK series
Only Fools and Horses. His latest
novel, The Face of the Waters, is a
thriller about a serial killer
that is set in Mexico.

Becca Turcotte
is 27 years old and work-
ing on a philosophy
degree full-time. It has taken her
twice as long as a typical student
due to living with multiple sclerosis
but she is now in her senior year.
She went back to school the same
year she was diagnosed. Philoso-
phy is her passion and she has
goals of getting into counselling
psychology after she graduates.
COVER BY STEPHEN LILLIE

Jonathan Beever
is Associate Professor of
Ethics and Digital Culture

8 in the Department of
Philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Central Florida, and director
of the UCF Center for Ethics. His
Regulars Poetry, Fun & Fiction interdisciplinary work in ethics
emphasizes how changing condi-
41 Interview: Nat Rutherford 17 De Omnibus Dubitandum tions shape the nature of
discusses happiness and morality Joseph Bou Charaa satirises dogmatism relationships. He is the author or
25 Secrets Yahia Lababidi reveals all editor of five books including Under-
with Annika Loebig
29 Philosophy Café Guto Dias standing Digital Ethics (2019) and
44 Brief Lives: Michel Foucault Philosophy, Film and the Dark Side
31 Simon & Finn Melissa Felder
Roy Williams looks at the life of the of Interdependence (2020).
64 Proof
most louche of French postmodernists Jeffrey Wald’s tale of be-leaf
46 Philosophical Haiku: St Augustine Lesley Chamberlain
came to philosophy
34
CAT © LEBERNARD 2016 CREATIVE COMMONS

Terence Green scribes a saintly stanza

through comparative liter-
47 Letters to the Editor ature. Her earliest research
THE GREAT MOUSTACHE HIMSELF

58 Tallis in Wonderland: was on German Idealism in 19th

The Fantasy of Conscious Machines century Russia, and her books on
Raymond Tallis says, beware the bewitchment German and Russian thinkers
include Nietzsche in Turin (1996,
of anthropomorphic language 2022); A Shoe Story: Van Gogh, The
60 Street Philosopher: Selling Snake Oil Philosophers and the West (2014)
Seán Moran tells the truth about charlatans and Arc of Utopia: The Beautiful
Story of the Russian Revolution
(2017). She lives in London.

October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 5


• Eth-letes Compete in Schools Olympiad
• Kripke, Noddings and Shoemaker dead
News
Jaspers Online
Good news for all fans of existentialist
thinker Karl Jaspers (1883-1969). His
complete unpublished works, including
letters, family archives and photos, as well
as audio recordings of the philosopher
have been made freely available online.
Following years of preparation, the
German Literary Archive (DLA), which
also holds important documentation con-
cerning thinkers such as Hannah Arendt,
Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Arnold Gehlen, Nicolai Hartmann, Edith
Landmann, Karl Löwith, Odo Marquard,
Joachim Ritter and Ernst Tugendhat, has
now released all materials. The significant
literary estate of the philosopher who died
1969 in Basel can be found via the DLA
website: www.dla-marbach.de/
Diogenes Statue Row
It is fair to say that Diogenes of Sinope (412
or 404 BCE-323 BCE) caused considerable
controversy in his time. The Cynic philoso-
pher, who spent years living in a wine stor-
age jar or barrel in Athens, famously
rejected Alexander the Great’s offer to grant
Diogenes statue in Sinop, Turkey
PHOTO © MICHAEL F. SCHÖNITZER. CREATIVE COMMONS 4.0
6 Philosophy Now l October/November 2022
• Karl Jaspers Reloaded
News reports by Anja Steinbauer
him any wish by replying that all he wanted
was for Alexander to stop blocking his sun-
light. This was an unheard-of rebuke to the
most powerful man in the world. A strict
moralist, Diogenes and his followers
believed that you should not do anything in
private that you would not also do in public,
resulting in a lifestyle that their fellow citi-
zens disgustedly said resembled that of dogs
(kynos). However, virtue was central to the
life and beliefs of these strange philosophers,
who often reprimanded people around them
for their moral failings. It is said that Dio-
genes used to carry a lantern in the market-
place in the middle of the day, holding it up
to shine in the faces of passers-by. When
asked why, he’d reply that he was looking
for an honest man. It is therefore appropri-
ate that sculptor Turan Baş depicted Dio-
genes as holding a lantern and standing on a
barrel. Erected in 2006, the 5.5m statue
graces Diogenes’ home town of Sinop, on
Turkey’s Black Sea coast, and was commis-
sioned by the municipal council. The statue
soon became an object of controversy. Local
politicians criticized the event it depicted,
stating that Diogenes’ search for honest
people was an implied insult to the people
of Sinop – despite the fact that any such
event would have taken place far away in
ancient Athens. In 2017, protests again
flared up with complaints that the statue
was an attempt to link modern Sinop and its
citizens with the cultural heritage of
Greece. Ismail Tezic, a spokesman for the
Erbakan Foundation (named after former
Turkish Prime Minister Necmettin
Erbakan, himself born in Sinop), said: “We
are not against art and statues. However, we
are opposed to those who try to stick the
label of Greek philosophy and ideology on
Sinop.” The statue is still there but the dis-
pute continues to this day.
Nel Noddings
Feminist philosopher and philosopher of
education Nel Noddings was involved in
education all her adult life. Born in 1929 in
Ivington, New Jersey, her first degree in
mathematics and sport was followed by a
Masters in mathematics at Rutgers Univer-
sity and later a PhD in education at Stan-
ford. She then taught mathematics for 23
years at primary and high school levels,
before embarking on an academic career
that would lead to a considerable body of
work at the intersection of education and
philosophy. She became Dean of the
School of Education at Stanford and
received numerous awards for her out-
standing teaching. Later she joined
Columbia University, then Colgate Uni-
versity and held the presidencies of the
Philosophy of Education Society and the
John Dewey Society. Noddings was a lead-
ing advocate of the ‘philosophy of care’,
holding that caring is the foundation of
morality. She argued this on the basis that
each person’s identity is defined by the set
of relationships they have with other
humans and the world around them. Nod-
dings did a great deal to develop this
approach and she created educational con-
cepts to go with it. This included a ‘Caring
Curriculum’, designed to apply the idea of

care to the different dimensions of self,
friends and peers, distant others, animals,
plants, the human-made world and ideas.
Married since 1950, she had 10 children.
Nel Noddings died on 25 August 2022.
Sydney Shoemaker
After studying philosophy at Reed College
and Cornell University, Sydney Shoemaker
lectured in philosophy first at Ohio State
University, then at Cornell, where he
became Susan Linn Sage Professor of Phi-
losophy. He was invited to give the John
Locke Lectures at Oxford University on
‘Mind and Behaviour’ and the Royce Lec-
tures at Brown University on ‘Self-Knowl-
edge’ and ‘Inner Sense’. Shoemaker made
ground breaking contributions to the phi-
losophy of mind, particularly concerning
the nature of mind, the nature of self-
knowledge, and the nature of mental prop-
erties. He criticised theories that explain
self-knowledge in terms of an ‘inner sense’.
Rather than humans merely being intro-
spective, he argued that perceptual and sen-
sory states have non-representational fea-
tures, ‘qualia’, which determine what it is
like to have them. In ‘Persons and Their
Pasts’, Shoemaker developed a neo-Lock-
ean view of personal identity. His ‘Func-
tionalism and Qualia’ is a defence of func-
tionalism against the problem of absent
qualia. Shoemaker died on 6 September
2022, at the age of 90.
Ethics Olympiad
The final of the 2022 Senior High Schools
Ethics Olympiad was held on Zoom on
27th July. Eth-letes aged 14-17 years repre-
senting schools in Australia, New Zealand,
Canada, China, India, Singapore and Hong
Kong competed in three heats. Toronto
University School in Canada won the Gold
Medal. Santa Sabina College in New South
Wales won Silver, and John XXIII College
in Western Australia picked up Bronze. For
more: ethicsolympiad.org.
STOP PRESS: Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke (1940-2022), one of the most
famous philosophers of his generation,
passed away on 15 September 2022. He
published his first influential paper at the
tender age of 17, but his best known book is
Naming and Necessity (1980). He made many
contributions to modal logic, metaphysics
and philosophy of language. We will pub-
lish a full obituary in Issue 153.
Shorts
Philosophy Shorts
by Matt Qvortrup
‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978
album by the rock band Talking Heads, about all the things rock stars
normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on
the theme of love; a track like Van Morrison’s 1976 hit Cleaning
Windows is the odd one out.
Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on
epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But
occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other
matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert
Nozick) and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle) This series of Shorts is about these
unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.
Philosophers on Sport
W e tend to think of philosophers
as somewhat nerdy types, not
the sort of folks who would indulge in
But John Rawls (1921-2002) played
college football for Princeton.
This foremost of American political
vigorous exercise. Wrong! philosophers is famous for his book A
One famous philosopher, whose Theory of Justice (1971), which intro-
real name was Aristocles, was very duced the idea that the just society
sporty. Indeed, he was a victorious would be one we would choose under a
contestant in the Isthmian Games, an ‘veil of ignorance’ where we do not
athletics competition held by the know if we are rich or poor, or anything
Ancient Greeks. His sporting nick- else about our identity and status in the
name was ‘Platon’, or in English, society whose rules we are helping to
Plato, meaning ‘Broad Shoulders’, pick. He thought that under such con-
because he was a strong wrestler. He ditions it would be rational to choose a
also had strong opinions on the society founded on equality of opportu-
subject, praising; “the legitimate nity. In Rawls’ view, only one sport fully
manoeuvres of regular wrestling – lived up to this ideal: baseball. This
extricating the neck and hands and “game does not give unusual preference
sides from entanglement” (Plato, or advantage to special physical types,
Laws, 281). However, Plato was not a e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All
fan of the showier type of wrestling: sorts of abilities can find a place some-
introducing ‘boxing devices’ was where, the tall and the short etc. can
‘absolutely useless’, and such antics, enjoy the game together in different
the former champion wrestler positions” (Letter to Owen Fiss, April 18,
declared, “don’t merit the honour of 1981).
being described.” So Rawls did not favour basketball,
Most other philosophers, if they as it unfairly favoured tall men. Perhaps
touched the subject at all, merely there was a reason why he singled out
wrote about sport. Aristotle, in a trea- that sport for censure: his department
tise that sadly is lost, wrote about neighbour and intellectual rival, the
Olympic winners. René Descartes neoliberal philosopher Robert Nozick,
wrote a treatise on the art of fencing. had used the example of the famous bas-
And G.W.F. Hegel agreed that sport ketball player Wilt Chamberlain to
serves a social purpose, “wrestling justify income inequality (Anarchy,
and boxing, and… throwing the State; and Utopia, p.18, 1974).
discus or javelin… express and form © PROF. MATT QVORTRUP 2022
part of the enjoyment of social exhila- Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political
ration” (Philosophy of History, p.260). Science at Coventry University.
October/November 2022 l Philosophy Now 7
God
The Ontological Argument Revisited
Peter Mullen explores the argument that by definition, God exists.
n one form the Ontological Argument for God is basically
I the argument: 1) God is by definition the perfect being;
2) It is more perfect for a perfect thing to exist than not
exist; 3) Therefore God exists.
This argument for the existence of God was given the name
‘ontological’ by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), but it was the
invention of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1078, in his
book Proslogion (how we miss philosopher-bishops these days!).
The word derives from ‘ontos’, which is the Greek word for
‘being’. Anselm’s own form of the Ontological Argument begins
with the words: id quo maius cogitari nequit – “there must be that
[thing] the greater than which cannot be conceived.” Anselm
concluded that a being who has all the qualities of greatness and
who exists must be greater than the conjectural amalgamation of
these qualities but who does not exist; therefore, God exists.
Anselm stressed the point in his prayer: “So truly thou dost exist,
O Lord. My God, that thou canst not be conceived not to exist.”
Some of the most renowned logicians of modern times have
accepted one or other variety of the Ontological Argument,
including Kurt Gödel (1906-1971), the inventor of the Incom-
pleteness Theorem (who, incidentally, deliberately starved him-
self to death). Even the professional atheist Bertrand Russell (1872-
1970) accepted it for a time. As he writes in his Autobiography:
“I remember the precise moment, one day in 1894, as I was walking
along Trinity Lane, when I saw in a flash (or thought I saw) that the
Ontological Argument is valid. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco;
on my way back, I suddenly threw it up in the air and exclaimed as I
caught it, ‘Great Scott, the Ontological Argument is sound’.”
Kant, however, rejected Anselm’s reasoning, famously argu-
ing that existence ‘is not a predicate’. He meant by this that
existence is not a contingent property of a thing, like its round-
ness or blueness can be. The implication of Kant’s position is
that we cannot as it were simply conjure things into existence
by mere words, as the Ontological Argument might seem to
do. In Kant’s own words: “A hundred real thalers do not con-
tain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers. My
financial position is, however, affected very differently by a hun-
dred real thalers than it is by the mere concept of them.”
G.E. Moore (1873-1959) made a similar point, saying inge-
niously, “While it makes perfect sense to claim ‘Some tame
tigers do not growl’ it makes no sense at all to claim, ‘Some
tame tigers do not exist’.” What exactly is it that these non-exis-
tent tame tigers do not do? But Gödel commented, “This ver-
sion of Anselm’s argument breaches no laws of logic, commits
no confusions and is entirely immune to Kant’s criticisms.” And
other modern philosophers apart from Gödel have accepted
the Ontological Argument. Alvin Plantinga (b.1932) has an
interesting perspective, borrowed from modern modal logic:
“Either God’s existence is necessary or it is impossible. That
is, God could not just happen to exist. Clearly God’s existence is
8 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
not impossible. So it must be necessary. Therefore God exists.”
But perhaps all these ways of considering the Ontological
Argument, as fascinating as they are, amount merely to several
ways of barking up so many wrong trees? R.G. Collingwood
(1889-1943) certainly thought so. For his elucidation of the argu-
ment’s meaning and significance he takes us back to Anselm him-
self. When he first produced his argument, Anselm quoted the
book of Psalms, saying, “The fool hath said in his heart. ‘There
is no God’.” A monk called Gaunilo wittily replied in a pamphlet
entitled On Behalf of the Fool. He wrote that if Anselm’s reason-
ing was sound, then parallel reasoning would establish the exis-
tence of some things that don’t, in fact, exist. His example was
of a perfect Lost Island. Such an island can be conceived, but a
perfect lost island that actually existed would be more perfect
than one which existed only as a concept. Therefore, said Gau-
nilo, if Anselm was right then there must also be a perfect lost
island. In his Essay on Metaphysics (1940) Collingwood comments
on this dispute: “If Gaunilo was right when he argued that
Anselm’s ‘proof’ of the existence of God proved the existence of
God only to a person who already believed it, and if Anselm told
the truth when he replied that he did not care, it follows that
Anselm’s proof, whatever else may be said for or against it, was
sound on this point.” But Collingwood enlarges his explanation:
“Metaphysical statements are not propositions. They are presupposi-
tions. When I say, ‘God exists’ what I mean is that I presuppose or
believe that God exists. This is the metaphysical rubric. The presup-
position that God exists is logically identical to the presupposition,
‘Every event has a cause.’ What Anselm’s argument proves is not that
because our idea of God is an idea of id quo maius cogitari nequit [‘of
which nothing can be thought greater’], therefore God exists, but
that because our idea of God is an idea of id quo maius cogitate nequit
[‘that which you can't think of as being more’], we stand [in relation]
to a belief in God’s existence.”
Most philosophers think Anselm was trying to prove the exis-
tence of God. In a sense he was, but his belief in God did not,
for him, depend on the validity of his proof. His Proslogion was
a prayer asking God, in whom he firmly believed, to enable him
to devise an argument to prove it.
What then are we to think? With so many elegant points
being made on both sides, as the fairground stallholder said,
“You pays your money and you takes your choice.” But for my
money at least, Anselm’s argument, and the eight hundred years’
discussion of it that followed, represents one of the most fasci-
nating, long-running topics in philosophy. It is in and of itself a
paradigm of philosophy. The Ontological Argument –
whichever side you find yourself on – is an example of what, at
its best, philosophy is.
© REV’D DR PETER MULLEN 2022
Peter Mullen is an Anglican priest. His last cure of souls before he
retired was Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London.
Anselm Ontologising
by Stephen Lahey
God
God & Humility
Benedict O’Connell argues we must recognise our limitations about knowing God.
s philosophers, we often like to think about what can
A be known. It is also important, however, to consider
the reverse: what cannot be known – whether there may
be certain truths that are simply beyond our under-
standing as human beings. I’m talking about ‘known unknowns’:
things that we know that we don’t know, or that we simply cannot
know. The philosophical candidates are varied: knowledge of the
nature of objects as they are or ‘things-in-themselves’ rather than
mere appearances of them; the nature of the mind and its rela-
tionship to the body; or the nature and existence of God.
I want to consider the theological question here, and how
attitudes to God may be seen through the prism of the humil-
ity of recognising one’s limits. Does it show greater humility
to accept that we cannot know of God’s existence and nature?
Or can greater humility be found in recognising that there is
more to existence than our human-created meaning, and there
may well exist a far greater being beyond our terrestrial lives?
We should first remember that, as a value, humility is not
unconditionally good. We ought to be cautious of how humil-
ity is packaged and sold to us, and mindful of how it can be
weaponised for pernicious ends by those in power. For instance,
promoting the values of humility and self-sacrifice can create
deference and obedience in the face of tyrannical leadership.
But concerning knowledge claims, humility has great utility, in
that it can help us meaningfully reflect on precisely which ideas
can be considered secure, and as a result give us a better sense
of what we know, who we are, and our place in the world.
The Possibility of Theological Humility
The Medieval theologian Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1093-
1109) emphasised the ineffability of God: the idea that the nature
of God cannot be adequately communicated. But this leads us
to a problem. Surely if God is literally inconceivable, does it make
sense to talk of God at all? Historically, theologians have
claimed all kinds of things about God: that he is immanent,
transcendent, omnipotent, eternal, everlasting, etc. But surely
if God is ineffable – too great to be described in words – then
this must entail that the thing being described cannot be under-
stood by the words describing it? Perhaps if God is ineffable,
then this means that if we are to speak about God, we at least
cannot speak of such a being literally. This may mean that God
can only be talked about metaphorically or through the medium
of analogy. Nevertheless, this presents a potential limitation in
how our language may grasp the essence of deity in itself.
The contemporary Christian theologian Simon Cuff argues
that where talk of God gets muddled and contradictory is in its
not recognising God’s key attribute of ‘simplicity’. God is sup-
posedly unlike the things we encounter in creation, which have
parts: God is simply one. Rather than exploring each divine
attribute individually, or trying to work out how they can coex-
ist in one being, Cuff argues in Only God Will Save Us (2020)
that we must remember God’s wholeness, and that when we
10 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
talk of attributes of God these are analogical. The mercy, jeal-
ousy, anger, suffering, and benevolence of God, for example,
cohere in him without contradiction, even though they may be
mutually exclusive in us. This view is not without support from
theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who
argued that if we assume that a named attribute of God is the
same as its corresponding attribute in humans, this is an idola-
trous concept of God. So maybe one way to exercise epistemo-
logical humility is to understand that God cannot be spoken of
on the same linguistic plain as earthly matters, or even conceived
of completely. In doing so we recognise our human limitations.
Another theological dimension to humility would be to assert
that if God exists then humans are demonstrably not the great-
est beings. This ‘metaphysical humility’, or the humility of an
individual before God, consists in recognising that in compari-
son to the Creator of the universe we are mere dust, ashes; prac-
tically dirt. This kind of humility is reflected in one of the dic-
tums that many Christians utter as they have a cross of ashes
marked on their foreheads for Ash Wednesday: “Remember that
you are dust and to dust you shall return”. To practice theolog-
ical humility is to exercise meekness before the mysterious power
of God. This is reflected in common rituals around prayer –
clasping hands, bowing, or kneeling, for instance – presenting
an act of deference in the presence of God.
One limitation on the claim that belief in God may entail
humility is the theist claim that humans are made in God’s image.
Why are we the chosen ones? Why is it that God created humans
in his likeness rather than any other creature? The ancient Greek
philosopher Xenophanes, reflecting on this last idea, quipped:
“If cows and horses or lions had hands and could draw, then
horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, cows like cows,
making their bodies similar in shape to their own.” To challenge
the believers’ position we could ask, was it really humanity that
was created in God’s image rather than the other way around?
The Humility of Agnosticism
Whilst there do seem to be elements of the believer’s position
that could warrant a kind of humility, particularly in a meta-
physical sense, there also appears to be some conflict between
the theists’ commitment to God and the value of humility.
Humility firstly involves recognising one’s limits – accepting
that I may be, for example, quick-tempered, not great at public
speaking, or have poor taste in daytime TV. Or as Thomas
Aquinas understood it, humility is about acknowledging the gifts
of God that have been placed in others but not one’s self, based
on a just appreciation of one’s own defects. However, the theist’s
position is a claim to know – at least for the strong or moderate
theist, who claim that there is almost certainly a God. There is
the epistemological issue here in demonstrating how one can
know there is a God, and moreover, that he has revealed cer-
tain doctrines to his believers. To my mind, agnosticism is the
more suitable, and humble, response to this: accepting that one
PLEASE VISIT ‘CARLA ANNA ART’ ON FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM

God

The Tower of Babel

by Carla Anna 2022

October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 11

God
does not know. The theist believes, whereas the agnostic is more
tentative and takes the side of caution and doubt. From the point
of view of humility, the agnostic is in the safer position: the
theist claims possession of knowledge, the agnostic only acknowl-
edges their own ignorance. It is harder to defend a claim to
know than it is a claim not to know, and so the theist’s asser-
tion seems to be incompatible with humility.
Of course, the atheist might not necessarily get off so lightly
here, in particular the strong or moderate atheist, who pro-
claims with certainty or near certainty that God does not exist.
After all, like the theist’s, their claim is a claim to know. This
claim can at times reflect, almost paradoxically, a profound and
unassailable faith in human reason.
The profound and unquestioned faith in human reason has
been extensively explored by John Gray (1942-), who argues
against the arrogance of some forms of humanist optimism.
Gray spotlights the strongly-held belief found in many religions
but also in humanism that humankind is able, or will be able,
to take control of its destiny. It seems that to an extent human-
ity will inevitably alter itself scientifically, and so remodel its
own destiny. However, this will not be by way of following a
meticulous, pre-meditated, thought-through rational plan, but
by sporadic change as different forces battle for dominance,
including political, economic, or cultural factors. Many promi-
nent religious thinkers, as much as humanists, place humanity
on a pedestal above other animals, as a species that can control
its own destiny. But in the end, as a species, we may be cast aside
by the turning of natural processes just like any other species.
Mary Midgley (1919-2018) reflects on the use of reason and
its potential limitations when she stresses that it matters who is
asking the questions. She emphasises that philosophy is done by
socially-developed beings with an evolutionary history, wedded
to this planet of ours, and not by abstract intellects or machines.
This means that reason is not the immutable absolute that it’s
often espoused to be: rather, it is woven into and filtered by our
human perspective and emotions. Thus, according to Midgley,
the rational person is not someone who is simply clever: it is
someone who has organised their ideas into something like a
coherent whole in our rarely neat and straightforward world.
Don’t Try To Be God
The Tower of Babel story in Genesis provides an early medita-
tion on the need for humility (it’s found in Genesis 11). A united
human race ends up in the land of Shinar in the years following
the Great Flood. Together they decide to build a city with a tower
tall enough to reach the heavens. God disrupted this project by
confusing the language of the workers so they could no longer
understand one another, and the people of the city were scattered
around the world. The city received the name ‘Babel’, from the
Hebrew verb ‫לָב‬ ּ ‫ל‬
ַ֥ (balal), meaning to jumble or to confuse.
The orchestrators of the Tower of Babel are punished for
trying to reach a status they don’t have – of being equal with
God. The story impels us to remember our place, to not go
beyond our ontological status. A parallel could be drawn
between the over-ambition on display in the Babel story and
the professed indubitability of our own claims to knowledge –
about God’s existence or non-existence, for example.
In attempting to espouse truths about God’s nature and what
12 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
God wants or desires, we may be making claims about some-
thing that, paradoxically, only a being like God could know.
We could call this ‘the knowledge of God paradox’. To put it
in Kantian terms, we can know God as the idea or concept
appears to us, but we cannot know the essence of God in Itself.
The Babel story demonstrates attempts by humans to tran-
scend their ontological status. We make a similar overstep in
claiming knowledge of God’s existence or non-existence. We
try to transcend our epistemological limits on a metaphysical
question of epic proportions, which, indeed, is unanswerable.
This may be our own Tower of Babel – though with more of
an epistemic tinge to it! And this elevation of our status can be
found in both theism and atheism.
The good response to this is to accept cognitive closure with
regards to claims about God: accept that our human minds may
be constitutionally incapable of solving the problem. This doesn’t
entail that talk of God is meaningless; but that theology may have
to resign itself to begetting a religious form of life rather than pro-
claiming a bold correspondence form of truth on the issue.
This also has implications for the ideas of God that believ-
ers form. Idolatry connotes the worship of something other
than God as if it were God. Protestants in the sixteenth century
were increasingly wary of idols; they were a distraction from
the real star of the show. But if God does indeed exist, then
every believer’s idea of God is idolatrous because it is limited.
What I mean by this is that every idea of God is just an idea.
To obtain the essence of God, you would have to be God. So
to practice the virtue of theological humility, we must accept
that we can only form an idolatrous concept of God. Christians
and other theists cannot have it both ways – they can dispose
of the virtue of humility and claim that their concept of God is
not idolatrous; or they can retain epistemic humility and accept
that their ideas of God are just imperfect representations.
When you try to make cats aware of something by pointing
at it with your finger, they’re often more interested in the finger
indicating the object than the object the finger indicates. In
relation to God, humans are like cats: they fixate on the ‘finger’
(the idea of God), not realising that by it they cannot grasp the
true object of fascination, God itself. We are infatuated with
the representations of God we construct, yet we fail to recog-
nise that they’re merely facades that contain no absolutely jus-
tified content in the way many theists claim them to. We simply
don’t possess the capacities to grasp the thing in itself. To make
positive, literal claims about God is therefore to try to be God.
When claiming definitively that ‘God exists’, we aim to boldly
go where no human could go: we try to transcend our epistemic
limits. In stating that God exists we are professing something
that only a being like God, who is omniscient, could know. So
if God exists, then only God can know that God exists. As the
Tower of Babel story tells us, we should refrain from placing
ourselves on a pedestal beyond our status; in this case not for
fear of what God might do, but to retain epistemic humility and
not go beyond what can be known.
So, does God exist? God only knows.
© BENEDICT O’CONNELL 2022
Benedict O’Connell teaches Philosophy and Religious Studies at
BHASVIC, Brighton. Besides philosophy, he also enjoys ultra-
marathon running and karaoke. @benedict.oconnell on Instagram.
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Deism
Traditional & Contemporary
Robert Griffiths looks into an anti-religion, pro-God way of thinking.
eism is belief in the existence of a creator God who
D does not intervene in the universe, and in particu-
lar, in the lives of people. Cleverly, deists try to
detach God from religion. As far as religion is con-
cerned, they look and sound like atheists: they reject religious
revelation, and often call religion ‘superstition’. But they hold
on to God.
Deism seems to come in what I call a ‘hard’ or sceptical ver-
sion, and a ‘soft’ version. The sceptical version is very critical
of religion, but it defends the idea of God and so wants to break
it away from religious trappings such as scripture and ritual.
This is the view developed in eighteenth century Europe by
writers such as Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and Voltaire (1694-
1778). Soft deism, by contrast, is barely critical of orthodox reli-
gion. This is an earlier form of deism, which originally emerged
in the seventeenth century, in the work of people like John
Toland (1670-1722) and Matthew Tindall (1657-1733). One
might also call it ‘Christian deism’. The general idea was that
Christianity has a core that could be defended entirely by reason,
and that was all that a Christian needed. This was partly a way
of cutting through the exhausting doctrinal disputes that had
dominated the Reformation and the formulation of Protes-
tantism in the previous two hundred years: let us be Christians,
but let us be rational Christians! Some hints of this soft deism
remain in Voltaire, who once cast Christ as a deist; but in Paine
14 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
Payne &
Voltaire
by Simon
Ellinas
2022
the sceptical note against religion is consistently harsh.
Deism became less popular by the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, partly because of an increase in atheism but also because
of the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment and its
heavy emphasis on reason. Also, naturally deism spawned no
churches or religious communities, and so often seemed an eli-
tist, intellectual position with limited appeal to ordinary people.
However, deism is still around, and may even be experiencing a
revival. Today, it is promoted by organisations such as the iron-
ically-named Church of the Modern Deist (moderndeist.org) and
The World Union of Deists (deism.com). There is also a stream
of publications by self-professed deists outlining for popular
audiences the alleged appeal of this philosophy. Today, the
target audience for deists may be (as it was in the seventeenth
century) Christians and other religious people who are becom-
ing confused or alienated by doctrinal disputes and are instead
looking for a rationally defensible simple ‘core’ to their beliefs.
It also tries to appeal to those who find organised religion dubi-
ous but are not convinced by atheists, old or new. In deism’s
avoidance of obscure doctrine, agnostics can also find a set of
convictions that might appeal to their desire for a certain vague-
ness or uncertainty in this area. So the potential audience for
deism is quite large; for instance, the sociologist Grace Davie,
in her Religion in Britain (2015), suggests that “between half and
two-thirds of the population continue to believe in some sort

of God or supernatural force.” However, only a minority of
these people participate in religious activity. Davie dubs this
‘believing without belonging’. One might also call it deism.
Deist Methods & Metaphysics
Emerging in the seventeenth century, deism was heavily influ-
enced by the Rationalist outlook that prevailed at that time. The
key methodological principle advocated by deists is that we
should base all our beliefs on reason. To emphasize this, the
word ‘reason’ was often written with a capital letter, or even all
in capitals. John Toland, who was a correspondent of the Ratio-
nalist philosopher Gottlieb Leibniz, wrote, “we hold that
Reason is the only Foundation of all Certitude” (Christianity
Not Mysterious, 1696). Bob Johnson, a modern deist asserts, ‘God
gave us reason not religion’ (Deism: A Revolution in Religion, A
Revolution in You, 2009).
Of course, few of us – certainly few philosophers – are going
to object to the use in general of reason. However, we may not
agree with the way in which reason is used by deists.
At the heart of deism are two claims. The first is that reason
can demonstrate the existence of an intelligent being who cre-
ated the universe, and because reason can do this very well, we
do not need revelation or any other religious way of establish-
ing the existence of God.
Rational arguments for the existence of God are very old, and
long predate deism. Perhaps the oldest type of argument is now
known as the ‘cosmological argument’. This basically argues that
there must be a first ‘uncaused cause’ of the universe – a cause
whose very existence is logically necessary in a way that the uni-
verse is apparently not – otherwise we have no explanation of
why there is a universe at all. Without a first uncaused cause,
there is a potential infinite regress of causes of the world – we
can keep asking ‘But what caused that?’ forever – leaving the uni-
verse without a rational foundation. Aristotle already presents
such an argument for a ‘Prime Mover’ in his Metaphysics. There
are also several arguments of this kind in Thomas Aquinas’s ‘Five
Ways’ of demonstrating the existence of God in his Summa The-
ologica. Rationalist Christian philosophers such as René
Descartes, Leibniz, and Samuel Clarke defended detailed ver-
sions of this argument. Thomas Paine relies on it: “the belief of
a first cause eternally existing, of a nature totally different to any
material existence we know of, and by the power of which all
things exist… this first cause man calls God” (The Age of Reason,
1794). Deists also share with Aristotle the view that once God
had created the universe, he did not interfere with it. They
regarded it as offensive to the Supreme Being to suppose that
he needed to fiddle constantly with his rational creation. They
therefore talk of miracles very glumly.
The second argument to which deists often appealed is what’s
called ‘the argument from design’. This is the claim that the
world shows signs of intelligent design, such that its order could
not be down to chance or the random permutation of matter.
Such an argument had already been put by Aquinas, so it also
was by no means new. Again, Paine relies on it: ‘‘The word of
God is the creation we behold’’. And for Voltaire this is per-
haps the strongest argument for the existence of God. In press-
ing it, Paine and Voltaire – who were both very knowledgeable
of contemporary science – were partly influenced by the mon-
God
umental work of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton seemed to many to
have revealed the underlying – and glorious – order of nature.
Newton himself was convinced that this order was created and
sustained by God. So the idea that the world was orderly, and
a reflection of the mind of God, was widely shared. (Newton,
though, remained a Christian.)
Deist Ethics & Politics
Another key deist claim was an ethical one. They argued that
God had created man as a rational being, and that if he pursued
a rational life he would be happy and virtuous. In line with his
liberal principles, Voltaire argued that the rational person would
treat all others equally, so that the rational life would lead to
both personal and general happiness. He conceded that the cen-
tral Christian principle of ‘loving thy neighbour’ could easily
serve as a foundation for deist (and liberal) ethics.
Having an ethical position was important to deists, as they
wished to avoid the imputation of immorality that was normally
thrown at atheists. So it was useful for them to cast the heart of
Christian ethics within deism.
Of course, the view that the rational life is both happy and
virtuous is also an old one, going back to Plato and Aristotle.
Aristotle had argued that man was by nature rational and that
the pursuit of a rational life would lead to happiness and virtue,
which he called eudaimonia. What was different about the ethi-
cal outlook of Paine and Voltaire was a greater liberalism, and
an openness to human equality that the aristocrat Plato and the
royal doctor’s son Aristotle did not share.
By the eighteenth century, deism’s criticism of institutional
religion had become quite strident, whereas seventeenth cen-
tury Christian deism seemed remote and abstract. This change
of tone was partly due to a gathering movement for radical polit-
ical reform – a movement in which the Church was often seen
as an enemy of the people. Paine’s comment was not untypical:
“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Chris-
tian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions
set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power
and profit.” Voltaire meanwhile attacked religion with literary
flair. The entry on ‘Religion’ in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
imagines a tour through the graveyards of religious disputes:
“These,” he said, “are the twenty-three thousand Jews who
danced before a calf, with the twenty-four thousand who were
killed while lying with Midianitish women” [citing the Old Tes-
tament’s book of Exodus, Ed].
This disparaging tone concerning established religion
reflected a growing interest in atheism and materialism, at least
in France, due to influential writers such as Diderot and the
Baron d’Holbach. The deists, though, resisted atheism even
while they shared the atheist’s disdain of religion. Voltaire’s
concern to retain God was partly ethical. As he commented
wryly, “I shall always ask you if, when you have lent your money
to someone in your society, you want neither your debtor, nor
your attorney, nor your judge, to believe in God.”
Deism, Modern & Troubled
In the eighteenth century the anxiety that atheism would open
the door to immorality was widespread. When it came, many
thought that the French Revolution confirmed this view. Nowa-
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 15
God God
Eye in the Sky
Paul Gregory
days, though, the deist lacks that motiva-
tion. In the twenty-first century the claim
that atheism leads to vice has no bite, and
the ethics of the modern deist is hardly dif-
ferent to the kind of humanism, or even
utilitarianism, defended by contemporary
atheists such as A.C. Grayling or Sam
Harris. This means that the modern deist
position has to rest pretty much entirely
on the view that one can provide rational
arguments for the existence of God.
16 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
Yet it is noticeable that a lot of modern
popular deist writing focuses predomi-
nantly, and negatively, on the apparent
irrationality of orthodox religion. When
they explain rational arguments for the
existence of God, they tend to appeal
extensively to the work of writers like
Paine. This is unfortunate, in a way, due
to how little awareness there seems to be
of the problems dogging the arguments
in Paine’s key work, The Age of Reason.
The book is philosophically rather thin,
being more of a manifesto than a con-
vincing piece of analysis. It was published
in various editions between 1794 and
1807. One is therefore struck by the
absence in it of any attempt to consider,
for instance, the objections to ‘existence
of God’ arguments raised in 1779 by
David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning
Natural Religion. Equally (if perhaps more
understandably), there is no awareness in
Paine’s work of Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason of 1787, in which rational argu-
ments for the existence of God are criti-
cised at length. This failure to engage
with intellectual difficulties is also typi-
cal of popular deism now: the website of
the Church of the Modern Deist also
makes no mention of Hume or Kant.
The modern deist is also disadvantaged
in comparison with Paine and Voltaire by
the blow to design arguments that was
dealt in the nineteenth century by the
theory of natural selection. In the form
that Paine or Voltaire use the design argu-
ment, Darwin’s theory is probably fatal,
and one could easily argue that nowadays
the intellectual foundations of deism, in
the first cause and design arguments for
the existence of God, cannot be developed
in the way they were developed by tradi-
tional deists. Nevertheless, it would be
wrong to say that deism has lost all intel-
lectual credibility. Philosophers continue
to discuss both these kinds of arguments
seriously, although the face of the battle-
ground has changed considerably.
Modern defenders of design arguments for
the existence of God, such as Richard
Swinburne (Is There a God?, 2010), largely
concede that one cannot argue from the
apparent design in, say, a horse, to the exis-
tence of an intelligent designer, since the
apparent design in a horse is fully explained
by evolutionary biology. However, Swin-
burne thinks that evolutionary biology
cannot explain why the laws of nature upon
which it relies take the form that they do.
Sometimes the form of one natural law can
be explained by appealing to a higher-level
natural law. Aspects of thermodynamics,
for example, might be explained in terms
of mechanics. But, Swinburne argues,
there can be no ultimate explanation by sci-
ence of the form of the laws of physics that
makes life possible. Science uses laws; so
it cannot completely explain them. From
this Swinburne argues that there must be

an intelligent creator responsible for the ultimate form of natu-
ral laws. This kind of argument is linked to the lively argument
today about whether the universe is fine-tuned by an intelligent
designer, since if the values of the fundamental physical constants
of nature had varied by even an infinitesimal fraction, life as we
know it would not be possible. Swinburne would argue that the
universe is fine-tuned; sceptics such as Victor Stenger would argue
that it is not (The Fallacy of Fine Tuning, 2011). Nowadays it is in
areas like this that the intellectual credibility of deism is tested –
in the arena of cutting-edge scientific knowledge. Similarly, theist
philosophers such as William Lane Craig continue to defend the
cosmological argument for the existence of God, while trying to
address Hume’s, Kant’s and anyone else’s objections to it. Craig
has done extensive work to show that the first-cause argument
can be made compatible with modern physics (The Kalam Cos-
mological Argument, 2019). Against him, atheist scientist Lawrence
Krauss argues in A Universe from Nothing (2012) that he has under-
mined all first-cause arguments by showing how quantum
mechanics and relativistic cosmology makes it plausible to claim
that the universe just appeared, from nothing – although to make
this argument Krauss relies on the laws of quantum mechanics
and relativistic cosmology themselves being ‘nothing’, or in other
words, not themselves requiring explanation.
The modern deist no longer has Voltaire’s excuse for reject-
ing atheism as leading to ethical failure. But she need not be
embarrassed by continuing to argue rationally for the existence
of a supreme being, as long as she is prepared to enter a more
contemporary debate than the one that seems to be played out
on deist websites or in the popular deist literature. If she is so
convinced that we must follow reason in order to discover the
truth, then reason must be followed where it leads, and in such
debates as those between Craig and his opponents, it leads into
some very difficult material, requiring a strong grip on both
philosophy and contemporary science.
Deism, Present & Future
Whether deism is ever likely to be a very popular position is
another question. Davie’s identification of a widespread vague
belief in a God or ‘force’ is perhaps not as much comfort to
deists as they might think. We live in a much more pluralist age
than the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We have also
moved beyond the Rationalist atmosphere in which deism had
its birth, and the charge of elitism that affected it then may still
affect it now. It is also unlikely that those people who believe
in an indistinct God or a primordial force do so because they
are convinced by rational arguments for its existence. Davie
herself acknowledges that contemporary ‘religious’ awareness
among those who do not practice an orthodox religion is often
of a vaguely ‘spiritual’ quality, influenced by a wide range of
both rational and non-rational sources.
Our world is a very different one to the world of Toland, Tin-
dall, Paine and Voltaire; yet the attempt to resurrect deism is not
without modern intellectual support. However, those who defend
its key arguments, such as Swinburne and Craig, are, significantly,
not deists, but Christians. Traditional deism suffered because a
number of influential Christian philosophers such as John Locke
(The Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695) and Samuel Clarke (A
Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, 1705) argued that
God
De Omnibus Dubitandum
[‘On the doubtfulness of everything’]
A satire against the dogmatists
Arise my Hume and yield your Scottish Fork,
Raze all systems and sack Scholastic York.
Observe the craft then falsify its claims
As Franklin did when testing Mesmer’s games.
Imagination thus one might conclude,
A fact to some, to others simply rude.
No dogma shall persist, no magic flute,
No Monads sing with Hegel’s absolute.
Behold my Hume how dialectics thrive
By utter fantasies are kept alive.
Each fervent man defends his sacred creed
Be it a Marx or others of that breed.
Oh look how great our Cosmos, well design’d:
A worthless sketch whose author(s) left unsign’d.
If add too much into that common sense
What verb might take then but a timeless tense?
Go matchless wit a statement senseless write,
Like Cantor’s Set, exhaust Reason’s light.
A style obscure do not such thoughts excuse
Which are thought to irk yet made to confuse.
Next praised a Beattie his God-given wits,
As skilful Sophists filling thus what fits.
Come, dogmatist, infer to reach your Cause,
Forget all facts, dismiss good Newton’s laws.
Your statement’s false, it lacks a solid ground;
Though valid, th’ argument may not be sound.
Throw thus your self-serv’d books to Etna’s flames
And let them cross the Styx in nameless names.
© JOSEPH BOU CHARAA 2022
Joseph Bou Charaa, a.k.a. Joseph Sopholaos, is a Lebanese
writer and translator on Mana Platform. He holds an M1 in
Arabic Linguistics & an M1 in General Philosophy, both
from Lebanese University. He recently translated Nigel
Warburton’s Philosophy: The Classics into Arabic (2021).
Christianity could be made as rationally defensible as deism. Swin-
burne and Craig et al may inadvertently be having the same effect.
Today the deist also faces a much more developed enemy in
atheism. Yet it shares with atheism a strong dislike of organised reli-
gion; so it needs to differentiate itself from that. It will have its
work cut out to ensure that its dislike of religion, often expressed
very vituperatively, does its own claims less harm than good.
Sometimes the baby can swim out of the bath-water. But
whether today one can persuade many people that God can sur-
vive the arguments for the death of religion, based entirely on
rational arguments for his existence, is less than obvious.
© ROBERT GRIFFITHS 2022
Robert Griffiths is a retired philosophy teacher currently writing a
book called God and the Philosophers.
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 17
God
How Theology Pre-Empts Philosophy
Tony McKenna relates how theology beat philosophy to fundamental metaphysics.
M
any people today still hold the stereotypical view of
medieval theologians: a bunch of monks squabbling
interminably over how many angels can fit onto the
head of a pin. Yet some of them were profound and subtle
thinkers. Some of their metaphysical arguments surprisingly
anticipate those of much later philosophers.
Hegel/Eriugena
One of the most famous and significant openers in philosophy
was brought to us courtesy of G.W.F. Hegel’s Science of Logic
(1812). In its first chapter, Hegel attempts to respond to the
problem of having false assumptions in thinking by starting with
a category which has been shorn of all presuppositions, deter-
minations and qualities, such that it simply is. Or to say the
same, the philosopher begins with the category of ‘pure being’.
Now according to Hegel, pure being “would not be held fast
in its purity if it contained any determination or content which
could be distinguished in it” (p.82). But, continues the philoso-
pher, that which is ‘pure indeterminateness and emptiness’ is at
the same time nothing whatsoever. And thus, from within itself,
the category of being issues forth the category of nothingness.
Having established the identity of being and nothingness by
the means by which one passes into the other, Hegel then argues
that this movement – ‘the immediate vanishing of the one in the
other’ – is the truth of their mutual relationship. The truth of
being and nothing, therefore, is contained in the category of
‘becoming’. So ‘becoming’ is the next category to emerge in
Hegel’s analysis; and in this way each category, possessed of its
own life and movement, gives rise to the following, in a ghostly
metaphysical ballet in which Hegel himself seems to be little more
than a spectator. There is something protean, something poetic,
in the way this world-historic philosopher delves into the onto-
logical depths, locating the most elemental categories of being,
capturing their movement and inner life, before eventually going
on to meticulously unfurl a whole logical universe. It provides a
masterclass in the ‘dialectical’ method which, in the modern epoch,
Hegel would bring to a systematic and comprehensive fruition.
And yet, a thousand years earlier, a thinker whose work has
been rendered faint by the mists of time also provided a pro-
foundly dialectical homily; only in John Scotus Eriugena’s case
he was contemplating not the nature of being but the nature of
God. The ninth century Celtic theologian drew heavily on Neo-
Platonist sources in evoking a transcendental and impersonal
God; but it is what he does with these sources which has such
stunning originality and such dialectically drawn prescience.
To summarise Eriugena’s argument, God exists because he
is the creator of all things, and he must exist in order to set his
scheme of creation into play. Yet since he is the creator of all
things, God is not a thing out there in the universe, alongside
a multitude of others. Rather, he is the very condition for being;
and he is, therefore, something other than being.
But what exists which is in some way other than being? That
which lacks being is nothing. Hence God is ‘nothing’. And yet
18 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
this nothing becomes; for, as Eriugena would point out, God “in
itself neither is, nor was, nor shall be, for it is understood to be
none of the things that exist because it surpasses all things, but
when by a certain ineffable descent into the things that are… it
alone is to be found in all things’. In other words, by becoming,
God is found in all things. In ‘from God to nothing to becom-
ing’, we encounter a movement which foreshadows, in spooky
outline, the Hegelian trajectory, in which something is dialecti-
cally derived out of nothing.
It is certainly true that Eriugena confounds the categories of
‘existence’ and ‘being’ in his approach, and his philosophy is not
systematic in the way Hegel’s is, but it is nevertheless remark-
IMAGE © VENANTIUS J PINTO 2022. TO SEE MORE OF HIS ART, PLEASE VISIT BEHANCE.NET/VENANTIUSPINTO
able and delightful to encounter such lithe and luminous dialec-
tical thought in the midst of what has been considered by many
to be a philosophical dark age.
Spinoza/Augustine
Baruch Spinoza begins his Ethics (1677) by outlining the infinite
substance that for him constitutes reality, saying that it is ‘self-
caused’. Later, he famously derives out of this one substance two
particular attributes (out of a possible infinite number of them).
These two attributes of substance are ‘thought’ and ‘extension’.
One inevitable problem which stems from this is that the two
attributes cannot be different from the one substance, cannot
be other to it. Thought or extension are not other than sub-
stance since there is nothing other than it. Thought and exten-
sion, therefore, cannot be conceived as separate substances, as
they would be for Descartes. The one infinite substance cannot
be limited by anything outside itself, according to Spinoza
because if substance were to be demarked by some external other
it would be finite and partial. So a paradox arises from the rather
obvious point that it seems as if thought and extension are nev-
ertheless limited by one another by standing in a dualistic rela-
tion to one another. For example, not all thought is physically
extended, while all matter is.
Spinoza endeavours to overcome this apparent paradox in sev-
eral ways. First he argues that experiencing the one substance as
either thought or extension is a product of intellectual percep-
tion only: the attributes are ‘‘that which the intellect perceives
as constituting the essence of substance’’. This is known as the
‘subjectivist’ interpretation of Spinoza. He also suggests that
thought and extension simply don’t limit one another: ‘a body is
not limited by thought, nor a thought by body’. Individual
thoughts and bodies, as modifications of attributes, are finite,
and do exist in relation to other finite modifications; but thought
per se, and extension per se, cannot limit either one another nor
the infinite substance, but instead harmoniously express differ-
ent aspects of the same eternal substance. Further, Spinoza explic-
itly argues that the attributes mind and extension do not “con-
stitute two entities, or two different substances. For it is the nature
of substance that each of its attributes is conceived through itself,
inasmuch as all the attributes it has have always existed simulta-
neously in it… each expresses the reality or being of substance”
God
(Ethics, p.51). Thought and extension are merely different expres-
sions of the same substance, which parallel one another for eter-
nity, without the possibility of thought giving rise to extension,
or vice versa (“eternity appertains to the nature of substance…
therefore eternity must appertain to each of the attributes”, p.63).
However, what is Spinoza’s substance/attribute/mode
system, other than a more secular take on the age-old theolog-
ical problem of the issue of the manifestation and knowability
in the finite world of the infinite God?
The third century Graeco-Roman philosopher Plotinus
grappled with this problem. Like Spinoza, he begins with a self-
sufficient unlimited being which issues multiplicity from itself,
in this case in the form of ‘emanations’. And just as with Spinoza
(or at least the subjectivist interpretation of him), Plotinus argues
that ‘the intelligence’ is able to contemplate the pristine, infi-
nite one only in the form of what ‘emanates’ out of it: “In turn-
ing toward itself The One sees. It is this seeing that constitutes
The Intelligence.”
But perhaps the most interesting classical thinker to antici-
pate aspects of Spinoza’s thought is the Neo-Platonist theolo-
gian Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD). Augustine speaks to
the problem of how multiple finite attributes of infinite being
can relate to one another without rendering the infinite finite.
He does this in a simple but brilliant way.
Whereas Spinoza - responding to the problem he had inher-
ited from Descartes - was focused on matter and mind, Augus-
tine is concerned with the Trinity. He is responding to a prob-
lem which had beset Christianity from the Council of Nicaea
in 325 AD onwards, revolving around the idea of God as Father,
Son and Holy Spirit. None of the members of the divine Trin-
ity can be separate from the others, for then God would be sun-
dered from his manifestations, which would remain other to
him. At the same time, how can they co-exist as a multiplicity
without each member being dependent on and limiting the
others, and so making them finite?
Augustine, drawing on Platonism, argues that the structure
of the transcendental and infinite reality, the Trinity, is mirrored
in the human soul. In the soul there are three properties:
memory, understanding, and will – ‘‘the Trinity which is God,
in our own memory, understanding, will’’ (On the Trinity, Book
XV, Chapter 20, 426). These properties are related, but not
causally. When one wills something, one understands that one is
willing – but the understanding does not set into motion the will:
it does not causally determine the will. Likewise, one can remem-
ber understanding something in the past without the memory in
any way determining that which was understood. There is an ele-
ment of the wilful in memory, when we struggle to remember
something, yet the quality and type of memory we call forth is
in no way itself determined by the will. In other words, Augus-
tine finds a solution to the problem of an infinite multiplicity in
the human mind: the members of the Trinity don’t condition
any other in a casual fashion, but merely pervade one another,
harmoniously and organically, as ‘attributes’ of the single divine
substance. “All together not three, but one wisdom. For so also
both the Father is God, and the Son God, and the Holy Ghost
God, and all three together one God.” (Chapter 17).
Fichte/Luria
The philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was
formed, in the main, in dialogue with Immanuel Kant. Kant had
20 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
theorized a subject, a bearer of perception and understanding,
which applied ‘forms’ and ‘categories’ to raw reality or the ‘thing-
in-itself’ in order to generate our experience of objects as we
perceive them. One problem Fichte was dealing with, was that
the transcendental subject brought to bear the forms and cate-
gories on the external world, but remained in some way logically
prior to them. But if the forms and categories could not be applied
to the subject itself (since it was logically prior to them), then
the subject could not be understood by the mind, which requires
its information to be formed through these categories. Hence
the transcendental subject is in some way placed beyond the
boundaries of pure reason, and unknowable.
Fichte responded to the problem of the unconditioned sub-
ject by resorting to the notions of ‘practical reason’ and ‘abso-
lute ground’. Like Kant, he argued that ‘the I itself must previ-
ously be posited’ for any contents of empirical consciousness to
be rendered intelligible. In other words, to perceive the world
requires a unified consciousness – an ‘I’ – to perceive it. The I,
therefore, was the ‘absolute ground’ from which the intelligi-
ble world sprang. However, unlike Kant, Fichte was not refer-
ring to an individual subject here, but rather to the ‘absolute’
subject which provides the ultimate source of being, and which
itself required no further grounding than its own spontaneous
and practical activity (hence the appeal to practical reason). And
yet – as Fichte was compelled to acknowledge – the absolute
and infinite ground of being issued from itself all the finitude
and causally determined empirical objects of the world. Once
again, it therefore generated something which seemed to be
other and in some way alien to its own infinite, implacable
nature. But how can anything be other than the infinite?
Fichte attempted to draw the relation between the infinite
grounds and the finite things in terms of a creative negation. For
the absolute subject to manifest, it needed to create a terrain onto
which it could stamp itself – emanate out into. And thus from the
subject issues forth the non-subject. In Fichtean terms, absolute
being separates out from itself in the guise of its own alienation.
But what is this idea other than a more secular and system-
atic rendition of the Lurianic Kabbalist take on the origins of
the universe?
Isaac Luria (1534-1572) began with God as the infinite sub-
stance, Ein Sof – that which is ‘unlimited’ or ‘endless’. The
notion of such an impersonal rational God had its genesis in
Ancient Greek philosophy, and Luria is faced with a problem
that beset the Greeks from Parmenides onwards (if not before)
– the problem of how infinite, perfect being can manifest in the
sphere of the material and changing. How can the finite, the
tragic, and the human exist in the presence of a single almighty
unknowable perfection?
Luria’s solution is poetic, filled with the type of melancholic
grandeur that perfumes outward to encompass the universe.
For the world of multiple finite temporal things to exist, that
initial substance Ein Sof performs an act of self-mutilation. It
carves out within itself a region which is other to its own uni-
fied and harmonious nature; a dark space, a place of exile from
its own essence. The one substance then endeavours to fill this
space with divine light; but in the transition the outpouring of
light is fractured, and into the abyss – into that realm of impla-
cable darkness both godless and lonely – only divine ‘sparks’
fall. On this account, then, creation is a moment of sundering,
of disunity. The divine nature has, in a single act of cosmologi-

© HARLEY SCHWADRON 2022 TO SEE MORE, PLEASE VISIT SCHWADRONCARTOONS.COM
cal trauma, split itself from itself, with elements of its eternal
brightness lingering in a world which is otherwise alienated
from godliness and perfection. And we, the scurrying, fallible
creatures which emerge in such an alienated world, spend our
lives bent down by the loneliness and the yearning which comes
from wanting to be united with God again.
Isaac Luria formed his luminous account in the aftermath of
the Sephardi exodus from Spain – the period following 1492 when
Spanish Jews were banished from the realm by an edict of Isabella
and Ferdinand. In the period which followed, the Sephardi Jews
were still subject to the persecutions of the Inquisition, and
remained the haunted, hunted victims of the dark wells of anti-
Semitism which had accumulated in Europe across the ages. Even
in places where they weren’t ghettoised, where they didn’t face
active prohibition and persecution – such as the Ottoman terri-
tories, or, to the North, modernising secular cities such as Ams-
terdam – the Sephardi Jews continued to exist in a limbo of sorts.
Not only were they in physical exile, but they endured a spiritual
exile too, having had their books burned, their synagogues
destroyed: the connection to much of their past had been shat-
tered. In the works of Luria, one too is an exile: one has to seek
out the divine sparks which have become nestled inside people,
secreted within the world of the ordinary. In this same way the
Sephardi had to recover the divine sparks of their own lost tradi-
tions, in a world which was alien and other to them, and which
at times must have felt like a perpetual wintery remove.
Luria’s myth attains a certain poetic pathos, for it expresses the
historical tragedy of a whole ethnic group; but in my view it speaks
to the future as well. In Luria’s vision one encounters the Fichtean
approach in its outlines. True, Fichte’s was a rational, self-refer-
ential philosophy which emerged in a systematic form as a con-
scious response to a definitive intellectual dilemma. Luria’s the-
ology, on the other hand, is a beautiful and intuitive allegory which
syphons the historical hopes and grievances of a people almost
unconsciously into its tragic arc. And yet, the answer is the same
in each: Ein Sof separates itself from itself in order to manifest
itself in the world. It carries out a divine act of alienation. In Fichte
the infinite substance does the same. The subject, in its own self-
alienation, generates from within itself the non-subject.
God
Descartes/Avicenna
René Descartes’ cogito – ‘I think, therefore I am’ – is arguably
the founding principle of modern Western philosophy. It
resulted from Descartes’ use of the method of doubt which was
to become so much a part of the spirit of science which had
begun with the Renaissance, and of the emerging humanism.
Descartes (1596-1650) uses the method of doubt to elicit truth.
He begins by imagining an omnipotent but malevolent entity:
“an evil demon… who has used all his artifice to deceive me” (Med-
itations, 1641). Such an entity would have the power to fabricate
the heavens and the earth – to call into being a whole universe of
illusion, a celestial temple of fakery, such that even the things you
lay your hands upon, the people you encounter, the stars which
wink in the darkness at night, are all sham products of a specially
contrived chimera. Indeed, Descartes takes his thought experiment
so far as to doubt the existence of his own body: “I will consider
myself as having no hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or senses, but as
believing wrongly I have all these things.” It is then that the pithy
but brilliant revelation comes: even in doubt, the one thing that
cannot be doubted is the existence of the doubter himself. The one
thing which must remain true is that even deception reveals the
existence of the being who is in the process of being deceived: and
so the argument continues, down to ‘I think, therefore I am’. The
‘I think’ is a masterstroke of thinking, then. In it there is also the
premonition of Descartes’ dualism, for the thinking substance has
been derived in theoretical isolation from the rest of reality.
But was that line of thinking original? Over half a millen-
nium before, the great Islamic philosopher Avicenna (980-1037
CE) conducted his own similar thought experiment, now known
as ‘the floating man’.
Avicenna had been imprisoned at a time of great political
strife, and was left to deliberate on the nature of being. In the
confines of his cell his physical movements were restricted, but
his mind could still roam freely, and his memory was able to
dwell upon the rich experience and study of a lifetime. In any
event, like Descartes, Avicenna performed a thought experi-
ment in which mind was abstracted from matter.
Like Descartes, Avicenna excludes his own physical senses and
the objects of the external world in order to whittle down being
to its most primordial and elemental throb. Avicenna does this
by imagining a man who has been created ‘at a stroke’ – fully
formed, fully grown – and at the moment he’s called into exis-
tence, his body is suspended in the air “with his vision shrouded
from perceiving all external objects… not buffeted by any per-
ceptible current of the air that supports him, his limbs separated
and kept out of contact with one another, so that they do not feel
each other.” Avicenna concludes: ‘There is no doubt that he would
affirm his own existence, although not affirming the reality of
any of his limbs or inner organs, his bowels, or heart or brain or
any external thing. Indeed he would affirm the existence of this
self of his while not affirming that it had any length, breadth or
depth.” As with Descartes, Avicenna has derived the existence of
his self from nothing else, and especially, from no body. And from
this it is no great leap to describe ‘thought’, or in a more tradi-
tional idiom ‘soul’, as ‘substance’ and possibly, as ‘infinite’.
© TONY MCKENNA 2022
Tony McKenna’s books include The Dictator, the Revolution, the
Machine: A Political Account of Joseph Stalin (Sussex Academic
Press), The War Against Marxism (Bloomsbury), and most
recently a novel The Face of the Waters (Vulpine Press).
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 21
God
A Theological Self
Stuart Hannabuss journeys into the human condition with Søren Kierkegaard.
A contemporary
sketch of
Kierkegaard
e tend to think of faith as a matter of personal
W
haps spiritually.
choice. It is very much up to you, we say, wish-
ing to give other people the space to live their
lives their way. We might think of ourselves all
on a journey through life, growing physically, mentally, and per-
It is often hard work since meaning and purpose are elusive
and moral values contentious and slippery. It seems a lonely path;
it is easy to lose hope and get depressed. ‘Keeping the faith’ is
hard work at times: it calls for maturity and sensitivity to realise
what a challenge it can be. We are often told, and may come to
believe, that we fall short because we are not mature and sensi-
tive enough, not far enough yet along the path of that life jour-
ney, and that’s why we feel unhappy. Not just marching to a dif-
ferent drum, but entirely on the wrong road.
We can give way to despair; and then that state of despair
creates more despair – that self-reflexive spiral. Fernando
Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (1991) speaks of being myself “at
the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss
demands it: I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist
so that I can spin.” This preoccupation with a loss of personal
control is familiar today. It led Pessoa to refer to life as “a meta-
22 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
physical mistake on the part of matter… We are isolated within
ourselves from ourselves.”
A Leap of Faith
As we reflect on what it’s all for, it is natural to consider what
others have said. Perhaps they might put our thoughts and feel-
ings into words better than we can ourselves. Even when we dis-
agree with them, it’s still worth doing. For some, the search for
purpose and meaning takes them in the direction of religious
faith, which can provide unique insights into issues of purpose,
meaning, and values.
Here it starts to get personal. Usually as we increasingly con-
firm what we believe and value there comes a tipping point where
commitment and identity become involved. There’s a stage at
which we feel obliged to commit to a basic position, and for some
people this happens when rational inquiry and analysis based on
empirical warrant seem inadequate to fully explain what to
believe. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55)
– often thought of as ‘the father of existentialism’ – famously
called this tipping point a ‘leap of faith’. Typically this involves
an acknowledgement not just that you believe there is a God or
supernatural dimension, or that you have a strong sense of the
numinous (say in nature or in the cosmos), but a commitment
to a firmly articulated ideology, creed, or dogma, such as ‘Jesus
is the God-man’ or ‘the transformation of substance in the
Eucharist’, to take Christian examples, since Kierkegaard was a
Christian. This is going beyond what Socrates called ‘the unex-
amined life’ and moving into declaring ‘I believe’: and not just ‘I
believe that…’ but ‘I believe in…’ – that is, to put your faith, a.k.a.
trust in something, doing so in full acknowledgement that others
might think us radically wrong. The leap of faith is a tricky step
to take, because such faith is perceived as coming with baggage,
such as guilt; so difficult that ‘fear and trembling’ (ironically, the
title of one of Kierkegaard’s books) appears to capture what the
leap of faith is all about. If we take the leap, others can always
think we are mad, bad, or sad, as they choose.
Like so many long-dead authors, Kierkegaard may seem remote
to us now. Many of the ideas and controversies of his time are of
interest to specialists alone. Even so, there are parallels with his
world and today’s. Secular or not, we still try to understand the
implications of what we actually believe in and why: those grand
existential questions, which for the believer include the paradox of
material corruption and the divine, or the truth claims of a dwin-
dling church, or making sense of concepts like redemption. We
wonder at times whether our decision to believe has been made too
subjectively or emotionally, without enough rational investigation
and reflection. Then we ask whether being too rational can get in
the way. We both respect and doubt ourselves for harbouring
doubts about our beliefs. We call our faith by the more neutral and
socially-acceptable word ‘belief’, because we all have beliefs, many

of them completely innocuous. But since faith entails pendulum
swings from joy to doubt, for many the journey is arduous. John
Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), in which Christian faces off
the giants Despair and Apollyon and the dangers of Vanity Fair, is
now for many a mere literary curiosity. The New Atheists like
Richard Dawkins aren’t the only ones to have deconstructed tra-
ditional religious ideas and the assumptions on which they’re based.
Nowadays Kierkegaard’s scepticism about the church is widely
shared. In his day he was well-known as anti-clerical: today the
issue seems obsolete except where faith claims and real life clash,
as on gay marriage, for example. Yet, all that having been said, we
nevertheless subscribe to the idea – the optimistic narrative – that
life is indeed a journey and we are making progress on it, even if
we’re moving like crabs.
The Sickness Unto Death: Insight into the Self
These are all themes explored by Kierkegaard. In the title of his
book The Sickness unto Death (1849) he refers to a phrase of Jesus’s
in John 11:4, “This sickness is not unto death”, where Jesus is
explaining to the disciples that the dead Lazarus has only ‘fallen
asleep’ and can be awakened. Kierkegaard uses the phrase as a
launch-pad for a subtle investigation into psychological and spir-
itual growth, or; how and why it is that we believe. Kierkegaard’s
overall argument in The Sickness unto Death is that personal
God
growth at best aspires to attain a spiritual relationship with God
– and not just acknowledging ‘God up there’, but the possibility
of a human encounter with the divine through Jesus Christ.
Kierkegaard’s writings – originally in Danish but long since
available in English – are no easy read. His style is intricate, he
uses several noms de plume to represent variant points of view,
and the content is complex anyway. Nevertheless, The Sickness
unto Death speaks to us today, and not merely to people of faith.
In part this is because what he says in it about the self and self-
awareness is still relevant and convincing. There are times when
we don’t want to be ourselves, when our very self-conscious-
ness seems to make things worse – when we’re ‘isolated within
ourselves from ourselves’. We get busy with the ‘immediate’,
and this reduces and impedes our sense of what is possible: ‘pos-
sibility is a mirror that does not tell the truth’. So we feel frus-
tration and despair. One paradox of self-awareness is that it
encourages us to rationalise our feelings of despair yet makes
us feel vulnerable to them. Kierkegaard says that fatalism and
stoicism – ideas which have often been seen as a seed-bed for
existentialism – are of little help. All we have left is to think for
ourselves about meaning and purpose. These are presented as
illusions in the existential novels of Albert Camus (above all, in
The Plague, 1947), but Kierkegaard takes our search for spiri-
tual identity in very much a Christian direction.
‘Kierkegaard’ is Danish
for ‘Churchyard’
Painting by Chris Gill 2022
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 23
God
itual journey’ (call it what you will), we know opposition-pairs
such as religion and secularism, or personal freedom and social
obligation. And the many ‘honest to God’ [with regard to
doubts] re-interpretations of religion in recent years – for
instance, deconstructing the anthropomorphic idea of God, or
debunking the virgin birth or images of heaven – indicate how
things keep changing. Ultimately, Kierkegaard suggested,
Socrates was concerned with knowledge, yet spiritual awaken-
ing goes beyond that. The evidential base, and the matter and
manner of the journey, are different.

A Christian Way & its Claims

In The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard tries to tease out what
form a spiritual journey might take. Being self-aware is neces-
sary for personal growth, yet makes us vulnerable to despair.
And even if we do not think of it in terms of sin, guilt is bad
enough to cast us down, triggering despair upon experiencing
it. We feel despair at being alone – the idea of existential angst
Kierkegaard from a
different angle
we often hear about stems originally from Kierkegaard – and we
by Woodrow often distrust the promptings of conscience, which seem unreli-
Cowher ably subjective and vulnerable merely to what we think we want
and how we feel. But to think in terms of society’s expectations
distracts us from the personal, which is the locus of change. So
A Socratic Way: An Inability to Understand for Kierkegaard then (as for many of us now), the church does
The Sickness unto Death has an interesting subtitle: A Christian not help, being ritualistic, pedantic, and condescending. His view
Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Many of contemporary preaching was that it was mediocre. Just as
books have been published on themes like this, as a branch of today, it was often trite, theologically naïve, and sententiously
the well-being and mindfulness wave. They highlight personal delivered. But this is where his ideas about subjectivity matter,
growth and self-knowledge – things many of us look for in one because for him subjective experience of God or religious truth
place after another, often in vain. Examples extend from text- is a core component of, even a pre-requisite, for faith, even if at
books like Kate Loewenthal’s Mental Health and Religion (1995) times it seems to be an oxymoron – rely on your own impres-
to pastoral guides like Samuel Wells’s Love Mercy: the Twelve
Steps of Forgiveness (2020). Some take us confidently towards a
deeper, fuller faith, while others comment on how interesting,
and perhaps misleading, the journey is.
The ‘Socratic method’ refers to the technique used by Socrates
(as reported in Plato’s dialogues) to elicit the truth about what
people really think, as opposed to what they thought they think.
Socrates coaxes his interlocutors to the position where they
realise that they didn’t know what they thought they knew after
all. Socrates called it a kind of ‘midwifery’. Kierkegaard uses the
framework of the Socratic method in two interesting ways. First
he draws us through a series of stages discussing our personal
growth from self-awareness through depression to deeper faith.
Secondly he encourages us to acknowledge that only by accept-
ing faith as a destination, and grace as a means, can we fully grow.
In order to get there (we see this in his writings as a whole)
Kierkegaard knew he had to examine the core problem of faith,
which he, like the New Atheists today, understood as ‘belief in
what cannot be proven’. For him, Christian belief involved a
paradox, a dialectic of two opposites: belief and uncertainty. In
the arena of theology there are many such tensions – between
rational analysis and personal spiritual experience; objectivity
and subjectivity; free will and God’s omniscience; or appear-
ance and reality. Kierkegaard thought he had to engage with Lone Journey
all this in order to find his way on faith – something we must by Dror Rosenski 2022
also do today if we want to make this choice. Today in our ‘spir-

24 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022

 God God
sions of the real, while admitting they may well be wrong.
In the final section of The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard
examines “the despair that is conscious of being despair and there- Secrets
fore is conscious of having a self in which there is something eter-
nal.” Thinking both about the personal dilemmas of the believer Can we ever write about matters
and the wider indifference to spirituality in his society, that we cannot speak of –
Kierkegaard returns to the ways in which the immediacy of the the thing or two which determine
busy world impedes our view of what is possible, even making who we are and what we do?
the possible into an ‘illusion’. Kierkegaard sees despair in two
ways. The despair that best copes with despair is ‘a feminine When can we hint at the harm
despair’, he says: ‘despair not to will to be oneself: despair in weak- we’ve hardly survived;
ness’. The typical ‘masculine’ approach is to rely far more on ‘defy- the realization that our allure
ing’ the thing despaired of. But perhaps we can understand this is due to deformity?
best not in crude gender terms, but with reference to the central
paradox of the Christian faith – of God becoming man in Jesus Sure, we confess in code
Christ – in which His very weakness became His strength. here, there and everywhere,
beneath our breaths
The Isolated Self is Male & Female and over their heads
Kierkegaard then shifts ground to consider whether there is a
typology of belief and response. Again he uses the categories But when can we ever speak
‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, but instead of talking in terms of plainly, of our obscene pain?
biology, he characterises the ‘feminine’ (for example) as an atti- To whom and how might we
tude, which he explicitly says is not literally feminine in the sense unburden ourselves, artlessly?
that ‘women’ (let alone all women) are like this. Rather, the atti-
tude like that of Jesus himself as he appears in the Gospels, wash- “The answer might be never”
ing the feet of the disciples, or as the wounded healer offering whispers art, to which we owe all
grace through pain and sacrifice. Something, then, at the heart – our masks, wisdom and lives.
of the Christian paradox that ‘blessed are the meek’, ‘turn the Only transformation will set us free.
other cheek’, ‘love your neighbour…’ However, for any modern
reader this raises semantic and sociological questions, as to, for © YAHIA LABABIDI 2022
example, whether there is something inherently ‘feminine’ and Yahia Lababidi is the author of Signposts to Elsewhere
‘submissive’ about being susceptible to an awareness of the (aphorisms), Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to
numinous; whether women really are more ‘religious’ than men; Bellydancing (essays), The Artist as Mystic
even whether women are more spiritually gullible than men. (conversations), and, most recently, Learning to Pray
Kierkegaard does not pursue the analogy this far: his feminine (poetry & aphorisms) and Desert Songs (poetry &
is merely a device for defining one kind of faith response which photography)
he claims starkly contrasts with the other.
Clearly, the other approach is ‘masculine’. In a surprisingly
modern way Kierkegaard argues that many us – and arguably,
especially men – deal with despair with stoic defiance. They
take a pull-your-socks-up attitude: God helps those who help depression. It is also theologically relevant for its thoughts on
themselves; deal with it; man up. Kierkegaard characterises this how far (or whether) personal growth is, and should be seen
stance as ‘I refuse to be erased’ – a statement which has all the as, a spiritual journey. Both aspects are evidently relevant to
heroic tone of the existentialist. However, his wider argument professional work in therapy, or pastoral care and spiritual
is that this defiant stoicism impedes both psychological and spir- direction, and his emphasis on the subjective and the reflec-
itual growth, because it emphasises passivity in the face of suf- tive self chimes with modern psychotherapy and mental health
fering and leads to denial or repression of feelings – a closing- practice.
in of personality and spirit. This has personal resonance for Kierkegaard speaks of ‘the theological self’. His examination
Kierkegaard, not only because it is set within a case for under- of the journey of the self might lead in directions which many
standing the spiritual journey best through accepting the cen- of us, as atheists, agnostics or humanists, find illogical and
tral role of subjective experience, but also because Kierkegaard implausible; but his call for us to make both an external and an
is, like Schopenhauer, a gloomy commentator on human affairs. internal journey of discovery and self-discovery is nonetheless
For that reason alone he might be misunderstood today. entirely valid. His work may seem long ago and far away, yet
revisiting it can offer us unexpected insights.
Conclusions © DR STUART HANNABUSS 2022
Kierkegaard’s description of spiritual growth is psychologically Stuart Hannabuss is a retired honorary chaplain at the University
relevant today for its emphasis on subjectivity and coping with of Aberdeen and voluntary counsellor for NHS Scotland.

October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 25

 God
Faith & An Unreliable God
Patrick Wilson argues that it’s irrational to trust an untrustworthy God.
t is important for many theists to show that their belief is
I rational, and this often involves them rejecting obviously
irrational beliefs. Holding that the Earth is six thousand
years old is irrational because it directly conflicts with
strong scientific evidence to the contrary. Saying that God could
move any hypothetical object while at the same time being capa-
ble of creating a rock so vast that even He could not budge it is
also irrational because the two claims are logically incompati-
ble. Nevertheless, some religious claims are quite feasible.
Someone who, for instance, thinks God guided the world’s evo-
lutionary process or in some sense inspired human authors to
write sacred texts can often reconcile their faith with an open
and affirming attitude towards scientific discovery and analyti-
cal thinking. However, in this short essay I will argue that it is
unreasonable to have faith in a God who appears highly untrust-
worthy. That is, even if an untrustworthy God existed, we could
not justify faith as a reasonable response to such a deity.
While ‘faith’ is commonly defined by atheists as ‘belief with-
out evidence’, in practice, someone having faith in someone or
BACKGROUND IMAGE © PATH SLOPU 2020 CREATIVE COMMONS
something implies more than mere intellectual assent, either
with or without evidence. Few Christians, Muslims, or Jews
would claim to ‘have faith in’ Satan, despite many believing that
something called Satan exists. So ‘having faith (in)’ suggests an
endorsement of and commitment to a person, idea, or institu-
tion. Similarly, the act of ‘trusting’ goes beyond simple affir-
mation of existence. The entrustor chooses to live as if the
entrusted will not betray them. For the theist, ‘faith’ and ‘trust’
are virtual synonyms.
Now, having faith in an untrustworthy God is different from
believing in an evil God. Believers in an evil God affirm the
existence of an immoral deity. By contrast, those who have faith
in an untrustworthy God align themselves with an understand-
ing of the divine whose character they consider untrustworthy.
Having faith in an untrustworthy person or thing is not so
uncommon: people often choose to put their faith in romantic
partners who repeatedly let them down. Nor is it unheard of
for voters to have faith in politicians commonly acknowledged
to be corrupt, even by them. However, in both cases, the moral-
ity and rationality of maintaining these faith positions are easily
criticised. Religious faith, on the other hand, is often given a
free pass. Critiquing the claims made by religions and object-
ing to portrayals of God are common; but questioning the ratio-
nality of having faith in an untrustworthy God even if that God
turns out to be real is less common: “My God might look like
a monster – a violent bully who once demanded racial cleans-
ing and who allows great suffering in the world; but if he or she
is real, you had better follow him or her” – or so the argument
goes. However, absolute submission on the basis of retributive,
fear-based threats is rarely seen as the best exercise of reason.
Some theists argue that the goodness and therefore trust-
26 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
worthiness of the divine should not be questioned because as
mere mortals we have no right to question our creator, and
moreover, God Himself set up morality. But their argument is
fallacious as it derives an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’: God did some-
thing, and we ought to respond in a certain way. Moreover, the
values of a creator do not necessarily determine the meaning or
values of the creation. The inventors and developers of auto-
mobiles, tanks, and atomic bombs do not by virtue of their sci-
entific ingenuity have a monopoly on how their creations should
be used. Likewise, if a God fashioned our world and maintains
the capacity to determine events which occur in it, this deity’s
responsibility for outcomes which appear unjust might be criti-
cised in the same way that subjects of a state might question
their rulers. This weak form of moral argument need not and
should not give any deity an ethical get-out clause, resulting
merely from their creative ability.
Questions about God’s trustworthiness can also be overlooked
when exploring various speculative outcomes: “My religious
leader and/or sacred texts might present God in a terrifying way;
but if I do not follow this deity and they turn out to really exist,
I could face a horrific punishment.” Setting aside the fact that
many competing groups claim their God punishes those who are
not loyal to their specific religion, a person who decides to follow
one particular frightening and morally incomprehensible deity
still has little reason to trust that this God would not deceive
them about, for instance, their salvation. Why would a God,
whose values and ambitions are so different from one’s own, be
beyond deception? More generally, an untrustworthy God pro-
vides no basis for assuming any level of divine protection. Just as
some theists believe life’s hardships could be blessings in dis-
guise, seemingly good events (even salvation experiences) may
in fact be part of an evil God’s plan to inflict meaningless suffer-
ing, by giving false hope. And thus the betrayer adds emotional
manipulation to an already bad situation.
Evaluating the behaviour and personality of others is essen-
tial for making reasonable decisions about whom to trust. So
having faith in a violent, uncaring or dishonest deity while refus-
ing to tolerate these characteristics in politicians, friends, or
romantic partners, involves an unreasonable double standard.
Of course, few people have faith in deities who they think lie to
them or pointlessly punish them. Nevertheless, many trust in a
God who could. When considering the reasonableness of par-
ticular faith commitments, we should not simply consider their
scientific or logical feasibility: a strong correlation between one’s
personal moral values and the divine’s is essential to having a
rational theistic commitment.
© PATRICK WILSON 2022
Patrick Wilson holds degrees in Theology, Philosophy, and History.
He hails from Ireland and has worked as a teacher in a variety of
countries.
 The Strange Story of
The Soviet Spinoza
Lesley Chamberlain on the Spinozists’ dangerous dance with the Bolsheviks.
hen after 1991 the Soviet archives were briefly
W opened, a surprising suicide note was found
among the papers of the Defence Ministry. One
of the country’s leading philosophers had planned
to kill himself in 1931 under pressure from Stalin, and the cause
of his despair was that he had preferred Spinoza to Lenin as a
teacher. His name was Abram Moiseievich Deborin, and, had
history taken a different course, Spinoza might have become
the Soviet Union’s default thinker. It might not have changed
the political reality, but philosophy itself would have survived
as something more than explicating Marxist-Leninist fantasy.
Spinoza in Russia
Deborin left an interesting story behind him, hardly known in
the West. Born in 1881, he graduated from Bern University,
in Switzerland. He seemed to Lenin in the mid 1920s to be the
best philosopher in Russia.
In truth by then there weren’t many left to compare him with,
for many leading academics in philosophy, sociology, and eco-
nomics had been forcibly exiled by Lenin on the famous ‘phi-
losophy steamer’ in 1922. With their families, together with out-
standing religious philosophers, those unwanted scholars and
academics filled two ships, with a total payload of over two hun-
dred people forced into exile.
In their absence, Lenin found himself in a quandary when
looking to staff Moscow’s recently founded Institute of Red Pro-
fessors. Deborin seemed uniquely capable of teaching at the
right level, yet he wasn’t quite trustworthy. The problem was
he had begun as a Menshevik, and Menshevism was a path Lenin
had already left behind. Lenin had once idolized the Menshevik
leader Georgy Plekhanov; but then Menshevism seemed too
close to German social democracy and lacking in revolutionary
potential. So, said Lenin, Deborin had to be watched.
That was the crucial moment for Spinoza too, because Plekhanov
had admired him. Was this Spinoza endorsed by a Menshevik to
be tolerated in the new Soviet society: and if so, to what degree?
The debate would last ten years, during which Deborin, together
with his colleague and only real rival at the Institute, Lyubov Aksel-
rod, would be alternately privileged and threatened.
Deborin and Akselrod were both Marxists who taught courses
in the history of Western philosophy. Akselrod believed
Spinoza’s claim that there are logically necessary laws of the
universe, while Deborin thought that Spinoza’s optimism, feel-
ing for collective wisdom, and concern with how to live a good
life offered the kind of philosophy Soviet Russia needed. Just
like a good Marxist, Spinoza was a materialist and atheist, they
argued; and in a way that was uniquely suitable because he could
give a systematically reasoned account of why these ideas were
necessary and true. Trotsky agreed. He freely admitted that a
problem for revolutionaries when ideologically underpinning
the new state was that Marx and Engels, though masters of
polemic, were hardly systematic philosophers. Unfortunately,
Trotsky would soon turn out not to be the most suitable politi-
cal ally. But he was a sincere Spinozist.
Deborin agreed with Trotsky that the Soviet Union needed
philosophy as a core discipline. The role of philosophy was to
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 27
help clarify the values and guide the actions of the new state.
But in fact, it’s not so easy to defend the claim that Baruch
Spinoza was a materialist and an atheist. Born in 1632 in Ams-
terdam, Spinoza was part of the Portuguese Sephardic Jewish
community there, and a regular synagogue-goer (until he was
expelled). He often wrote affirmingly of God. His materialism
however might be conceded. Spinoza taught that the world was
one substance or entity, ‘God, or Nature’. But critics would say
his philosophy was still metaphysical, if not in some more obvi-
ous sense religious. Another problem was that Spinoza hadn’t
passed through the school of Hegel as Marx had done. So unlike
for Hegel and Marx, his necessary universe was static, for he
had no account of historical change. But the country that would
become the Soviet Union in 1924 needed a dynamic philoso-
phy of historical progress.
The early Soviet Spinozists tried to answer these national
requirements while battling to distinguish themselves from
Western readings of Spinoza. Spinoza in the West was a great
rationalist and humanist, and seen as somehow associated with
the French Revolution. In Soviet Russia, 1789 wasn’t a bad date;
but it marked the triumph of the bourgeoisie, not of the newly
emancipated Soviet and worldwide proletariat.
In 1927, the 250th anniversary of Spinoza’s death, Deborin trav-
elled to a conference in the Hague, with a view to orienting him-
self in the implicit east-west ideological debate about the thinker.
He heard a speaker from the League of Nations praise Spinoza as
a seeker after peace whose philosophy was compatible with Chris-
tianity. The Russian was outraged. Sitting in the audience, he
mused, “You are impudent liars… The contemporary proletariat
is Spinoza’s only genuine heir” (Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy, George
L. Kline, ed, 1955). The idea was that the Soviet Union should lay
unique claim to Spinoza as its guiding philosophical light.
Russian philosophy had just experienced its own October Rev-
olution, as marked by those steamer expulsions five years earlier.
To set a new civilization on course, the philosophy that had to
be expelled was metaphysical idealism, and indeed any remnants
of metaphysics, including religious belief. The parallels here with
the Logical Positivists in Vienna, and Bertrand Russell’s Cam-
bridge at about the same time, are obvious. Just as in the West
in the first half of the twentieth century the temptation arose to
call metaphysics ‘nonsense’ and see it as holding back general
enlightenment, so Russian philosophy, on behalf of Russia her-
self, was working out the same story. But in Russia it wasn’t only
a matter of scholarly debate. Livelihoods and lives were at stake.
Spinoza the Atheist Materialist
How Spinoza was discussed in 1920s Russia shows us today how,
from proposition to proposition, an optimistic social collectivism
and a faith in scientific progress became cornerstones of the Soviet
mentality. Spinoza was admired as the archetypal modern thinker,
who, in opposition to Descartes, had closed the gap between mind
and world, and in doing so had closed off the possibilities of rel-
ativism and scepticism. Deborin liked the power Spinoza invested
in human possibility, while for Akselrod the Spinozan universe
with its necessary laws embracing both the human and the uni-
versal was exactly what made Spinoza scientific.
They considered the defence against a charge of ‘meta-
physics’ easy. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) had called
28 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
Spinoza a ‘rationalist monist’, and surely that was what he was.
Unpacked, what that meant was that when Spinoza referred to
‘God, or Nature’ as two names for ultimate reality, he had in
mind two aspects of the same materiality. There was nothing
that touched on a mysterious higher power at all. It was a clever
move on the part of the Soviet Spinozists to loop back to Feuer-
bach, because it highlighted where Marx, who rejected Feuer-
bach, had left philosophy behind. These fresh Soviet thinkers,
who really knew their history of philosophy, went back to the
last moment when God was still in the picture, which on Feuer-
bach’s understanding was as a projected human need for a better
world. So they chose on behalf of Russia the Spinozan monist
route forward: one world, in which we think and act according
to necessary laws. They rejected Marx’s materialist dialectic, of
changing material conditions changing the human mind as both
progressed along a predetermined path. Perhaps they simply
didn’t believe it was philosophy, for, as Russia borrowed it, it
contained a great deal of wishful thinking.
Deborin and Akselrod were genuine enough thinkers to know
that any future philosophy had to be able to accommodate
Darwin and Einstein. But they felt that their Spinoza could
accommodate change. For Spinoza, the world caused itself
according to its own laws. Ergo if the world changed, the task
was to understand how and why. This was their answer to the
dialectical materialism the Soviet Union would eventually adopt
as its sole ideology. Yet only dialectical materialism could argue
for necessary historical change in favour of the proletariat. And
so the conflict between philosophy and ideology brewed.
The two Russian Spinozists helped determine the values of
the anti-individualist, socially collectivized Communist state.
They both admired Spinoza’s rejection of free will and subjec-
tivism. Both believed Descartes’ view of an isolated thinking
ego was inherently mistaken. It could be argued that Spinoza’s
Ethics left no room for individual critics of the system and rebels
against the necessary way of things, and that suited their vision
for the future society well.
But then differences opened up between their two camps. In
1924 Akselrod argued that natural science, not a priori logic,
discerned nature’s laws. She admired Spinoza’s rationalism and
universalism, and liked the way his Jewish heritage seemed to
encourage that position. But she couldn’t accept his non-empiri-
cism. Hers was an honest but uncomfortable position which
was promptly labelled ‘mechanicism’. That associated her think-
ing with the experimental science of the French eighteenth-
century materialists such as La Mettrie and Condillac, and dis-
sociated it from Hegel and Marx.
Deborin for his part would not concede that science made
Spinozan logic superfluous. Spinoza’s ethics, though not a matter
of empirical science, could yet be proved logically and applied to
guide humanity to a happy life, of the right and true (Soviet) kind.
This for me is one of the most illuminating of all moments
in the history of Soviet philosophy. Others were looking to priv-
ilege science over philosophy, and derive from it a guide to the
future. But Deborin was searching the history of the discipline
for a theory, and a practical guide, to happiness, on behalf of a
whole people and a new civilization. Akselrod stood for the
integrity of the scientific method, Deborin for philosophy as
wisdom in human conduct.
 © GUTO DIAS 2022. PLEASE VISIT FACEBOOK.COM/PG/GUTODIASSTUDIO OR INSTAGRAM.COM/GUTO_DIAS_CARTOONS

October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 29


Stalin.
The smile
of a mass
murderer
The ultimate question, though, was the looming issue of
dialectic. The issue was which arguments in philosophy, suit-
ably tailored, were going to give the Soviet state its philosophi-
cal engine. While Akselrod was a ‘mechanicist’, Deborin had
managed to associate himself with ‘dialectic’, but it was a tenu-
ous association.
For Hegel (actually inspired by Spinoza), dialectical idealism
described how the human mind acted upon the (divine) natural
world, and was acted upon by it in turn; and so on and on. The
Soviets’ dialectical materialism was the outcome of Marx stand-
ing the idealist Hegel the right way up, so deriving a material-
ist account of constantly evolving history. For Deborin the task
was to somehow find those mechanisms of change in Spinoza.
So he contended that there was a dialectic of sorts in Spinoza
too; and for four years, from 1926 to the crisis of late 1930, his
views prevailed. Already in 1922 he had become editor of the
authoritative journal Pod Znamenem Marksisma (Under the
Banner of Marxism). He was deputy director of the Institute of
Marx and Engels. By February 1929, when he was elected a
member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, he was an
eminent figure.
But then, late in 1929, Stalin intervened. That Georgian
gangster-turned-tyrant disliked the erudite philosophers around
Deborin, with their extensive knowledge of Western philoso-
phy. They might trick him. Their knowledge of the West was
dangerous in itself. Yet the greatest problem of all was that
Deborin dared make philosophy independent of the will of the
state and its leader. The time had come for the great theoreti-
cian Stalin to decide what Soviet philosophy was to be.
30 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
Spinoza versus Stalin
When he left the country in 1981, Yehoshua Yakhot, for many
years a philosophy professor in the Soviet Union, wrote an
extraordinary book on The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR,
in which he observed the details of this power struggle.
Not unlike the outcome of some great schism in the Chris-
tian church, at a pioneering All-Union Conference on Russian
Philosophy in March 1930, the organizers issued an edict – that
the dialecticians had won against the mechanicists. That was true,
and the end of Akselrod’s career; but it was also a smokescreen,
since the rest of 1930 saw Deborin and his followers attacked in
the press all the more fervently. March 1930 was thus not a vic-
tory for Deborin, but the occasion of a trick on the part of Stalin,
underpinned by a cunning manipulation of the claims at stake.
As philosophy was annexed to become an official prop of the state,
both mechanicism, or the authority of natural science, and dialec-
tic, as a way of accounting for man’s place in nature, were stripped
of their essential meaning. Stalin announced that dialectic, or the
principle of material change (a concession to Deborin) was to be
viewed as scientifically sound (a concession to Akselrod) – but
this was to be true in the Soviet Union, and thus allowed only
under tightly policed ideological conditions.
This new dialectical materialism was in fact a sleight-of-hand
combination of Hegel’s metaphysics of progress and Spinoza’s
metaphysics of reason. The theory of change came from Hegel,
via Marx, and the scientific necessity from Spinoza. In my under-
standing, ‘Marxist-Leninism’ was a cover name to draw from
the history of philosophy a programme (or at least a set of reas-
surances) for the Soviet future. Under that programme, a Soviet
Spinozan universe – an inspired view of humanity’s universal
material condition – would become (in line with Hegel’s vision
for reason) ever more intelligible to ever more people, and thus
deliver a meaningful life for the proletarian masses. Hegel’s
logic, moreover, could always explain how the negative could
herald the positive to come.
After the 1930 denouncement, Akselrod retired from phi-
losophy. She was fortunate to escape with her life. In an early
anticipation of what would become the USSR-wide Great
Terror, a number of her disciples were purged. Deborin mean-
while enjoyed success, but only for another eighteen months.
When Stalin denounced him as a ‘menshevizing idealist’, he felt
doomed. No one had previously heard of that description, but
whatever it meant, it was bad. Deborin spent the night of 23rd
December 1930 in prison, and then sat night after night in a
Moscow park, not wanting the authorities to pick him up at the
family flat. Attacks in the Party newspaper Pravda, demands
that he publicly apologize for having undervalued Lenin as a
philosopher, overwhelmed him. His family remembered him
as desperate in the New Year of 1931. And in the (unfulfilled)
suicide note, Deborin wrote to his family and colleagues:
“I am weakened, exhausted, destroyed. Life has lost all meaning for
me. A voluntary exit is the best way out of what has arisen. I don’t
have the strength to sign a document about my anti-Marxism and my
menshevizing idealism. I broke essentially with menshevism already
in October 1917. I am not in a condition to bear the shameful exclu-
sion from the Party that stands before me.” (My translation.)
The note was dated 20th January 1931.

by Melissa Felder
SIMON & FINN © MELISSA FELDER 2022 PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM
Publicly though, in a recantation rather like Galileo’s before
the Inquisition, he capitulated. He said he could now see that
Plekhanov’s understanding of Spinoza was misleading. Shame-
ful too was the fact that he, Deborin, had ‘forgotten’ to inspire
his followers to attack Trotskyism. Lenin was the Soviet Union’s
greatest philosopher. No, actually now it was Stalin.
Like Galileo, Deborin’s recantation earned him a reprieve.
But in a way of which Russian literature has given us so many
examples, his moral soul was destroyed. His first act as a man
no longer under threat of death, was to denounce a colleague.
He attacked the country’s most eminent scientist, Vladimir Ver-
nadsky, to see if he couldn’t bring him into terminal dishonour,
and so show, with renewed zeal, his own good credentials. Ver-
nadsky advocated the freedom of science. Deborin willfully
risked getting him killed. Yet Vernadsky was so eminent that
he survived. He even went on to win the Stalin Prize in 1943,
and eventually to die a natural death.
We know this was what Stalin’s Russia was like; but do we know
that the purges began as early as the near-destruction of Deborin
in 1930/31? And that one outcome of the Terror was a handful of
lucky survivors? Yakhot noted the “hundreds and thousands of
scholars [who] fell victim to the executioner”, including more than
a dozen of Deborin and Akselrod’s followers. But neither of the
leading Spinozists was among them. Deborin survived to become
Vice-President of the Academy of Sciences. His now obscure works
were even published, and he too died a natural death in 1963.
Spinoza After Glasnost
Even if the Soviet leaders had continued to tolerate the com-
peting interpretations of Spinoza, I doubt that the political real-
ity would have been much different. Genuine criticism of the
system would have remained impossible. What comes through,
however, is Spinoza’s extraordinary capacity to inspire modern
visions of the good life across the ideological board.
During the Cold War, Western philosophers, especially British
and American, were all too aware of the early Soviet Spinoza con-
nection. The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, in one of
the best introductions to Spinoza ever published (Spinoza, 2007),
lamented it, and urged his readers to see beyond it.
French left-wing philosophers in the 1960s – I’m thinking of
the radical Marxist Louis Althusser, and the postmodernist Gilles
Deleuze – easily moved between Marx and Spinoza. They saw the
combination as promising more hope for reason and progress than
the heinous combination of capitalism and Western individualism.
Spinoza was out of favour with Anglo-American philoso-
phers in those days; but after 1990, the year the Cold War
ended, his popularity in the West suddenly soared, now that
the Soviet taint no longer applied. This was when Jonathan
Israel’s 2001 book Radical Enlightenment reclassified the
Enlightenment – the ongoing hope of a secular democratic
non-metaphysical worldview – into ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’
strains. One moderate had been John Locke, inspiration for
the Founding Fathers of the United States. Spinoza was the
radical, and inspiration for something else. Of course it was
Lockean moderation, which deferred to humanist ideals and
even to God, which the 1928 Amsterdam congress had wanted
to associate with Spinoza. Cue Deborin accusing the West of
a flagrant ideological hijacking of a radical atheist. Cue
Jonathan Israel bringing back Spinoza at the head of a radical
enlightenment in his 1998 book, Spinoza.
All that was over twenty years ago. These days we are back
with the religious Spinoza: a fact that ought to make us just a
little bit wary of the independence of our own practice of phi-
losophy in the free world. We too seem to be caught up in an
ongoing ideological battle, whether we like it or not.
© LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN 2022
Lesley Chamberlain is the author of The Philosopher Steamer:
Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (2006), which was pub-
lished in the US as Lenin’s Private War. The centenary of the
expulsions was in August 2022. Her latest book is Street Life and
Morals: German Philosophy in Hitler’s Lifetime (October 2021)
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 31
 The Horror
of Relations
Jonathan Beever explores the light and
dark sides of interconnectedness.
s a result of the explosive growth of ecological think-
A ing, the idea of interdependence is all around us. Fun-
damental to the idea is the view that, in some way,
‘we’re all connected’ – to each other, to other organ-
isms, and to our environments, both analog and digital. And usu-
ally implicit here is the idea that this connectedness is a good
and beautiful thing. Being connected makes us stronger, health-
ier, more engaged, and more thoughtful. Yet lurking under this
positive view of our relatedness is a darker view – that being
inextricably interconnected is existentially horrifying. Being con-
nected in the strong sense of being interdependent with others,
threatens what it is to be a self, and what it is to be an individ-
ual. This dark side of interdependence is revealed when we see
that interdependence means more than merely interconnection.
The Light View
Many ecological and social theorists argue that relational think-
ing has implications for understanding the nature and moral worth
of the individual self. For example, if we see individuals as inter-
connected, then valuing others becomes a necessary condition for
valuing oneself. This thinking is at the heart of some feminist pro-
jects too, which seek to reconcile what has been seen as ‘masculin-
ist’ projects of autonomy, identity, and individuality with the more
‘feminist’ projects of relationality and interconnectedness.
Thinking about the individual takes at least three major
forms. The first of these is strong individualism. This view holds
individuals as akin to billiard balls: isolated, discrete and self-
contained entities, negotiating space viz-a-viz one another. This
view, I think, has been especially prevalent in mainstream West-
ern philosophy, which has tended to exalt the capacity for
autonomous rational decision-making above all other human
capacities. This individualism has trickled down into our under-
standing of other organisms, too. It has enabled us to believe
we can understand any organism simply by isolating it and exam-
ining its internal functioning.
Strong individualism has also been widely and regularly chal-
lenged. Indeed, I set it up here as a bit of a straw-man, against
which to juxtapose a second view. That second view of the indi-
vidual, from feminist epistemologists such as Annette Baier,
Anne Donchin, and John Christman, champions the constitu-
tive role that social relationships play in framing what we are and
what we know about the world. According to this view, we are
32 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
SPIDER IN WEB © SNAPDRAGON66 2019 CREATIVE COMMONS
as individuals somehow dependent on our social relationships.
And if social relationships are constitutive of an organism’s
nature, then any organism that enters into social relationships
is shaped by them. Nonhuman animals, just like human ones,
are formed and defined by their relationships.
We have strong evidence that like social relationships, our
relationships are to our environment partly constitute. So, a third
form of thinking about the individual looks beyond social inter-
connections to ecological interconnectedness more generally. While
interdependence has initially been seen in terms of social rela-
tionships, ecological relational thinking has much longer legs.
Two examples, one external and one internal, are instructive
here. The soundscape ecologist and musician Bernie Krause
tells a story of a troop of elephants in Malawi, at a place called
Senga Bay. A geological feature of the bay enabled them to
develop a troop-specific dialect by incorporating echoes off cliff
walls into their communications. According to Krause, the
uniqueness of their environment means that no other group of
elephants on the planet shares this dialect.
If social and environmental relationships are external, micro-
bial relationships are internal. Human bodies are made up of
human cells and microbial organisms in approximately equal
quantities. The intimate relationship between each individual
and their microbiome makes possible physiological capacities
that are not the product of specifically human organism evolu-
tion – affecting someone’s obesity or leanness, for example.
Microbial ecologists have continued to add nuance to a sym-
biotic view of the human organism and its microbial communi-
ties, especially those present in the human gut. Yet even as they
recognize relationships of dependence, the language of micro-
biologists upholds individualism in the distinction between the
human body and the microbes that reside inside or upon it. Here
is a view of two distinct entities, two ‘individuals’, working
together toward a common end – in this case, health.
Putting this all together, we can say that the human individual
is constituted by relationships between its microbiome and its
own cellular structures, as well as by our external social and envi-
ronmental relationships. We are dependent on our connections.
There is beauty in this positive view of ecological interde-
pendence. It challenges the isolating individualism of Western
modernity while sustaining identity and uniqueness. It reflects
a deep connection to the living world around us, shaping and
sustaining who we are. Thanks to this view, we can have our
relations and eat them, too.
Interconnection is Not Interdependence
Although we are quite comfortable with being richly interconnected
in this way, interdependence implies that we are somehow contin-
gent. As ecological culture continues to develop through scientific
inquiry and technological progress, it increasingly accepts not only
the dependent relationships with which we are already comfort-
able, but also our interdependent relationships. And the more we rec-
ognize the difference between interconnection and interdepen-
dence, the uneasier we become. The differentiation challenges
what philosopher Lorraine Code calls our social imaginary.
Dependent relationships are those that link together two oth-
erwise distinct individuals. When feminist thinkers spoke of ‘con-
stitutive social relationships’, they largely left implicit the assump-
tion that the individual stands alone. Individuals interact and
influence one another, true, but still much like the billiard balls
of strong individualism. If an individual was in some specific rela-
tionship, for instance, they would still be, just slightly differently.
Interdependence offers a very different perspective, asking
us to consider that our existence itself depends on certain rela-
tionships. This is just the concern that biologist Kriti Sharma
takes up in the introduction to her brief but brilliant Interde-
pendence (2015), arguing that although that term has been used
in a myriad of ways, it is fundamentally about this ontological
question – about what it is to be.
Sharma believes understanding interdependence requires two
distinct shifts in our social imaginary. The first she describes as the
‘nontrivial’ move from considering things in isolation to consider-
ing things in interaction. This shift is a popular and popularized
one, perhaps first taken up by feminist thinkers challenging strong
individualism, and now championed by, well, nearly everyone. It’s
difficult to imagine a philosopher who’s able to ignore the vast and
compelling evidence of the ways we function in interaction rather
than isolation. A prime example of this to me is the work of moral
psychology, which has shaken up the traditional view in ethics that
vastly privileges reason at the expense of emotion.
While Sharma’s first shift is a popular one, the second is the
more significant. She advocates a move from considering things
simply in interaction to considering things as mutually consti-
tuted. By that she means things existing at all only due to their
interdependence.
The Dark View
The first shift is easy by comparison, because it doesn’t ask us
to change our view of the world. We can happily say naive things
like, “Whoa, dude, everything is, like, totally connected.” But
the second shift? To say that strong individualism is a myth
makes us uncomfortable – maybe very uncomfortable.
In fact, that second shift points us to an uncomfortable prob-
lem that is also an ancient problem: How can something’s iden-
tity depend on constitutive relationships, either inside or out?
Plutarch posed a problem like this in his tale of the Ship of The-
seus. According to him, after Theseus returned from slaying the
Minotaur, the Athenians preserved his ship for the edification of
posterity. They regularly took away old planks as they decayed
and replaced them with newer, stronger timbers; or nails as they
rusted; or sails as they wore out, until none of the original mate-
rial of the ship remained. Was it still the original ship, or not? And
if not, when did it stop being the original ship? Plutarch describes
this a standing example among philosophers, some of whom
believed the ship remained the same, and some who contended
that it was not. (Consider that all the cellular material in our own
bodies is also completely replaced every seven years or so.)
Interdependence introduces the possibility of radical change
in dynamic interrelated systems in a similar way, as that with
which we are interdependent itself changes. Radical shifts in
our relationships – social, environmental, and even microbial –
fundamentally change us. But this means that the stable isolated
self might well be nothing more than a useful fiction.
There is darkness here. Relationships that we initially took
to build us up, supporting our free choices and moral worth,
instead make us wholly contingent, dependent completely for
our identity on the shifting world around us. If we accept that
we are interdependent with our relations, this weakens the con-
cepts of self, individual, and identity that have grounded us. And
then, what’s left? What if there is nothing at all in what it is to
be an independent, free individual? Existentialism is grounded
in this sort of horror: Sartre glimpsed it first in the chestnut
tree’s roots, and felt the nausea of being de trop (‘unwelcome’).
My point is that the conceptual shift from connection to
dependence shifts the ways we perceive what it is to be an indi-
vidual, and therefore a self, and the result of this shift is a cas-
cade of practical effects that we can’t quite foresee but which
we can only imagine as horrific. Imagine, for instance, a world
in which the idea of the individual which supports a respect for
autonomy is eroded. Anyone fancy that brave new world?
The dark side of interdependence draws inspiration from
emerging biology, much as its light counterpart did. If some see
interrelation and symbiosis, others see the dissolution of the self
and parasitology. Couple this with the concerns for individual-
ity arising from digital technology, and the picture looks even
darker. No longer is the self somehow isolated, internal, and
stable, but instead dynamic, externalized, and informationalized
– informed and shaped by a myriad of technologies which
increasingly control us in both explicit and subtly implicit ways,
epistemically and ethically. We extend our selves out in ways we
don’t fully understand, through social networks that tell us we
need more friends, through biobanks that make us think we need
to know our genetic history, and through consumer markets that
tell us what to want and when to want it.
These extensions promise (on the positive view) or threaten
(on the negative view) to reshape, reform, and reconstitute us. If
we see these challenges to the self as challenges of connection,
then we maintain a grounding in the individual, the hub in the
network of connections. But the challenge of interdependence is
that the connection itself – the dependency – explains the nature
of the world, with the hub and the node mere fictions which help
us make sense of that shapeless rhizome of our relations. When
the individual is seen as truly interdependent upon its relationships,
then a rapid shift in the nature of those relationships can radi-
cally transform not only how the individual is perceived, but what
the individual is. And such shifts can be horrifying.
© JONATHAN BEEVER 2022
Jonathan Beever is an associate professor of philosophy, ethicist, and
father, among other relations. You can learn more about his work at
jonathan.beever.org
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 33
The Bataillean-Freudian Cat
Ansu Louis employs Freud & Bataille to solve the mystery of human-cat bonding.
“The cat is the only animal to have succeeded in domesticating man.”
– Marcel Mauss
lthough ‘Time spent with cats is never wasted’ is a
A quote that social media popularly ascribes to Sigmund
Freud (1856-1939), no one can trace this statement
back to any documented source. In any case, one
would perhaps more easily identify Freud as a dog person. He
was really fond of the dogs he came to own from the 1920s,
after he had purchased an Alsatian Shepherd named Wolf for
his daughter Anna.
BRITISH SHORTHAIR CAT PUBLIC DOMAIN
Cats & the Economy of Expenditure
Although Freud being a cat lover remains mere conjecture, I
want to draw on a few of his psychoanalytic concepts, supple-
menting them with a theoretical notion borrowed from
Georges Bataille (1897-1962), to develop a strand of thought
concerning what could strike one as the mystery of the human-
cat relationship.
Many have pointed out that the cat’s affiliation with humans
has a history of more than ten thousand years. But we’d find it
difficult to explain from a strictly scientific perspective precisely
why we have been entertaining the presence of this particular
animal in our households. In the case of dogs, the matter is
apparently not so complicated, as in addition to providing the
companionship that is invaluable for many, dogs can be seen to
have served a range of purposes in the human domain: guard-
ing houses and settlements, protecting people, helping them
34 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
steer livestock, and so on. On the other hand, the only purpose
scientific research could attribute to the human domestication
of cats has to do with the curtailing of rodent proliferation in
the new agrarian communities. (This idea appears to be based
on archaeological evidence suggesting that cat domestication
dates back to the agrarian era, while that of the dog dates fur-
ther back, to the time that humans were hunter-gatherers.)
Even if we accept these claims to be true, human-cat bonding
seems to have taken an interest-
ing evolutionary trajectory
involving a radical shift
away from simple utility
to a unique enjoyment
tinged with a com-
ponent of loss
and sacrifice.
2018
Moreover, the figure of the cat amidst humans epitomizes what
Georges Bataille in his 1933 essay ‘The Notion of Expenditure’
called ‘the economy of expenditure’. For Bataille this plays an
important and often overlooked role in human civilization.
Bataille’s purpose in the essay is to challenge the utilitarian
view that all worthwhile human activity falls under the categories
of ‘production and conservation’. He highlights humanity’s heart-
felt investments in a plethora of things ‘‘that have no end beyond
themselves’’, such as the sacrificial act of gift-giving illustrated
by purchasing an expensive piece of jewellery. Bataille’s insights
here can help us shed some light on what the elusive figure of the
cat really evokes in the human psyche.
Indeed, the Bataillean notion of unconditional expenditure could
explain many aspects of the relationship between humans and
cats. First, any kind of material benefit we can expect from a cat
(say, the odd mouse) pales into insignificance compared to what
we can offer them. Even if we go with the view that cats, like
dogs, are self-domesticated animals, the mystery still persists. If
the primitive farmers had tolerated cats around them solely to
hunt vermin, this is unlikely to have evolved into the current
scenario of human-cat bonding. Moreover, humans are no longer
dependent on cats for controlling the mice population.
We are willing to share our resources with cats, including
food, of which a cat often eats a human’s share. From a materi-
alistic perspective, therefore, human bonding with cats revolves
around an economy of loss; but from a Bataillean point of view,
this unprofitable exchange can nonetheless bring in immense
pleasure to our lives.
Cats & the Unconscious
I believe that human-cat ‘friendship’ (if one can call it that) is
in fact a psychological mystery that has to be investigated from
outside the scope of a hard scientific inquiry, by remembering
that it may involve possible interventions from unconscious
human inclinations that often bypass conscious reasons involv-
ing utility or purpose. For my present task, therefore, I will use
a conceptual framework in Freud’s work, especially in his The
Ego and the Id (1923). He categorizes all human motives under
the headings of three psychological agencies, namely, the id,
the ego, and the superego, yielding the pleasure principle, the
reality principle, and the morality principle respectively.
Several studies indicate that a number of psychological traits
serve to distinguish between dog people and cat people, and
although accidental factors can at times influence one’s pet pref-
erences (such as happening to grow up in the company of either
of these animals), in most cases this psychological distinction
holds true.Thus it appears that people share a few more-or-less
similar personality traits with the animal they like to associate
with. Dog people are more social and outgoing, orderly, obe-
dient, and likely to be more conservative than cat people. On
the other hand, cat people are generally more independent,
open to new experiences, creative, and more likely to live alone
in apartments than dog people. To apply a Freudian distinc-
tion, dog people and cat people exhibit superego dominant and
id dominant characteristics respectively.
The superego represents the moral, parental authority,
which, according to Freudian theory, one internalizes during
the process of psychosexual development as a child. Superego
dominant people thus possess a markedly parental disposition,
and they expect loyalty and respect in return for their compas-
sion and guidance – something a dog is ideally suited to pro-
vide them with, in sharp contrast to a cat. The parent-like
responsibility that accompanies the ownership of a dog also falls
precisely within the domain of the superego.
On the contrary, the question of responsibility does not arise
with regard to the cat, over-ridden as it is by the sense of inde-
pendence cats enjoy so dearly. Unlike dogs, cats tend to resist
any kind of restraint. We do not really own cats.
Imagination tends to capture the cat in this sort of rebellious
image. The belief that black cats are witches in disguise is its
most explicit form (one that’s humorously articulated by Edgar
Allan Poe in his 1840 essay ‘Instinct vs Reason – a Black Cat’,
and in his 1843 tale ‘The Black Cat’). Witches are explicitly plea-
sure-seeking figures with little sense of the superego (that is, of
self-discipline) who might go to any extent of crookedness to
gratify their base desires. Ruskin Bond’s short story, also called
‘The Black Cat’, provides an exemplary instance of the cat-witch
connection here. The reclusive narrator is visited by a mysteri-
ous elderly lady to retrieve her black cat, which has worked itself
into the narrator’s household after he bought a broom from an
antique shop. After her departure with the cat, the narrator real-
izes that the lady has somehow stolen the broom too, and he
imagines her flying about on a new witchy adventure.
Ultimately then, the enjoyment that a cat’s presence causes
in a human mind cannot but be emerging from the id, the source
of the pleasure principle in the psyche. Perhaps then the ego –
the problem-solving faculty in the human psyche, which often
toils under pressure from a tyrannical superego while trying to
obtain favors for the id – has adopted the cat as the embodi-
ment of its dearest fantasy about gratifying the pleasure princi-
ple in a straightforward manner. In this (unconscious) fantasy,
the otherwise overbearing superego takes a back seat and the
id enjoys the carefree existence for which it always longs, relat-
ing back to the cat’s own carefree existence. This could also be
a source of the mysterious sense of pleasure we experience in
the company of cats. In sum, human-cat bonding embodies our
fascination for what is psychologically desirable for the uncon-
scious, but available to us in an affordable and contained form.
There is fulfilment in some pain – a vicious pleasure –
although Freud maintains that the id seeks only pleasure and
avoidance of pain. But Freud is well aware of the complexities
of pleasure, as his writings on masochism attest. The id’s ulti-
mate aim – the desire for pleasure – is fulfilled in cat owner-
ship, but in a way that can at times also involve expenditure and
discomfort, or ‘the economy of loss’ in more general terms.
Otherwise, having a cat as a pet does not demand too many eco-
nomic or lifestyle compromises. The domestic cat poses no real
physical threat when compared to its bigger and more ferocious
wild counterparts. But watch out for its claws. Oh, too late!
© ANSU LOUIS 2022
Ansu Louis is assistant professor of English at Indian Institute of
Technology, Ropar, Rupnagar, Punjab.
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 35
Time
Calling Time
Anthony Proctor asks: Are we on time? Do we have time? What is time?
ot only is time a long-standing mystery in itself, but
N it is also at the heart of many other mysteries, para-
doxes, and misunderstandings. For instance, back-
wards time travel could lead to anomalies such as
the famous ‘grandfather paradox’, where you go back in time to
kill your grandfather, thus preventing your own birth. Or, time
appears to progress, but we cannot ask ‘how fast?’ as there is no
meaningful answer: one second per second is hardly a meaning-
ful answer to the question ‘How fast is time flowing?’. And time
is the only physical quantity that we can experience by thought
alone, but when we do so, it sometimes appears to progress more
swiftly, or more slowly, than at other times.
Even hundreds of years ago St Augustine was well aware of the
problematic nature of time: ‘‘What then is time? If no one asks
me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know"
(Confessions, c.400 AD). He also struggled to reconcile his theo-
logical beliefs with his experience of time, since even the creator
of time cannot create in the absence of time, and yet if God exists
in some ‘supertime’, then the problem arises of what was happen-
ing before God created anything at all, and if the answer’s ‘noth-
ing’, then how could we say time passes there anyway?:
“But if the roving thought of someone should wander over the images
of past time... let him awake and consider that he wonders at illu-
sions. For in what temporal medium could the unnumbered ages that
thou didst not make pass by, since thou art the Author and Creator
of all the ages?”
(Confessions)
Interestingly not a single equation anywhere in physics iden-
tifies our special ‘now’ moment, or even embraces dynamical
change as we perceive it – apart from as a simple slope on a
graph. This leaves us two choices: either time is non-existent
(and all nows and dynamical changes are illusory), or mathe-
matics cannot describe everything in the universe (and physics
is doomed).
Experience vs Mathematics
On 6 April 1922, Albert Einstein took up a forum invitation to
the Société Française de Philosophie in Paris to discuss his Spe-
cial and General theories of Relativity. One of the many intel-
lectuals there was the celebrated French philosopher Henri-
Louis Bergson, who also wrote about time. The pair clashed at
the event over the nature of time, and their heated debate turned
into a lifelong disagreement on the subject. Like many readers
of this article, Bergson believed in the basic reality of experi-
ence, and in a single universal time. He criticised Relativity for
having distanced time from experience, thus leading to counter-
intuitive consequences. Einstein had shown that space and time
must be treated in a conjoined fashion mathematically, and that
36 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
neither were absolute since their measurement depended upon
the motion of the observer. But Einstein never bridged the gap
between his mathematics and our first-hand experience of time.
Such was Bergson's standing that his criticisms, could well have
been a deciding factor that prevented Einstein receiving a second
Nobel Prize, for Relativity. Physics now accepts that Einstein
was right, but did Bergson have a point?
The truth is not so black and white. Before we can explore
the different viewpoints – and explain how both missed an oppor-
tunity to answer many deep questions in philosophy and physics
– we need to take a short tour of dimensions and spaces.
In popular culture a ‘dimension’ is synonymous with a sepa-
rate reality or universe, as in ‘alternate dimension’ or ‘parallel
dimension’, but this is an abuse of the term. A dimension is really
an extent in a particular direction. It’s also useful to know that
when we talk about spaces, their dimensionality indicates the
minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any given
location in that space. This would be three for our everyday
space. It does not matter whether the coordinates are given in
terms of some x, y, and z values relative to three axes at right
angles, or in terms of a longitude, latitude, and distance from
the centre of our Earth; there will always be three required. We
consider space to be ‘flat’ or Euclidean, because it obeys Euclid’s
basic geometric axioms, such as the angles of a triangle adding
up to 180⁰ and Pythagoras’ theorem being correct. A sheet of
paper is a two-dimensional Euclidean example. However the
surface of a globe is a non-Euclidean, ‘curved’ space, upon which
the angles of a triangle do not add up to 180⁰.
How are we then to think about time in relation to physical
space? Consider a moving ball A involved in a glancing colli-
sion with a stationary ball B. As any pool player will know, a
glancing collision will send the balls apart, to the left and right
of the incident path. Ignoring the possibility of any spin being
placed on A, the angle of their separation is determined by simple
conservation laws.
This diagram shows the collision in just two spatial dimen-
Collision in two dimensions

sions: x and y. Time is not shown, but we can imagine A pro-
ceeding from left-to-right, hitting B, and then A and B bounc-
ing off each other. But notice that we add that information to
the diagram, which is otherwise entirely static in its depiction
of the events.
But now imagine that we add time as a third dimension to
this diagram. The collision then appears very different.
Collision in three
dimensions
At the bottom this diagram shows the same two-dimensional
spatial paths, but it also shows them as three-dimensional space-
time paths (x-by-y-by-t). We now see the actual speeds of the
balls, which are represented by the gradients of the slopes of these
pipe-like structures. However, the diagram is still entirely static,
and the fact that A is travelling towards B is not implied by it.
Again, we have to add information to our diagram to get that.
But now let’s imagine that these pipe-like structures are a
picture of something real, and not simply implying motion on
a spacetime diagram. In this situation, we no longer have to add
any information because we are stipulating that the diagram
fully captures the objective nature of A and B as structures that
have an extent across the time dimension. This shows the idea
of a block universe, in which all of space and time are a contin-
uous single block.
When physicists talk about a block universe, they consider
the point of view of a super-observer. You might interpret this
as some god-like figure who resides outside of spacetime; but
to a physicist, it is simply a hypothetical reference point from
which to consider the whole of time and space together. How-
ever, those same physicists often fall into the trap of still adding
the temporal information of movement, causality, and many
other notions that we gain from our subjective experience – thus
preventing them fully seeing the nature of the idea they’re using.
Einstein regularly used space-time diagrams to illustrate the
motions of objects, but it was his former teacher, the German
mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who reformulated the
equations of Special Relativity using a four-dimensional nota-
Time
tion where time is multiplied by the square root of minus one
and the speed of light. By doing so, the equations then took on
a much simpler form (as did many other equations in physics).
And it is from this reformulation that we get the notion of a
four-dimensional spacetime continuum. But one subtle impli-
cation of this mathematics was that time was a real dimension
in the newly-minted ‘spacetime’, just like the spatial ones, and
not merely an axis on a diagram. As a result, Minkowski's space-
time has since been used as a model for a block universe.
Misunderstanding Physics
When Einstein later formulated his theory of General Relativ-
ity (which explained the force of gravity in a very novel way),
he extended Minkowski's spacetime from the ‘flat’ geometry of
Special Relativity into a ‘curved’ or non-Euclidean geometry,
within which objects affected by gravity are just following their
natural paths through spacetime.
Unfortunately, the fact that both Minkowski's spacetime,
and the spacetime in a gravitational field, are four-dimensional
continua, has led to many misunderstandings and misrepresen-
tations, not just in fiction but in philosophy and physics too.
Writers regularly talk about objects travelling through space-
time, or through wormholes, or back in time, and so on; but in
a block universe there is no movement, nor any dynamical
change at all, because the contents are entirely static and
immutable in the four spacetime dimensions. It would be mean-
ingless to say that an object can move through a spacetime con-
tinuum; one only have to ask 'how fast?' or 'where is it now?'
in order to see why. For instance, if an object were moving spa-
tially from A to B, then you cannot meaningfully ask when it
arrives at B in a block universe, since that time coordinate already
exists, and hence from a block universe point of view it would
already be there! This highlights that we can have no dynami-
cal change without some special ever-changing time coordinate
— a sort of ‘cosmic now' or dynamically changing present
moment which progresses through time — and there is noth-
ing in physics to even suggest that this exists.
© HARLEY SCHWADRON 2022 TO SEE MORE, PLEASE VISIT SCHWADRONCARTOONS.COM
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 37
Time
The term 'wormhole' was coined by American theoretical
physicist John A. Wheeler in 1957; but the correct term for the
phenomenon is an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, after some work in
1935 by Einstein and Israeli physicist Nathan Rosen on solu-
tions to the equations of General Relativity. A wormhole is
essentially a shortcut from one remote point to another by join-
ing the two remote locations together by ‘folding’ space, typi-
cally through gravity. Using the illustration of the two-dimen-
sional surface of a sphere, imagine a depression on either side
being forced together so that they connect. Now extend the
illustration to be applying to a four-dimensional spacetime.
No one has ever seen a confirmed wormhole, and there are no
observations that would benefit from such a description. A short-
cut it may be, but there is nothing that could be construed as ‘travel’
because we’re talking about the 4D spacetime continuum of a
block universe where there is no objective measure of dynamical
change; that is, there is no movement. It’s just mathematics.
A related concept is a Closed Time-Like Curve (CTC) – a
path that starts and ends at the same time coordinate: a sort of
‘time loop’. After Einstein moved to Princeton to work at the
Institute for Advanced Study, he and Austro-Hungarian math-
ematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel became walking part-
ners to and from the Institute. Gödel showed that CTCs could
appear in certain solutions to the equations of General Relativ-
ity, leading to potential temporal anomalies; but he also rightly
argued that Relativity itself left no room for a subjective flow-
ing time, and that it must therefore be illusory, that is, in some
sense, merely a mathematical model, however useful. Although
the notion of CTCs is now routinely used to suggest a way of
travelling back in time, Gödel's arguments would make that a
nonsense, but his work on this subject is not well-known.
Experiencing Space & Time
by Dror Rosenski 2022
38 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
Time In & Out of Mind
Why is this little tour of four-dimensional spacetime important?
The idea of a block universe can arguably be traced back over
two thousand years, but it is not a popular idea because of its
supposed repercussions for free will, causality, and all dynami-
cal change. We accept that mathematics cannot address mental
phenomena, such as emotions, thoughts, and perceptions: but
perhaps it can be shown that all dynamical phenomena, includ-
ing movement, are associated with the conscious perception of
time. If so, then this leaves unobserved reality entirely suscepti-
ble to the mathematical description.
This approach can be summarised in two principles. Firstly
a Temporal Anthropic Principle says that consciousness and sub-
jective time cannot exist without each other; they are bound
together as part of the same phenomenon. Secondly a Determi-
nate Pattern Conjecture says that the pattern of changes over time
in objective, unobserved reality can be fully modelled by sets of
consistent mathematical axioms and formulae that are finite,
deterministic, and continuous.
Using these principles it is possible to present a credible argu-
ment for the emergence of consciousness within a block uni-
verse, thus cleanly separating the objective reality of spacetime
from the subjective experience of space and time. And this fur-
ther means that all things that are independent of conscious
observation must be susceptible to the mathematical descrip-
tion; and conversely, that all things not susceptible to such a
description, must be a product of consciousness.
© ANTHONY C. PROCTOR 2022
Anthony C. Proctor is the author of On Time, Causality, and
the Block Universe (2022). Website: parallax-view.com, email:
parallaxview@proctor.net

The Phenomenology of Time
in Memento
Becca Turcotte looks at some aspects of our experience of time, as revealed by a
temporally-challenging movie.
e all want to understand the nature of the world
W in which we live, but philosophers have pointed
out that there are some big obstacles to doing
so. What we see, hear and touch depends not
only on the external world but also on the nature of our sense
organs. Frustratingly our experience of perception is also
shaped by the structure of our minds – by our categories of
understanding, as Kant put it – and by our cultural expecta-
tions. So how can we obtain truly independent information
about the external world to understand it better? The 20th
century philosophical movement known as phenomenology
said that we should try to focus on the immediate data of per-
ception, to notice how things look before we culturally inter-
pret them. Philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger, and
a little later Sartre, tried to develop techniques to make it easier
to do this. What is often forgotten is that these techniques can
apply not only to our perceptions of what is around us in the
present moment, but can also be used to try to grasp how things
change from moment to moment – in other words, phe-
nomenology can be used to better understand the nature of
time.
Our perception includes memory, imagination, and antici-
pation. The importance of these often philosophically-over-
looked parts of our experience is highlighted in Christopher
Nolan’s debut movie Memento (2000), so I’ll use that movie to
illustrate some of the key concepts here.
Memento tells the story of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), who
has short-term memory loss from a home invasion that also
resulted in his wife’s death. He’s unable to make new memo-
ries or remember what happened even just a few minutes ear-
lier. The last long-term memory he has is of his wife being
attacked. Shelby seeks revenge against his wife’s murderer. He
spends most of the movie following clues he leaves for himself,
including tattoos, polaroid photos, and notes-to-self, which he
hopes will lead to the attacker. These mementos keep him on
track with his mission. Throughout the movie, Shelby con-
stantly questions who he can trust, even himself. We discover
that he is being used by a crooked cop, Teddy, who has been
manipulating him into killing other people. Shelby then manip-
ulates himself into killing Teddy.
The way that the story is told is unique; it has a retrograde
narrative that shows you the climax at the beginning and slowly
reveals the story backward. You don’t get a clear picture of
everything that happened to Shelby until the end of the movie,
Time
when the audience can put together the pieces of what has
happened.
Parts & Wholes
The phenomenological approach uses three main structural forms
to analyse experience. In experience, we see things as parts and
wholes; as identities in a manifold; and as presence and absence.
Every time we think about something, we articulate the parts
and wholes that make up the content of what we think. Wholes
can be separated into two different kinds of parts; pieces and
moments. Pieces can exist and be presented apart from the whole,
are able to be detached from the whole, and can themselves
become a whole independently, whereas parts cannot. In
Memento, most scenes are pieces that exist for the main charac-
ter and the audience as separate from the whole story. There
are also moments that cannot be separated from the story, such
as his tattoos and photos. In phenomenological terms, these
would be moments of the experience. Moments are parts of expe-
rience that cannot exist or make sense without the whole to
which they belong, they can never be detached from it. They
are non-independent and can only be thought of as moments
abstractly. For Shelby, such moments include his tattoos and
taking photographs, as these moments cannot be detached from
his story. Without them he would not have any recent back-
ground information on himself, or anything telling him what
it is he needs to do, which is why they cannot be thought of
independently from his story. We might say his story is founded
on these things.
Identity in a Manifold of Appearance
Each scene also presents a new manifold, giving the audience
many layers of perception through which we can understand
Shelby’s identity. The manifold is the collected information in
experience yielding a continuous identity to something. Each
scene of the movie reveals slightly more of Shelby’s story, help-
ing the audience understand the different aspects of his iden-
tity. However, for Shelby, his identity is in constant flux because
his condition prevents him from fully accessing his living pre-
sent. An identity synthesis usually occurs in regard to retention
of the past and ‘protention’ of the future in the living present.
This is not possible for someone who cannot form new memo-
ries. We could say that Shelby knows who he was, but not who
he is. His identity to himself is unstable, constantly in flux, and
he’s unable to maintain a coherent identity beyond who he once
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 39
Time
was. This is highlighted in the movie when the audience thinks
that they know him at the beginning as he appears; as just a victim
on a search for vengeance, yet throughout the movie the audi-
ence gains a sense of his true present identity as an oblivious
hitman being manipulated by a crooked cop. And in fact his iden-
tity transcends the manifold of the movie, since there are signif-
icant parts of his identity that are still not revealed by the end of
the movie.
Presence & Absence
Recognition of identity includes experiencing presence and
absence. Our perception of identities is usually shaped by the
absent past and absent future. Indeed, all our experience can be
seen as a blend of presence and absence because the absences
of past and future are present in all experiences. Yet without
temporal continuity we would just experience momentary pres-
ences that are separate from each other. Experience is supposed
to have a kind of flow to it, where the present yields to another
present and still retains the absent past. This is not the case for
Shelby: he cannot form new memories, which leads him to live
in a constant ‘now’. He also cannot easily plan for the future:
all he has is the present moment.
Often, empty and filled intentions are directed to the same
object, making it both present and absent at the same time. This
is the case in Memento, when Shelby seeks to avenge his wife by
killing her murderer. But having done so, he then forgets that
he’s done it, and continues to seek what’s again absent.
Most people get the satisfaction of absently intending an
event. They can do this because of the experience of the living
present, which is a primary impression that retains experiences
from the past while opening us up to the future. One’s experi-
ence is shaped by what one retains from past experiences and an
opening before you that welcomes continued perceptual engage-
ment in the future. Without being able to anticipate or remem-
ber, we would not be able to properly organize the processes
that occur in the world into temporal patterns. This happens to
Shelby when he forgets that he already got his vengeance.
Memory, Imagination & Anticipation
Phenomenology also calls our attention to more complicated
forms of perception, such as memory and imagination. The ‘dis-
placement of the self’ that happens in memory, imagination,
and anticipation, can allow a heightened sense of self-identity –
but not for Shelby.
In remembering, we do not imagine the object, it’s more like
a kind of perceiving. Memory is similar to reperceiving earlier
perceptions. In Memento, when Shelby remembers his wife, he
calls up and relives earlier perceptions of her, bringing them to
life again and re-living them.
Within the action of remembering we can usually recognize
a special type of presence and absence. We store up perceptions
we lived through in our memory and call them up when we
remember the objects as they were at that time. Memory is thus
a blend of presences and absences by reactivating the object not
there and then, but also here and now as part of the past.
Through our memory, we can displace ourselves into the past.
This means we are not always confined to the here and now. With-
40 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
out the displacement that comes with memory, we also could not
be fully actualized as selves and as human beings. Shelby is lim-
ited in his ability to do this; he can only remember his life before
the accident, and can only displace himself to that past.
In imagination, we suspend belief and displace the self from
the real world into a possible future or alternative realities. The
displaced forms of consciousness are derived from material pro-
vided to them through earlier perception. But whereas in
memory the object presents itself as the real past, imagination
is a suspension of belief, and of reality. Yet in both perceptions,
the self is transported to a time outside of the current moment.
While imagination has a similar structure to memory in terms
of experience, in imagination one suspends belief and enters a
fantasy world while still living in the real world. This is cap-
tured best in the final scene of the movie, when Shelby is driv-
ing his car in real life while imagining a world in which he’s
with his wife.
Because we can imagine the future, we can make choices that
lead to imagined outcomes. This is illustrated by Shelby set-
ting himself out for revenge on the crooked cop Teddy. How-
ever, although he can sometimes imagine the future Shelby is
unable to properly anticipate, because he forgets the circum-
stances of his current moment and soon becomes oblivious to
possible decisions. This is shown clearly when he forgets who
is chasing who in a fight scene; he doesn’t know if he’s the one
doing the chasing, or the one being chased.
Phenomenology is a promising way of describing our expe-
riences of time. It helps us analyse details that otherwise would
go unnoticed or unmentioned. This movie lets us see the com-
plexity and richness of our lived experience of time, of parts and
wholes, of identities in a manifold, and of presence and absence,
in a unique and dramatic way.
© BECCA TURCOTTE 2022
Becca Turcotte is a university student working on her BA in
philosophy in Northern Ontario while living with multiple sclerosis.
STILL FROM MEMENTO © NEWMARKET 2000
Shelby shares a memory
I
contacted the London-based
philosopher Nat Rutherford after
reading an article he did for the
BBC earlier this year. In line with
Rutherford’s PhD on ‘Moral Pluralism
and Political Disagreement’, we dug
into the moral pluralism of happiness,
and what happens when our happy vices
oppose morality.
“I just don’t think that happiness is
very valuable. It’s not something I
pursue,” he tells me. “But the value of
happiness is also something I don’t really
consider, because I don’t think it’s very
effective. One of the important things
about happiness – and I think Aristotle
had this insight over two thousand years
ago in a way that the utilitarians in the
nineteenth century didn’t – is that we’re
often hostage to fortune. How well your
life goes, whether you get to be happy, is
a matter of luck over which you have no
control. And Aristotle saw this. You can
cultivate your virtues, you can behave in
a virtuous way, but your happiness, or in
Greek, your eudaimonia – the term he
uses, which is not quite happiness, but
something similar – is dependent on
luck. And you can’t guarantee it.”
The characters in Voltaire’s 1759
novel Candide are all too familiar with
the limitations on happiness and the
inevitable suffering that’s part of the
human condition. After a series of
misfortunes, Candide and his friends
meet a man who suggests that ‘one must
cultivate one’s own garden’ instead of
letting one’s potential for happiness
depend on other people and politics. To
distract ourselves from the constant
suffering in the world we need to find a
project that satisfies us, for as Arthur
Schopenhauer noted in The World as
Will and Representation (1818), “if you
led the most unrepentant optimist
through the hospitals, military wards,
and surgical theatres, through the pris-
ons, torture chambers and slave stalls,
through battlefields and places of judg-
ment, and then open for him all the
dark dwellings of misery that hide from
cold curiosity, then he too would surely
come to see the nature of this best of all
possible worlds."
This might suggest that happiness is
a state of ignorance, in which we
temporarily ignore the extent of suffer-
Interview
ing in the world. Schopenhauer’s under-
standing was that happiness was the
absence of pain – merely a brief
moment of relief that we’re granted in
the liminal space in our minds when one
desire has been fulfilled and we’re wait-
ing to begin our pursuit of the next. In
contrast to this stance, Voltaire seems to
encourage a pursuit of happiness which
doesn’t look out to the world but rather
actively focuses on what’s within our
reach to achieve, be that friendship,
love, or perhaps even, literally, cultivat-
ing a fruitful garden.
“One of the ways we tend to think
about happiness is very individualisti-
cally, right? This connects to a kind of
medicalised view of happiness as well,
which is that it’s a state that exists in
your brain,” Rutherford suggests. “But
one aspect of Aristotle’s thought is that
Nat
fundamentally we are not isolated indi-
viduals. We are deeply political, and we
are fundamentally social. What distin-
guishes us from other animals is that
Rutherford
human beings are ‘political animals’, as
Aristotle famously said. And I think this
connects to his view of eudaimonia as
well, which is that you can only funda-
mentally achieve happiness through and
in relation to and connection with other moral philosopher and
people. This opens up really difficult
questions. As soon as you stop just look-
lecturer in political theory
ing inside yourself, into your own inner at Royal Holloway,
state, and start thinking about your rela-
tion to other people, you get these ques- University of London,
tions of morality and justice and how
you treat other people, and whether you talks with Annika Loebig
should sacrifice your own happiness,
your own contentment, in order to about the connections
further their happiness or contentment.
These pose much more difficult moral between morality and
questions, which aren’t really about you
at all.” Although admittedly a weird
happiness.
linguistic formation, Rutherford empha-
sises that ‘the social function of happi-
ness’ suggests that happiness is some-
thing we do with other people rather
than being a pursuit in which we’re
detached from social involvements.
In the same way that our happiness is
tied to other people, our vices often are
too. Indulgences such as getting intoxi-
cated with friends, whether through
legal or illegal means, then ordering a
takeaway, may be vices, but at the same
time are often valuable because of their
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 41
@MOUCECILIAART
SEE MORE ART, PLEASE INSTAGRAM HER AT
IMAGE © CECILIA MOU 2022. TO
social character, Rutherford points out.
But even if our pursuit of happiness
isn’t inherently morally flawed, it tends
to at least be transgressive at times, or
make us blissfully unaware, if not of our
own shortcomings, then of the suffering
of those around us. So what happens
when our indulgence’s ‘social function’
doesn’t protect us from full moral
condemnation?
“I think the Aristotelian answer to
that is that morality and happiness
shouldn’t conflict. For Aristotle ‘the
Good Life’ is a life in which you live
virtuously, and with a bit of moral luck,
that will provide you with eudaimonia. A
very simplified version of this concept is:
a virtuous life plus good luck equals
eudaimonia, or the good life. But really,
without opening up a much bigger
meta-philosophical question about what
we’re talking about with indulgence,
we’re talking about morality. And what’s
more, I think that often the framework
42 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
that we’re using to talk about indul-
gences is a deontological or consequen-
tialist [moral] kind of framework.”
A consequentialist like Peter Singer
might argue that we should feel guilty
about getting a £4 flat white in central
London, knowing that the farmer who
provided the café with the beans proba-
bly couldn’t afford to buy that coffee
himself with his day’s wages. But
Rutherford is not a consequentialist:
“I don’t think these things can be
resolved in an abstract way. One
response is particularism, and you get
this in Aristotle. It’s the idea that lives
and actions can only be assessed in a very
contextual, one-off kind of way. In other
words, you can’t come up with any useful
very broad rules about how one ought to
behave and what the connection between
these very abstract things are.”
Part of the problem which makes
achieving happiness such a difficult
equation to solve, Rutherford suggests,
What is Happiness?
by Cecilia Mou, 2022
is that we don’t know ourselves very
well. While we might receive momen-
tary satisfactions from retail therapy or
the dopamine hit from social media likes
and retweets, we know deep down that
these activities have very little to do with
achieving sustainable happiness:
“No one really thinks that those pass-
ing momentary pleasures contribute
fundamentally to your good life. But all
of those things that bring momentary
pleasure – whether that be taking drugs
with your friends, or drinking, or going
shopping, or eating a pizza – any of
those things can be connected to happi-
ness. There might be some secondary
questions about their morality. But
you’re never going to be able to draw
that hard and fast line between what
constitutes morality and happiness.
There’s some connection, but maybe
it’s a very unclear one.”
Rutherford opposes seeing immoral
behaviour as a failure of personal
Interview

responsibility, which moralises
behaviour in a way that he thinks is
often marked by a particular kind of
puritanical undertone. He’s also skepti-
cal of the idea that morality overrides all
other concerns in life. One of his main
interests is moralism in political thought
which can have both positive and nega-
tive effects. However, rather than
implying that politics requires immoral-
ity, it’s more useful to remind ourselves
that politics is about conflict, and at its
best, about compromise. He explains:
“Often in politics you’re not going to
be able to do the right thing. What
you’re often trying to do is avoid the
worst thing. We get this idea from the
twentieth century Harvard philosopher
Judith Shklar, who wrote about this in
relation to modern liberalism, which she
called ‘the liberalism of fear’: so the point
of liberalism is not to achieve justice,
perfection, freedom for everyone; it’s to
avoid the worst things that humans do to
each other. So cruelty and hypocrisy, and
these kinds of standard vices – that’s what
liberal politics should be about tackling.
So I would kind of want to separate
morality and politics a little bit.
“That kind of goes against what I
said earlier, right? That happiness is
political, or at least that happiness is
social. But I think these contrasting
ideas can both be true. I wonder
whether we could draw a spectrum
where we’ve got hedonism at one end –
pure pleasure – a view of happiness as
some thing in the mind that’s very indi-
vidualistic, a positive emotion with no
morality involved whatsoever. And near
the other end of the spectrum, I think
we’ve got something like Moralism,
which is a condemnatory attitude
towards all spontaneous joy. And out of
Moralism you get asceticism: all plea-
sure is regrettable and sinful, and the
only way for you to be morally pure is to
refuse pleasure or to lead an ascetic life
of self-abnegation.
“I think both of those extremes are
wrong. Neither of those are the right
way to approach either happiness or
politics. And so it’s about where you
find the midpoint between pleasure and
moral responsibility. I think it’s in the
recognition that pleasure and morality
do kind of coincide, even though the
Interview
Interview
relationship isn’t very clear.”
The American political theorist John
Rawls’ circumstances of justice say that
justice is only truly operative in a society
in which there is sufficient prosperity for
all. One corollary of this would be that
the more prosperity we have, the more
justice we should expect. It might even be
easier for people to act ethically in their
pursuit of happiness if they were wealthy.
However: “I think it’s plausible to say
that you can live in a society which is
extremely just, and yet the people in
that society are deeply unhappy, have
very low levels of eudaimonia – very low
levels of well-being, very low levels of
satisfaction. And maybe they will also be
individually unvirtuous and treat one
another badly, even though the society
itself is just in some way. Again, I just
think that the choices most people make
are guided by forces that are beyond
their control – which may well be
genetic forces, but may also be social-
economic forces.” It makes intuitive
moral sense not to blame a starving
family for stealing, or a person for
acting violently in self defence. These
“Schopenhauer’s
understanding was that
happiness was the absence
of pain – merely a brief
moment of relief that we’re
granted ... when one desire
has been fulfilled and
we’re waiting to begin our
pursuit of the next.”
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 43
can in certain contexts
constitute necessary
behaviours in order to
simply survive. So the idea of
‘the just society’ in the context of
limited resources would also need to be
examined.
Rutherford also argues that funda-
mentally we lack a degree of self-knowl-
edge that’s necessary to answer what
behaviours will make us happy in a way
that also aligns with our moral compass:
“I think that a lot of philosophical
accounts, both of happiness and moral-
ity, assume that we know ourselves a lot
better than we actually do. And if you
recognise that you don’t know yourself
that well, but also that you’re not in that
much control of how you behave, that
kind of realisation is probably quite
beneficial for you for having both a
happy life and a moral life; because, for
example, if you can recognise those
limitations in yourself, I think you’re
also more likely to recognise them in
other people. When people treat us
badly, or do something selfish, we all
have this emotional reaction to it and
think ‘’What a bastard! Why do people
behave so awfully? Why are they so
immoral? Why are they so selfish?’’
Actually, they’re probably guided by the
same forces you are, which will be
beyond their control a lot of the time.
Therefore the right kind of response to
that behaviour is not judgment of any
kind; it’s compassion.”
In an attempt to conclude our conver-
sation with an alternative to the individual
pursuit of happiness, I asked Rutherford a
perennial question of existential philoso-
phy: When are we at our happiest?
“Fundamentally, humans are creative
animals, we produce things; so what’s a
good life?” Rutherford asks himself. If
you were to ask me how to be happy or
how to live a good life, my answer
would be ‘Do things with other people’.
And if those things bring you pleasure,
fine. If that makes you happy, great.
That’s a nice by-product. But that’s not
the point. The creativity and the other
people are the point.” PN
• Annika Loebig is a freelance writer and
recent journalism graduate from London
College of Communication, UAL.
Brief Lives
Michel Foucault (1926-84)
Roy Williams analyses a notorious yet influential post-modern philosophe.
P
aul-Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, on
October 15th, 1926, to an upper-middle-class bour-
geoise family. He excelled in his education yet rejected
much of his upbringing. Foucault’s work as a philosopher
and historian of ideas radically influenced the historical method as
well as many other fields apart from philosophy. The influence that
Foucault had upon literature, philosophy, history, and psychology,
was groundbreaking, and caused many interdisciplinary changes.
While Foucault did not abide labels regarding his philosophy, his
work was instrumental in influencing post-modernism and post-
structuralism. His central interests were in the understanding
power and knowledge. He argued that knowledge is used as a form
of social control.
The History of Foucault
Michel Foucault studied philosophy and psychology at the
Ecole Normale Superieure under Professor Louis Althusser,
whose students also included Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bour-
dieu. Althusser, a long-time member of the French Communist
Party, was influential to a degree upon Foucault; and although
Foucault did not remain active in the Party, his ideological bent
remained heavily towards socialism. He was also influenced by
Marx and Hegel in formulating his historical method of philo-
sophical research. Foucault worked for a time under Professor
Georges Canguilhem, who sponsored his doctoral thesis on the
history of madness. Canguilhem’s own work on the history of
biology stood acted as an example for Foucault’s research.
Foucault’s first book, The History of Madness (1961) analyzed
the concept of madness from a historical standpoint. In it he
argued that the modern concept of ‘mental illness’ was essen-
tially a means for controlling those who might challenge bour-
geois morality and the established power structure.
Foucault’s research was groundbreaking in its attempt to
challenge the establishment as it justified the isolation and
forced medical treatment of the mentally ill. Foucault viewed the
modern medical infrastructure as a societal enforcement of
power, with the mentally ill as victims of institutional oppres-
sion. In his analysis, Foucault juxtaposed historical interpreta-
tion of madness, in which the mad were to a certain extent con-
sidered wise in a different manner, with the modern era of
mental health treatment. ‘Historiographical methodology’ was
employed: The History of Madness sought to analyze the written
experience of the past to comprehend how the present situation
and attitudes in medicine arose.
Another of Foucault’s works, The History of Sexuality (four
volumes, 1976-2018) used a similar argument – that the estab-
lishment ultimately uses sexual norms as a form of enforcement
44 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
and social control. This excerpt captures Foucault’s central argu-
ment:
“There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psy-
chiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on
the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and
‘psychic hermaphrodism’ made possible a strong advance of social con-
trols into (the) area of ‘perversity’; but it also made possible the forma-
tion of a ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own
behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged,
often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was
medically disqualified. There is not, on the one side, a discourse of
power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Dis-
courses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force
relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses
within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without
changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.”
(The History of Sexuality, Vol 1, 1976)
From 1969 Foucault worked as a professor of the History of
Systems and Thought at the College de France. He was also a
visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkley.
Over his lifetime he wrote a multitude of books, encompass-
ing a massive field of historical and philosophical research.
Some of his most influential include The History of Sexuality, The
Birth of Biopolitics, and Society Must be Defended. He used his plat-
form as a writer and a professor to criticize modern societal
structures through the lens of historical research. From social
constraints on sexuality, to the modern prison structure, Fou-
cault’s central theme of the relationship of power, knowledge,
and social control continued through his work. This excerpt
from the posthumously-published The Birth of Biopolitics (2008)
displays the provocative nature of Foucault’s conclusions con-
cerning the nature of power in relation to politics and govern-
ment authority:
“The new governmental reason does not deal with what I would call
the things in themselves of governmentality, such as individuals,
things, wealth, and land. It no longer deals with these things in them-
selves. It deals with the phenomena of politics, that is to say, interests,
which precisely constitute politics and its stakes; it deals with interests,
or that respect in which a given individual, thing, wealth, and so on
interests other individuals or the collective body of individuals… In the
new regime, government is basically no longer to be exercised over
subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Govern-
ment is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal
republic of interests. The fundamental question of liberalism is: What
 Brief Lives

Michel Foucault
by Gail Campbell

October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 45

Brief Lives
is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a
society where exchange determines the value of things?”
Michel Foucault died in 1984 in Paris due to complications
from AIDS, at the age of 57.
Evaluating The Evaluator
Foucault’s work stands as an insightful exploration of the rela-
tionship between power, knowledge, and the way in which social
control is enacted. He insisted on the importance of re-interpret-
ing history in order to understand the perspective of the modern
era, and seeing the ways in which previous events and social
norms dictate the present. Winning widespread acceptance of the
value of this approach was itself a groundbreaking achievement.
While previous models of historical analysis had generally
argued that human history had a progressive scheme, or ‘grand
narrative’, Foucault like other French post-modern philosophers
of his era, believed that the trajectory of history was not one of
purpose or inevitability. He argued that both history and the pre-
sent were heavily influenced by the relationship between power
and knowledge. The interests of the state, of capitalism, and of
institutional power structures were promoted to exert power over
the rest of society but often in subtle and non-obvious ways. By
analyzing earlier epochs from the perspective of the present, and
comparing contemporary societal norms with those of the early
modern and ancient worlds, Foucault was able to establish a rad-
ical new way of understanding both history and philosophy.
Indeed, Foucault brought about radical change in multiple
disciplines due to his interdisciplinary approach, including psy-
chology, history, science and philosophy. His analysis of the
structures of power and knowledge and their relation to control,
was capable of extremely diverse application. And though he did
not consider himself a post-modernist or a post-structuralist, his
works stand as some of the most important contributions in
those strands of philosophy.
Foucault’s unique perspective in understanding the relation-
ship between power, knowledge, and control can be utilized in
nearly any field. Indeed, his concepts of ‘biopower’, and of the
politics of control exerted by the state in determining who may
live or die, as well as the fundamental approach of deciding what
must live and what must die, relates heavily to my own research.
As a genocide scholar, I can well appreciate Foucault’s under-
standing of the relationship between power, knowledge, and
control. Similarly his concept of ‘biopower’ is essential to my
own research into the destruction of the North American bison:
over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States
government and extractive capitalism worked to destroy and
subjugate the indigenous people of the plains by eradicating
their most important resource, the bison.
Foucault’s legacy as a professor and researcher is as a stunning
example of intellectual achievement and discovery, and the inter-
disciplinary breadth of his intellectual contributions stands as a tes-
tament to one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.
© ROY WILLIAMS 2022
Roy Williams is a historian specializing in genocide scholarship with an
emphasis upon the Armenian Genocide, and the nineteenth century
North American destruction of the bison.
46 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
Philosophical Haiku
St Augustine of Hippo
(354–430 CE)
Beyond space and time
God stands over creation
All done, yet to be.
S
t Augustine is a deeply complex and troublesome figure, at once
both sympathetic and repugnant. At an early age he showed he
was profoundly sensitive to the suffering of others, whereas as a
bishop he was quite willing to persecute heretics, not to mention doom
unbaptized babies to Hell.
In his Confessions (400 CE) – considered the first instance of autobi-
ography in Western literature – he candidly talks of his sinful youth, when
he wallowed in the fleshpots of Carthage. It was at this time that he was
supposed to have offered up to God the dubious but admirably forthright
prayer, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Then, after enjoy-
ing carnal delights (and having a son with his courtesan), Augustine expe-
rienced an epiphany and converted to Christianity. There followed a rapid
rise through the ecclesiastical ranks until he became Bishop of Hippo (in
modern-day Algeria).
Concerned that the sack of Rome by Visigoths in 410 CE was being
seen as a punishment for the abandonment of Rome’s traditional gods in
favour of Christianity, Augustine penned (over eight years) The City of God
(426 CE). This whopping great tome explained why, even if Rome had
fallen, the elect needn’t worry, God’s plan for the world is nevertheless
being fulfilled.
It’s a sensational read, even if what he’s selling isn’t your thing. Augus-
tine argues God is not a part of space and time, but the creator of them.
In this way, looking down upon His creation, God knows everything that
will happen. However, from our perspective the future is unknown and
undecided, thus leaving room for moral choice. (If you think that God’s
foreknowledge and our free will make uneasy bedfellows, you’re not
alone.) And so God would have known that Augustine was going to die in
430 CE, just as the Vandals were, well, vandalising Hippo. To be fair to
them, they were polite enough to leave his library alone.
© TERENCE GREEN 2022
Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in
Eastbourne, New Zealand.

Philosophers Overturn Physics
DEAR EDITOR: Heiner Thiessen wrote a
beautiful and moving tribute to the
Greek polymath Eratosthenes in Issue
151. But something puzzles me about the
measurements and calculations he made.
Eratosthenes must have assumed the Sun
to be a vast distance away when he made
the bold assumption that its rays run par-
allel towards the Earth. A Flat Earther
would have rejected this assumption. He
would have maintained that the Sun was
merely thousands, rather than millions, of
miles away, and explained the difference
in shadow lengths as only what was to be
expected when the Sun’s spreading, non-
parallel, rays hit the Earth. He might
even have added that the Sun’s rays never
run parallel, and would only tend towards
that alignment over a much longer dis-
tance. Eratosthenes was therefore actually
making it a foregone conclusion that the
difference was due to the curvature of the
Earth: he was presuming, rather than con-
cluding, that the Earth is a sphere, in
order to measure its curvature. Of course,
he was right (or nearly so) in his conjec-
ture and measurement. Or was he?
COLIN STOTT, SOMERSET
DEAR EDITOR: In Letters, Issue151,
Colin Stott says that we cannot unlight a
match by reversing the operation, cannot
unbake a cake, nor reverse the ageing
process. There is no reason why we – or
rather the universe – cannot; but in order
to do so, to preserve its homogeneity, the
entire universe, including ourselves,
would have to go into reverse. Therefore
to become aware of this reversal, we
would have to be able to isolate ourselves
spacetime-wise from the rest of the uni-
verse. Imagine you’re watching a movie
and at some point you set it in reverse.
You can only do so and be aware of it by
being isolated from what you’re witness-
ing on the screen. The universe might be
constantly moving both forward and
backward, both baking and unbaking
cakes – but of necessity we would be
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up!
Write to me at: Philosophy Now
43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ, U.K.
or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
unaware of it, because our brain processes
would be reversed during the process.
DOUG CLARK, CURRIE, MIDLOTHIAN
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 151 Matei Tanasa
imagined a conversation between ancient
Greek philosophers on whether move-
ment is possible. Appearances over-
whelmingly suggest that the world con-
tains movement. Nevertheless, I would
side with those who argue that movement
cannot be real. I think, like Parmenides,
that change is not logically possible. In
the conversation Heraclitus argues that
since the appearance of the world
changes, then something changes, even if it
is only the appearances in our minds.
However, I would argue that change of
any kind involves a logical contradiction.
The reason is simple. Any thing must
be itself. If at any point a thing fails to be
identical to itself, then there is a contra-
diction. This means that nothing can
actually change, because, in order to
change, a thing must fail to be identical
to itself. Any object X cannot change to
the slightly different object X1 without
failing to be identical to X.
Some might argue that change is still
possible, because although at any one
moment what exists is identical to itself,
it is different to what exists at another
moment, so different things exist at dif-
ferent moments. In that case reality itself
would be changing. But logically, reality
cannot change either, because it too can
never fail to be identical to itself.
This goes very much against how the
world appears.There appears to be
change, even if it’s only in our minds.
But my argument shows that such
‘change’ must be some kind of illusion.
It would be contradictory for change to
be real. And, of course, without change,
there cannot be any movement.
PETER SPURRIER, HALSTEAD, ESSEX
How To Be Fairly Good
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 151 Robert Grif-
fiths contrasts different approaches to
October/November 2022 l Philosophy Now 47
being good advocated by some major
philosophers. They are all important,
but each is inadequate on its own.
Peter Singer, following Jeremy Ben-
tham, emphasises beneficial actions. But
what should impel us to perform good
actions at a cost to ourselves? Aristotle by
contrast emphasised the importance of
becoming the sort of person who natu-
rally does good. Certainly it is easier to
do good when it comes naturally; but
sometimes we should do good even when
we find it distasteful. So, Kant empha-
sised that we must do good because it’s
our duty.
What balance should we strike
between the amount of good we do and
what it costs us to do it? We cannot help
everyone, so how do we choose who to
help and who to neglect? That decision
will be affected by the severity of their
distress and by how it affects us. Do we
love them? Are we in debt to them for
past favours? Have we made promises?
Also, what someone wants is not always a
benefit to them. Being really good is
really difficult. Most of us have to be sat-
isfied with being fairly good.
ALLEN SHAW, LEEDS
Kant Get Enough
DEAR EDITOR: ‘Transcending Kant’ in
Issue 150 sinks to the naïve realist view
that ‘information is knowledge’, and says
that Kant’s ‘categories’ of thought are
but inert intermediaries, like a pair of
glasses, between we who know the world
and the world we know. But this will not
do. All glasses and telescopes do is make
observation keen; but surely, they do not
make empirical observations into knowl-
edge, as though ‘the cat is on the mat’
and ‘the chair is red’ and ‘Mars is larger
than Mercury’ exemplify knowledge
about furniture, felines, and planets. To
be aware of how things are is, surely, no
knowledge of what things are.
No. Not optical devices, but language,
the vehicle of meaningfulness, is
deployed by Kant to make knowledge of
Letters
the world possible. This is put most pun-
gently by the teacher Richard Mitchell:
“You are, in a certain sense, uncon-
scious... Language is the medium in
which we are conscious. The speechless
beasts are aware, but they are not con-
scious. To be conscious is to ‘know with’
something, and a language of some sort is
the device with which we know” (Less
Than Words Can Say, 1979).
BOB GILGULIN, COLORADO
DEAR EDITOR: Joshua Mozersky’s essay
‘Transcending Kant’ (Issue 150) touches
on an aspect of epistemology that is
essential, even fundamental, but largely
ignored by mainstream philosophers.
He provides an example early in his
treatise, citing geometry, specifically the
Euclidean theorem that the internal
angles of a triangle add up to two right
angles. As he expounds it, “This proof is
usually carried out a priori, or purely the-
oretically… There is, however, Hume
points out, a great mystery as to how the
result of such a theoretical process could
apply to real space at all. There is an
even greater mystery as to how it could
accurately capture the structure of huge
swaths of space that have never been, and
never will be, observed, as we assume it
does.” This may have been a mystery in
Hume’s and Kant’s time, but not today.
When the sum of the angles don’t add
up to 180º, we know we’re observing
curved space. This is even true on the
Earth’s surface, where the sum of the
angles of a large enough triangle exceeds
180º. So there is a relationship between
mathematics (discovered a priori) and the
physical world overlooked by Kant and
many who have followed in his footsteps.
In his conclusion, Mozersky makes the
following point: “The fact that access to
something is mediated does not mean
that how it is accessed is entirely a con-
struct of the mediator.” Yet that is exactly
what happens when mathematics is the
mediator. Yet it has been extraordinarily
successful, from the cosmic scale to the
subatomic. (But of course, this is not
what Mozersky, or Kant, had in mind...)
PAUL P. MEALING, MELBOURNE
Good Life Hunting
DEAR EDITOR: Thank you for Michael
Ferreira’s well written review of Good Will
Hunting in Issue 150. While the author
makes several salient points about self-
education versus university education, and
48 Philosophy Now l October/November 2022
very articulately dismantles the fallacy of
thinking them equal, and the potential
dangers of this (especially in the current
intellectual climate), I feel he missed a
crucial more nuanced point in his analysis
of Will’s ‘hard-hitting zinger’. The core
of Will’s claim is not really about whether
one can garner the same breadth of
knowledge from library books as from an
expensive university education. Rather,
Will is commenting more broadly on the
elitism or internalised superiority of some
educated folk and of academia in general,
and the covert exclusion of those who
don’t ‘fit the mould’.
I agree with Ferreira’s initial assump-
tion that Will is not just trying to be cut-
ting or pick a fight, and that he does truly
believe that library books can provide as
much knowledge as an expensive degree.
However, I don’t agree that he is dismis-
sive of formal education because he’s
convinced it’s of no value. Rather, it’s
because he is outside of it, and doesn’t
feel worthy of belonging to it. In effect,
he’s flipping a middle finger to the estab-
lishment, while secretly wanting to be
accepted by it. However, while he does
know its value, he also understands the
limits of formal education – that while it
can certainly be useful and beneficial, it
does not make a person superior, and is
not essential to a good, worthwhile life.
So he is scathing of the formal world of
learning not because he believes one can
necessarily learn more on his or her own
than in that learning environment, but
because of its elitism and conformism.
Although Will is a natural genius, due
to his socioeconomic circumstances of
poverty, abuse and neglect he is excluded
from the halls of learning. Working as a
janitor in one of them is the closest he
thinks he can get. So while he is not liter-
ally excluded from enrolling as a student
(and indeed, once his genius is discov-
ered, he is actively encouraged to do so,
and offered the guidance of staff), he is
painfully aware of his ‘other’ status, and
that he would be unlikely to fit in within
the university environment.
The pompous grad student in the bar
riles Will since Will appears to be a per-
son of lower means, and therefore, of
lower intelligence. The student assumes
that he is intellectually superior to Will
based on appearances, and ensures Will
knows it. So more than offering a critique
of formal education, Will is calling out
ingrained class inequality and prejudice.
Of course, Will has gained much of his
knowledge from books on his own. But
humans are social creatures and, as Fer-
reira points out, the group environment
of a university offers crucial opportunities
to discuss and analyse ideas with others, as
well as providing a guided, established
and informed structure the self-learner
may find challenging to replicate. How-
ever, despite its clear advantages, it does
not necessarily follow that an expensive
degree is going to result in better future
outcomes for an individual than self-
learning. And it sure doesn’t guarantee
that the person is of a higher calibre –
which is exactly the point Will was mak-
ing by challenging the smugness and bias
he encountered from the more ‘educated’
guy in the bar.
ROSE DALE, PERTH, AUSTRALIA
Thoughts Emerge
DEAR EDITOR: I write in response to the
article ‘An Unholy Trinity’ by Raymond
Tallis in Issue 150. Prof Tallis, describ-
ing the notion of ‘emergence’ in evolu-
tion, says: “It is however, becoming
increasingly obvious that ‘emergence’
doesn’t reduce the puzzle of the origin of
life, even less the puzzle of conscious
intelligent life. Emergence looks more
like a description than an explanation.”
In this context, ‘emergence’ doesn’t
refer to the classic scientific model of
cause/effect. When one billiard ball is
struck by another, the motion is classic
cause/effect, and sufficiently explained by
it. However, in the course of evolution,
new ‘hierarchies of complexity’ are natu-
rally created when the components of one
level are combined. Yet the qualities
inherent in the higher level are never fully
or even sufficiently explained as simple
additive qualities of the prior level. Rather,
new and original qualities emerge. Even if
one were to know everything that could be
known about the individual elements
hydrogen and oxygen, one would still be
unable to prospectively determine the
quality complexion of their combination,
water. The qualities of water emerge from
the new order of complexity found in the
combination, and are not a simple additive
combination of the constituent qualities.
The fact that not every explanation
fits the ‘cause and effect’ model has
tremendous implications for the scope of
scientific understanding. For example,
the quantum lack of a cause/effect expla-
nation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty

Principle is not due to our current state
of incomplete knowledge or experimen-
tal instrumentation, but is inherent in
the nature of the world. Our rules for
explanation in our everyday tier of reality
are not applicable in the quantum world,
due largely to the emergence via com-
plexity from that tier unto our own.
Self-consciousness is also an emergent
quality, arisen upon the prior stage of
organic biochemical evolution in the
brain; and all the attributes native to self-
consciousness, such as personality,
nature vs. nurture, self-image, subjective
perspective, imagination, shame, hope,
anticipation, guilt, etc, are emergent, and
independent of the preceding levels.
DAVID MCQUADE, HANCOCK, MAINE
DEAR EDITOR: Richard Oxenberg states
that the nature of the relationship
between a man and a woman cannot be
inferred from a ‘strictly physical’ account
of the interaction between them. (‘What
is Truth?’ PN 149) However, Oxenberg’s
observer will hear the words spoken by
them, and will normally understand
them. In this way they will be able to
comprehend the caring relationship
involved, solely on the basis of a physical
– in this case auditory – sensation.
Oxenberg further asks, “How does
inert matter, through some rearrange-
ment of its form, suddenly begin to care?”
He needn’t have gone as far back on the
evolutionary trail as inert matter; the
arrangements among the higher mam-
mals and birds to ensure the survival of
the species would have been sufficient – a
dog’s reaction to the pheromones of a
bitch in heat that gives rise to a litter of
puppies; or the lure of a peacock’s tail.
Eternal romantic love in a highly intelli-
gent species whose young remain depen-
dent for a long time (ie, in humanity), is
only a more complex example of such
evolved behaviour. Of course, the
progress from ‘inert matter’ to a dog’s
awareness of a scent remains to be
explained. But I doubt if Oxenberg would
require a moral dimension to account for
that, any more than he would for the
response of a hungry non-vegan teenager
to the smell of bacon frying.
JACK HASTIE, RENFREWSHIRE
De Vino Veritas
DEAR EDITOR: I bought my first issue of
your magazine today, and I am very
grateful for it. I notice that in ‘Philoso-
phers on Wine’ in the ‘Shorts’ section of
Issue 150, Professor Matt Qvortrup
quotes Aquinas in favor of drunkenness,
saying “getting hammered was not some-
thing that troubled” Aquinas. Qvortrup
quotes from Aquinas’s 150th Question;
but his quote is the first objection to the
first article of Q150, which Aquinas goes
on to refute in his first reply by saying
“the vice opposed to drunkenness is
unnamed; and yet if a man were know-
ingly to abstain from wine to the extent
of molesting nature grievously, he would
not be free from sin.” The implication is
that both extremes are sin. Qvortrup’s
piece was written with humor, and he
may have meant his point sarcastically;
but I don’t think it’s part of the Summa.
SAMUEL GATES, CHARLOTTE, NC
Spinoza Limerick
You can’t but be impressed by Spinoza,
It’s the feeling that he really knows ya,
His Ethics sublime,
Is truly divine,
The West’s path to becoming a buddha
BERNARD O’CONNOR, BRUSSELS
Interpreting Socrates
DEAR EDITOR: Dennis Sansom in Issue
151 offered an interesting critique of
Nussbaum’s presentation of Socrates. Yet
while I am sceptical of taking philoso-
phers out of their historical contexts, I
don’t see how else we can continue to
tease out new insights without interpret-
ing them in a more modern light.
Philosopher Alan Goldman argues that
the purpose of interpreting art is to max-
imise its artistic value. Is not the purpose
of interpreting philosophy to maximise
its philosophical value? Does it really
matter whether Socrates was a through-
and-through cosmopolitan if such a view-
point can widen our perspectives?
SOPHIE ANDREAE
LONDON
Russell and Khayyam
DEAR EDITOR: I cannot possibly let a
typo in your Issue 150 go uncorrected,
for it is emotionally important to me. In
your report headlined Bertrand Russell
Branches Out, you reported the philoso-
pher’s birthday as May 16. In fact it is
two days later, and it is important to me
because he shared it with someone he
admired very much: his fellow mathe-
matician and freethinker of the eleventh
October/November 2022 l Philosophy Now 49
Letters
century, Omar Khayyam, on whose
biography I spent a decade of my life.
I regret that I did not know this
myself before Russell died in 1970. As
one of his millions of fans all over the
world, and as a member of the Bertrand
Russell Peace Foundation, I had a slight
correspondence with him by the time he
had retired to Wales. He would have
enjoyed to know of the coincidence. He
would also have admired Khayyam even
more had he known that his Persian idol
had calculated the average length of the
year to within five seconds of what an
atomic clock would have given him,
despite the immense inaccuracy of the
measuring instruments of those times.
For the achievement, astronomers have
named a crater on the Moon after
Khayyam, but I think he deserves better.
A story may amuse your readers. When
my Kurdish father in western Iran learnt
of my admiration for Russell, he admon-
ished me for it, for he objected to Russell’s
atheism. Soon, however, a fine pipe carved
out of cherry wood arrived in the post as a
present to the atheist. I regret to say I was
too embarrassed to send it on. It was too
large, as it was carved for dervishes in
which to smoke cannabis seeds. Now that
I know more about Russell – his son Con-
rad later became a friend – I think that the
old man would have been so moved by my
religious father’s gesture that he would
have had himself photographed with it for
the record.
One more point, please. Why did it
take Russell’s philosophical admirers
here in Britain so long to set up a British
equivalent of America’s Bertrand Russell
Society? It is true that Russell’s world-
wide fame – and possibly his greater
importance – is due to his later political
activities, his championship of humanism
devoid of ideological dogmas. But more
and more of us now believe that he was
the more important, the crucial, member
of the trio who founded analytical phi-
losophy. He introduced Frege to other
logicians and he was teacher and mentor
to temperamental, unstable Wittgen-
stein. And it is analytical philosophy that
has now become the dominant school of
philosophy in the world. Where would
we be without it? So power to the elbows
of the new Bloomsbury Chapter of the
Bertrand Russell Society. I shall certainly
apply to join it.
HAZHIR TEIMOURIAN,
LONDON

Books
The Enigma of Reason
by Hugo Mercier and
Dan Sperber
ACCORDING TO THE
journalist H.L. Mencken,
every complex problem
has a solution that is clear, simple, and
wrong. The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory
of Human Understanding by cognitive scien-
tists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber is
devoted to examining one such problem and
solution. The problem in question is, Why
did human beings develop the capacity to reason?
The solution, defended by philosophers
throughout the ages and by most psycholo-
gists today, is that “reason seems to have an
obvious function: to help individuals achieve
greater knowledge and make better deci-
sions on their own” (p.175). The goal of The
Enigma of Reason is to show why this solution
doesn’t work, and why an alternative expla-
nation makes better sense.
So what’s wrong with the traditional idea
that “the job of reasoning is to help individ-
uals achieve greater knowledge and make
better decisions” (p.4)? Two things, actually.
The first is that the traditional explanation
makes reason out to be a veritable Darwinian
superpower, an obvious boon for any
animal, living in any environment. It’s not
like echolocation, say, which is only useful
for animals like bats which live in environ-
ments with very little light, but more like
sight, which is useful in a wide range of envi-
ronments, and which has evolved indepen-
dently many times. Why, then, haven’t other
animals developed the ability to reason to an
equivalent level? Why should such a useful
faculty have only developed once? “Under-
standing why only a few species have echolo-
cation is easy,” write Mercier and Sperber,
“Understanding why only humans have
reason is much more challenging” (p.2). The
second difficulty is that if human beings
developed the capacity to reason in order to
help them make better decisions, then why
don’t we make better decisions? Psycholog-
ical study after psychological study has
demonstrated what most of us know from
experience: that “human reason is both
biased and lazy. Biased because it over-
whelmingly finds justifications and argu-
50 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
We descend from the divine to the human as Peter Stone
reasons about the purpose and uniqueness of human reason,
and Stephen Alexander is against a work against humanity.
Kate Taylor recalls a ‘humanist’ classic by Jean-Paul Sartre.
ments that support the reasoner’s point of
view, lazy because reason makes little effort
to assess the quality of the justifications and
arguments it produces” (p.9). Mercier and
Sperber conclude that “Reason as standardly
understood is doubly enigmatic. It is not an
ordinary mental mechanism but a cognitive
superpower that evolution… has bestowed
only on us humans. As if this were not enig-
matic enough, the superpower turns out to
be flawed. It keeps leading people astray.
Reason, a flawed superpower. Really?” (p.4).
So the goal of The Enigma of Reason is to
develop a “new scientific understanding of
reason, one that solves the double enigma.”
Mercier and Sperber then endeavour to
show that reason, “far from being a strange
cognitive add-on, a superpower gifted to
humans by some improbable evolutionary
quirk, fits quite naturally among other
human cognitive capacities and, despite
apparent evidence to the contrary, is well
adapted to its true function” (p.5). So they
hope to explain both why humans – and only
humans – evolved the ability to reason, and
exactly what reason does for us.
What is Reason, Really?
In order to do this, however, they first must
define just what reason is. According to
Mercier and Sperber, reason should be
regarded as “one module of inference among
many” (p.328).
All animals make use of inference, defined
as “the extraction of new information from
information already available” (p.53).
Whenever an herbivore, for example, sees or
smells a type of plant, and concludes that the
plant is food, or poison, it engages in infer-
ence. An animal that couldn’t infer anything
would have a very short lifespan indeed.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that a cow
sees grass and thinks to itself, ‘I can eat that’.
Most of the inferring done by animals is
nonconscious. Indeed, conscious inference is
the exception rather than the rule. But
between fully conscious and fully noncon-
scious inference lies a significant grey area,
within which falls intuition. On the one hand,
“The content of an intuition is conscious.”
But on the other hand, “One has little or no
knowledge of reasons for one’s intuitions,
but it is taken for granted that there exist such
reasons and that they are good enough to
justify the intuition, at least to some degree”
(p.66). Put another way, an intuition tells you
to believe something – indeed, it often tells
you it very confidently (even though it could
be mistaken) – but it doesn’t tell you why you
should believe it. Mercier and Sperber
describe intuitions as “mental icebergs: we
may only see the tip but we know that, below
the surface, there is much more to them,
which we don’t see” (p.7).
Reason is often contrasted with intuition,
as though they were fundamentally different
– even opposed – in nature. This is a mistake,
argue Mercier and Sperber, as reason is in fact
a specialized form of intuition: “Reason,” they
write, “is a mechanism for intuitive inference
about one kind of representations, namely,
reasons” (p.7). Reason gives you an intuition
that X counts as a reason for believing Y. It
doesn’t, however, give you a reason why X
Book Reviews
 Books
counts as a reason for believing Y. Further
reflection, of course, may turn up such a
reason; but if it does, then that further
reason will itself be an intuition.
It couldn’t be any other way, argue
Mercier and Sperber. If we couldn’t rely on
our intuitions about reasons, we’d have to
have a reason W for believing that X counts
as a reason for Y, and then a reason V for
believing that W counts as a reason for believ-
ing that X counts as a reason for Y, and so on
and so on forever. As Mercier and Sperber
note, this is the paradox that Lewis Carroll
explored in a fun paper entitled ‘What the
Tortoise Said to Achilles’ (p. 131-132).
For Mercier and Sperber, then, “reason-
ing is not an alternative to intuitive inference;
reasoning is a use of intuitive inferences about

QUESTION_MARK_WORD_ART © JOHN HAIN 2014 PUBLIC DOMAIN.

reasons” (p.133). The question then
becomes, why did humans, and no other
species, develop this capacity?

The Society of Human Reason

As noted, the answer can’t be because it helps
individuals to draw inferences better on their
own: if so, we’d all be better at it by now.
Instead, “Reasons are primarily for social
consumption” (p.127). That is, reasons,
according to Mercier and Sperber, serve two
major social functions – a justificatory func-
tion, and an argumentative function.
The justificatory function arose because
we all care what other people think of us. If
they are to trust us and cooperate with us,
other people need to know why we do what
we do. Reasoning makes it possible for us to
explain ourselves to others, and to evaluate
the explanations others give us about their
own behaviour. As they say, “Giving reasons
to justify oneself and reacting to the reasons
given by others are, first and foremost, a way
to establish reputations and coordinate
expectations” (p.143).
The argumentative function matters
because we care what other people both
believe and do. We often like them to do
things we want, or to share certain beliefs that
we also have, but they might not be naturally
inclined to do so. It therefore helps us to be
able to give people reasons why they ought to For Mercier and Sperber, therefore, reason and no other species, evolve the capacity to
agree with us in either case. And reason also is “first and foremost a social competence” reason? Because we are an incredibly social –
helps people evaluate the reasons given them; (p.11): “We produce reasons in order to justify indeed, a hypersocial – species. No other
otherwise, we’d be putty in the hands of any our thoughts and actions to others and to species engages in the level of complex social
con artist. Reasoning thus has “a double argu- produce arguments to convince others to coordination that the human race has been
mentative function: for a communicator, think and act as we suggest. We also use reason practicing since its earliest days. “Reason is an
reasoning is a means to produce arguments in to evaluate not so much our own thought as adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans
order to convince a vigilant audience; for the the reasons others produce to justify them- have built for themselves,” they explain (p.33).
audience, reasoning is a means to evaluate selves or to convince us” (p.7). This theory, The theory also tells us why solitary
these arguments and accept them when good, they contend, explains perfectly the doubly human beings prove so bad at reasoning: for
or reject them when bad” (p.288). enigmatic nature of reason. Why did humans, the same reason that people prove so bad at

Book Reviews October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 51

 Books
breathing underwater. “In our interactionist
approach, the normal conditions for the use
of reasoning are social, and more specifically
dialogic. Outside of this environment, there
is no guarantee that reasoning acts for the
benefits of the reasoner…This does not
mean reasoning is broken, simply that it has
been taken out of its normal conditions”
(p.247). Under the right conditions,
however, people are very good at calling
each other out for making poor arguments
and engaging in sloppy reasoning. Indeed,
the scientific community has developed this
social practice to a high art-form: it’s what
makes possible the incredible knowledge
which that community has attained. With-
out other people to call them out when they
go wrong, even the brightest of scientific
minds can go painfully astray. Just ask Linus
Pauling, the only person to win two Nobel
Prizes, about his bizarre conviction that vita-
min C could prevent cancer – a conviction
he didn’t abandon even after his own cancer
diagnosis (pp.205-207).
There is much more that could be said
about The Enigma of Reason, an incredibly rich
and complex book that musters an extraordi-
nary array of scientific and philosophical
evidence, but I will end this examination of
the book on a philosophical note. Mercier
and Sperber say that one of the first great
philosophers of the Western tradition,
Socrates, understood the social nature of
argument very well indeed, and that for early
philosophers in this tradition, such as Plato,
“Socratic reasoning could be seen as reason-
ing par excellence” (p.197). Philosophy took
a different turn, however, with Aristotle, who
provided a new image of the typical reasoner:
“Rather than Socrates trying to convince his
interlocutor and the interlocutor under-
standing the force of Socrates’ argument, the
paradigm of a reasoner became the scientist
reasoning on his own (more rarely on her
own) to arrive at a better understanding of the
world” (p.198). So if Mercier and Sperber are
to be believed, if we want to understand
reason properly, we need to be a little more
Socratic and a little less Aristotelian.
© PETER STONE 2022
Peter Stone is an associate professor in political
science at Trinity College Dublin. The second
edition of his book Bertrand Russell: Public
Intellectual (co-edited with Tim Madigan)
was recently published by Tiger Bark Press.
• The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of
Human Understanding, Dan Sperber, Hugo
Mercier, Allen Lane, 2017, £6.99 pb, 416 pages,
ISBN: 9781846145575
52 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
The Ahuman Manifesto
by Patricia MacCormack
THE FULL TITLE OF
MacCormack’s book is The
Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the
Anthropocene. It may be about the end of the
era of human beings, but according to the
Preface, it is intended to be an optimistic
work of joy and radical compassion, with
‘radical compassion’ being interpreted as a
form of grace to be extended to all life on
Earth. Its position is a counternihilism that
affirms (amongst other things) queer femi-
nism, atheist occultism, deep ecology, and
human extinction. In other words, it’s ethics,
Jim, but not as we know it.
MacCormack’s central argument is
simple: “It is time for humans to stop being
human. All of them” (p.65). But that’s easier
said than done. You can’t tell someone who
has the flu to ‘just get over it’; neither can we
just shake off our humanity. What’s more,
the demand is controversial because there
are many who are still waiting for their
humanity to be fully recognised and are still
keen to assert themselves as subjects. But
MacCormack insists that we can all exit the
world in perfect harmony, so long as we
agree to abandon the ‘phallo-carnivorous’
realm of the malzoan [‘bad life’, Ed.]
MacCormack is probably right to suspect
that for many readers the idea of the death
of humanity will be an absurd and troubling
proposition. But if, on the one hand, she
desires a human-free future, on the other
hand she also wants to avoid despair and
retain her political commitment to some-
thing that seems rather like old-fashioned
humanism and its values. For example, any
form of discrimination, such as racism,
remains abhorrent, presumably on the
grounds that it lacks compassion.
Equally troubling for some will be
MacCormack’s rejection of personal iden-
tity, which she describes as a peculiarly anthro-
pocentric obsession. That’s certainly at odds
with the spirit of the times, and I admire her
willingness to be untimely, even at the risk
of being branded a traitor to the human race.
Ultimately, MacCormack doesn’t care
about interhuman arguments over identity,
social justice, or even animal rights; she cares
about the “reduction in individual consump-
tion of the nonhuman dead” (ie vegetarian-
ism). If she retains a notion of equality, for
example, she asserts that it is “as much of a
myth as the humanist transcendental
subject” (p.51). But surely better this myth
of equality than giving humanity over to
structured inequality, for hierarchy is a life-
denying form of categorisation that restricts
freedom and the potential of the individual
to develop.
Having said that, MacCormack is also
contemptuous of the idea that inanimate and
inorganic objects might be seen as having a
degree of agency. She calls it “a tedious incli-
nation in certain areas of posthuman philos-
ophy, where a chair is no different to a cow
or a human” (p.56). Now, I’m no object-
oriented ontologist, but I’m pretty sure
that’s an unfair characterisation of their
work. Contrary to what MacCormack says,
those speculating in this area argue not that
all objects are equal, but that they are all
equally objects. Further, as a Nietzschean,
I’m tempted to remind MacCormack that
being alive is only a very rare and unusual
way of being dead and that to discriminate
between living beings (cows) and inanimate
objects (chairs) is, therefore, ultimately a
form of prejudice.
I can’t help seeing this as the point at
which her moralism triumphs over her own
confessed worldview, for instance, over her
model of queerness – triumphs over and,
indeed, infiltrates it: “Queer in my use is...
about the death of the human in order for
the liberation of all life...” (p.60). That’s one
definition, I suppose. And, in as much as
‘queer’ does mean ‘rare and unusual’, then
yes, life is queer – but then that would surely
include human life. Hasn’t she heard the old
Yorkshire saying that “There’s nowt so
queer as folk”?
Chapter 2 of The Ahuman Manifesto
explores redefining aesthetics to enhance the
ethical nature of activism. Alas, I fear that
MacCormack is mistaken to pin her hopes
on art as something that occupies a “privi-
leged space of knowing/unknowing” (p.69)
which is distinct from the epistemological
spaces occupied by science and philosophy.
Baudrillard was right; at best, all we can do
in this era of transaesthetics and self-refer-
ence is ‘act out the comedy of art’.
I also think she’s mistaken to articulate her
project in the religious terms of hope, faith,
and belief – or what MacCormack calls ‘non-
secular intensities’. As an atheist, I can accept
an ethics of care, compassion, and even grace;
but I’m not about to embrace the virtue of
hope, for example, and it’s ironic to see
MacCormack affirming something that only
serves to prolong human existence.
In Chapters 4 and 5 MacCormack offers
us alternative escape routes from anthro-
pocentrism – the first occultural and the
second thanatological.
Book Reviews
 Books
For those who don’t know, thanatology is
the study of death and its implementation;
and occulture is “the contemporary world of
occult practice which embraces a bricolage
of historical, fictional, religious and spiritual
trajectories... an unlimited world of imagina-
tion and creative disrespect for... hierarchies
of truth based on myth or materiality, law or
science” (pp.95-6). It is also apparently a ritu-
alistic method of catalysing ahuman becom-
ings, which leads onto a paradoxically vital
and compassionate form of ‘death activism’
that posits “the death of the human body in

ILLUSTRATION © JAIME RAPOSO 2021. TO SEE MORE OF HIS ART, PLEASE VISIT JAIMERAPOSO.COM
its actual existence more than just a pattern
of subjective agency” (p.141). In other words,
this is the death of man as species, conceived
as “a necessity for all life to flourish and rela-
tions to become ethical” (p.140).
This is an idea I’m certainly familiar with,
and to which I’m vaguely sympathetic.
Where MacCormack and I part company is
on the topic of human abolitionism. For
whilst I don’t subscribe to human exception-
alism, as a Nietzschean I accept that life is
founded upon a general economy of the whole,
in which certain terrible aspects of reality –
cruelty, violence, and exploitation, for exam-
ple – are indispensable. MacCormack may
address this idea elsewhere, but, as far as I can
see, she entirely fails to do so in The Ahuman
Manifesto. Instead, she adopts a fixed, unex-
amined and, ironically, all too human moral
standpoint throughout the book from which
to pass judgement: on men, on meat-eaters,
and on those she denigrates as ‘breeders’.
Even when she does attempt to get a bit Niet-
zschean and celebrate death as an absolute
Dionysian frenzy, she quickly adds a proviso:
“the celebration of the corpse and of death
here is entirely mutual and consensual.”
Ultimately, her dream is “to create an
ahuman thanaterotics based on love, not
aggression” (p.158). By that she means a
‘death love’ free of misogyny, racism, and of
the angst-ridden pessimism of the typical
white male, who can only rather insensitively
imagine necrophilia and cannibalism in the
savage, sensational and pornographic terms stained with tears ‘of love and joy’ (p.191). Indeed, it’s arguably no more than another
of the serial killer. But in MacCormack’s And other than cry, there’s precious little left unfolding of the ‘slave revolt’ in morals: one
‘thanaterotics of love’, the corpse can be for us to do now anyway, says MacCormack: that speaks of love and joy, but is shot through
sexually used, or served with fava beans and nothing except manage our own extinction, with ressentiment and a refusal to accept that
a nice bottle of Chianti; but only if the corpse and act as kindly caretakers for the planet. nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.
has not been produced against its own agency Which sounds all a bit like Nietzsche’s Last © DR STEPHEN ALEXANDER 2022
via anthropocentric violence. So her Man, does it not? Stephen Alexander is a London-based writer
ahumanism is not philosophical nihilism, but Oddly enough, MacCormack quotes from with a PhD in Modern European Philosophy
a form of ethical affirmation, and a form of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and and Literature. He blogs at
freedom, albeit it’s the freedom to be eaten suggests that her compassionate model of torpedotheark.blogspot.com.
or to become a necrophile’s object of desire. apocalypse is in tune with his message of creat-
The closing chapter of The Ahuman ing beyond the self. But it’s hard to see • The Ahuman Manifesto, Patricia MacCormack,
Manifesto is an apocalyptic conclusion anything Nietzschean about her ahumanism. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, £21.99 pb, 224 pages.

Book Reviews October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 53

 Classics
Existentialism is a
Humanism
by Jean-Paul Sartre

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE’S short

book Existentialism is a
Humanism (1946) sets out the main claims of
Sartre’s existentialism, and defends these
against some of the criticisms laid against it.
Sartre makes two basic claims – firstly that
God is dead and this has consequences for
the way we live; and secondly that all claims
about humanity and the world must begin
with human experience. Given these two
claims, Sartre concludes that ‘existence
precedes essence’. What he means by this is

PORTRAIT © CLINTON INMAN 1986 FACEBOOK AT CLINTON.INMAN

that human beings are without any pre-exist-
ing purpose or ‘essence’ which is not of their
own making.
Let’s explore these claims some more.
If we think about an everyday manufac-
tured object – let’s say a chair – we can see
that it has been made with specific qualities
in order to carry out a specific purpose: as
something for us to sit on. Even before he
goes about making it, the manufacturer of
the chair already has in mind what he wants
the chair to look like, the types of qualities
that he wants it to have. This specific set of
qualities exists before the chair exists, in the
mind of the manufacturer. Sartre thinks that
when we talk of human beings having a
specific essence, we are making the assump-
tion that we, like the chair, have been made
according to a specific set of qualities in order
to carry out a specific purpose. In other
words, we assume that even before we are
born what we are – our essence – already
exists in the mind of our supernatural manu-
facturer, that is, God.
But if God is dead, this cannot be true. So
since he is an atheist, Sartre says that exis-
tence precedes essence: unlike the chair, we
do not come into existence with a specific set
of qualities in order to carry out some or
other purpose. Rather, the responsibility falls
solely on us as individuals to make our
purpose for ourselves. In the absence of a
supernatural manufacturer, we make
ourselves.
But how, without a manufacturer’s
blueprint, do we go about making ourselves?
For Sartre, the answer to this question is what
defines existentialism as a philosophy of
action: we live through our freedom of the
will to choose. This brings us to the second
of Sartre’s core assertions: that all claims
about humanity and the world must begin
with human experience.
Jean-Paul Sartre
by Clint Inman
It was René Descartes three hundred
years earlier who concluded that the primary
thing we cannot doubt is that we are thinking
things: ‘I think, therefore I am’. For Sartre,
it is this human subjectivity – our lived expe-
rience – that underpins his claim that we have
the freedom to choose how to act. Sartre says
that our lived experience shows us that we are
always free to choose to act upon this or that.
Think about the next choice that you make:
you could stop reading this article, or
continue, or get up and get a glass of water;
take the dog out; get some ice-cream, and so
on. The point is that our lives are always filled
with possibilities, and we are free to choose
which ones to take.
This takes us on to Sartre’s moral point:
by choosing this or that, we at the same time
choose the set of values endorsed by our
choices. This is because, for Sartre, we can’t
choose something that we don’t think is
good, therefore each choice is also an affir-
mation of the value of what we choose. This
kind of potential pick-and-mixing of values
has faced criticisms for being overly individ-
ualistic. But for Sartre, our freedom cannot
come without responsibility, because all
choices have consequences, and his defence
against criticisms that existentialism is an
extreme individualism is the radical claim
that individual choices legislate for humanity
as a whole. Sartre believed that in choosing
this or that, we at the same time validate that
choice for the rest of humanity. In this way,
human beings are not only responsible for
making themselves, we are also responsible
for defining humanity as a whole.
In a post-God world, only human beings
can choose what to make of their existence.
Sartre in fact says that we are ‘condemned to
be free’. Our freedom is a condemnation
because we cannot escape having to choose,
nor escape the responsibility that comes from
having that capacity. We cannot deny the
weighty responsibility that accompanies our
freedom to will as we choose.
© KATE TAYLOR 2022
Kate Taylor is a writer, clearly.

54 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022 Book Reviews

 Jason Friend searches the infosphere for the
identity algorithm [CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS].
midst the vast sea of superhero-
A themed popular culture, the 2021
television series WandaVision
(Disney+) stands out not for spec-
tacular action scenes, but for its emphasis on
the psychological stakes of being superhu-
man. The show’s protagonist, Wanda Maxi-
moff, a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch, one of the
most powerful member of Marvel’s preem-
inent superteam the Avengers, has suffered
a string of terrible losses. Her parents, her
brother Quicksilver, and her romantic part-
ner, the android known as the Vision, have
all been victims of the violence that pervades
the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In a
madness brought on by grief, Wanda uses
her mystical abilities to forge a refuge for
herself, transforming a New Jersey suburb
into a utopian dream-world based on the
sitcoms of her youth, and creating a replica
of her beloved Vision to play the role of
loving husband in her fantasy world.
In the final episode of the series, two very
different versions of the Vision battle one
another. But as the show makes quite clear,
the true fight is not physical, but philosoph-
ical: Which of the two entities is the real
Vision? Is it the simulation of the Vision
WANDAVISION IMAGES © DISNEY +/MARVEL STUDIOS 2021
created by Wanda – a being who seems to
have the personality of the original Vision
and at least some of his memories – or is it
the ‘evil’ Vision – a being who possesses the
android’s original body, but whose memo-
ries (and paint job) have been wiped clean,
and whose personality has been repro-
grammed by nefarious government forces?
At the culmination of the battle, Wanda’s
simulated Vision even steps into the role of
philosophy teacher, as he explains the
famous Ship of Theseus thought experi-
ment. Consider a ship which, over the course
of many years, has had every single part
replaced – should it still be considered to be
the original ship? However, unlike Theseus’
hypothetical ship, each of the two Visions
retain different pieces of the original. But
there’s one important thing that both of
them lack which the original Vision had –
the Mind Stone, the mystical Infinity Stone
which, in the film Avengers: Age of Ultron
(2015), seemed to be the key ingredient that
first transformed a lifeless machine into a
person: the touchstone that turns Pinocchio
into a real boy. Thus, encoded into the very
essence of Vision’s story is the classic dualist
idea that selfhood is some sort of additional
Wanda’s sitcom vision
of happiness
October/November 2022 l Philosophy Now 55
TV
entity, which can never be equated with a
mere program in a brain.
But what if the self is, in fact, a program?
In Search of the Lost Self
This is not the answer to the question of
identity most commonly found in the philo-
sophical literature. Here the soul, the body,
the brain, memory, psychological continu-
ity, and consciousness, all vie as contenders
for the keystone of the self. However, as
philosophers in opposing camps are quick
to point out, there are serious problems
with all of these traditional answers. The
soul is an overly vague spiritual idea with no
empirical grounding. Memory is fickle: it
can be lost, flawed, or completely delusional
– so an unstable thing to build a self from. A
body with no brain is a useless husk rather
than a key marker of personal identity. The
brain seems to me a much more promising
bearer of personal identity, since it contains
or underpins most of the facets we associate
with identity: our thoughts, our personality,
our memories, and our consciousness. But
as many philosophers have also pointed out,
the brain itself seems like just another
vessel: if its relevant contents could be trans-
ferred to some sort of supercomputer that
could function like a brain, wouldn’t the self
follow it there? So if Wanda has successfully
transferred all of Vision’s memories,
personality, and thinking-capacity into her
simulated version, isn’t the simulation then
the real Vision?
The camp which argues for psychological
continuity as the basis of continuing personal
identity is the hardest to refute. This is the
idea that I am the same person who experi-
enced what I remember experiencing. The
best attempts at refuting this idea come from
the most radical philosophical position on
identity, held by philosophers who argue that
there is no self at all. When David Hume for
example turned his gaze inward in search of
his self, he found no stable footing to ground
such an entity; instead, he noted a constant
stream of ever-changing perceptions and
thoughts based on those perceptions, with no
TV
singular ‘I’ clearly in charge. Derek Parfit,
who later took up Hume’s no-self position,
added that even our consciousness, which we
tend to think of as an indivisible stream, is
capable of being divided into different enti-
ties. He cites the cases of split-brain patients
and invents various ingenious thought exper-
iments to support his claim. But what of our
personality traits – those trademark steady
characteristics which most of us would
quickly list off if we were asked to describe
ourselves? The No-Selfers respond by point-
ing out that these too shift over time, and that
if we increase the time horizon widely enough
this becomes self-evident. The personality of
Wanda as a seven-year old girl is likely to be
very different from that of the seventy-year
old Scarlet Witch. From the perspective of
the No-Selfers, we are all like the Ship of
Theseus; our identity is constantly in flux, and
there is nothing that anchors it besides the
name that we use to label it.
However, although the assertions of the
No-Selfers may look persuasive at first
glance, I think that their arguments ulti-
mately miss the mark. We do have real
selves, and if like Hume we cannot see them
when we introspect, this might simply mean
that the self is not visible from that vantage
point. You could, after all, disassemble the
Vision piece by piece without ever seeing
his source code. So how then do we glimpse
what constitutes our true self?
The Source of the Code
One of the best answers I have seen to this
question comes from a philosopher who
was not tackling the question of personal
identity head on, but was instead examining
one of the other bedeviling questions of
metaphysics – the question of free will.
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach
(1723-1789), was one of the first modern
intellectuals to argue that not only is the
world godless, but that humans have not an
ounce of free will. In making this claim, he
was also one the first thinkers to compare
humans to machines, and in The System of
Nature, he proclaims that if the human
machine were less complicated, a person
“would perceive that all of his actions were
necessary, because he would be enabled to
recur to the cause that made him act.” In
other words, we believe we have free will
because our machinery is so complex that
we do not understand all of the causes that
join together to produce a particular
thought or action.
It is here in the writings of Baron d’Hol-
bach that we see the first sketch of the idea
56 Philosophy Now l October/November 2022
Baron
d’Holbach
of the self as a program: an identity algorithm
by which specific new input is transformed
into specific new output. But what is the
algorithm made of? This is one of Holbach’s
key insights, for he notes that the causes that
produce our reactions are both biological,
such as the survival instinct, and cultural,
such as education. Holbach understood that
it is almost always both nature and nurture
that produce a given mental phenomenon.
Our mental algorithm is coded from an
inseparable intertwining of biology and
socialization.
Of course, by today’s standards, Holbach,
writing in the eighteenth century, had only
a rudimentary notion of the personality
code. I would now say that the root of our
identity code is our unique genetic inheri-
tance. Why does a newborn baby react the
way it does when presented with a novel
stimulus? At that point the answer is purely
genetic. New baby Wanda and her twin
brother baby Quicksilver are swaddled in
their bassinet when a gust of wind brushes
their cheeks: baby Wanda’s eyes widen,
while baby Quicksilver begins to cry. Why
do they have such different reactions to the
same stimulus? Because the twins have
different genetic and epigenetic codes, and,
at the earliest stage, each of their selves is
made entirely from this genetic code.
Years pass, and five-year-old Wanda and
five-year-old Quicksilver are taken by their
parents to the local ice cream parlor, and
asked to choose a flavor they’ve never tasted
before. Why does Wanda gleefully choose a
scoop of Scarlet Fury while Quicksilver
devours a scoop of Lightning Flash?
Although these decisions seem elemen-
tary, they are far more complex than they
first appear. With each new experience, a
line of code from the nurture (or ‘experi-
ence’) side is added to the algorithms of baby
Wanda or baby Quicksilver. By the time
they’re five, their decision-making algo-
rithms are already a dense web of genetics,
teaching, and other experiences. It is no
exaggeration to say that their ice cream
choices may be the result of a thousand
different factors, the interplay of years of
mental coding.
Many people may understandably be
upset at this depiction of the self as a deci-
sion-making algorithm. But our deep desire
to believe in free will obstructs us from
understanding our identity as it truly is. We
want to believe that Wanda and Quicksilver
could have chosen any flavor when they
entered that ice cream store; but as Holbach
and other philosophers have argued for
centuries, this is not the case. Viewing the
vast array of ice cream choices before them
was a new stimulus, which was then input
into their different decision-making algo-
rithms, necessarily producing a specific
different output in terms of their choices.
Others may agree that there is no free
will, but disagree with the equating of self-
hood with a decision-making algorithm.
After all, who cares what ice cream flavor
Wanda chose on a random afternoon when
she was five? Why would this or any other
choice be significant to her identity?
What’s important to understand here is
that the decision-making algorithm is
responsible for every thought we’ve ever had
and every action we ever take. It is what leads
Wanda to fall in love with Vision in the first
place. It is what causes her to cope with her
many traumas by creating WandaVision.
Everything that we really care about that we
associate with our selves – our thoughts, feel-
ings, personality traits, decisions, and actions
– results from our identity algorithm.
While many may shudder at such a
thought, and perhaps find it depressing, I
think it is anything but. We all yearn to be
special snowflakes, never realizing that we
already are. It is precisely because no two
people share the exact same genetic code or
the same experiences that no two people
share the same identity algorithm. So each
self is unique. The identity algorithm is quite
a beautiful idea when properly understood.
Continuity of What?
So, how does the identity algorithm idea
stand against criticisms from the No-Self
philosophers?
The algorithm model clearly rejects the
assertion that there is nothing constant
about the self. The genetic aspect of the
code is there from birth to death. Some
might even be tempted to dub the genetic
portion ‘the true self’, since it is an unchang-
TV
ing code which all the later code builds on
through the teachings we receive and the
experiences we have. However, I think this
would be a significant misunderstanding of
the identity algorithm. The effects of social-
ization are every bit as important to our
selves as our genetic inheritance, and every
bit as influential to the outputs of our deci-
sion-making algorithm. While seven year
old Wanda might still find Scarlet Fury ice
cream to be delicious, seventy year old
Wanda might find it absolutely repulsive,
even though the genetic part of her code has
not changed a bit in the intervening years. So
while the No-Selfers might argue that the
change in Wanda’s taste shows an absence of
continuing identity, I contend that it simply
reveals the evolution of the algorithm. There
is still a singular thing, an ‘I’, in charge of
every decision that we make – the algorithm
– but due to our experiences new code is
being added to it at every moment, and over
time this shifts the decisions the algorithm
makes. Just as the algorithms that social
media sites so effectively deploy on their
users grow and learn with every new data
point, so do the algorithms that defines each
of us. Our identity is both constant and
changing.
While the differences between the iden-
tity algorithm and the No-Self positions are
vast, the distinction between the identity
algorithm idea and psychological continuity
is much more subtle.
Here we must turn back to Wanda’s
simulation of Vision. Throughout the early
episodes of WandaVision, it is quite clear that
the simulation believes himself to be the
Vision, and with his memories of Vision’s
past life he does appear to be psychologically
continuous with the original. However, he
may in fact be but a shadow of the Vision;
Wanda’s best interpretation of the Vision in
her desperate attempt to recreate him. The would indeed be the Vision, since he would erased; and the restored one flies away, leav-
psychological continuity camp does not subsequently have all the same thoughts and ing the viewer to wonder whether he has
seem able to offer a clear answer to the ques- make all the same choices as the original returned to his former identity. Doubt
tion of whether the simulation is the Vision Vision would. But if his algorithm differs in remains, for this restored Vision still does
or merely a shadow, since it takes psycholog- any way, then he is not the Vision, since his not possess the Mind Stone, which might be
ical continuity to be primarily a subjective thoughts and decisions would inevitably vary thought to contain his soul. But perhaps the
experience, such that if you experience your- from those of the original. wise philosophers at Disney+ have come to
self as having it, you have it. However, from While the show does not provide a defini- realize that the Vision does not need a soul
the perspective of the identity algorithm, tive answer to this question, it is notable that to have a self: that if an identity algorithm is
there is a clear and objective answer to the Wanda’s simulated Vision seems to eventu- good enough for humans, it’s good enough
question: if the simulated Vision contains ally give up the idea that he is the original. for an android. It turns out that Pinocchio
the exact same code as the original Vision did Instead, he decides to aid the reprogrammed was a real boy all along.
at the moment of his demise (including Vision, seemingly by unlocking his blocked © JASON FRIEND 2022
encoding all his experiences and so incorpo- memories and returning him to his original Jason Friend has an MA in English from
rating the impacts of those experiences on code. By the end of the final episode of Stanford University. He teaches literature and
the evolution of his algorithm), then he WandaVision, the simulated Vision has been philosophy in California.

October/November 2022 l Philosophy Now 57


allis
T in
Wonderland
B
eing bald means that you can’t tear
your hair out in lumps. Conse-
quently, I have to find other ways of
expressing exasperation. One such
is through a column inflicted on the readers
of Philosophy Now (who may justly feel they
deserve better). And the trigger? Yet another
wild and philosophically ill-informed claim
from the artificial intelligentsia that conscious
machines are, or soon will be, among us.
An engineer at Google recently attracted
international attention by claiming that the
company’s chatbot development system –
Language Model for Dialogue Applications
(LaMDA) – had shown the signs of sentience
by its seemingly thoughtful and self-reflex-
ive answer to being questioned as to what it
was afraid of. It was, it confessed, afraid of
being turned off – in short, of its own death.
It ought to be obvious that LaMDA was
not aware of what it was ‘saying’, or its signif-
icance. Its answer was an automated output,
generated by processing linguistic probabil-
ities using the algorithms in its software. Its
existential report was evidence then, not of
its awakening into a sentient being, but of its
unconscious aping of sentience for the bene-
fit of an actually sentient being – in this case
the engineer at Google. So why the hoo-ha?
It’s rooted in longstanding problems with
the way we talk about computers and minds,
and the huge overlap in the vocabulary we
use to describe them.
Mind Your Language
Ascribing mentality to computers is the
obverse of a regrettable tendency to comput-
erize human (and other) minds. Computa-
tional theories of minds are less popular than
they were in the latter half of the last century,
so it’s no longer taken for granted that mani-
festations of consciousness are to be simply
understood as a result of computational activ-
ity in the wetware of the brain. However, there
remains a tendency to look at computers and
so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ through the
lens of mentalising, even personifying,
discourse. Their nature as semi-autonomous
tools, in which many steps in the processes
58 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
The Fantasy of
Conscious Machines
Raymond Tallis says talk of ‘artificial intelligence’ is
neither intelligent nor indeed, intelligible.
they facilitate are hidden, seems to license the
use of language ascribing a kind of agency and
even a sense of purpose to them. But when we
describe what computers ‘do’, we should use
inverted commas more liberally.
The trouble begins at the most basic
level. We say that pocket calculators do
calculations. Of course, they don’t. When
they enable us to tot up the takings for the
day, they have no idea what numbers are;
even less do they grasp the idea of ‘takings’,
or what the significance of a mistake might
be. It is only when the device is employed by
human beings that the electronic activity
that happens in it counts as a calculation, or
the right answer, or indeed, any answer.
What is on the screen will not become a
right or wrong answer until it is understood
as such by a conscious human who has an
interest in the result being correct.
Reminding ourselves earlier of the need
for inverted commas in our descriptions of
computer activities might have also
prevented misunderstandings around some
of the more spectacular recent break-
throughs in computing. It is often said that
computers can now ‘beat’ Gary Kasparov at
chess (Deep Blue), Lee Sedol, the world
champion at Go (AlphaGo), and the great-
est performers at the quiz game ‘Jeopardy’
(Watson). This is importantly inaccurate.
Deep Blue did not beat Gary Kasparov. The
victors were the engineers who designed the
software. The device had not the slightest
idea of what a chessboard was, even less of
the significance of the game. It had no sense
of being in the location where the tourna-
ment was taking place, and had nothing
within it corresponding to knowledge of the
difference between victory and defeat.
We could easily summarize the way in
which pocket calculators and the vastly more
complex Deep Blue are equally deficient:
they have no agency as they are worldless.
Because they lack the complex, connected,
multidimensional world of experience in
which actions make sense, and hence count as
actions, it is wrong to say that they ‘do’
things. And increasing the power, the versa-
tility, and the so-called ‘memory’ of comput-
ers, or the deployment of alternative archi-
tectures such as massively parallel process-
ing, does not bring them any closer to
understanding the nature and significance of
what they are ‘doing’. My smartphone
contains more computing power than the
sum of that which was available worldwide
when I went to medical school, and yet it is
you and I, not our phones, who make the call
– who exchange information.
This situation will not be altered by unit-
ing the processes in Deep Blue with any
amount of ‘artificial reality’. A meta-world
of electronically coded replicas of the world
of the chess player would fall short of an
actual world in many fundamental ways,
even if it were filled out in precise, multi-
dimensional detail. Merely replicating
features of a world won’t make that world
present to that which replicates it, any more
than the mirror image of a cloud in a puddle
makes the cloud present to the puddle.
Replication does not secure the transition
from what-is to that it is or the fact that it is
in or for a perceiving mind (but that is a
huge story for another time!).
Criteria for Consciousness
I have already indicated why we think of
computers as agents, or proxy agents, when we
do not consider other tools in this way. Many
of the steps that link input with output, or
connect our initial engagement with the
machine with the result we seek from it, are
hidden. Because we can leave the device to ‘get
on with it’ when it enables us to perform things
we could not do without its assistance, it seems
to have autonomy. This is particularly striking
in devices such as AlphaGo, which are
programmed to modify their input-output
relations in light of external ‘feedback’, so that
they can ‘train’ themselves to improve their
‘performance’. Such self-directed ‘learning’ is,
however, nonconscious: the device has no idea
what it is learning. It has no ideas, period. Nor,
to digress for a moment, do these devices
remember what they have learnt in the sense
that matters to humans. Truly to remember
MARVIN THE PARANOID ANDROID, FROM THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY © BBC TELEVISION 1981
“Your plastic pal who’s fun to be with.”
something is to be aware of it, and aware of it
as being past, and in some important cases as
belonging to my past. It is courtesy of such
memories that I relate to myself as a person
with a past, rather than simply being a present
entity shaped by prior events. It means that I
at time t2 reach back to some experiencer that
I remember myself being at time t1. This is
relevant when deciding whether a LaMDA
chatbot should be regarded as the kind of self-
reflexive being suggested by its ‘answer’ to
questions about its fears. Feedback loops in
circuitry do not deliver that kind of awareness.
Many will accept all this, but still find it
difficult to resist thinking of advanced compu-
tational networks as intelligent in the sort of
way that humans are intelligent. ‘Artificial
intelligence’ in fact usefully refers to the prop-
erty of machines whose input-output rela-
tions assist their human users to perform
actions that require the deployment of intel-
ligence. It is, however, misleading if the trans-
fer of the epithet ‘intelligent’ from humans to
machines is taken literally, for there can be no
real intelligence without consciousness.
That should not need saying, but it is
widely challenged. The challenge goes all
the way back to a conceptual muddle at the
heart of Alan Turing’s iconic paper,
‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’
(1950). There Turing argued that if a hidden
machine’s ‘answers’ to questions persuaded
a human observer that it was a human being,
then it was genuinely thinking. If it talked
like a human, it must be a human.
The most obvious problem with this
hugely influential paper is that its criterion
for what counts as ‘thought’ in a machine
depends on the judgement, indeed the gulli-
bility, of an observer. A naïve subject might
ascribe thought to Alexa, whose smart
answers to questions are staggering. Her –
sorry! its – ‘modest’ willingness to point us
in the direction of relevant webpages when
it runs out of answers, makes its ‘intelli-
gence’ even more plausible.
But there is a more fundamental problem
with the Turing test. It embraces a function-
alist or behaviourist definition of thought: a
device is thinking if it looks to an observer as
if it were thinking. This is not good enough.
In the absence of any reference to first-person
consciousness, the Turing test cannot provide
good criteria for a machine to qualify as
thinking, and so for genuine intelligence to
be present in artificial intelligence machines.
There is neither thinking, nor other aspects
of intelligence, without reference to an expe-
rienced world or experienced meaning. And
none of this is possible without sentience,
which cannot be reducible to observable
behaviour, but is a subjective experience.
The Turing test, in short, does not help us
to determine whether the machine is
sentient, even less whether it is aware of itself
or of the individuals engaging with it.
Computing the Future
It may be the case that, notwithstanding the
anthropomorphic language in which we talk
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 59
T allis
in
Wonderland
about electronic devices, inside or outside
the world of AI engineering few people
really believe that there are sentient comput-
ers – machines aware of what they’re up to
while they are prosthetically supporting
human agency, and conscious of themselves
as agents. There are some, however, who
think it’s only a matter of time. Thomas
Metzinger is so concerned with this possibil-
ity (though he is careful to state that it is only
a possibility and he does not suggest a time-
frame) that he thinks we should impose a ban
on the development of all ‘post-biotic’
sentient beings. We know from nature that
consciousness is often associated with
appalling suffering, and so it is a fundamen-
tal moral imperative that we should not risk
this happening artificially.
But why should we think that it’s even
possible? What advances in information
technology would result in calculators that
actually do calculations, know what they are
for, take satisfaction in getting them right, and
feel ashamed when they get them wrong?
What increases in the power, and what modi-
fications in the architecture, of computers
would instill intentionality into their circuitry
and make what happens there be about a
world in which they are explicitly located,
with some sense of ‘what it is like’ to be that
computer? Our inability to answer this is the
flip side of our bafflement as to how activity
in our own neural circuitry creates a subject
in a world that, courtesy of the body with
which it is identified, it embraces as its own
world. We haven’t the faintest idea what
features of brains account for consciousness.
Remembering this should cure us of two
connected habits of thought: of, on the one
hand, computerising minds, and, on the
other, of mentalising computers. Mean-
while, we should be less modest, and refrain
from ascribing to machines the intelligence
we deployed in creating them.
Good to get that off my chest. I feel
calmer now. Thank you for listening.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2022
Raymond Tallis’s latest book, Freedom: An
Impossible Reality is out now.
Street Philosopher
Selling Snake Oil
Seán Moran hunts the hype around hypertension.
I
sn’t this wonderful news? My photo-
graph shows an inexpensive magnetic
bracelet that relieves pain and cures so
many ailments – including the ‘silent
killer’, high blood pressure. Except it can’t
cure anything. It’s not a panacea, it’s a scam.
I grant that the false claims may have a
surface plausibility to them. After all, we
remember from school that our blood
contains iron, a shortage of which causes
anaemia; and magnets attract iron, don’t
they? Well, sort of. We might recollect
magnets attracting iron filings in school
science lessons. However, the iron in our
blood is not in the form of iron filings, but
is bonded to the oxyhaemoglobin molecule.
And that structure is not magnetic, so noth-
ing happens when magnets are brought near.
I’m on iron tablets at the moment, so let me
test this theory right now.
Here are the results: fridge magnet and
steel paper clips: attraction; fridge magnet
and iron pills: no attraction. That’s because
the iron in the pills - and in the blood - is not
in the form of metallic filings (Fe0), but is in
the ionic incarnation of iron (Fe2+), which is
not magnetic. (My apologies for including
this bit of science in a philosophy article, but
it is really the only effective epistemic defence
against medical scams such as this, epistemol-
ogy being the branch of philosophy that deals
with knowledge claims. By the way, if you say
the following word out loud, you can test how
much attention you paid in science class.
Here’s the word: ‘unionised’. If you said ‘un-
ionised’, you paid more attention in science
lessons. If you said ‘union-ised’, you paid
more attention in history lessons.)
It’s only the metallic, unbonded, unionised
form of iron that magnets attract. Which is
just as well for me, since I recently had an MRI
scan. With Magnetic Resonance Imaging
you’re exposed to very strong magnetic fields
as you slide in and out of a doughnut-shaped
scanner. The fields are about fifteen times
stronger than the bracelets’ fields: 3000mT,
compared with 200mT (‘T’ is for Tesla, after
the eccentric Serbian-American inventor
Nikola Tesla). If haemoglobin were vigor-
ously affected by magnets, I would have been
in trouble; but I’m happy to report that I
didn’t explode and become the jam in the
doughnut. So the claim that magnetic
60 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
bracelets can affect our blood has been
conclusively undermined.
Magnetic bracelets can’t kill pain either. In
their systematic review and meta-analysis of
the literature in the Canadian Medical Associa-
tion Journal (2007), Pittler et al concluded that
there were “No significant effects of static
magnets for pain relief relative to placebo.”
And yet the BBC reported in 2006 that sales
of ‘therapeutic’ magnetic devices topped $1
billion worldwide. What’s going on? How
does this scam continue to deceive people?
Snake Oils & Their Salesmen
Arthur Conan Doyle’s diagnosis of human
folly is a little harsh: “There seems to me to
be no limit to the inanity and credulity of the
human race. Homo sapiens! Homo idioticus!”
(The Land of Mist, 1926). But he himself was
famously fooled by hoax photographs
purporting to depict fairies, taken by some
young girls in Cottingley, England, and
published by him in The Strand Magazine of
Christmas 1920. Perhaps then we are all
epistemically flawed and susceptible to being
defrauded by cheats of all kinds.
I want to help Philosophy Now readers to
protect themselves from medicinal fraud-
sters, sometimes called ‘snake oil salesmen’.
A key intellectual quality for philosophers is
critical thinking. So how do we critically
differentiate between genuine cures and
snake oil swindles?
Surprisingly, the original snake oil sales-
men had some claim to legitimacy. They
sold a product that did exactly what it said
on the tin. Though they didn’t know the
biochemical basis of their potion’s curative
action, they had empirical evidence for its
efficacy. In other words, they knew it
worked. And it did have a legitimate
biochemical mode of action. The Chinese
indentured labourers who constructed the
pan-American railroad system in the Nine-
teenth Century used oils from the Chinese
water snake as a rub to alleviate sore muscles
and arthritis. The oils were rich in omega-3
fatty acids, so the remedy was pharmacolog-
ically effective. It wasn’t just a placebo, it
genuinely worked by reducing inflamma-
tion. Charlatans then tried to replicate this
cure, but their nostrums used rattlesnake oils
and they cited Hopi Indian tradition.
However, these oils only contained a frac-
tion of the active ingredient of the Chinese
water snake oils, so their ‘cure’ was relatively
ineffective, apart from potential placebo
effects (more on which soon).
Clark Stanley went even further in this
fraudulent enterprise. His foremost product,
‘Stanley’s Snake Oil’, contained no snake oil
at all, neither Chinese nor American – only
beef fat, red pepper, and turpentine. This
product fell down over two key criteria for
medical legitimacy: (1) Being more effica-
cious than a placebo (2) Having a plausible
mode of biological action in the body. It
fulfilled neither.
Between Knowledge & Ignorance
Our epistemic station in life is an intermedi-
ate position: unlike God as traditionally
defined, we humans are not all-knowing; but
neither are we completely ignorant. Our
power to take action is limited, too: we are
not all-powerful. But it’s just as well that we
have such limitations, for they can work
beneficially together: as Thomas Aquinas
once wrote, “it is better for a blind horse if
it is slow” (Summa, 1a2ae, Q.58, a.4). If we
were omniscient, we would know exactly
what was coming down the tracks for us –
but without the Godlike power of omnipo-
tence we’d be in the awful position of not
being able to do anything about it. Being
epistemically flawed can be an advantage.
Sometimes it is better not to know precisely
what lies ahead.
All of us are fooled some of the time, too.
For example, many jokes rely on ambiguities
which the punchline then disambiguates.
Consider a joke by Bob Monkhouse (again,
it’s best said out loud): “I hate Italians… with
their little slanty eyes… Oh wait, I mean ital-
ics.” We firstly infer that he is a despicable
racist; then we deduce that he’s confused;
finally, the punchline restores our epistemic
equilibrium, making us laugh when we realise
that he’s actually talking about typography.
It’s also fine to be outwitted by a conjurer’s
sleight of hand, in fact, our enjoyment
depends on it. The trick is to avoid being
bamboozled when there’s a lot more at stake
than mere entertainment. It is extremely
unfortunate to fall for a quack’s ‘cure’ if our
illness is potentially life-threatening and the
PHOTO © SEÁN MORAN 2022
‘cure’ doesn’t work. We could be robbed of
years of life by putting our trust in an untrust-
worthy source of medical advice. If your blood
pressure is high, making heart disease more
likely, a magnetic bracelet will not reduce it,
unless the placebo effect helpfully intervenes.
However, there are reliable ways of reduc-
ing blood pressure: by adjusting diet and
exercise, or by taking doctor-prescribed
medication. There are facts of the matter, and
good medical practice is backed up by empir-
ical data. ACE inhibitors and beta blockers
work: magnetic bracelets are ineffective. And
yet we can convince ourselves that the fake
cure is doing good, courtesy of that well-
established psychological phenomenon the
placebo effect (from the Latin placebo mean-
ing ‘I shall please’), which sometimes makes
a fake cure work, to a degree. It does this by
triggering the brain’s ‘feel-good’ chemicals,
endorphins, and by unleashing the neuro-
transmitter dopamine. The placebo effect is
a psychological phenomenon which relies on
our ability to harness our powers of thought
to improve our health – albeit the effect is
subjective: if you think that the placebo is
doing good, then it will do good, or at least,
appear to do good. The opposite
phenomenon is the ‘nocebo’ effect. If you
Street Philosopher
think that something is harmful, then it
becomes harmful, whatever the objective
realities otherwise. These are epistemic
effects, for in both cases our beliefs are fool-
ing us and keeping us from the truth.
The Australian comedian Tim Minchin
quips that “You know what they call alter-
native medicine that’s been proved to work?
– Medicine.” I would quibble with his use of
the word ‘proved’ here – ‘demonstrated’
would be better, for medical knowledge is
provisional, not provable like maths.
However, he makes an excellent point. In the
unlikely event of the ‘alternative’ magnetic
bracelet approach to high blood pressure
being shown by empirical evidence to be
effective, it becomes part of medical knowl-
edge. Otherwise, it is pseudoscientific woo-
woo, and to be shunned.
Magnetic Attraction
Such is the seriousness of medical swindling
that the state should arguably have a role in
combating it. There is no need to monitor
the trickery of the comedian or the stage
conjurer, but crooks touting fake cures
deserve close official attention. To protect
the public from its own folly, they need to be
watched and prosecuted. (The word ‘folly’ is
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 61
a little harsh perhaps, for the claims of
magnetic bracelet vendors, though spurious,
have a superficial plausibility.)
I contacted the authorities here in Ireland
who deal with this sort of thing. But to protect
my own blood pressure I almost gave up on
the lengthy back-and-forth of emails. Even-
tually the Health Products Regulatory
Authority conceded that the bracelets didn’t
work: “where such bracelet products have
been reviewed, the HPRA has not seen
evidence to date to support medical claims of
this nature” (email, 31/08/2022). They
offered to take on the case, if I provided
“further details including the name of the
legal manufacturer or any product packag-
ing/labelling or images if available.”
Snake oil has never been a thing here in
Ireland, since Saint Patrick drove all the
snakes into the sea. Ironically we still seem to
be attracted to bogus magnetic bracelets.
Caveat emptor. Cave fraudator.
© DR SEAN MORAN 2022
Seán Moran teaches postgraduate students in
Ireland, and is professor of philosophy at one of
the oldest universities in the Punjab. His
doctorate is in philosophy, not medicine, so please
consult a proper medical practitioner if you are
affected by this article.
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AUTUMN MOUNTAIN FOLIAGE, VIRGINIA © FORESTWANDER 2011 CREATIVE COMMONS Fiction
Proof
Jeffrey Wald’s philosophy professor has an epiphany.
he professor was stumped and had been for a long,
T long time. He sat in his office, his oversized corduroy
jacket appearing to wear him rather than the other
way around. He was old, and now walked with a slight
yet perpetual limp. But his mind was strong – strong as ever!
As he sat and pondered, he intermittently ran his long fin-
gers through his thin hair like a rake through a patchy lawn.
Before him, just to the left, sat an enormous stack of papers,
coffee-stained, sun-foxed, crispy as parchment. On all the pages
– three thousand or more – was the same tiny handwriting,
almost illegible, but perfectly perpendicular. And on the top-
most page, in bigger letters, the words Proofs For The Existence
Of God. But directly in front of Professor Anselm William James
sat a single blank page.
It had started as a proposal to God Quarterly, a small Midwest-
ern journal of religion and philosophy. The proposal was simple
to express: Professor James was to write a five thousand word essay
expounding a new proof for the existence of God. He was thrilled
when the journal accepted his proposal. There was just one diffi-
culty: when he sat down to write the essay, his mind went blank.
64 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
No problem, he’d thought at first: he’d jump-start his creativ-
ity by explicating some of the extant proofs for God’s existence
that he had been exploring in his manuscript. He began reading
Aquinas’s Five Ways (his specialty)… But still nothing. Then
Anselm’s ‘That Which Nothing Greater Can Be Thought’... Still
nothing. Pascal’s Wager – not quite an argument for the exis-
tence of God, but he liked its creativity; and boy could he use
some of that creativity. But still nothing! Whenever he switched
from his lined pages, on which he wrote his notes from the extant
proofs, to the unlined, plain computer paper he was going to use
to write his own proof on, he became utterly stumped. Perhaps
ten thousand times he had brought the tip of his pen (he always
wrote with a blue pen) within a millimeter of the plain paper.
But alas! He never wrote so much as a single dot.
‘No worries’, he’d told himself time and again, ‘It will come.
Surely the inspiration will come. Meanwhile, I’ll keep plodding
along.’ And that’s just what he did. For thirty-seven years. He’d
tracked down, scrutinized, memorized, anthologized, and ana-
lyzed every single proof for the existence of God that existed. This
began with the earliest – the Proof From Man’s Religious Nature

– prehistoric cave art of suns and moons and stick-figure depic-
tions of gods in the sky revealing the deities behind the religious
impulse. It ended with the most recent, Mark Zuckerberg’s Proof
from the Metaverse Blob. (A critic might be forgiven for being a
bit suspicious of the last one: rather than proving the existence of
God, it may only prove the existence of Mark Zuckerberg –
although for Zuck, that may amount to one and the same thing.)
The old editor-in-chief of God Quarterly had been very
patient. But now there was a new pilot at the helm, Dr Randy
Chakrabarti from Creighton, a young guy who wore jeans, toms,
and a Patagonia T-shirt under his blazer, and like a creditor,
or the hound of heaven Himself, he had come a knockin’. He’d
given Professor James until the end of the semester to submit
his article or he was revoking its acceptance.
And now it was mid-November. The professor was under
the gun, and he still hadn’t written a word. In fact, he’d wake
up in the middle of the night, sweating, and clutch at his pained
chest, which felt like God Himself was sitting on it. He’d make
himself a pot of coffee and sit in the cracked leather chair in his
study, listening to the grandfather tick tock away the hours. But
far from midnight inspiration, he only ever received caffeine-
induced headaches and acid indigestion from the gallons of
coffee he drank per day.
For several months, he’d taken proactive measures. He’d
unplugged the phone in his work office, even though he hadn’t
received a call on it in over three years. He’d locked himself in
his office (but to be fair, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d
had a visitor, either from a student or a colleague). And, most
drastically of all, he had drawn the blinds (like most philoso-
phers, he was prone to daydreaming or stargazing out of win-
dows). But still he’d written nothing. He’d bite the end of his
blue pen, run his hand through his sparse hair, cough loudly as
if attempting to dislodge a hairball, and even from time to time
jab his right finger in the air. Exclaiming a lightbulb moment?
Hardly. More likely he was jabbing a fly away.
In desperation, he’d stand and pace his office. Three steps.
Wall. Turn. Three steps. Shelf. ‘Ah, what’s this here? Aquinas’s
Summa Theologica in Latin.’ He’d pick it up and start reading –
but then briskly put it down, muttering to himself, “No, no,
I’ve been through that a thousand times. Five Ways. Always
those blasted Five Ways – as if the fat monk defined the entire
universe in a handful of arguments. Perhaps he had! But there
must be a sixth. There just must be!”
Turn. Three steps. Desk. Turn. Three steps. Another shelf.
‘Ah, what’s here? Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker.’ He’d pick
it up. “Not exactly a proof of God’s existence! But perhaps
there’s something to respond to. Maybe it’ll give my creative
juices a spark.” He’d read a little out-loud: “This book is writ-
ten in the conviction that our own existence once presented the
greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no longer
because it is solved.” At that he’d slam the book closed (although
it was a cheap paperback copy and thus it lacked the force of a
hardcover slam) and mutter to himself, “What rubbish. What
pure, imbecilic nonsense!” But then he’d grow slightly ashamed,
realizing that Dawkins had at least put pen to paper. And maybe
he was right. His own lack of output perhaps demonstrated that
the mystery was dead; that all had been solved. He’d look over
at his manuscript then, walk to it, leaf through it, sometimes
Fiction
even bend down and smell it (and it did indeed have a distinc-
tive scent). Then he’d sit again before his blank sheet of com-
puter paper, pick up his blue pen, and try to write. But within
minutes he’d think, ‘Oh what’s the use! Perhaps old Solomon
was right, there’s nothing new under the sun, not even argu-
ments for the existence of God! I should have given up long
ago.’
So it went on, day after day, as his deadline steadily
approached. Then suddenly one day there came a knock, knock,
knocking on his door.
Professor James, who had tired himself out from pacing, had
been napping, his head resting on his desk. He jerked awake and
rushed to the door. The thought of a distraction more exciting
than a mid-afternoon nap thrilled him.
He opened the door and found a petite young woman, brown
hair pulled back in French braids, wearing glasses and a back-
pack. It was Elizabeth Forrest, a student in the ‘Faith and Doubt’
course he taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays: “Come in, come
in,” he said, as he beckoned Ms Forrest into his office.
The overwhelming sensation of roasted coffee beans flooded
her nostrils: it appeared to be coming from the professor’s jacket.
She walked to the lone guest chair and stared at it. Half a dozen
books and about three hundred student papers waiting to be
graded already sat there.
“Oh, excuse me. Excuse me. Here, let me take those away.
Have a seat. Have a seat. There, there, you go. Now you can
sit… So, what brings you here, Ms Forrest?”
She sat down and stared shyly at the floor. “Well, um, I
wanted to talk to you about class, professor.”
“Oh yes. Faith and Doubt. I’ve been teaching that course for
a long, long time. It’s one of my favorites. Used to be that we’d
get a good bit of vigorous debate going. In the Eighties and
Nineties. But now… I don’t know what it is. Kids these days –
I mean, I mean, students. Maybe all those stupid video games
and YouTubing, but barely anyone grasps a simple Modus Tol-
lens nowadays.” The professor stared at a spot on the wall above
Ms Forrest’s head, lost in thought.
“Ah, well, umm…” she responded.
“Oh, oh, I don’t mean you, Ms Forrest. You’re a very capa-
ble student. The best I’ve had in years! But you didn’t come here
to listen to me blabber about the good old days... Umm, why
exactly did you come, Ms Forrest?” The professor looked directly
at the young woman, but his praise did not assuage her shyness.
She continued to stare at the floor as she spoke. “Yes, I’ve found
the course very, um, interesting… But there’s something I wanted
to ask you about. I mean, I don’t wish to disparage you or any-
thing. You’re a very fine teacher and all. It’s just that – how to
put it – I’ve begun to have doubts.”
“Oh, is that it?” said the professor, raking his scalp. “That does
happen from time to time. The course is called ‘Faith and Doubt’,
after all. But usually, it is the atheists who begin to have doubts
on this course – the proofs for so far exceeding those against that
any reasonably-minded atheist can’t help but have doubts. And
you seem to grasp those arguments exceedingly well.”
The professor looked again at the wall, appearing deep in
thought, perhaps considering how best to counsel his student.
But Ms Forrest quickly responded, “No, no, not that kind of
doubt. I’m beginning to doubt the project itself.”
October/November 2022 ● Philosophy Now 65
 Fiction
Make like a theological tree,
and be leaves
© JOYDIP DUTT 2018 CREATIVE COMMONS
MAPLE LEAF
“I’m afraid I’m not following. What do you mean?”
Her voice rose a notch in tone as she continued. “I mean, I
doubt whether we should be even trying to prove God’s exis-
tence, as if God were the answer to some calculus equation.”
“Hmmm? Go on please.” The professor leaned back in his
chair, studying the young woman’s face.
“Something just doesn’t seem right about it. Like it trivial-
izes God or something. I can’t quite put my finger on it. That’s
why I wanted to talk to you. You see, yesterday, after class, I
went walking in the woods – you know, the ones just outside
campus. And I was thinking about class, and our discussion of
Aquinas’s Five Ways. And I got to the Second Way: God as
First Cause, and I tried to puzzle it out. To think it through.
For my sister, you see. Emma. She doesn’t believe. Never really
has, I don’t think. She describes it almost as if she can’t believe.
Quite frankly, she talks as if God Himself has removed the grace
to believe from her – which would of course paradoxically imply
a God doing the acting. But that’s neither here nor there. I so
desperately want her to believe.
“I’ve never really struggled with belief myself. It’s sort of just
always been there, a part of me. A childlike belief, yes; but one
that’s grown from a pilot light into a forest fire. So I wanted to
convince my sister, you see, prove to her once and for all that
God exists – so that she might not simply know He’s there, but
that He loves her. But the more I thought about God as First
Cause, the more my own mind felt like it was stuck in circles,
not getting anywhere. So I prayed – something like, ‘God, show
me how to prove your existence to Emma. Please.’ And pre-
cisely then I heard a rustling and I looked up. I have a habit of
staring down, you see, especially when I’m walking and think-
ing. But I looked up and I saw the forest. Really saw it. Birch
and aspen, maples and oaks. Most of the leaves were on the
ground. I didn’t realize it, but I’d been kicking them as I walked.
But a few leaves still hung on, brilliant yellows and reds and
oranges. They spun and twisted in the breeze, the sunlight cre-
ating a remarkable glow. And I just felt it. Felt Him. And I knew.
Knew that if, if...” She jumped off her chair, ran to the window,
66 Philosophy Now ● October/November 2022
and pulled open the blinds. A cascade of light entered as she
finished: “I just knew that if this” – she pointed at the trees just
outside the window – “couldn’t make a person believe… well,
then, probably nothing could. At least no rational argument
could.”
Professor James rose from his seat and stepped toward the
window. He stood next to Ms Forrest, staring at a spot about
thirty yards away. There, a lone maple leaf hung on a branch,
twisting in the breeze. It was brilliantly red and dappled in yellow,
and it reflected the light with stunning luminosity. Then a gust
came and lifted it, and tore it from its branch. It rose, then
dropped, spun, flipped. It seemed to dance. It was remarkably
free and unencumbered, and yet, mysteriously, seemed led by
an invisible hand. And then with one last flip, it landed, very
softly, atop a pile of freshly fallen leaves. The professor gasped.
Then he turned and wrapped Ms Forrest in a great hug – as big
a hug as a skinny old man can give – and exclaimed, “You’ve
done it! My dear, thank God, you’ve done it. Brilliant! Simply
brilliant!” He opened his office door, and was gone in an instant.
Ms Forrest stood there, puzzled for a moment. Then she saw
movement out of the window: it was Professor James running
into a pile of leaves! He bent down, grabbed the topmost leaf,
a perfect red and dappled yellow maple specimen, and held it
aloft, staring at it in rapture and wonder. Then he pocketed it
and was off.
* * *
Later that night the professor’s wife was astonished to see
him picking up the dead twigs and branches that had fallen in
their yard over the course of the summer. She’d been at her
husband to finish the yard work before the first snow fall, but
he was always distracted. That blasted proof! But not tonight.
He was on a mission. She watched him make a teepee of sticks
atop an enormous stack of papers, coffee-stained, sun-foxed,
crispy as parchment. Then she watched as he brought out his
lighter (he smoked a pipe from time to time), smiled, whispered
the word “Farewell”, struck the lighter, and lit the topmost page.
The first couple of pages licked and flicked, but then soon rolled
up into a consuming fire. Soon, the stack was fully ablaze, then
the twigs and branches. ‘I ignited the lighter, which lit the paper,
which burned the wood… but… but, who made the hand that
struck the lighter?’ Prof James thought, and smiled. ‘Bother, it
doesn’t matter anymore,’ he further thought as he patted the
pocket on his corduroy jacket.
Several weeks later, just before Christmas break, Dr Randy
Chakrabarti, wearing jeans, toms, and a Patagonia T-shirt under
his blazer, received a manila envelope in the mail. The return
address listed Dr Anselm James, 1010 Wonder Way, as the
sender. ‘Finally!’ he thought, ‘That old nit has sent me his
blasted article.’ But when he turned the opened envelope upside-
down to dump its contents onto his desk, a sole red and yellow
leaf descended, swooping, and dancing, to land gently, as if
placed by the hand of God Himself, on Chakrabarti’s
manuscript, titled New Proofs For The Existence of God.
© JEFFREY WALD 2022
Jeffrey Wald is an attorney living and writing in the Twin Cities,
Minneapolis and St Paul.
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