PREFACE

Philosophy covers an immense range of topics, but part of its

concern has always been with mortal life: how to understand it
and how to live it. These essays are about life: about its end, its
meaning, its value, and about the metaphysics of consciousness.
Some of the topics have not received much attention from
analytic philosophers, because it is hard to be clear and precise
about them, and hard to separate from a mixture of facts and
feelings those questions abstract enough for philosophical treat-
ment. Such problems must be attacked by a philosophical
method that aims at personal as well'as theoretical understand-
ing, and seeks to combine the two by incorporating theoretical
results into the framework of self-knowledge. This involves
risk. Large, relevant questions too easily evoke large, wet
answers.
Every theoretical field faces a contest between extravagance
and repression, imagination and rigor, expansiveness and preci-
sion. Fleeing from the excesses of the one, it is easy to fall into
the excesses of the other. Attachment to the grand style can
produce an impatience with demands for rigor and may lead to a
tolerance for the unintelligible. Since the defects of a tradition
tend to reflect its virtues, the problem in analytic philosophy has
been the reverse. It is not exactly correct to say that Anglo-
American philosophy avoids the big questions. For one thing,
there are no problems deeper or more important than those
in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language that
lie at the center of the field. For another, the analytic establish-
ment has been quite hospitable to recent attempts to explore

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 x Preface

unfamiliar territory. Nevertheless, the fear of nonsense has had a

powerful inhibiting effect. Long after the demise of Logical
Positivism, analytic philosophers have tended to proceed with
caution and to load themselves with the latest technical equip-
ment.
It is understandable that an attachment to certain standards
and methods should lead to a concentration on problems
amenable to those methods. This can be a perfectly rational
strategic choice. But it is often accompanied by a tendency to
define the legitimate questions in terms of the available methods
of solution. This habit appears not only in academic subjects but
also in discussion of political and social questions - where it goes
under the name of Realism or Pragmatism. It insures comfort of
a sort - one is saved from the possibility that one may be
ignoring real and important problems - but it is insane in any
field, and especially in philosophy. Interesting things happen
when new methods and their appropriate standards have to be
developed to deal with questions that cannot be posed in terms
of the already existing procedures of inquiry. Sometimes the
questions cannot be fully understood until the methods have
been developed. It is important to try to avoid making claims
that are vague, obscure, or unfounded, and to maintain high
standards of evidence and argument. But other values are also
important, some of which make it difficult to keep things neat.
My own philosophical sympathies and antipathies are easily
stated. I believe one should trust problems over solutions,
intuition over arguments, and pluralistic discord over systematic
harmony. Simplicity and elegance are never reasons to think that
a philosophical theory is true: on the contrary, they are usually
grounds for thinking it false. Given a knockdown argument for
an intuitively unacceptable conclusion, one should assume there
is probably something wrong with the argument that one
cannot detect - though it is also possible that the source of the
intuition has been misidentified. If arguments or systematic
theoretical considerations lead to results that seem intuitively not
to make sense, or if a neat solution to a problem does not remove
the conviction that the problem is still there, or if a demonstra-
tion that some question is unreal leaves us still wanting to ask it,
then something is wrong with the argument and more work
needs to be done. Often the problem has to be reformulated,

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 Preface XI

because an adequate answer to the original formulation fails to

make the sense of the problem disappear. It is always reasonable
in philosophy to have great respect for the intuitive sense of an
unsolved problem, because in philosophy our methods are
always themselves in question, and this is one way of being
prepared to abandon them at any point.
What ties these views about philosophical practice together is
the assumption that to create understanding, philosophy must
convince. That means it must produce or destroy belief, rather
than merely provide us with a consistent set of things to say.
And belief, unlike utterance, should not be under the control of
the will, however motivated. It should be involuntary.
Of course belief is often controlled by the will; it can even be
coerced. The obvious examples are political and religious. But
the captive mind is found in subtler forms in purely intellectual
contexts. One of its strongest motives is the simple hunger for
belief itself. Sufferers from this condition find it difficult to
tolerate having no opinion for any length of time on a subject
that interests them. They may change their opinions easily,
when there is an alternative that can be adopted without
discomfort, but they do not like to be in a condition of
suspended judgment.
This can express itself in different ways, all of them well
represented in the subject. One is an attachment to systematic
theories that produce conclusions about everything. Another is
the penchant for clearcut dichotomies that force a choice bet-
ween the right alternative and the wrong one. Another is the
disposition to adopt a view because all the other views one can
think of on the topic have been refuted. Only an intemperate
appetite for belief will motivate its adoption on such grounds.
As a last resort, those who are uncomfortable without convic-
tions but who also cannot manage to figure out what is true may
escape by deciding that there is no righi or wrong in the area of
dispute, so that we need not decide what to believe, but can
simply decide to say what we like so long as it is consistent, or
else float above the battle of deluded theoretical opponents,
observant but detached.
Superficiality is as hard to avoid in philosophy as it is
anywhere else. It is too easy to reach solutions that fail to do
justice to the difficulty of the problems. All one can do is try to

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 XII Preface

maintain a desire for answers, a tolerance for long periods

without any, an unwillingness to brush aside unexplained intui-
tions, and an adherence to reasonable standards of clear expres-
sion and cogent argument.
It may be that some philosophical problems have no solutions.
I suspect this is true of the deepest and oldest of them. They
show us the limits of our understanding. In that case such insight
as we can achieve depends on maintaining a strong grasp of the
problem instead of abandoning it, and coming to understand the
failure of each new attempt at a solution, and of earlier attempts.
(That is why we study the works of philosophers like Plato and
Berkeley, whose views are accepted by no one.) Unsolvable
problems are not for that reason unreal.
These essays have both internal and external sources. Dispa-
rate as they are, they are held together by an interest in the point
of view of individual human life and the problem of its relation
to more impersonal conceptions of reality. This problem, which
receives a general discussion in chapter 14, arises across the
board in philosophy, from ethics to metaphysics. The same
concern with the place of subjectivity in an objective world
motivates the essays on philosophy of mind, on the absurd, on
moral luck, and others. It has been at the center of my interests
since I began to think about philosophy, determining the
problems I work on and the kind of understanding I want to
reach.
Some of these essays were written while the United States was
engaged in a criminal war, criminally conducted. This produced
a heightened sense of the absurdity of my theoretical pursuits.
Citizenship is a surprisingly strong bond, even for those of us
whose patriotic feelings arc weak. We read the newspaper every
day with rage and horror, and it was different from reading
about the crimes of another country. Those feelings led to the
growth in the late 1960s of serious professional work by
philosophers on public issues.
But a different kind of absurdity attaches to the production of
philosophical criticism of public policy. Moral judgment and
moral theory certainly apply to public questions, but they are
notably ineffective. When powerful interests are involved it is
very difficult to change anything by arguments, however cog-
ent, which appeal to decency, humanity, compassion, or fair-

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 Preface xm
ness. These considerations also have to compete with the more
primitive moral sentiments of honor and retribution and respect
for strength. The importance of these in our time makes it
unwise in a political argument to condemn aggression and urge
altruism or humanity, since the preservation of honor usually
demands a capacity for aggression and resistance to humanity.
Of course the notion is flexible, and may eventually expand to
include certain requirements of decency. But that is not the
general form of moral consciousness in this time and place.
So I am pessimistic about ethical theory as a form of public
service. The conditions under which moral argument can have
an influence on what is done are rather special, and not very well
understood by me. (They need to be investigated through the
historv and psychology of morals, important but undeveloped
subjects much neglected by philosophers since Nietzsche.) It
certainly is not enough that the injustice of a practice or the
wrongness of a policy should be made glaringly evident. People
have to be ready to listen, and that is not determined by
argument. I say this only to emphasize that philosophical
writing on even the most current public issues remains theoreti-
cal, and cannot be measured by its practical effects. It is likely to
be ineffective; and if it is theoretically less deep than work that is
irrelevant to the problems of society, it cannot claim superior
importance merely by virtue of the publicity of its concerns. I do
not know whether it is more important to change the world or
to understand it, but philosophy is best judged by its contribu-
tion to the understanding, not to the course of events.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107341050.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107341050.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press