Казанский государственный энергетический университет
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12.00. ПЛЕНАРНОЕ ЗАСЕДАНИЕ Доклад: д. филос. н., проф. Иван Калчев, Болгария. Prof. Dr. Ivan Kaltchev, President de l`Association des philosophes bulgares, de l`Association des philosophes des pays de l`Europe Sud-Est, Membre du Comitee des directeurs de la FISP. Pour la necessite d’une morale universelle. ПОДВЕДЕНИЕ ИТОГОВ (ОТЧЕТ РУКОВОДИТЕЛЕЙ СЕКЦИЙ) 13.00. ОБЕД 14.30. ЭКСКУРСИИ (РАЗЪЕЗД) PROGRAM International Conference «TOWARDS THE XXIII WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY: Philosophy as Inquiry and Way of Life» (Kazan, April 26–27, 2013) April 26, Friday 9.00–10.00. PARTICIPANTS REGISTRATION 10.00. OPENING CEREMONY 10.00. OPENING MESSAGE Rector of Kazan State University of Power Engineering E.Y. Abdullazyanov CONGRATULATORY ADDRESSES General Secretary of Russian Philosophical Society A.D. Korolev Vice-President of Tatarstan Academy of Science D.Sh. Suleimanov Secretary-Academician of Tatarstan Academy of Science M.D. Schelkunov /socio-economical sciences department/ PLENARY SESSION 10.40. KEY-NOTE SPEECHES 1. Dr. Prof. Marc Lucht, Department of Philosophy and Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA. Philosophy as a Way of Living. 2. Dr. Prof. Panos Eliopoulos, Vice-President of International Society for Universal Dialogue; University of Peloponnese, Greece. The Stoic Cosmopolitanism as a Way of Life. 12.00. COFFEE-BREAK 12.20. KEY-NOTESPEECHES 3. Dr., Prof. V.I. Przhilenski. Moscow State Academy of Law, Department of philosophy. Realism, Anti-realism, Constructivism: ontological premises and methodological consequences. 4. А.S. Guryanov, PhD. Kazan State University of Power Engineering, Department of philosophy. Philosophy as in quiry and Absolute Knowledge Quest. 13.00. LUNCH 14.00. PARALLEL SESSIONS Section I. ONTOLOGY, THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE, EPISTEMOLOGY Chairs: Dr. Prof. N.M. Solodukho, Kazan State Technical University Dr. Prof. E.A. Taysina, Kazan State University of Power Engineering Ass. Prof. A.R. Karimov, PhD., Kazan Federal University Session 1 14.00–16.00
Section II. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Chairs: Dr. Prof. Т.М. Shatunova, Kazan Federal University D.M. Kolomyts, PhD., Kazan State University of Power Engineering Session 1 14.00–16.00
Section III. ETHICS, AESTHETICS, AXIOLOGY Chairs: Dr. Prof. E.L. Yakovleva, Kazan Institute of Economics, Management & Law F.М. Nuriakhmetova, PhD., Kazan State University of Power Engineering Session 1 14.00–16.00
Section IV. DIALOGUE OF PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION Chairs: Dr. Prof. V.I. Kurashov, Kazan State Technological University Ass. prof. V.G. Nanayenko, Kazan State University of Power Engineering Session 1 14.00–16.00
16.00. COFFEE-BREAK 16.30. PARALLEL SESSIONS Section I. ONTOLOGY, THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE, EPISTEMOLOGY Session 2 16.30–18.30
Section II. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Session 2 16.30–18.30
Section III. ETHICS, AESTHETICS, AXIOLOGY Session 2 16.30–18.30
Section IV. DIALOGUE OF PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION Session 2 16.30–18.30
19.00. BANQUETTE April 27, Saturday 10.00. PARALLEL SESSIONS Section I. ONTOLOGY, THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE, EPISTEMOLOGY Session 3 10.00–12.00
Section II. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Session 3 10.00–12.00
Section III. ETHICS, AESTHETICS, AXIOLOGY Session 3 10.00–12.00
12.00. PLENARY SESSION KEY-NOTE SPEECH. Dr. Prof. Ivan Kaltchev, President de l`Association des philosophes bulgares, de l`Association des philosophes des pays de l`Europe Sud-Est, Membre du Comitee des directeurs de la FISP. Pour la necessite d’une morale universelle. CLOSING CEREMONY 13.00. LUNCH 14.30. EXCURSIONS DEPARTURE ПЛЕНАРНЫЕ ДОКЛАДЫ Marc Lucht PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIVING I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Professor Emily Tajsin for the opportunity to speak here. This is my first time visiting this part of Russia, and I feel honored to be able to address you today. Being here is especially meaningful, considering the fact that one of my very favorite writers, Count Tolstoy, spent a few years in Kazan as a student. And I also must thank Emily for asking me to speak about the way in which philosophy can inform and orient living. Often in our scholarly efforts we have a tendency to become preoccupied with fairly narrow, abstract, and remote problems. Perhaps it is strange, but philosophical discussion can be quite divorced from ordinary life when professional philosophers deal even with questions of ethics (which one might expect to be as concrete and urgent as possible). During the weeks I spent thinking about what to talk about today, I found myself increasingly grateful for the opportunity with which she provided me to spend some time reflecting upon the importance of philosophy more generally. Soon after beginning to think about what to say, however, I realized that there is really too much to say. One venerable approach to the question about the connection between philosophy and living would begin by defining philosophy. As everyone in this room surely knows, however, one could devote a career to trying to define philosophy and perhaps never finish. Professional philosophers themselves are notorious for their vehement disagreements precisely about the nature, true subject matter, and proper methods of their own discipline. Even bracketing the question of the nature or definition of philosophy, there is a great variety of ways in which philosophy can shape a life or perhaps constitute a form of life. One could, for instance, reflect upon the Socratic linking of philosophy with self-knowledge and the pursuit of virtue. One could explore the Kantian idea that self-knowledge and knowledge of the principles flowing from one’s reason make possible autonomy and the capacity to take responsibility for one’s self – and conduct oneself responsibly towards others. Insofar as philosophy cultivates one’s critical rationality as well as a sceptical drive to challenge and test entrenched dogmas and unexamined biases, one could explore its connection with political liberty and personal intellectual maturity. Thus Martha Nussbaum, for instance, says: «In order to foster a democracy that is reflective and deliberative, rather than simply a marketplace of competing interest groups, a democracy that genuinely takes thought for the common good, we must produce citizens who have the Socratic capacity to reason about their beliefs. It is not good for democracy when people vote on the basis of sentiments they have absorbed from talk radio and have never questioned […]. In such an atmosphere bad arguments pass for good arguments, and prejudice can all too easily masquerade as reason […]. [All too often, however, people allow themselves to be controlled.] Words come out of their mouths, and actions are performed by their bodies, but what those words and actions express may be the voice of tradition or convention […]. They are like instruments on which fashion and habit play their tunes, or like stage masks through which an actor’s voice speaks. The Stoics hold, with Socrates, that this life is not worthy of the humanity in them [….]. Critical argument [as cultivated by philosophical education] leads to intellectual strength and freedom [….]»1. There is more. Philosophy as a professional discipline is ever concerned with its own history, and much work within philosophy moves within the history of ideas, helping us understand and recognize the continuing relevance and influence of ideas from our past. Thus one might reflect upon the way in which philosophical thinking can shed light upon our own history, that is, on how we came to think what we think and to be who we are, and therefore on both the promise and limits of the possibilities bequeathed us by our tradition. Philosophy often involves reflecting upon the ideas and achievements of other disciplines, such as painting, music, architecture, physics, and the social sciences; in this way, philosophy can provide one with an orientation in the wider world of culture. And those of us who suspect that there is wisdom to be found in the writings of thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger, and Tolstoy as well, might be inclined to talk about the ways in which philosophy can provoke one into recognizing one’s own tendency to conform unreflectively to the conventional ways of thinking, valuing, and acting characteristic of one’s society; we might be inclined too to talk about the ways in which philosophy can attune one to the importance of striving to become an autonomous individual by facing up to the implications of one’s own finitude and mortality. Not to be discounted, in addition, are the sheer intellectual pleasures philosophy affords through the wrestling with complex, often intractable, paradoxes and problems. In 1975, UNESCO released a statement asserting that by «training free, reflective minds capable of resisting various forms of propaganda, fanaticism, exclusion and intolerance, philosophical education contributes to peace». I think this is right. Philosophy also contributes to peace because of its emphasis on engaging with different points of view through dialogue. Kant, for example, refers to the dangers associated with what he calls «logical egoism». Because the logical egoist «considers it unnecessary to test his judgment by the reason of others, as if he had no need of a touchstone», the logical egoist risks falling into a dogmatic self-assurance that blinds him or her to error as well as isolates himself or herself from the larger community2. The logical egoist’s pretension that his or her point of view is the only correct one and requires for its certainty no appraisal from others, threatens peace because of the ways in which such self-righteousness can motivate intolerance and lack of regard for the interests of (or objections advanced by) others. However, as Kant recognized, human reason is rarely self-correcting, and we must engage in dialogue with others in order to uncover and correct our mistakes. And philosophy, of course, involves precisely this sort of constant dialogical testing of our ideas against the ideas of others. Kant therefore enjoins upon us the task of engaging with perspectives very different from our own. He recommends the importance of «broadening» one’s thinking, that is, learning to think from alien points of view. Such a broadened way of thinking enables us to transcend «the private subjective conditions of […] judgment» in which we all too often are confined, and helps us envision a more objective perspective from which we can reflect critically on the strengths and weaknesses of our own more usual point of view3. Such dialogue with new and alien perspectives promotes peace because it works against the propensity to dogmatic and perhaps imperialist self-righteousness. (Indeed, reflecting upon the limits of our own perspective already should promote the kind of humility that makes us less likely to pursue our aims employing violent means; more often than not, the more we learn about others, the more we discover that they also have good reasons for their views). Dialogue promotes peace too simply because it creates opportunities for us to listen to and acknowledge claims made by others, and because it encourages understanding and appreciation of others who may be very different from us. Perhaps I should recall that the ways in which philosophy can shape a life are not always so beneficial. Philosophers, as do many humanists, often affect a sort of bookishness which can distract from an appreciation for the many other dimensions of a richly lived experience. In a discussion of the way in which Husserl’s phenomenological indication of the importance of perceptual meaning to the constitution of experience serves as a counterweight to various kinds of over-emphasis on language that are characteristic of recent philosophy, David Carr notes that for many thinkers: «Human existence and activity are conceived as the use of and understanding of language […]. Perception is either neglected altogether or viewed metaphorically as itself being a special version of the deployment of the concepts of our language. Against this view, Husserl reminds us of the concretely and sensuously given, indeed pregiven reality of the world around us […]. One wonders if the overemphasis on language is not merely the self-centeredness and even elitism of philosophers and literary critics who spend all their time reading and writing, and project their bookish world onto everyone else»4. Maybe even worse, the time philosophers spend reflecting on those questions and ideals they take to be of overriding importance can contribute to attitudes of superiority towards and disdain for other disciplines and for those dimensions of life which are not strictly speaking philosophical. Plato has Socrates point to this sort aloofness in the Republic. Socrates says that, «To an understanding endowed with magnificence and the contemplation of all time and all being, do you think it possible that human life seem anything great?»5. (His interlocutor Glaucon, as usual, misses the point, forgets large parts of their earlier conversation, and answers that it would indeed be impossible.) Similarly, Socrates asserts (I think ironically), that «a man who has his understanding truly turned toward the things that are has no leisure to look down toward the affairs of human beings…», for, the assumption is, when compared to the eternal, divine, and perfectly ordered ideals that are the proper subject matter of philosophical reflection, the matters preoccupying us in our ordinary lives appear unworthy of attention6. This is why Socrates’ disciple Apollodorus, who, in the Symposium, is portrayed as laboring under a similar misunderstanding of philosophy and thereby demonstrates that he still has a lot to learn, tells his friend Glaucon that all talk other than philosophy, «especially the talk of rich businessmen like you, bores me to tears, and I’m sorry for you and your friends because you think your affairs are important when really they’re totally trivial»7. Sadly, such disdain sometimes seems to evolve into precisely the dogmatic self-righteousness that philosophical dialogue should subvert. I suspect we all are acquainted with professional philosophers who are utterly certain of their own grasp of the truth and the good, and treat people who disagree with them accordingly. Probably I should talk about all of this, but there simply is too much to say for the amount of time we have. At the risk of being embarrassingly simplistic, I propose to focus more narrowly on just one idea. This idea has to do with the manner in which philosophical reflection can enable one to recognize – and begin to resist – the sorts of existential dangers arising from our all too common preoccupation with objectivity, efficiency, and instrumental rationality. Philosophy can facilitate the recognition that certain kinds of merely instrumentalist thinking and valuing threaten to impoverish a life, and can point one to alternative kinds of thinking. A long line of thinkers, from Kant to Marx to Habermas, has highlighted dangers associated with instrumental rationality. I would like to follow briefly Heidegger’s path of reflection about these dangers. As Heidegger sees it, we live in a time in which enormous authority is invested in the natural sciences. Heidegger is not the Luddite that some portray him as being, but he is very troubled by our tendency to think of the natural sciences as the model for all legitimate modes of inquiry. For him, the more it is that scientific and technical modes of thinking are taken to be the sole legitimate modes of access to truths about the world, the less it is that anything not subject either to quantitative representation or technological subjection to practical ends will be regarded as anything more than the correlate of mere subjective interpretation or preference. Heidegger traces the genesis of the prevailing ways of thinking to a metaphysical shift initiated by Galileo and Descartes. The legacy with which they left us is that nature comes to be defined a priori as sheer material objectivity and its motion. Nature is conceived a priori as «the self-contained system of motion of units of mass related spatiotemporally» or, basically, matter and energy8. As Descartes knew, the equivalence of the real with extended matter (and with determinate quanta of energy) makes possible the mathematical representation of nature in terms of quantitative magnitudes. Science proceeds on the foundation of this rigorous objectification of nature. Only those phenomena conforming to this schema are taken to be at all, and any concrete empirical investigation will proceed on the basis of this a priori presupposition about the nature of the real and the correlative purview of legitimate inquiry. Now, Heidegger argues that beings are represented as objects ultimately so that they are appropriate material for technological manipulation and control. His claim is that modern European metaphysics has sought to universally objectify the natural world with the final aim of securing dominion over it. The objectivity of a being allows for the measurability and calculability presupposed by the project of acquiring mastery over that being. (This is why Descartes says in the Discourse that the new philosophy will enable us to become the masters and possessors of nature). Objectivity and mastery are connected in part because quantitative measurement and mathematical calculation enable us to fix and know the properties of a being with a definiteness and precision impossible in the flux of ordinary perceptual experience, and thus enable us to predict that being’s future states and behavior. Objectivity and mastery are connected also because modern theory proceeds analytically, determining the various components of an object, the way in which those components fit together, and the dynamic laws governing the behavior of those components; once one knows all that, in principle one already knows how those components can be assembled differently, that is, how the thing can be re-made or altered9. What this means, is that modern thought is not a «pure knowing for its own sake», but is technological in its very structure. With modern metaphysics, then, nature comes to be represented as raw material or resource that is available for human use, consumption, and manipulation. Theory’s aim, Heidegger famously says, has been to convert nature into a «gigantic gasoline station»10. Theoretical reflection, even though it purports to be normatively neutral, in fact aims at power. As did Husserl before him, Heidegger thinks that our theoretical commitments and biases end up guiding common sense. The technical interpretation of being as object and resource increasingly regulates our unreflective, pre-theoretical ideas about, and even ordinary experience of, the world. (I have found that when one asks those representatives of common sense, undergraduate students, about whom one should turn to if one wants to know what is real, they invariably suggest physicists and chemists, but never poets.) If Heidegger is right, then even in the course of ordinary experience we increasingly encounter little but the uniformity of material quantity and functionality. The world is taken to be, and is encountered as, object and resource. In other words, we encounter the world primarily in terms of its capacity to contribute to the satisfaction of our goals. Attending primarily to those features of the things that bear upon our projects, we allow ourselves to be responsive to the world merely in its possible instrumentality, that is, in its relation to us and what it can be for us. Another way of putting this point is to say that modern metaphysics has dis-aggregated thing and meaning, or fact and value, and only side of these distinctions is taken to be fully real. Once the real is taken to be nothing but quantity, it can contain no significance of its own. The real is just matter and energy. Any significance it may have will arise out its connection to our needs and desires. Significance then comes to be taken as a subjective artifact of our judgments and interpretive activity, and is to be found just in the way in which we take things and in what it is that we take them to be for. As Kant puts the point, «without man all of creation would be a mere wasteland, gratuitous and without a final purpose»11. Thus, as for Descartes, for whom secondary qualities such as purple do not inhere as real properties in the thing that appears purple, so for us phenomena that initially do not appear to be either matter or energy are either subject to the attempt to be reduced to and understood in terms of quantitatively measurable primary qualities, or else are passed over as «merely subjective». Increasingly we tend to think that phenomena such as hope and humor are reducible to the disposition of neurons in brains, and phenomena such as the frightening, the good, the fitting, and the vile are conceived not as real properties of objects or situations, but as mere artifacts of judgments we make and feelings we have about things. To take an example of the implications of such a view, in the American education system, there is increasing emphasis placed on quantitative assessments of student learning. These assessments are accomplished mostly using multiple-choice exams. The implication is that even the learning of something like Socratically inspired philosophy, with its emphases on one’s recognition of one’s own ignorance, on wonder, on intellectual liberty and the critique of convention, on openness to new perspectives, on dialogical relations with others within a community, on tenacity, and on virtue, is reducible to determinate bits of data and measurable «outputs». For the contemporary view, what is real in learning, or real learning, must, it seems, be measurable quantitatively. It seems to me that this approach overlooks a great deal, including what is most important about education. To take another example…. With the advent of modern industrial agriculture, what used to be called «animal husbandry» has come to be referred to as animal science or meat science. Animals that once were thought of as requiring at least some degree of care, now are thought of and written about merely as meat production units. Accordingly, the only issues that show up as requiring attention relate to the most efficient means of production and delivering consistency of product. Such efficiency, as put in a presentation for the meat industry, requires, «highly coordinated flows of sophisticatedly [sic] produced raw materials arriving at a huge processing facility […] the movement to a more attribute specific raw material […] economies of scale in larger production and processing facilities [and] the need to reduce inefficiencies originating in hogs»12. No longer is there incentive for any care for the animal at all; all that matters is correcting for the natural «inefficiencies» arising in animals in order to ensure the most reliably consistent and least expensive product. And of course such correction typically requires creating living situations of the most horrendous suffering, as well as the application of techniques such as genetic engineering, utilized in order to re-design these meat delivery devices to enhance their efficiency. Life itself is subject to technical mastery. Instrumental reasoning is the kind of thinking corresponding to a world in which what matters are instrumentalities, and for which other sorts of concerns simply do not arise. Heidegger says: «The willing of which we speak here is the putting-through, the self-assertion, whose purpose has already [e.g., a priori) posited the world as the whole of producible objects […]. Correspondingly, human willing too can be in the mode of self-assertion only by forcing everything under its dominion from the start, even before it can survey it. To such a willing, everything, beforehand and thus subsequently, turns irresistibly into material for self-assertive production […]. At bottom, the essence of life is supposed to yield itself to technical production […]. In place of all the world-content of things that was formerly perceived […] the object-character of technological dominion spreads itself over the earth ever more quickly, ruthlessly, and completely. Not only does it establish all things as producible in the process of production; it also delivers the products of production by means of the market. In self-assertive production, the humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which not only spans the whole earth [… but] subjects all beings to the trade of a calculation that dominates most tenaciously in those areas where there is no need of numbers»13. Heidegger does not think that this sort of technical or instrumental approach to the world is wrong, nor does science provide a false disclosure of the world. But he does think that the ontology of material presence is partial and reductive; our attention is narrowed to those aspects of the world that are controllable, and we overlook what is not representable as object and resource. In other words, when we gaze at the world only through the lens of our own interests, focusing only on what it can do for us, our gaze is narrowed, and our selfishness blinds us to what Heidegger thinks of as the manifold rich abundance of being. It is for this reason that Heidegger says that objectifying science «already had annihilated things as things long before the atom bomb exploded»,14 for things «can no longer pierce through the objectification to show their own»15. We fail to attend to the richness of a thing, instead seeing only those aspects of it relating to our aims. As Matthew Scully puts the point, «when you look at a rabbit and can see only a pest, or vermin, or a meal, or a commodity, or a laboratory subject, you aren’t really seeing the rabbit anymore. You are seeing only yourself and the schemes and appetites we bring to the world […]»16. Imagine looking at a forest and seeing in it only potential toothpicks. This seeing must overlook a great deal. And the technical approach is not only reductive. When allowed to become authoritative and exhaustive, it is dangerous. There are several dangers to which Heidegger points, from the obvious ecological dangers, to ethical dangers (namely, the more habituated we are to treating everything around us as mere resource, the more likely it is that we shall treat other people and other sentient creatures merely as things to be used, valuing them solely for their possible utility), to what he thinks of as a sort of blasphemy connected with approaching the cosmos in such a reductive and objective manner. Heidegger’s language about the impiety associated with reductive and self-assertive scientific approaches echoes that of the Franciscan Platonist St. Bonaventure, who already in the 13th Century was troubled by the project of «speculation without devotion, investigation without wonder, observation without joy, work without piety, knowledge without love, understanding without humility, endeavor without grace»17. Here, however, I want to reflect upon an existential danger connected with the over-emphasis on technical ways of thinking. Charles Taylor says that the primacy accorded to instrumental reasoning is threatening in part because choices «that ought to be determined by other criteria will be decided in terms of efficiency or ‘cost-benefit’ analysis». However, such thinking is threatening also because the over-emphasis on instrumental reasoning contributes to what he calls a «narrowing and flattening of our lives […]»18. Characteristic of the instrumentalist attitude is the sensitivity to only one kind of meaning – that attitude encounters things merely in terms of their capacity to further or frustrate our projects. We only attend, as it were, to the sides of things facing us, those aspects of things bearing upon our practical interests. Attending solely to instrumentality blinds us to the multiplicity of other kinds of significance incorporated into the world. As Taylor suggests, attending only to utility can lead to a sort of dreary graying or flattening of one’s life. Why? One reason is because the more we engage in practices that are important to us only for instrumental reasons, the more it is that we defer our satisfaction. If going to school is only important insofar as it can help us get a good job, for instance, if the significance of our endeavors is external to the endeavors themselves, then we are always deferring what we care about and value – the payoff – until the future. The present, and our present experience, is experienced not as important for its own sake, but merely as a transition to an ever receding and perhaps never reached future state of satisfaction or reward. Instead of living, we plan, and we wait. A deeper reason why preoccupation with utility can lead to the impoverishment of a life is simply because a life replete with a multiplicity of different kinds of significance or worth is fuller – more meaningful – than a life containing only one mode of meaning. Attending to only one sort of value blinds us to a range of other sorts of worth that can make our endeavors rewarding and worthwhile. Seeing things only in terms of their practical benefit to us blinds us to a host of other ways that things can matter. Joseph P. Fell illustrates the problem with a series of rhetorical questions. What would be missed or lost, «If travelling were regarded simply as the use of the most efficient means of getting from one point to another. If learning were regarded simply as picking up skills, as a means to productivity […]. If forests were regarded simply as a ‘national resource’ […]. If adjusting the snapshot or movie camera as a means of re-producing the present in the future were to become more important than appreciating the scene now […]. If sex education manuals for our school-children were considered simply an antiseptic and clinically-neutral way to keep kids out of future trouble.If vacations were to be considered primarily as a way of ‘recharging the batteries’ […]. If college were seen as simply a means to grad-school or a ‘preparation for life’ rather than life itself. If human communication were seen primarily as the use of ‘media’ for data transmission»19. A focus on mere instrumentality and practical benefit would deprive many of these things and practices of their point, and of their potential for enriching human conduct and cultural life. Sexuality is not important to think about solely in order to help us regulate it with the goal of avoiding unwanted infections or pregnancy. It is not the case that education is important only for its capacity to train students for a job. Education is not good merely for the sake of something else, something other than education. Both sexuality and education are worthwhile for their own sakes. What is good about them is not only external to them (though certainly they do make possible other, external goods as well), but their goods are internal to the practices themselves. Because philosophy involves rigorous thinking about the nature of values, because it involves investigation of the nature of representation, of the promise and limitations of scientific approach to the world, of different modes of rationality, and of the history of ideas, and because it involves disengaging ourselves from our habitual modes of conduct and then reflecting on them and their legitimacy, it is especially well suited to uncover the dangers of our preoccupation with the instrumental, as well as to help us begin to envision alternative ways of thinking. Philosophical reflection in part includes the process of making distinctions. One of the most fundamental distinctions in philosophy is that between instrumental and inherent worth. Philosophical reflection can remind us that instrumental value is not the only kind of meaning, that some things are significant not just relative to us, and that some things are important not solely for their practical bearing on our endeavors. Philosophy can help us recognize that at least some things and practices might possess an inherent worth and be important for their own sakes, thereby helping prepare us to appreciate an array of different kinds of meaning. One sort of inherent worth is to be found in pleasure. (I think the contribution made by pleasure to living a full life all too often is overlooked.) We pursue pleasure not for the sake of something external to the pleasurable experience, or for the sake of some sort of practical utility, but we pursue it for its own sake. We pursue it because it matters to us, and it is its own justification; it is its own point. The appreciation of beauty is similar. The beautiful is not important for something else, it is not important instrumentally. As Kant taught (or maybe reminded) us, we love the beautiful in a disinterested way, for its own sake. Surely goodness is the same. Goodness is not good because it is good for something. Goodness is just good. Perhaps forests and pigs too possess a worth independent of their relation to human desires and practical needs. Perhaps forests, like music and virtue, are not just important for something, but are just important. Perhaps worth is not to be determined solely in connection with human interests. As Fell suggests, perhaps it is the case that the meanings we all too readily seek «in the subject’s interiority, in immanence, have not originated there, but have occurred antecedently in the world»20. Earlier I chose the word «appreciate» deliberately. Thinkers such as Kant and Heidegger argue that significance is encountered in attitudes of responsiveness and receptiveness, in attitudes such as appreciation, wonder, love, and awe, rather than in a more assertive and active ordering of all things according to their relation to our purposes. Kant, for instance, thinks of the aesthetic regard for the world as disinterested, that is, as a non-covetous or non-appropriative vision. This vision does not seek to impose categories on the world, or to master it either in thought or deed, but arises with the suspension of our more normal drive to organize the world according to our practical purposes. The appreciation of the beautiful presupposes the bracketing of my more typical practical engagement with the world. This vision is receptive and responsive. It is attentive and contemplative, and requires us to open ourselves to the possibility of being touched by something. Such a vision, as Heidegger puts the point in a discussion of Kant’s aesthetics, enables «what encounters us» to «come before us in its own stature and worth»21. Perhaps were we to suspend our usual focus on achieving our practical aims, our normal approach of actively ordering and assigning value to things on the basis of their relation to us, perhaps if instead we were to adopt more open and responsive attitudes, allowing ourselves to encounter things as they come before us, we then would discover a wealth of different kinds of meaning already surrounding us, and different kinds of worth whose determination is not given merely by their relation to our interests. What I want to suggest to you is that a life spent attending to the abundance of manifold kinds of significance to be found within the world, a life spent, at least in great part, in the pursuit of practices whose goods are internal to them, that are good for their own sakes, will be more richly lived than would be a life spent preoccupied more narrowly with only practicality and efficiency. It strikes me that philosophical contemplation, which at its best is precisely the disclosure of and attentiveness to meaning, can help us cultivate a sensitivity to inherent worth. Philosophy offers a way to resist the homogenization of meaning to the kind of utilitarian value that is the correlate of instrumental rationality. In this way, philosophy – living philosophically – is the enriching of a life. BIBLIOGRAPHY Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 19, pp. 28–29. Carr, David. «The Life-world Revisited». Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Textbook. Ed. William R. McKenna and J.N. Mohanty. Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, University Press of America, 1989, p. 301. Carr has in mind thinkers as diverse as Gadamer, Derrida, Dreyfus, and Foucault, as well as recent trends within «analytic» philosophy. Plato, Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968, 486a. Plato, Republic, 500c. Plato, Symposium. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989, 173c–d. Apollodorus’ philosophical immaturity is made evident not only by his denigration of ordinary life, a denigration most likely grounded in a «two worlds» misunderstanding of the relation between the forms and the spatiotemporal world, but also by his poor memory, evident at 178a. It is the «two worlds» theory, for which the forms are held to be entirely transcendent (and in comparison to which the temporal world can only seem unimportant), that Plato ascribes to «young Socrates» and that is corrected over the course of young Socrates’ discussion with Parmenides in the eponymous dialogue. Heidegger, Martin. «The Age of the World Picture». The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988, p. 119. cf. Jonas, Hans. «The Practical Uses of Theory». The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966. Heidegger, Martin. «Memorial Address». Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966, p. 50. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987, 442 / 331. Chris Hurt, «Staying Competitive in Today’s Pork Business», quoted in Scully, Matthew. Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002, p. 251. Heidegger, Martin. «What are Poets For?». Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1989, pp. 111–115. Heidegger, «The Thing». Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1989, p. 170. Heidegger, «What are Poets For?», p. 133. Scully, Dominion, p. 3. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, and the Life of St. Francis. Trans. Ewert Cousins. New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978, p. 55. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 5, p. 6. Fell, Joseph P. «What is Philosophy?» Eidos: The Bucknell Academic Journal. Lewisburg, PA: A Publication of the Bucknell Student Government, 1990, pp. 68–9. Fell, Joseph P. «Seeing a Thing in a Hidden Whole: The Significance of Besinnung in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik». Heidegger Studies 10 (1994): 91–109, p. 95. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche, vol. 1.Trans. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995, p. 109. Марк Лахт |
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