Arvind asked:

Are reason and imagination two separate, antithetical entities?

Are there some situations or contexts in which they get interrelated?

Answer by Helier Robinson

They are separate but not antithetical. First we need to distinguish the concrete from the abstract. The concrete is any quality known through the senses, such as colours, sounds, smells, tastes, hard and soft, hot and cold, heavy and light, rough and smooth, etc. The abstract is anything that has no concrete qualities. Imagination deals with the concrete, in the form of concrete memories and concrete images. Reason, or thought, deals with abstract ideas. Nominalists are people who deny that there is anything abstract, so for them all thought is ‘silent speech’. Conceptualists declare that there are abstract ideas, which, when bonded to words, form concepts; thought is then manipulation of concepts. Most conscious activity is a mixture of imagination and thought, so they are not antithetical.

The question as to who are correct, nominalists or conceptualists, can be decided by considering relations. Consider the example of a cup of coffee. You can see the cup and the coffee, and you can also see that the coffee is in the cup. The in is a relation, having the coffee and the cup as its terms, or relata. So you can see the in, but if you ask what it looks like you find that it does not have any concrete properties at all. So, if it is real then it must be abstract. And it must be real because if it wasn’t you would not be able to drink the coffee. Relations have in fact given philosophers a great deal of difficulty throughout history, to the extent of some of them declaring all relations to be entia rationis, or things of the mind, hence unreal. The widely accepted view these days is that modern logic and set theory have solved the problems with relations, by defining them within set theory in such a way as to make them concrete. In my opinion this fails because it assumes the existence of far too many relations before defining a relation. My own view is that most relations are real, abstract entities, and that relations in thought are abstract ideas.

Helier Robinson is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy, University of Guelph. His books are available from http://SharebooksPublishing.com.

Amanda asked:

One objection to utilitarianism is that it places too much emphasis on pleasure. After all, if we lived for pleasure we would just spend all of our time eating and getting massages. Such a life, according to those objectors is fit only for swine. John Stuart Mill says that it is not utilitarianism but those objectors who represent human nature in a degraded light.

Explain Mill’s point here.

Answer by Craig Skinner

Mill was unable to completely break free of his father’s and Bentham’s tradition of framing all consequences in terms of quantity of pleasure and pain.

This produced several problems:

(1) if total quantity of pleasure is what matters, then an oyster with a tiny bit of pleasure but living a very, very, long time, would be a better life than, say, Haydn’s full and successful 77 years (the ‘Haydn and the Oyster’ objection).

(2) a life of swinish pleasures would seem satisfactory, provided the pleasures are pleasurable enough.

(3) a brain-in-a vat life with intense pleasure supplied by the mad scientists in charge would also seem satisfactory.

(4) the pleasure felt by, say, sadistic child torturers would count on the plus side.

Your question refers to (2).

You ask what is Mill’s point when he says that it is not utilitarianism but rather the objectors who represent human nature in a degraded light.

As far as I can make out from the text (Utilitarianism, Chapter 2), both Mill and the objectors agree that humans are capable of more than swinish pleasures. The objectors say that utilitarianism ‘supposes human beings to be capable of no pleasures except those of which swine are capable’. Not so, says Mill, he recognizes the distinctly human pleasures, so that it is not he, but rather the objectors, who take this degraded view of humanity.

But then Mill has to depart from the simple ‘quantity of pleasure’ view. which, earlier in the text, he endorsed. In order to elevate the distinctly human pleasures above the swinish, he distinguishes ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures, but of course this introduces a moral good other than straightforward quantity of pleasure. Mill also explains that a small quantity of a higher pleasure is worth more than any vast quantity of a lower pleasure, that a higher pleasure is preferred even if it entails some discomfort, and that these distinctions between the two kinds of pleasure have been made by people who have experienced both. It all seems ad hoc, he gives no survey data to support his position, and one feels that the so-called ‘higher’ pleasures are unnecessarily intellectual, and just the pursuits that Mill and his friends enjoyed.

Mill would have done better to abandon the Benthamite narrow, hedonistic view of happiness as quantity of pleasure, given up talk of higher and lower pleasures altogether, and framed consequences in terms of welfare, interests, satisfaction, preferences (as later consequentialist views do), or a broader view of happiness akin to Aristotle’s eudaimonia (flourishing, fulfilment).

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

Lizzy asked:

Was Kant a naturalist or a non-naturalist? What is the best way of explaining Kant in relation to meta-ethics?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

In ‘The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionist Logic’ (1973) Michael Dummett quotes the mathematician George Kreisel:

“As Kreisel remarked in a review of Wittgenstein, ‘the problem is not the existence of mathematical objects but the objectivity of mathematical statements’.”

One can speculate about what exactly Kreisel meant, but I see this as an important insight that goes beyond the philosophy of mathematics.

Kant’s meta-ethics is objectivist as opposed to subjectivist. He believes that moral statements are not merely expressions of feeling, or true by virtue of the way ‘we’ feel, or the conventions that we have agreed to adopt. They are true in a substantial sense. There is no room for choice about whether or not to act according to the Categorical Imperative, no dependency on our way of seeing or feeling. You either act from an ethical motive, with the aim of conforming one’s action to the Categorical Imperative, or not.

According to the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.”

In the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten Kant makes far-reaching metaphysical claims, which could be interpreted as being ‘about objects’. Kant insists on the necessity of the dualism of phenomenal and noumenal worlds in order to provide the proper grounding for the Categorical Imperative. However, as commentators have noted, the section on free will and the noumenal world is desperately obscure.

I would like to consider the possibility that Kant went further than he needed to. In order to provide an adequate meta-ethical basis for an objective view of ethics, the Categorical Imperative suffices. Let’s assume this.

In Kreisel’s terms, both the naturalist and the non-naturalist seek a grounding for ethics in terms of ‘the existence of objects’. According to the naturalist, these objects are such things as human nature, or biology, or, possibly, the virtues as conceived in virtue ethics. According to the non-naturalist, these objects might be Platonic Forms, or the Will of God.

Kant sees, or thinks he sees, a third possibility. As the formulation of the Categorical Imperative quoted above (from the James W. Ellington translation, Hackett 3rd edn.) implies, Kant sees ethics in terms of moral rationality versus irrationality. The laws of ethics are like the laws of logic. No-one would look for ‘objects’ with which to ground the laws of logic. If you examine the ‘maxim’ of someone who intends to do an action that conflicts with the Categorical Imperative, you will find a ‘contradiction’. Just as you would find in someone who, literally, wanted to ‘have their cake and eat it’. The proposed action doesn’t ‘add up’. It’s irrational.

It could be said as a criticism of Kant that he is too sanguine about the possibility of always finding a ‘contradiction’ in actions that people do every day (for example, telling ‘white lies’). But I think it is still a view to be reckoned with. We should always be suspicious of dilemmas in philosophy, and the alternative: naturalism versus non-naturalism is one that raises my suspicions.

http://www.philosophypathways.com/vita.html

Matthew asked:

In simple terms, could you explain the point that Strawson makes in his article ‘On referring’ against Russell’s theory of descriptions. Who’s right, Strawson or Russell?

Answer by Craig Skinner

Strawson made several points. I’ll deal with the most famous one.

Russell, after his success in marrying logic and mathematics, believed that formal logic could clarify ordinary language, helping solve or dissolve problems and confusions, and was a big advance as a method in philosophy.

Strawson thought formal logic had little to offer over ordinary language: logic took a narrow view – what the words mean (semantics) – ignoring speaker meaning and conversational implicature (pragmatics), and, in any case, got the semantics wrong.

So Strawson sought to show that Russell’s approach gave the wrong answers, whereas ordinary language considerations got it right.

The focus of the dispute was the truth-value of statements about nonexistent objects (statements which fail to refer). Example:

‘The present King of France is wise’.

Russell held this to be false, there being no present King of France.

Strawson felt it had no truth-value i.e. was neither true nor false. If we accept this, it is an affront to classical logic where every statement is either T or F, and would derail Russell’s programme.

Part of Strawson’s case was that nobody would make the statement if she knew that the King of France didn’t exist. To do so would violate a presupposition of statement-making so that no statement was really being made, and there was therefore nothing to be T or F.

Aside: others, mistakenly, said that if ‘The present King of France is wise’ is false because there is no King of France, then its opposite ‘The present King of France is not wise’ is also false for the same reason, so we have a statement and its opposite both F when of course the opposite of a F statement must be T. But this is just a logical blunder: both the statements are indeed F (according to Russell) but they are not opposites. The opposite of ‘The present King of France is wise’ isn’t ‘The present King of France is not wise’, rather it is ‘It is not the case that the present King of France is wise’, and this is clearly T.

In my view Russell is right. His theory gives correct and consistent results without any need to modify classical logic by introducing truth gaps. Also, ordinary language considerations, in my view, don’t favour Strawson. To me, statements such as ‘The present King of France cuts my lawn’ or ‘My sister is dating the present King of France’ are clearly false, not, as Strawson had it, lacking truth-value. Also, we do, knowingly, make statements about nonexistent things all the time (Santa Claus, Hamlet, Vulcan for example) and we do mean something by such talk.

However, Russell’s programme delivered less than he hoped for. His, and the early Wittgenstein’s, foray into logical atomism applied to ordinary language failed. As a logician/mathematician, like Frege before him, Russell concentrated on what the words mean, whereas Strawson, Grice, Austin and the later Wittgenstein saw that what the speaker means is wider than this, and may be different, that language is a public ‘game’ with rules, meaning is related to use, and there can be no ideal logical language.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.org

Phil asked:

My name is Phil and I’ve been very recently wondering about very disturbing stuff (including death anxiety) and I think I’m past the worst of it, but I have some lingering questions. Here’s the background for one:

So, in light of all of the above, what do you think is the difference between reality and illusion?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

You are worried about nothing, although I admit that your question reflects a state of confusion that seems pretty widespread.

The way you harp on the word ‘illusion’ tells me that you have no clear grasp of its meaning. So my first suggestion is, clear your mind of the confusion associated with the word. Here’s how:

We humans all have the same sensory equipment. Hence by and large the sensory information we receive from the world is common to all of us. Moreover you can use suitably calibrated apparatus to ensure that what you discern is objectively discernible in exactly the same way to the apparatus.

Illusions arise either from deficient sensory equipment or from defective judgement. This applies equally to humans and apparatus. It indicates that information has been incorrectly apprehended-either because the equipment is ‘out of tune’ with the norm (defective) or else because circumstances prevail (such as bad lighting, noise, pain, or strange surroundings) which inhibit proper identification. The latter condition applies mostly to humans, of course. Apparatus cannot have illusions. Otherwise if the apprehensions of your senses and the apparatus match each other, there is no illusion.

In a word: We have a norm that decides when and under what circumstances a person suffers from illusions. Among humans, this norm is provided by the average Tom, Dick and Harry. Once you have accounted for the relatively few and clearly identifiable instances of illusion, there is no logical avenue from the notion of ‘illusion’ to ‘universal illusion’. Indeed logically the idea of a universal illusion is a self-contradiction. If everything is illusion, then nothing is illusion. If everyone has the same illusion, then the word illusion is meaningless.

Coming now to your example of the quantum level of reality, what is illusory here? Consider the weather in this context. We often get our forecasts wrong, because they seek to predict states with a high degree of uncertainty in their trends. But uncertainty is not illusion. Similarly the unpredictability of quantum wavefronts offers no license for the use of the word. You should make yourself aware that the phrase of the ‘observer participation’ in the collapse of a wavefront is a metaphor, not a statement of fact; and moreover the associated notion of infinite alternative universes does not hold as an account of any sort of reality, but is merely a kind of game we play with unrealised possibilities – like the moves in a chess game that were never played, although they were all of them possible and would in each case have altered the course of events. In fact this is a very good comparison. An unplayed move in one game may be played in another. Or it may never be played in any game. Whichever is the case, it is clear that uninstantiated realities is a self-cancelling supposition!

Consider further that the quantum level is nothing other than a huge magnification of the visible features of the world. It is peeking at a tiny detail of an immense swarm, since you cannot grasp the whole. It is exactly the same as looking at a speck of dirt at the foot of a mountain. Will you now pronounce the mountain to be an illusion, because all you can see is the speck of dirt?

Moving on to your worries over the ‘Self’. Every human being has a sense of individual selfhood. But we fall easily into the trap of thinking of the ‘I’ as something other than ‘I’-a confusion engendered by language, when we say (as I just did) ‘I have a sense of selfhood’, as if this selfhood were something other than ‘I’. What am I? Not my selfhood? Is selfhood something I possess or am? Is my selfhood something other than my body or are they a unity? We often shoot ourselves in the foot this way, and then proceed to draw illicit conclusions from the mere use of language, that some kind of illusion must be involved.

In a practical sense, this problem falls away the moment you realise that your ‘self’ is a boundary that encloses your subjective and objective existence as a body. Another person is another enclosed self. So your argument about ‘my self isn’t out there’ is completely false. You know without the slightest doubt that ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘they’ are objectively real and objectively instantiated selves. Moreover it is easily proved when you check on the means of your communication with another self. Since no-one can read your thoughts, you must employ empirically discernible means of projecting them, usually speech. You translate your thoughts into speech patterns and direct your vocal muscles to push a bunch of aerial molecules in the direction of the other person, who can apprehend those signals and translate them into thoughts again. You may be misunderstood in your meanings or intentions, but this is not illusion either!

I won’t comment on your notion of the self persisting beyond physical death. Since there is no positive evidence for it, this is just about the only case where lots of people indulge themselves-not in illusion, but delusion. A big difference!

So your question is answered by a proper consideration of the term ‘illusion’. Your examples don’t qualify as illusory. Illusions are misapprehensions of actual states of affairs, or faulty perceptions of facts in the world. They can also be pretenses and/or beliefs concerning states of affairs that cannot be shown to actually exist under the criteria that govern either the dead-matter or living objects and processes of the world. Regarding beliefs and pretenses, there is a choice between illusion and delusion, but these too can be objectively resolved, e.g with apparatus. You may have the hallucination (illusion) of seeing a ghost, and this cannot be validated by an apparatus. You may entertain the delusion that your soul is imperishable, but no-one has ever stepped forward with an empirical proof that this is possible.

Finally a word on the discrepancy between physics and sensed reality. The blue of the sky can be validated, although an apparatus may also reveal that in this case the colour is an effect of certain chemical interactions in the atmosphere. But to call this an illusion is stretching the notion too far again. Colour vision does not produce illusions, but enhancements of objective phenomena for the purpose of better discernibility. We can indeed reduce these enhancements intellectually back to their ‘factual’ state, and this is good for mathematical physics. But to survive in the real world, colour vision is more effective tool than physics for discriminating the world’s features. An organisms has need of discernment of real features, not numbers. This is where the question mark over the word ‘illusion’ returns with full force.

So we may now conclude that sensed reality is objectively real to the extent that the interaction between phenomena and our sensory equipment has resulted, over evolutionary times, in a necessary form of understanding. In contrast, physics reality is a luxury that goes beyond the imperative of survival and is not in direct contact with lived reality.

My last observation concerns the belief that lower strata of the material universe (such as the quantum realm) causally influence higher strata. But this again has not been proved; and I can’t see how it could be. It is just another intellectual construction which does not amount to a coherent theory because we have nothing remotely resembling a theory of dimensions of existence. On the contrary, to our perceptions, different dimensions seem to be self-integrated causal systems, perhaps nested holons. But in a nested holons, interaction is restricted to contact at peripheries, and this allows only minute causal exchanges.

For us humans, therefore, reality is what a consensus of all life forms experience as reality. The human intellect is not in direct touch with the physical world and prone to evolve unreal fancies, whether in the form of quantum physics speculations or invocations of divine authorities or the innumerable fictions in which we indulge. Some creatures have experiences denied to human beings. Reality for fish is the watery habitat; for some bacteria it may be volcanic vents. We do not credit them with any intellect, but if they had one, what would their judgements on illusion and reality be? Maybe a sobering thought! But none of this invites the suggestion that we suffer from illusions and that reality is anything other than what we know it to be!

Jürgen Lawrenz at PhiloSophos.org

Answer by Peter Jones

You would only need to examine Buddhist philosophy, in particular the ‘Middle Way’ philosophy of Nagarjuna, with its concept of ‘sunyata’ or ’emptiness’, to see how your questions may be answered. This link is to an excellent essay by Thomas J. Macfarlane titled ‘The Meaning of Sunyata in Nagarjuna’s Philosophy’.

http://www.integralscience.org/sacredscience/SS_sunyata.html

Macfarlane explains what the sages mean when they say ‘nothing really exists’, or, in respect of the conditioned and unconditioned realms, that ‘the two worlds are one’, by reference to Nagarjuna’s ‘Middle Way’ philosophy, and discusses ‘sunyata’ or ’emptiness’ as a cure for ignorance and suffering. Here ‘suffering’ would include death and fear of death.

For this philosophy you would be quite right in your suspicions, in that for an ultimate view all forms would be illusory, conceptual imputations, and this would include all corporeal and mental phenomena. It would not be correct to say bluntly that they do not exist, obviously not, but they would not exist in the way we usually imagine they do.

In regards to death anxiety you might see that this as a hopeful philosophy. This is because everything would reduce to an ultimate phenomenon and can never cease to be identical with this phenomenon. All division would be superficial. Thus for an ultimate analysis, or for the ultimate experience, we would be God, and not the distinct individuals we usually think we are. The word ‘God’, with all its endless meanings, is not one that everybody would use, and certainly it is not used in Buddhism, but it conveys the basic idea. The self would not survive death, as you suspect. According to the Hindu Upanishads there would be no intentional consciousness after death. But there would be some subtleties that save the day. Advaitans and Buddhists are not happy for no reason.

Here is a link to Macfarlane’s publications list. It is nearly all relevant and he knows his stuff.

http://www.integralscience.org/tom/

The implication of this view would be that we may well have reasons to fear death, depending on our circumstances, but it would at least be possible to reach a state of knowledge for which death would be of no concern to us. Death and fear of death would be suffering, and for Buddhists suffering would be as unreal as subjective selves and objective objects. While this is a theory and not a realisation it will be of little help to us, of course, but even as a theory it allows us a little optimism.

As for reality and illusion, the situation would be as Francis Bradley describes in his Appearance and Reality, which I would recommend. Only one phenomenon would be truly real. This could never live or die, and you and I would be it. Two brief quotes may indicate that this is not an exclusively Buddhist teaching, or even just a result of Bradley’s kind of logical analysis, but also a central teaching for the esoteric tradition of Islam and Christianity, and that there would be a method of verification.

“There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, even that ye should be partakers of the divine nature.” (2, Peter I:4)

“Man can partake of the Perpetual. He does not do this by thinking he can think about it.” (Jan-I-Janan, Sentences of the Khajagan)

Peter Jones at PhiloSophos.org

Ralph asked:

According to the ancient Greek philosophers what is Love (Eros) and Sex?

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

Would you be surprised to hear that Plato tells us the story of Socrates going to the priestess Diotima to ask the same question?

He went to Diotima asking about love, but she instead taught him about beauty and wisdom. This suggests that we attain wisdom and beauty through love.

However, to answer your question, I have to start with separating Love from Eros. I noticed you have Eros in brackets after Love. That’s a mistake – eros is not love! But the differences between them are subtle and not exactly what we understand today. This is because we have gone through 2000 years of Christianity, which changed the way we think about these matters.

So to start:

Eros according to Socrates is not a god. What then? Well, it’s difficult, as I said, but not impossible, We get help from Hesiod, who wrote a poem about the birth of the gods. When Uranos and Gaia (Heaven and Earth) copulated to produce offspring, Hesiod says that Eros was present. This means that Eros is prior, but not a personalised divinity.

Now in today’s world, the word we would use is ‘passion’. It is not restricted to what we mean when we say ‘erotic’. In fact, eroticism is just one of our passions. In the dialogue between Socrates and Diotima, she tells him that Eros is the passionate search for love, beauty, wisdom, truth, justice and many other things that can be summarised as ‘the Good’.

So in the first instance, Eros is the energy that drives artists, politicians, inventors, philosophers in their search for truth. But you might entertain a passion for football, or stamps, ants, stars, coins, gardening or any other worthwhile activity; and this passionate interest is also Eros.

In a word, Eros is the great energiser that gives us the will and the power to pursue what we are passionate for.

So Eros means passion, the intense desire for something you want to achieve in life.

Sex, on the other hand, is not associated primarily with Eros, because it is the prerogative of Aphrodite. She is the goddess of sex and everything that belongs to courtship, relationships, sex and marriage and children, as well as the sheer pleasure of intimate affection.

This again overlaps with Love. To the Greeks, love was not quite the explosive sort of relationship that you find in many modern novels, plays and movies. Rather it was focused on stable and mutually beneficial relationships. Aristotle is a good example. He had intimate friends, and he had a very close loving relationship with is wife. Evidently love is wider than passion or sex, because it includes the love of parents and children, sometimes even close friends, and perhaps even animals.

One more things needs to be said. Plato is often represented as promoting homosexual love, even pederasty. It’s a terrible misrepresentation. He was only interested in ideal love, and in the ideals for which we need the help of Eros. For him, sex was for the sake of procreation. It played no part in his doctrine of love. Accordingly he abhorred physical sex for any other purpose. Neither love nor eros (passion) should ever be diverted into the lower desires that we share with animals.

Caterina Pangallo completed her BA Honours degree in Philosophy at Sydney University. Her main interests are political thought, ethics, and social relations, as well as the historical development of these ideas.