Having v Being: Marx and the accumulation that robs us of our humanity

I recently came across some passages in Lionel Trilling's wonderful book Sincerity and Authenticity that, to my mind, speak both insightfully, and poignantly, to many of our current problems - from the decline of the arts and humanities to the degradation of the natural environment. There is not enough space to quote in full, but perhaps enough to inspire some useful thoughts. Trilling's book is much neglected these days, but it was given a honorable mention in Bernard William's Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, and although it is a bit old-fashioned, even quaint, in its approach at times, it contains many treasures like the following:

"The human autonomy which is envisioned by Schiller, Wilde, and Nietzsche is, we perceive, in essential accord with the conception of moral life proposed by Rousseau and Wordsworth when they assigned so high a significance to the sentiment of being. Indeed, the preoccupation with being informs most speculation about the moral life throughout the nineteenth century. The intense meaning which Wordsworth gave to the word 'be' became its common meaning in moral discourse. And it came commonly to be felt that being, which is to say the gratifying experience of the self as an entity, was susceptible to forces which either increased or diminished its force. There was a pretty clear consensus, for example, that among the things which increased the experience of self, art was pre-eminent. And, there was no question at all of what diminished the experience of the self - the great enemy of being was having ... it is accumulation robs you of being."

Trilling buttresses these views with some telling quotes form the early Marx, among which the following stands out:

"The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life - the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the economist takes away from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth. And everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you; it can eat, drink, go to the ball and the theatre, It can acquire art, learning, historical treasures, political power, and it can travel. It can appropriate all these things for you ... but although it can do this, it only desires to create itself, and to buy itself ..."

With regard to this, Trilling makes an important point about the alienation involved (note, alas, his naive optimism about what "will be readily seen"):


"It will readily be seen that alienation does not mean to Marx what it meant to Hegel. It is not the estrangement of the self from the self which Hegel sees as a painful but necessary step in development. Rather it is the transformation of the self into what is not human. Marx's concept of alienation is not wholly contained in what he says about money; but certainly money is central to it and provides the most dramatic way of representing it."

(Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1972,pp.122-123. The Marx quotation is from Early Writings: Karl Marx, T.Bottomore (ed. and trans.), McGraw-Hill: New York, 1964, p.171-2)

The Anti-Private Wittgenstein Argument: a light-hearted observation

Wittgenstein seemed to have had  a morbid fear of not being understood. James Klagge says some interesting things about this in his book Wittgenstein in Exile. But, perhaps he makes too much of it. And, perhaps, at times, Wittgenstein did too.
Shouldn't he at least have shown us a glimpse of the irony in the very idea of there being a private Wittgenstein, someone who uses words and has thoughts only he can understand? Recall, it wasn't just Joanna or Joe Soap who would be left in the dark - even verbally astute philosophers like Russell would not be able to understand him. At the same time, isn't there something dubiously realist, and unWittgensteinian, about the notion of there being words and thoughts the meaning/content of which are unavailable to others?

Morals without worlds

If there hadn't been a world, if there had been just nothing, would there still have been a basis for morality? Some philosophers seem to think there would. For example: there would still have been reasons to do the right thing regardless (i.e. regardless of whether anyone existed to do it). But, this is hard to make much sense of: reasons drifting around outside of space and time, unattached to anything?
   Dissolve the universe leaving no physical remainder, then, or so the idea appears to be, this would have no effect on the existence of, say, moral principles. Here, we might agree up to a point. We might accept that such principles cannot be destroyed in the way the thought experiment envisages. But instructive puzzles remain.
   Suppose there is a world in which the existence of certain moral principles is recognized and that world ceases to exist. Here, we might want to say that the principles in question have some kind of latent operational status. In such circumstances it still remains true, for instance, that it would be wrong to do X. This has to mean something like: if beings capable of moral judgement and behavior were to exist, then it would be wrong for them to do X.
   If we go along with this, we end up with a world filled with all possible moral principles. For from each instance of 'if there were to be creatures who lived in such and such ways', we can derive the existence of moral principles relevant to their behavior. This encourages us to think of moral principles sitting there waiting to be discovered. We might also wonder whether we can ever to sure about our own moral status. Might we not fare very badly in that respect when scrutinized in the light of moral principles that we have not yet discovered?
   But, if you think about it, the chances are that we are already faring badly. For moral principles that we are unaware of already exist. Ignorance will not get us off the hook.
   Recall, however, that we were originally thinking of the case where there is simply no world in the first instance. Doesn't even latent operational status becomes nebulous in this case? Can we say "no" without having to lean on platonic myths as support for so saying? Are we happy to allow that moral principles can neither be created or destroyed, but are just there?
   A pragmatist can agree that all sorts of new moral principles might be 'discovered' in the future, and even that we might look bad in the light of them. But, these will be created at the time, out of the social circumstances that happen to exist then. To think of them already being there in splendid isolation, waiting to be found, is the kind of mistake that the philosophical imagination has been prone to for far too long.

Worlds without Explanations

Student: “Why is there so much suffering?”

Shunryu Suzuki: “No reason”.

That there has to be a reason for everything is an appealing thought. It is hard for us to accept the notion of something just happening, or just being there, for no reason. And, when we are thinking along these lines, “reason” is usually short for “reasoned explanation”. Can we imagine a world in which this kind of thinking has no application? This is not easy. Imagine a world in which there are no intelligent beings: our world, if things had gone differently. Isn’t this a reasonless world? In one sense, perhaps, yes. But, we will still want to ask of that world why it is like it is – why it is reasonless, for instance. All worlds seems to invite such questions, as does their absense.

          Will the quest for reasons run out of steam at some point? Not because we are intellectually exhausted (although we can imagine that happening), but rather because it comes up against a natural boundary beyond which such a quest makes no sense?  Some think that this world, our world, constitutes just such a boundary. We can ask of things in it “Why this?” or “Why that?” - “Why is the sun so hot at its core?”, “Why do earthquakes occur in some places and not others?” And so on. But, when we start to ask certain questions of that world considered as whole, then, or so some people believe, these questions implode. We don’t know how to press them further because no answer seems possible even as we begin to raise and reflect on them. “Why does this world exist?” and “How is it possible for this, or any, world to exist?” are examples of these questions.

          Of course there are standard answers to such questions which are liable to satisfy many people. “Because God made it” is one. And, “As a consequence of the big bang” is another. But, anyone inclined to take the thrust of the initial questions seriously will not be so easily satisfied. 
        They will want to ask these questions of the very phenomena invoked in the answers: "Why does God exist?", “How is the existence of God possible?”, "Why did the big bang occur?", and “How was the existence of the big bang possible?”
More on this some other time.

Succinct Summary: Surprising Source

"The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything."
                                                            Charles Moore (Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, former editor of The Telegraph, etc.)

A bit more on visual goings on in Wittgenstein's later work

Actually, this is just a bit more about some of the philosophical consequences of the ubiquity of linguistic awareness thesis (ULA) that propped up the previous post.
Consider, for example, Eugen Fischer's Wittgensteinian claim "Pictures rather than propositions determine most of our philosophical convictions" (Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy: Outline of a Philosophical Revolution, p.21). ULA implies that this cannot be right (so it also looks (sic) as if the envisaged revolution can only be an abortive one). For only a linguistic interpretation of a picture can do the work of forming convictions by interacting with our stock of beliefs. And, a picture in itself cannot determine such an interpretation (something that Wittgenstein seems to be committed to anyway). Here, of course, we will want to say that pictures have some causal role. But, it appears that we cannot define it non-arbitrarily at any useful level of generality. This holds for the general relationship between our beliefs and the world if we think of that relationship as being primarily non-linguistic.
Fischer tends to explain 'pictures' in terms of what might best be called linguistic models - so the visual aspect turns out to be redundant and the relations that are important are inferential.
My main concern here, I guess, is that, frequently, the philosophical use of visual language might itself be the product of thinking that requires therapeutic intervention - something Rorty cottoned on to in Philosophy and the mirror of nature (though he also slipped into pictorial mode all too often).

Visual goings on in Wittgenstein

In PI 122, Wittgenstein famously says that "A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of our use of our words". He goes on to claim that "our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity" and that "a perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'".
But, what does 'commanding a clear view', one that enables us to see connections, involve? It has always concerned me that the visual analogies relied on here cannot do the work required of them. For what, when it comes to language, do we see it with? Just our eyes? Surely not. For these can
reveal nothing philosophically interesting without embodying an element of linguistic interpretation. And, when we rely on eyes that are linguistically enhanced, so to speak, then what we see is already infected with the confusions we wish to allay. The assumption here, of course, is that all visual awareness that tells us anything interesting is linguistically saturated.