Only a Game

The Righteous Mind

Some researchers are of the opinion that emotions are the primary influence on our moral judgements – that “reason is... slave to the passions”, as Hume delightfully put it. Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “Height”) is one such person, and his latest book The Righteous Mind stands behind Hume in a bizarre attempt to stab three centuries of moral philosophy in the back while waving a triumphant flag for moral psychology. I suspect the book intentionally picks a fight with nerds (New Atheists also get a repeated poke in the eye) just to get them riled up and talking about the interesting collection of stories Haidt has assembled as his case.

Depressingly, the UK hardback edition of The Righteous Mind presented in a very ‘shouty’ way – a gigantic font size makes it look far bigger than it really is, and the front cover shows a hand giving the finger that made me slightly uncomfortable reading it on the train. I’m not squeamish about this sort of thing usually, but when I’m reading a book on morality I’d like it to be something I can show to polite company at least. I notice that the US cover is considerably more laid back (block text with a fake cut mark through the diagonal): did someone at the publisher think that Brits wouldn’t be interested in a serious work of moral psychology if it didn’t have something offensive to show off? I became seriously tempted to remove the dust jacket so that I could feel less inclined to apologise for what I was carrying around.

I’ve been following Haidt’s work now for at least four years, ever since his Edge article on the diversity of moral foundations in contemporary politics. He said much that I agreed with, and much that I thought was rash. His position has actually changed very little in the interim, although in the new book he writes as if he’s been through something of a transformation of perspective. Perhaps this is mere showmanship, it’s hard sometimes to know when reading popular science writers, and his acknowledgements make it clear that his agent has prepped him for the popular science audience. Foibles aside, he and I share similar goals – to improve dialogue between partisan groups – but our methods are wildly different and I’m far from convinced that Haidt’s approach is the best way at the problem.

Much of The Righteous Mind is concerned with discussing Haidt’s social intuitionist model (SIM), also called Moral Foundations theory, at length. There’s a lot of anecdotal discussions about his influences that adds a little flavour to the book, but frankly if you really wanted to get at the theories any one of Haidt’s papers would be a more efficient route than this book. A key part of SIM defended here and elsewhere is the claim that rational argument doesn't contribute as much to moral judgement as our snap emotional judgements. We have a moral intuition, Haidt claims, then justify it rationally only afterwards – at least most of the time. Furthermore, the book asserts that our intuitions can be influenced by other people in our social circles but only rarely by our own rational thought.

Haidt’s case is strong in places, but absurdly weak in others. Steve Clark (in SIM and the City) has already pointed out the chief problem with using Haidt’s model to undermine rationalist philosophy: according to SIM, our intuitions are shaped and trained by our social environment; if our social world appeals to rationality in its justifications, our moral intuitions will learn to react accordingly. We may not be born rational (Clark's argument runs), but we can be inculcated into rationality. Since Haidt’s model allows the arguments of others significant capacity for ethical influence, a well-formed rational morality is still theoretically useful, if that's really what we want. What Haidt doesn’t ever do is really consider whether or not rational morality is something we might want to endorse. He backs moral pluralism on pragmatic grounds, but steers clear of actually presenting any specific ethic viewpoint – despite (in the final chapter) wading in on politics having skipped the transitional ground entirely.

Haidt seems to have a strange compulsion to push philosophers under the bus. It’s no secret that academic scientists tend to love Hume and despise Kant, but then I’ve yet to find one who has actually spent any time understanding either. Haidt was an undergraduate philosopher who abandoned the field for psychology, but I’m not wholly convinced he really grappled with the moral philosophers to any reasonable degree. (Perhaps he didn’t get on with his tutors at Yale?) He makes a big show early in the book of turning against philosophy – and in some respects, this rejection is warranted in so much as twentieth century moral philosophy (as many philosophers now admit) was a disastrous rabbit hole of epic proportions. But his argument is weak for the ironic reason that he needs (and does connect with) philosophy at a few key places but only shows a passing grasp of it, leaving him vulnerable to a few common gaffes.

The first error – and this is incredibly common throughout academia – is to believe that the caricature of Kant’s ethics that gets thrown around represents Kant’s views of morality. It doesn’t. Allen Wood, probably the foremost scholar of Kant today, has called the excessive focus on the Formula of Universal Law version of the categorical imperative a ‘sausage machine’ ethics – and this is the face of Kant that Haidt chooses to show. Perhaps this was what was taught at Yale,  but digging into what Kant’s views on morality actually were, they are far more nuanced and (in particular connection with Haidt’s work) Kant employs a morality that touches upon all six of what Haidt calls ‘moral foundations’. Kant is a long way from being as dependent upon non-contradiction as The Righteous Mind suggests, and his sideline about whether Kant was autistic borders on insulting people with autism: why would having a highly systematic mind discount Kant’s views from consideration, exactly?

Apparently, Haidt wants to claim that philosophy has failed in the context of ethics (which, if we looked at the twentieth century moral philosophers might be defensible) yet at the same time he also recognizes that the great moral philosophers did have a role in shaping contemporary society. There is a tension here that is never quite resolved. When he comments that historians could tell a compelling story about how we got to where we are culturally, all I could think was “absolutely – and a number of moral philosophers would be key to this story!”. Alastair McIntyre’s After Virtue actually does tell this story rather excellently, and would have been useful reading for Haidt’s book. What a shame that Haidt has decided that philosophers couldn’t possibly have anything useful to contribute to the debate on ethics…

As many historians will attest, Kant’s work had wide-reaching effects in the transformation from feudal to contemporary society, and his influence can still be strongly felt both in contemporary commitment to Human Rights and also in the roots of the United Nations, not to mention the creation of the modern University. Neither is Kant the only philosopher to have had such social influence:  John Stuart Mill, for instance, actively worked to abolish slavery and to improve the democratic status of women. Trying to brush moral philosophy under the carpet with Haidt’s rather ill-chosen phrase “the rationalist delusion” seems to miss entirely the role of imagination in establishing ideals that ferment social change. Ultimately, he wants to bring about such social change too – he might find it a lot easier with a handful of good philosophers working with him!

A second error – and this is also common throughout a number of the sciences – Haidt is far too quick to turn to evolution for answers to questions that can be answered without it. There’s a huge amount I agree with in his presentation of contemporary evolutionary theories, including his defence of group selection (a similar argument appears in my next book, The Mythology of Evolution). For much of the discussion Haidt manages to update perspectives on evolution with a moderate degree of success, albeit sometimes as a part of overlong digressions. However, Haidt’s (scientific) partisan positions ironically distort his claims in a few places.

For instance, Haidt talks metaphorically about our “Hive switch” that allows us to work effectively in social groups. He states: “If the hive switch is real – if it's a group-level adaptation designed by group-level selection for group binding – then it must be made out of neurons, neurotransmitters and hormones.” This is a weird claim! Perhaps it ought instead to say: “If the hive switch is real then it must be made out of neurons, neurotransmitters and hormones – and it may be a group-level adaptation designed by group-level selection for group binding”. The ‘if’ in the middle clause is misguided because Haidt’s claim then becomes that the nature of the hive switch is determined teleologically by the kind of evolutionary interpretation we put on it.

Yet the empirical nature of the ‘hive switch’ is something to be determined by study of human behaviour, not by speculation about its plausible evolutionary origins. Except as an imaginative spur for research, the group selection aspect is utterly tangential here. The reason, it seems to me, that Haidt has to defend group selection is because the excessive focus on individual selection after George C. Williams (whose work is the basis of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene) made it far harder for scientists to be open to research that seems to run contra to that paradigm while it prevailed. But this is a failure of those particular scientists to separate their metaphysics from their work – Haidt can’t make this situation any better by doing the same but in reverse!

Lastly, and on similar lines, I find Haidt’s support for E.O. Wilson’s early excessive claims in respect of sociobiology to be incredibly bizarre, and ultimately one-sided. Don’t get me wrong, I like Wilson's work – but it has got so much better since Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Haidt claims that Wilson was proved right about the “cannibalization” of social science by biology. Surely this is the partisan bias of a part-time evolutionary biologist! When I look at contemporary psychology et al, what I see is on the one hand a much greater willingness to accept cross-disciplinary data – my own work in game studies uses neurobiology, for instance – and on the other hand a rather bizarre insistence on turning to evolutionary speculation as a bolster to theories that actually rest better on empirical foundations. What I don't see is the cannibalization of any social science disciplines by biology: there are still an extraordinary number of sociologists, for instance. Either Haidt does see this cannibalization somewhere, and this is why he thinks Wilson was right, or he doesn’t think Wilson meant what he appears to say in 1975. Either way, this whole thread comes out rather less well in The Righteous Mind than most that Haidt chooses to pursue.

All these complaints may make it sound that this is a terrible book: it’s not. There are many worse books trying to take control of ethics on behalf of science, and few better books about the reasons that US politics ends up at a standstill. But it’s an incredibly uneven book, especially considering that it wants to see itself as the basis for a moral armistice between liberals and conservatives. Why would anyone aiming for peace write a book that spends so much of its time kicking various factions in the shins? I’m certainly not a fan of excessive rationalism, but even I baulk at calling it a delusion – a move surely motivated by marketing issues and not by any concern for science or morality. It’s odd that a book that is so committed to moving past the partisan perspectives that have paralyzed contemporary democracy should itself be marred by incredibly tendentious views on so many subjects.

Published by Allen Lane, ISBN 978-1846141812.

Review of Imaginary Games

Allen Zhang has published an absolutely wonderful review of Imaginary Games in MAKE magazine. He concludes:

Fittingly, Imaginary Games is published by Zer0 Books, which is committed to resurrecting the figure of the public intellectual. Chris Bateman, whose scholarship is astonishingly honest, refreshingly cogent, and thoroughly meticulous, earns that title.

What a wonderful start to my morning!

Parfit's On What Matters

I recently finished Derek Parfit’s monstrous epic, On What Matters, Volume 1 and 2, and am currently processing my rather voluminous notes from it. It took me about four months to read this, which isn’t bad for a 1,440 page leviathan, all in all. Although it contains some great material it is far, far too long for what it is and would have seriously benefited from being broken up into shorter, thematically connected books. However, some of the things Parfit does in this work would be impossible in anything other than its current cyclopean tome format.

The first volume was rather less interesting to me than the second, simply because I found Parfit’s methods to be too systematic for his goal. He wants to pick up Kant’s task of uncovering the supreme principle of ethics – and indeed, has a serious stab at revising Kant’s formulae in order to achieve this goal. Revising and expanding some of his work on normative reasons from his earlier Reasons & Persons, Parfit is able to take his ideas much further – in part because he is now a “born again” Kantian, and thus isn’t as held up by the inherent problems with Utilitarianism (as showcased by Rawls and Parfit himself in his first book). Parfit ultimately concludes that Kant’s system, Scanlon’s Contractualism and Rule Consequentialism all coincide when cleaned up in certain ways that he finds plausible – rather than being competing ethical systems, their exponents were “climbing the same mountain on different sides”.

I have a lot of sympathy for Parfit’s (volume 1) conclusion, in so much as I believe that all ethical systems are in essence transformable from one to another. However, I see Parfit’s Triple Theory, like Shelly Kagan’s Kantian Consequentialism and other specific instances of apparent moral philosophy convergence, as being just one instance of the kind of crossover in ethical thinking that occurs because of commonality in imaginative ideals and underlying elements such as empathy. The Triple Theory is unsatisfying, however, in that Parfit has had to conduct some considerable violence to Kant’s project in order to make it reach his very high standards – namely, to make it logically and mathematically sound. He basically has to remodel it until it very nearly is Rule Consquentialism, and thus it’s not wholly surprising that after this make-over they seem to “fit together like two pieces in a jig-saw puzzle.”

Volume 2, however, immediately justifies itself by commencing with a series of essays by various moral philosophers that respond to and critique Parfit’s first volume. This odd state of affairs came about since the material originated as a lecture series, plus drafts of the book have been in circulation for quite some time. (Indeed, a book entitled Essays on Derek Parfit’s On What Matters was published two years before the book itself!) The response essays that open the second volume are all great reading – and in fact the contribution by Allen Wood is my favourite part of the entire project. Wood (perhaps the greatest living Kant scholar) supports some of Parfit’s points before cogently arguing against Trolley Problems and similar thought experiments (which are key to volume 1’s argument) claiming they are “utterly disastrous” and “far worse than useless for moral philosophy”. For me, this essay isn’t just the best thing about On What Matters, it’s my favourite paper on moral philosophy bar none. Parfit’s response to Wood’s contribution, frankly, doesn’t seem to wrestle with the depth of the objection it raises.

Parfit is at his best in the main body of the second volume, in which he presents his meta-ethical theory in a formal but slightly scattershot fashion. There are some great sections here, none of which depend on having read volume 1 – which makes me think some philosophers would do better to focus on the second part alone. Some of my favourite moments are here in the minutiae, particularly in Parfit’s critique of Nietzsche which lands right before closing time. With a straight face, Parfit writes:

In other passages, Nietzsche returns to the aim of revaluing all values. We need, he claims, new values. But Nietzsche says little about these values. In his last published attempt to revalue values, The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche merely returns to attacking Christian values. Nietzsche hopes for ‘a new nobility’, whose ‘formula for happiness’ would be ‘a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal’. That is not a helpful formula.

Nietzsche’s brand of poetic madness is about as perpendicular to Parfit’s logical, methodical process as is conceivable, and reading the latter’s thoughts on the former is thoroughly entertaining. Personally, I’d have put material like this up front instead of opening with the mind-numbing sequence of definitions that clog up the start of the first volume.

Ultimately, reading On What Matters is like being locked in a room with a mad genius for a week while he carefully explains his theories. There is much to commend it, but it’s also seriously heavy going – not because it’s too complex, but just because it is so verbose, and so systematically unwieldy. Fans of Parfit’s earlier philosophy are likely to be underwhelmed by this new work, which doesn’t contain anything quite as spectacular as the discussion of Persons in part III of Reasons & Persons, although as a summary of the state of moral philosophy, a source of new points of departure, and as something to gainfully push off against through opposition, On What Matters has a great deal to offer. The books are essential reading for anyone interested in normativity – especially if you are looking for an impassioned defence of the idea that some things really do matter, despite the prevailing sceptical currents in meta-ethics. I can’t recommend it unequivocally, but I certainly don’t regret having tackled it.

Published by Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199265923.

Circus Philosophicus

Graham Harman’s Circus Philosophicus is that rarest of beasts, a philosophical treatise that is also deeply personal. Although it seems to have been intended both as an approachable explication of Harman’s object-oriented ontology and as an attempt to restore mythic vision to the philosophical tradition, it is simultaneously a slightly fictionalised account of the author’s personal journey both through life and throughout the world. As such, it is currently a one-of-a-kind work – as short as the most restrained scholarly essay yet written in an accessible, narrative style that feels oddly comfortable.

The book is comprised of seven myths – six philosophical metaphors constructed to illuminate elements of Harman’s object-oriented thinking, and one final myth concerning the origin of the book. There is a slightly uneven quality to the chapters, in that the direction of the book transforms from distant to intimate. The opening myth, The Ferris Wheel, concerns a colossal structure presented as a thought experiment, and constitutes the most memorable image that the book has to offer. Unfortunately, the connection with the philosophical model it represents is let down by serving the principle role of disputing other people’s models – namely Alfred Whitehead and Bruno Latour – and as such a reader not already somewhat familiar with ontology (the field which studies the nature of existence)  is likely to be left quite uncertain what they are being shown.

However, the second myth changes the style directly into a  more biographical context, which is retained for the rest of the book. The story embedded within this tale of love lost is a Dante-inspired, Hieronymus Bosch-esque fantasy in which the devils of hell throw the pre-Socratic philosophers off a bridge into a pool of molten lead as one by one they fail to meet the challenge set before them. Even if one is unfamiliar with Greek philosophy, there is a charm to the way the fable unfolds that helps raise the appeal of the book above its slightly distanced opening. Harman is revealed here, more than anywhere else in the book, as being more than just a collection of thoughts and ideas. He is shown to be human.

The reader is taken both around the world and throughout the history of the Western philosophical tradition as the various myths are presented in turn. Leibniz’s ideas are connected to a macabre mechanical organ in India; Husserl is vindicated via a ghost story on a Japanese ferry; and Latour – the “enemy” of the first myth, appears as a friend and colleague in the Parisian reverie of the last. There is also a rather curious tale of Harman and science fiction author China Miéville marooned on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico during a hurricane. This chapter begins with a recitation of the autopsy of the Elder Thing from H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which despite being entirely out of place seems to fit into the tempo of the work with baroque ease.

I confess to being quite beguiled by the whole endeavour by the time I reached the end of its incredibly short 83 pages, and the afterward – a larger than life account of the origins of the book – is far harder to believe than some of the myths themselves, despite being presented as purely factual! My chief reservation in recommending the book is the uncertainty as to who might enjoy it – since I am far from certain that anyone with no prior experience of ontology will be able to extract anything useful about Harman’s model without having invested in some of his other books. Here again I have a concern, since key terms in Harman’s work, such as tool-being, are referenced only in passing, yet surely the audience for this book should not be expected to have read his earlier, heavier treatises?

But perhaps the point of attempting to “restore myth to its central place in the discipline” (as the blurb states) is to allow some hint of philosophical thinking to be expressed in a manner far more easily grasped. This surely was part of what motivated Plato to use allegory and mythic image in so many of his works. Harman’s myths are perhaps less enduring than Plato’s, and certainly less bold than Nietzsche’s, but they are timely and charmingly presented. I can think of no greater praise than my fervent hope that Circus Philosophicus will encourage other modern philosophers to eschew the arid formalism of the academy and adapt their ideas for a wider audience via allegory and fable. And if it does not, then it can be enjoyed all the more as an oddity, a curio shop for the curious, and, indeed, a circus of ideas.

Graham Harman's Circus Philosophicus is published by Zer0 Books, ISBN 978-1-84694-400-0. You can read his blog at Object-Oriented Philosophy.

Strindberg and the Quest for Sacred Theatre

August Strindberg was one of the most influential figures in Scandinavian literature, and is considered to be a forerunner of (and major influence upon) modern theatre. In Strindberg and the Quest for Sacred Theatre, Theo Malekin dissects several of the playwright's final plays in the context of his reversion in 1896 to Christianity, having previously adopted an atheistic naturalism that dictated the tone and approach of his middle work. Malekin's enquiry revolves around the nature and content of Strindberg's metaphysical beliefs after returning to the Church – revealing an individual with views wildly disjunct from Christian orthodoxy at the end of the nineteenth century, wrestling honestly with the spiritual crises of his era.

I confess, prior to reading this book I had no awareness of Strindberg's work or life, and had the author not have been a long-time stalwart of this blog it's likely this book would never have come to my attention. This placed me in the uncomfortable position of reading a book concerning the details of a set of plays about which I had no prior experience to draw upon. Yet while my deficits in this regard were tangible, my lack of previous knowledge concerning the man and his work did nothing to blunt my enjoyment of the unravelling of the mysteries of his life and work, which are carefully and studiously exposited in an accessible and engaging style. The tenuous but tangible connections between Strindberg and the pioneering existential philosophers Nietzsche (to whom he briefly corresponded) and Kierkegaard (who influenced his early plays) also served to whet my appetite for Malekin's investigation, which might well appeal to anyone with an interest in theatre, philosophy or theology.

What fascinated me about Strindberg's story and beliefs are the inherent ambiguities, which in turn fed into a theatre that seems transposed between the symbols and practices of traditional Christianity and the Pandora's Box of uncertainty that broadsided conventional religion in the nineteenth century. The paradigmatic figure of the latter is Nietzsche, whose “death of God” is emblematic for the crisis – not connoting an inescapable atheism but rather a severing of the foundational conditions of belief such that we are all stranded amongst uncertainty. As Nietzsche puts this: “Is there still an up and a down? Aren't we straying as though through an infinite nothing?” Strindberg, facing up to this crisis of belief (from an entry point of naturalistic unbelief) entered what is termed his Inferno-crisis, which immediately preceded his (reluctant?) return to the Church.

Malekin describes Strindberg's situation as that of the “half-believer” – not a person who is indifferent or merely partly-committed to a religion, but rather the crisis of the devout in the face of the metaphysical uncertainties Nietzsche's philosophy (and the like) heralded for conventional systems of belief. The latter plays of Strindberg thus contain contradictory themes and situations, which are easily misunderstood if taken to be in strict opposition to conventional faith (as Strindberg's middle work appears to have been), and equally misrepresented if taken to be propping up religious orthodoxy. To Damascus (1898), for instance, appears to be built upon a template of redemption – of unregenerate descent followed by some kind of conversion and ultimate return to the bosom of the Church. Malekin rejects such a simplistic interpretation, pointing out the circular structure of the play and the ambivalence of the ultimate acceptance of Christianity by its protagonist in the conclusion. This is not the linear narrative of salvation that the nineteenth century Church was committed to, but a merry-go-round of half-belief that may have no end.

To Damascus also shows an intriguing attitude of ambiguity towards perception, something not previously explored in theatre. For instance, in an early act the protagonist encounters pallbearers dressed in brown, and asks why they are not wearing the traditional black. One responds: “To us in our foolishness, it's black, but if Your Grace commands, then it is brown for him.” Since the audience also sees these people dressed in brown the result is an inherent uncertainty as to whether what is seen can be trusted. The pallbearer's remark suggests he and his colleagues are indeed dressed in black – whatever the protagonist or the audience may perceive. Malekin draws out this theme in a number of Strindberg plays, and frames this in terms of a movement away from Aristotle's conception of theatre as mimetic and instead towards a kind of Platonic theatre – one in which the reliability of perceptions cannot be trusted, much like the dwellers' in Plato's cave who mistake shadows for reality.

Even more ambiguity and uncertainty can be found in A Dream Play, a piece which appears to have left theatrical directors in something of a quandary. Although the play's content is clearly intended to depict a dream, it is never clear whom the dreamer might be. Directors thus often select (or append) a character in order to provide this framework – a move which Malekin criticises as misrepresenting Strindberg's intentions. Inherent to the play, Malekin argues, is the absence of a denoted dreamer. Strindberg has drawn from religious ideas originating in Dharmic religions (such as Maya; the world as illusion) – an influence explicitly included by a framing narrative concerning the descent to the Earth of the daughter of Indra. In this light, the story might be best interpreted as a dream emerging in an identity-free cosmic mind. Malekin notes the incompatibility of this metaphysical view with the idea of a personal God, an aspect of Christianity Strindberg seems either unwilling or unable to accept in his post-Inferno half-belief, frequently fearing that such a personal deity could only be a tyrant.

Theologically, Strindberg seems unable to commit to anything approaching a typical Christian perspective of God – which leads to the inevitable question as to why in his later life he finds himself returning to the Church, and expressly identifying as Christian. Indeed, rather than the personal God of conventional Christianity, Strindberg seems to find an existential abyss lurking behind divine mystery. Malekin suggests this is not a denial of the divine (such as Nietzsche's project implied) but rather the end of any system of metaphysical certainty. The old beliefs face an apocalyptic termination, yet the unveiling of an infinite abyss lying beyond the world need not be (Strindberg seems to say) wholly negative. Why should the divine be emptied of its force by the discovery of its formlessness? What is denied by this uncovering are the easy answers of dogma, not the possibility of the sacred.

Furthermore, Strindberg's characters seem (especially in his Chamber Plays) trapped in a fallen world. Hell, in these intimate theatrical productions, can be found on Earth, and salvation is either tenuous or unobtainable. Yet this denial of Christian orthodoxy seems not to point away from the possibility of the sacred – rather, the plays seem to invite a discarding of illusions, not only of a personal God (of whom Strindberg could apparently conceive but perhaps could never accept), but of any conception of the world or belief in the self. Stripped of all such illusions, one may encounter the divine. It is a theme from the Dharmic religions that Strindberg imports into Christian symbols, a pathway of belief perhaps opened to him by his time as part of the Unitarian church prior to his atheistic years.

Ultimately, Malekin's exploration of Strindberg's later work reveals a paradoxical turn, underpinned by a confluence of pessimism and doubt that never quite seems to reconcile with his decision to return to Christianity. Just what Strindberg's faith might have consisted in at this time in his life is far from clear. Yet within his plays, one can find conflicting perspectives thrown against each other in a clash of beliefs that provide no easy answers, where no single interpretation can be adequate. This risks incoherence, but only in the same way life itself reflects a constant danger of unintelligibility. It is a theatre less concerned with ideology, and more interested in existential exploration.

Behind the action upon the stage lies – quite literally in A Dream Play – a yawning abyss, which may be the nihilistic negation of values foreshadowed by Nietzsche, but which yet might manifest as a divine groundlessness. It is in this latter possibility that Strindberg's plays may be seen as striving towards a new sacred theatre, one existentially divorced from the dogmatic certainties of the religious dramas that precede it. Yet Strindberg also seems to have been afraid of this, unwilling to cast off his ego into nothingness, even if to do so might be the only remaining path to the divine. Caught between doubt and faith, Strindberg's half-belief peeks behind the scenery of the world to find a vertiginous metaphysical chasm into which he was unwilling or unable to hurl himself. The liberation it might bring seems, in Malekin's view of Strindberg, as much a threat as a promise.

Theo Malekin's Strindberg and the Quest for Sacred Theatre is published by Rodopi, ISBN 978-90-420-2847-0.

Bioethics in the Age of New Media

Until recently, the term “bioethics” had been used solely to denote ethical issues within the field of medicine, a practice which (Ivan Illich not withstanding) has largely escaped criticism. In Joanna Zylinska's radical and challenging new work Bioethics in the Age of New Media, the idea that bioethics should be the sole concern of doctors comes under considerable scrutiny. Moving far beyond the concept of medical bioethics, Zylinska explores the relationship between human, animal and technology in fresh and engrossing new ways.

The goal of this book is to propose an alternative framework for thinking about bioethics, constructed through the interplay of media studies and philosophy. The main focus of the content is an exploration of various conflicting moral positions concerning human and non-human life, and the various possible technological transformations therein. Sadly, the book is slow in starting because of the necessary burden of recapitulating the conventional perceptions of bioethics (which is to say, medical ethics). This makes for a rather dull opening, but once the foundations have been laid, Zylinska moves into increasingly fascinating territory.

The alternative bioethics that Zylinska proposes is rooted in the work of a number of key twentieth century philosophers, including the concept of alterity (“Otherness” or difference) considered by Emmanuel Levinas, and the notion of biopolitics explored by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agambens. A grounding in this background material is not necessary for understanding Bioethics in the Age of New Media, and indeed it serves as an extensive introduction to several pivotal ideas in recent philosophical thought (although this is far from an introductory text to philosophy, and will present a considerable a challenge to anyone who has not tackled a work of this kind previously).

From Levinas, Zylinska examines ethics from outside of its usual presentation as a normative, humanist conception, comprised of universal rules (following a tradition rooted in Kant). The Levinas-inspired position on morality is effectively an ethics of hospitality, taking responsibility for the “infinite alterity” of the other. To put this another way, according to Levinas the fundamental ethical question emerges when we meet someone that is not us, and that question concerns how we will react: with violence, or with hospitality? However, whereas Levinas comes at this issue solely from the perspective of the human having a monopoly on ethics, Zylinska attempts to push beyond the assumption of “the human” entirely. Her goal is not some kind of reconstructed animal rights agenda, but rather to deconstruct the underlying assumptions of our concepts of “human”, “animal” and “machine” (a perspective that owes a debt to Donna Haraway) thus interrogating the assumption of a privileged position for our species. This allows her to bear on issues such as genetic engineering with an extremely fresh point of view.

In addition, the notion of biopolitics forms a key concept in the arguments that Zylinska explores. Zylinska claims one of the vectors of the twentieth century was an increasing degree of life management – from the brutality of the labour camp to the “democratisation” of countries, the political machinery of nations are pursuing vast (and often unstated) agendas of life control, and this includes the life management of the citizenry with respect to desirable lifestyles (such as not smoking, eating balanced diets, assumptions of appearance etc.) Rather than pre-supopose that this life management is necessarily wrong or bad, Zylinska recognises that the political organisation of populations will always be conducting this kind of life management, and that it is from this that both dominion and freedom result. Thus, biopolitics is examined as an inescapable background to life as a citizen within a nation, a network of relations and forces that occurs both between the State and the individual, and between the individuals themselves.

Four essays (three of which are grouped as the second half of the book, “Bioethics in Action”) constitute the core of what Zylinska is exploring, and are considerably more engaging than the necessary but slightly tedious prefatory materials. The topics explored include the role of narcissism in blogging, the biopolitics of extreme makeover television shows, the effects of branding DNA as “the secret of life” and the ethical dimensions of what is called “bioart” (the use of biological materials as an artistic medium). Each examination is highly engaging, and leaves the reader with much to think about. There is little pre-assumed moralism behind Zylinska's discussions; indeed she expressly calls for “a clearly articulated ethical supplement to counteract anti-ethical moralism and profit-driven economism”. It is this project which clearly has engaged Zylinska's concern and imagination.

While media studies has certainly taken a shine to so-called New Media (including, but not restricted to “Web 2.0” i.e. community content and social networking), this book is perhaps the first attempt to take on this domain from a philosophical perspective. In looking at the phenomena of blogging, Zylinska conducts a highly revealing dissection of existing reactions to an activity which occupies an uncomfortable position for many people, being both too public (anyone can read your personal dirty laundry) and simultaneously not public enough (most blogs are read by no-one, and disappear into the infinite abyss of the internet). The criticism that blogging can be reduced to mere narcissism is both accepted and rejected – yes, narcissism does underlie the act of writing a blog, yet there is no reason to presume that this is necessarily negative. Indeed, cannot one claim that narcissism is an emotional root to the work of most artists? Following Derrida, Zylinska suggests that there are “good” and “bad” narcissisms, and that narcissism might even be an inevitable and necessary condition for sociality.

Her analysis of “extreme makeover” TV shows and in particular The Swan, which combines elements of both the freak show and the beauty pageant, is one of the most insightful pieces in the book. In reality TV, biopolitics – the ubiquitous process of life management – is packaged as entertainment. Zylinska suggests that, contrary to the mythology that the show's makers deploy, the viewers of such a show glean much of their enjoyment from the branding of the contestants as “abnormal”, thus reassuring the viewer of their normalcy. But far from being unequivocally hostile to what The Swan is doing, she finds within it aspects both terrible and promising. The concentration camp fascism of the reality TV show “training camp” is chillingly compared to real “zones of indistinction” such as the Guantánamo bay detention centre, but at the same time she seems to believe that such shows have the possibility of exploring the ethical ambivalence of the kinship between humans, animals and machines (the women, having been altered by plastic surgery, bearing the artifacts of machinery upon them and being, in effect “cyborgs” of some kind). She finds that the show forecloses on this potential, but still acknowledges that there was some potentiality to be explored.

Although not intended as a work of philosophy of science, the chapter discussing how the term “the secret of life” came to be applied to DNA and research into the genome is one of the more penetrating critiques of the interface between science and the wider world that have been published in recent years. Studiously researched, she catalogues how the trope of “cracking the secret of life” was used to reposition biology (previously seen as somehow inferior to the mathematically-grounded physical sciences) as a matter of serious importance. From this “rebranding” stems a wide range of modern biotechnological fields, almost all of which have not yet come under serious critical scrutiny from the philosophical community. Zylinska argues compellingly that having allowed the “secret of life” gloss to be applied to genetics, and from there, to allow genetics to obscure the realities of life in favour of an information theoretical slant that elides precisely what life means to most of us, the question of what life is, should be, or could be, has been lost in favour of a glorification of an imperialistic biopolitics, the consequences of which could be dire if not addressed thoughtfully.

Finally, Zylinska explores the field of bioart with a critical eye, and while she concedes that some work in this arena has been thought provoking, she accuses many of the artists of falling into didactic, moralising, deterministic and excessively pro-technological stances which ultimately undermine the credibility of bioart as a medium. However, she identifies a few interesting cases, and in particular expresses admiration for the work of Stelarc (an artist perhaps best known for grafting a cell-cultivated ear onto his left arm), whom she notes considers technology “first of all an environment... rather than merely an object”. This perspective clearly resonates with Zylinska, but on the whole the chapter on bioart serves as more of a media studies review than a philosophical enquiry. This need not be a deficiency of the chapter, but it rests in a slightly uneasy space in the wake of the essays that have preceded it.

This, on the whole, is the principle problem with Bioethics in the Age of New Media: the individual pieces from the latter part of the book are all magnificently compelling and leave the reader with much to think about, but in terms of the overall goal of generating an alternative framework of bioethics the individual chapters fail to cohere into a tangible whole. It is not that Zylinska fails in her goals – rather, it is that this book can only begin to scratch the surface of the challenge that is being mounted here. It is perhaps impossible for one lone individual to achieve the outcome that has been posited. However, I will not criticise Zylinska for not attaining the impossible – it is surely the work of many individuals to re-envisage bioethics. As a multi-faceted signpost to this emerging and ongoing ethical project, this book warrants considerable praise.

Bioethics in the Age of New Media by Joanna Zylinska is published by MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-24056-7.

For full disclosure I wish to note that the cover of the hardback first edition carries an endorsement by me; I was invited by MIT to read the book, and offer an endorsement. After reading the book, I was happy to do so. You can read the endorsement on the Amazon page for the book.

Fear & Trembling

The cover of this exquisite Penguin Books ‘Great Ideas’ edition of Søren Kierkegaard’s classic philosophical work Fear & Trembling contains a quote which instantly draws the reader into the world of Kierkegaard’s thought:

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair? 

Kierkegaard is considered to be the father of the existentialist philosophical movement, although the term ‘existentialism’ was not in common usage for another century. This short but powerful book was published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio (“John the Silent”) and represents one of the major works of Christian existentialism. The book explores themes central to the Abrahamic traditions, and may be difficult for a non-Christian to appreciate. It is a work of profound religious anxiety; an exploration of the doubts with which sincere souls must wrestle.

At the centre of the ideas here expounded is the paradox of Abraham, and in particular the sacrifice of Isaac. The events are from Genesis 22, but a brief synopsis is as follows: Abraham has been promised by God that he would become “the father of many nations”, but then finds his wife, Sarah, is barren, and possibly too old to bear children. But miraculously, she does conceive by Abraham, and gives birth to a son, Isaac. God then tests Abraham by instructing him to sacrifice Isaac – a son whom he loves dearly, and who is the embodiment of all Abraham’s dreams of a family by Sarah, as well as the fulfilment of God’s promise to him to be a father of many nations by her. Yet Abraham is prepared to go through with this sacrifice, despite the terrible nature of what is being asked. At the last moment an angel stays his hand, and a ram is provided for sacrifice instead. 

This story seems utterly horrific to those who find no value in faith, and is defended too vociferously by those who place too much confidence in their own certainty and call that conviction ‘faith’. Kierkegaard excoriates those of the latter kind, and denies that this behaviour can legitimately be termed ‘faith’, using the story of Abraham as the central point in his thesis. The horror of this situation – when viewed as a purely ethical matter – is not denied, but emphasised:

If faith cannot make it into a holy deed to murder one’s own son, then let the judgement fall on Abraham as on anyone else. If one hasn’t the courage to think this thought through, to say that Abraham was a murderer, then surely it is better to acquire that courage than to waste time on undeserved speeches in his praise… For if you simply remove faith as a nix and nought there remains only the raw fact that Abraham was willing to murder Isaac, which is easy enough for anyone without faith to imitate; without the faith, that is, which makes it hard. 

Indeed, to Kierkegaard’s mind faith is a rare and precious thing – he does not consider himself sufficient to its great task, even though his commitment to God is unwavering:

I have seen horror face to face, I do not flee it in fear but know very well that, however bravely I face it, my courage is not that of faith and not at all to be compared with it. I cannot close my eyes and hurl myself trustingly into the absurd, for me it is impossible, but I do not praise myself on that account. I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a pristine lyrical validity. When it is present in me I am unspeakably happy, when it is absent I yearn for it more intensely than the lover for the beloved; but I do not have faith; this courage I lack. God’s love is for me, both in a direct and inverse sense, incommensurable with the whole of reality. I am not coward enough to whimper and moan on that account, but neither am I underhand enough to deny that faith is something far higher. 

Kierkegaard refers to those who possess the ‘infinite movement’ of faith as “knights of faith”, and specifically considers Abraham as a great example of such a person. It is his view that such people are capable of renouncing all things, to “drain in infinite resignation the deep sorrow of existence”, and then – astonishingly – take everything back “on the strength of the absurd”. He views this as something that only a knight of faith can do, and in turn considers this to be “the one and only marvel.”

Do not mistake the term “knight of faith” as expressing a gender bias, either: Kierkegaard is quite explicit that it is “that order of knighthood which proves its immortality by making no distinction between man or woman.” 

The book begins by presenting the story of Abraham and Isaac in four alternative retellings, in order to establish the nature of the event around which Kierkegaard will develop his thoughts on faith. Then, it turns to three “problemata”, namely:

Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? (Which is to say, can Abraham’s intention to sacrifice Isaac be justified even though ethically human sacrifice is not permissible). 

Is there an absolute duty to God? (Which we shall shortly explore further).

Was it defensible for Abraham to conceal his intentions from his wife and son? 

All three problems are related, and Kierkegaard’s solution rests upon faith as being the paradoxical situation that the individual can be higher than the universal (that is, the ethical). He admits that this position is “inaccessible to thought” but exclaims: “And yet faith is this paradox. Or else… faith has never existed just because it has always existed. And Abraham is done for.”

Either Abraham embodies faith, and his title as “the Father of Faith” is justified, or else there is no such thing as faith for what it refers to is so trivial that it was always part of human experience, and Abraham’s story loses its meaning. He accuses those exponents of shallow religiosity of failing to rise to the challenge of understanding just what is entailed by faith, and instead redefining faith as something easier so they may claim to possess it: “True enough… that many people may have a natural aversion to the paradox, but that is no reason for making faith into something else so that they too can have it…” 

All this leads Kierkegaard quite naturally to the conclusion that there is an absolute duty to God, and that this obligation is and must be higher than ethical obligations (the universal). Kierkegaard was probably writing against the tenor of the Christians of his day who touted the ethical obligations as the absolute element to be obeyed blindly. (This ‘absolute duty to God' can also be expressed in an agnostic or atheist fashion, as we shall see).

It is important to appreciate that in expressing an absolute duty to God, Kierkegaard is in no way suggesting that one must listen for whispering voices in one’s head and do what they say. The absolute relationship between a person and God is not something expressed in language. Kierkegaard says: “For in the world God and I cannot talk together, we have no common language.” 

The absolute duty to God is the absolute duty to be an individual under God, which is to say one’s proper relationship with God must be as an individual facing the infinite. The infinite – which is God in Christian terms – cannot communicate in words to the individual, so the individual is left to wrestle with their faith – to take a leap of faith on the strength of the absurd which is, after all, what is being asked in faith by definition, for if there is no step to be made here, then what we are dealing with is not that which we call faith.

Kierkegaard notes that there is “a fear of letting people loose”, resulting from the idea that living as an individual is supposedly easy, and that people must be coerced towards behaving ethically. He counters this accusation by noting: “No person who has learned that to exist as the individual is the most terrifying thing of all will be afraid of saying it is the greatest.” Because to be an individual in Kierkegaard’s terms is to have an absolute relation to God – to the infinite – which one can only do on the strength of absurdity. To follow one’s desires and whims is not to be an individual, but a “slave to the passions” (to coin Hume’s phrase). 

This is a difficult pill for many devoted religious individuals to swallow, because endemic in organised religion is the idea of a particular path that everyone should be on. Kierkegaard says that if there is a particular path that everyone should be on, it must be up to the individual to find it – because only the individual has the relationship with God, and the claim that ethical strictures are more universal than this relationship is, if not blasphemy, then deeply sacrilegious. This is why ‘faith schools’ that merely parrot someone’s interpretation of sacred texts can be seen as a travesty:

The false knight… just doesn’t grasp the point that if another individual is to walk the same path he has to be just as much the individual and is therefore in no need of guidance, least of all from one anxious to press his services on others… The true knight of faith is a witness, never a teacher, and in this lies the deep humanity in him which is more worth than this foolish concern for others’ weal and woe which is honoured under the name of sympathy, but which is really nothing but vanity. 

The ‘vanity’ being the idea that one can impose oneself between some other person’s relationship with God. That relationship is absolute: no-one may come between any individual and God. Anyone who mistakes dogma for devotion to God is in desperate need of spiritual revelation, or at least a truly humble look in the mirror.

Where does this leave the agnostic or atheist with no God to have an absolute relationship with? From such a person’s perspective, their duty is still to the infinite, even if they do not call the infinite ‘God’ – they must discover what this means to them if they are truly to be individuals. From the (external) point of view of those of us who find the term ‘God’ both meaningful and useful, it may be hard to understand how an atheist might have a relationship with God, but it is not hard to hear the Dalai Lama speak and find God within his spirituality – yet the Dalai Lama has said, and not without cause, “we Buddhists are atheists” (although the term non-theist is perhaps more accurate). 

Thus we can equally see that the atheist or agnostic who is desperately trying to foist their beliefs on other people cannot be “an atheist knight of faith”; they are as vacuous as when the religiously minded attempt the same interference in our personal duty to individuality. Even if someone does not believe in God, if they truly possess an absolute relationship to the infinite, those who believe in God will find God in their behaviour. An atheist can have an absolute duty to the infinite and not call the infinite God, and yet still uphold what the theist would call the duty to God. Again, this is a paradox, but faith itself, as Kierkegaard amply demonstrates is just such a paradox.

Kierkegaard’s conviction that we must each establish our own nature – that to truly be individual is to observe an absolute duty to the infinite – transformed philosophy. Wittgenstein said of him: “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” His influence on modern philosophy is inestimable. 

Fear & Trembling is a breathtakingly profound book, the most astonishing and engaging Bible study I have ever experienced, and one of the great works in the history of philosophy. That this is not required reading for all Christians would be tragic, were it not the case that to assert such a requirement would be to inevitably invalidate the very message that Kierkegaard was trying so passionately to convey.

The edition of Fear & Trembling reviewed is published by Penguin Books as part of their Great Ideas series, ISBN 0-14-303757-9.

Farewell to Reason

This is an ad hoc summation of Paul Feyerabend’s book Farewell to Reason, which presents a vigorous challenge to scientific nationalism. Feyerabend was Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley and Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich. He died in 1994.

Paul Feyerabend may have been the last major philosopher of the twentieth century, although his critics would rather he had never taken up his pen. Feyerabend (whose name is pronounced ‘fire-a-bend’) is that rarest of things, a relativist with claws. While other relativists have found themselves retreated to an untenable position akin to solipsism (the belief that the only thing one can know with any certainty is one’s own perceptions), Feyerabend runs roughshod over the landscape of philosophy with the sure footed confidence of someone not only blessed with great intellect, but an exceptional grasp of history and a grand compassion that is infectiously democratic. 

Farewell to Reason is a collection of disparate essays which deal with cultural diversity and cultural change. Their goal is to demonstrate that diversity is beneficial while uniformity reduces both our available resources and the joy of living. Although it succeeds in this goal, it will not convert Feyerabend’s opponents (whose philosophical position, frankly, may be so entrenched as to perhaps be intractable) and his rigorously presented arguments are not for the intellectually timid, nor for the philosophical amateur. This material is hard to read – but all the more rewarding because of it.

(In order to get the most from Feyerabend, an awareness of the philosophies of Wittgenstien and Kuhn is an inessential but useful starting point. Anyone approaching Feyerabend from a position of total philosophical ignorance is likely to be completely out of their depth, or at the very least, unlikely to fully comprehend Feyerabend’s concepts). 

Feyerabend contends that there exist powerful traditions which oppose diversity. The proponents of these points of view concede that people may arrange their lives in a variety of fashions but they insist that there must be limits to variety, and further claim that these limits are constituted either by moral laws which regulate human action, or by physical laws which define our position in nature. In particular, Feyerabend criticises two ideas which have historically been used to justify and make respectable the expansion of Western forms of life (or the ‘brave new monotony’, as one essay terms it) – namely the idea of Reason and the idea of Objectivity.

When someone says that a procedure or point of view is objective (or ‘objectively true’, which is synonymous) they are asserting that it is valid irrespective of human expectations, ideas, attitudes and wishes. It is an underlying claim which many modern scientists and intellectuals assert about their work. This issue is explored in more depth than I can possibly reproduce here, with historical examples spanning from the ancient Greeks through Galileo to more modern examples such as Popper. (Fans of Popper beware: Feyerabend worked with Popper at one point in his life and appears to have developed a pathological hatred of the father of what is termed ‘naïve falsificationism’). 

In the context of Reason (with a capital R), or Rationality (the words are functionally equivalent, if not synonymous), Feyerabend presents fundamental problems even in the introduction to the book, as this short extract demonstrates:

Hardnosed empiricists regard it as irrational to retain view plainly in conflict with experiment while hardnosed theoreticians smile at the irrationality of those who revise basic principles at every flicker of the evidence. 

He asserts that the notions of ‘this is rational’ or ‘this is irrational’ are ambiguous, and never clearly explained, and demonstrates why attempting to enforce such views would be counter productive. By way of context he suggests:

The assumption that there exist universally valid and binding standards of knowledge and action is a special case of a belief whose influence extends far beyond the domain of intellectual debate. This belief… may be formulated by saying that there exists a right way of living and that the world must be made to accept it. 

He proceeds to give examples of religious intolerance and war propelled by such a belief. Indeed, he is far less generous to religion than I would be, but does demonstrate that it is extreme fundamentalism (of the kind expressed above) which causes the problem – and it matters not if this is built on a religious, political or scientific framework. I have long been seeking someone who could present this viewpoint in an erudite fashion, as I have been struggling alone with it for many years. Feyerabend continues:

We may surmise that the idea is a leftover from times when important matters were run from a single centre, a king or a jealous god, supporting and giving authority to a single world view. And we may further surmise that Reason and Rationality are powers of a similar kind and are surrounded by the same aura as were gods, kings, tyrants and their merciless laws. The content has evaporated; the aura remains and makes the powers survive.

In many respects, the perspective that Feyerabend sets down in this book has much in common with the views espoused by Robert Anton Wilson in ‘The New Inquisition’. While Feyerabend lacks

Wilson’s entertainingly constructed prose, he makes up for it with a rigorous argumentation built on a much more solid understanding of philosophy and history (and an absence of entertaining drug-addled rambling). Fans of

Wilson’s work, however, and especially those with the patience for highly academic material, would gain much from considering Feyerabend.

Rather than discuss all of the essays in Farewell to Reason, I shall focus my attention primarily on the first and the final chapter. This is not to say the other material is not fascinating (or, in the case of ‘Aristotle’s Theory of Mathematics’ completely beyond my comprehension!), but these two chapters have the most general remit, and therefore are perhaps easier to summarize.
 

Notes on Relativism 

The first chapter discusses a particular attempt to make sense of the phenomena of cultural variety, namely relativism. In this essay, Feyerabend begins by presenting a particular thesis (which I will include here), then gradually strengthens the idea presented through a series of arguments. I cannot summarise this adequately, so one must accept that what I present here gives you some idea of how this chapter proceeds but does not give you the necessary information to fully comprehend (or meaningfully oppose) this viewpoint. For this, you must read Feyerabend’s work yourself.

The opening thesis concerns practical relativism, which overlaps somewhat with opportunism: 

R1: individuals, groups, entire civilizations may profit from studying alien cultures, institutions, ideas, no matter how strong the traditions that support their own views (no matter how strong the arguments that support these views). For example, Roman Catholics may profit from studying Buddhism, physicians may profit from a study of the Nei Ching or from an encounter with African witch doctors, psychologists may profit from a study of the ways in which novelists and actors build a character, scientists in general may profit from a study of unscientific methods and points of view and Western civilization as a whole can learn a lot from the beliefs, habits, institutions of ‘primitive’ people. 

(Note that this does not make a recommendation, nor suggest a requirement. It merely suggests that such a study may have effects which could be regarded as beneficial).

Feyerabend observes that there is a spectrum of response to this thesis:

• The thesis is rejected, which happens when a tightly knit world view is regarded as the only measure of truth and excellence, as happens with certain religious, political or scientific beliefs.
• The thesis is rejected, but only in certain areas, as occurs in pluralistic cultures with separate components (religion, politics, art, science etc.) that are each guided by a well defined and exclusive paradigm.
• An exchange of ideas and attitudes between different domains (cultures) is encouraged, but is subjected to the laws that rule the domain (culture) entered.
• An acceptance that even our most basic assumptions, our most solid beliefs, and our most conclusive arguments can be changed, improved or defused, or shown to be irrelevant by a comparison with what at first looks like undiluted madness.

He then discusses in great length the relationship between modern science and this thesis, in a section that defies easy summation. 

Later, in considering R1 in the political context of democracy – which subjects important matters to public debate and is inherently pluralistic, encouraging the development of a variety of traditions – Feyerabend suggests that R1 suggests that each tradition may contribute to the welfare of individuals and to society as a whole. He therefore presents a new thesis:

R2: societies dedicated to freedom and democracy should be structured in a way that gives all traditions equal opportunities, i.e. equal access to federal funds, educational institutions, basic decisions. Science is to be treated as one tradition among many, not as a standard for judging what is and what is not, what can and what cannot be accepted. 

(Feyerabend is quick to point out that he does not favour the export of ‘freedom’ into regions that are doing well without it and whose inhabitants show no desire to change their ways. Rather, R2 is restricted to societies based upon ‘freedom and democracy’ in order to avoid facile generalisations).

This is rapidly strengthened into: 

R3: Democratic societies should give all traditions equal rights and not only equal opportunities. 

The discussion builds over a number of subsequent theses; these intermediate propositions are used to suggest the following hypothesis:

R10: for every statement (theory, point of view) that is believed to be true with good reasons there may exist arguments showing that either its opposite, or a weaker alternative, is true. 

And its stronger variant:

R11: For every statement, theory, point of view believed (to be true) with good reasons there exist arguments showing a conflicting alternative to be at least as good, or even better. 

Feyerabend concludes the chapter with the obvious criticisms of the relativistic viewpoints expressed, in a manner that once again is highly resistant to summation. An extract is perhaps required for demonstrative purposes:

‘If two parties disagree’, says Popper, ‘this may mean that one is wrong, or the other, or both. It does not mean, as the relativist will have it, that both may be equally right.’

This comment reveals in a nutshell the weakness of all intellectual attacks on relativism. ‘If two parties disagree’ – this means the opponents have established contact and understand each other. Now assume that the opponents come from different cultures. Whose means of communication will they use and how will understanding be reached? … Popper… seems to assume that there exists, basically, a single medium of discourse, that the medium is ‘rational’ in his sense (for example, it obeys simple logical laws), that is consists mainly of talk (gestures, facial expression plays no role), and that everybody has access to it… 

Furthermore:

Why should it not be possible to say conflicting things about ‘the same situation’ and yet be right? A picture that can be seen in two different ways (Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit is an example) can be described in two different ways – and both parties will be right. It is a matter of research and not of philosophical fiat to decide whether the world we inhabit resembles a duck-rabbit picture. 

In concluding this essay, Feyerabend is keen to point out that he is not opposed to science:

Nor am I asserting that we can do without the sciences. We cannot. Having participated in, or permitted, the construction of an environment in which scientific laws come to the fore, both materially, in technological products, and spiritually, in the ideas that are allowed to guide major decisions, we, scientists as well as the common citizens of Western civilization, are subjected to their rule. But social conditions change and science changes with them. 

This essay opens Farewell to Reason with a resounding clatter of cymbals, presenting and arguing for an understanding of relativism with a thoroughness and philosophical precision which is admirable. My précis here captures only a fragment of the piece, and even then only the tone is conveyed, not the underlying arguments. For this, one must read ‘Notes on Relativism’ oneself.

One of the most striking aspects of this piece is the way it places science and religion on equal footing by considering both to be ‘traditions’. This approach had not occurred to me before, but provides a useful tool for examining belief systems from markedly different backgrounds. Viewed from Feyerabend’s vantage point, the last few hundred years of the history of science seem rather like Orwell’s Animal Farm: the forces of Reason manage to unseat the tyrannical despotism of religious traditions, only to take upon the aggressive fundamentalism of that which they opposed (but from a different set of prior beliefs – replacing theism with positivism i.e. the idea that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge), and eventually emerging themselves as fanatical dictators, imposing onto others what can and cannot be believed. One might be inclined to suggest the problem was not with the religion or science that provided the motivation, but in the fascism that resulted.

As someone already sympathetic to relativism, the most surprising part of this chapter for me was how it made me re-evaluate democracy. For the first time in many years, I began to consider how democratic values might be worth rescuing, instead of being trapped in a place where the only political philosophy that seemed appealing was ‘enlightened anarchy’ (a state achievable only by luck). It is a call to arms for everyone open to new ideas, diversity of belief, and variety in approach, to participate in the development of our own societies. 

 

Farewell to Reason

The final chapter appears to have been written to clarify points Feyerabend raised in his book Against Method, and as such has a strangely uneven quality. However, it makes a good closing statement for this book, as well as a potential introduction to Feyerabend’s earlier work. 

One of Feyerabend’s themes is that there is no common structure to the sciences; individuals may assert that there is, but an analysis of the history of science shows how impressively ad hoc the development of science has been. This is not exploited as a criticism of science, per se, but rather identified as a strength: it argues against placing restrictions and limits on the spirit of open inquiry that underlies science:

My main thesis on [the structure of science] is: the events and results that constitute the sciences have no common structure: there are no elements that occur in every scientific investigation but are missing elsewhere (the objection that without such elements the word ‘science’ has no meaning assumes a theory of meaning that has been criticized, with excellent arguments, by Ockham, Berkeley and Wittgenstein)…

A theory of science that devises standards and structural elements of all scientific activities and authorizes them by reference to some rationality-theory may impress outsiders – but it is much too crude an instrument for the people on the spot, that is, for scientists facing some concrete research problem. The most we can do for them from afar is to enumerate rules of thumb, give historical examples, present case studies containing diverging procedures, demonstrate the inherent complexity of research and so prepare them for the morass they are about to enter. 

Another key theme is that science should be understood as one tradition among many, which is to say, Feyerabend questions the authority of the sciences:

I assert that there exist no ‘objective’ reasons for preferring science and Western rationalism to other traditions. Indeed it is difficult to imagine what such reasons might be. Are they reasons that would convince a person, or the members of a culture, no matter what their customs, their beliefs or their social situation? Then what we know about cultures shows us that there are no ‘objective’ reasons in that sense. Are they reasons which convince a person who has been properly prepared? Then all cultures have ‘objective’ reasons in their favour. Are they reasons which do not depend on ‘subjective’ elements such as commitment or personal preference? Then ‘objective’ reasons simply do not exist (the choice of objectivity as a measure is itself a personal and/or group choice – or else people simply accept it without much thought). 

He patiently attacks numerous common arguments extended to assert the innate superiority of science:

[Some intellectuals] distinguish between basic science and its application: if any destroying was done, then this was the work of the appliers, not of the good and innocent theoreticians. But the theoreticians are not that innocent. They are recommending analysis over and above understanding, and this even in domains dealing with human beings; they extol the ‘rationality’ and ‘objectivity’ of science without realising that a procedure whose main aim is to get rid of all human elements is bound to lead to inhuman actions. Or they distinguish between the good which science can do ‘in principle’ and the bad things it actually does. That can hardly give us comfort. All religions are good ‘in principle’ – but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards. 

He is particularly horrified by Popper’s suggestion that:

…the benefits of civilization may occasionally have to be imposed, on unwilling victims, by ‘a form of imperialism.’ 

The inevitable consequences of this statement are hopefully clear, and I will leave the political ramifications in respect of foreign policy as mere implications.

The spirit of relativism infuses the chapter: 

This is a general feature of all ideological debates: arguments in favour of a certain world view depend on assumptions which are accepted in some cultures, rejected in others, but which because of the ignorance of their defenders are thought to have universal validity. 

Feyerabend summarises his position in two statements:

(A) the way in which scientific problems are attacked and solved depends on the circumstances in which they arise, the (formal, experimental, ideological) means available at the time and the wishes of those dealing with them. There are no lasting boundary conditions of scientific research.

(B) the way in which problems of society and the interactions of cultures are attacked and solved also depends on the circumstances in which they arise, the means available at the time and the wishes of those dealing with them. There are no lasting boundary conditions of human action. 

Thus he criticises the view:

(C) that science and humanity must conform to conditions that can be determined independently of personal wishes and cultural circumstances.

And also the assumption: 

(D) that it is possible to solve problems from afar, without participating in the activities of the people concerned. 

(Opponents of the IMF, and of cultural imperialism of any kinds, will especially appreciate this point).

Finally, Feyerabend pointedly distinguishes between abstract traditions and historical traditions: 

Historical traditions cannot be understood from afar. Their assumptions, their possibilities, the (often unconscious) wishes of their bearers can be found only by immersion, i.e. one must live the life one wants to change. Neither (C) nor (D) apply to historical traditions… my main objections against intellectual solutions of social problems is that they start from a narrow cultural background, ascribe universal validity to it and use power to impose it on others. Is it surprising that I want to have nothing to do with such ratiofascistic dreams? Helping people does not mean kicking them around until they end up in someone else’s paradise, helping people means trying to introduce change as a friend, as a person, that is, who can identify with their wisdom as well as with their follies and who is sufficiently mature to let the latter prevail: an abstract discussion of the lives of people I do not know and with whose situation I am not familiar is not only a waste of time, it is also inhumane and impertinent. 

Furthermore:

I say that Auschwitz is an extreme manifestation of an attitude that still thrives in our midst. It shows itself in the treatment of minorities in industrial democracies; in education… which most of the time consists in turning wonderful young people into colourless and self-righteous copies of their teachers… it shows itself in the killing of nature and of ‘primitive’ cultures with never a thought spent on those thus deprived of meaning for their lives; in the colossal conceit of our intellectuals, their belief that they know precisely what humanity needs and their relentless efforts to recreate people in their own, sorry image… in the lack of feeling of many so-called searchers for truth who systematically torture animals, study their discomfort and receive prizes for their cruelty.

As far as I am concerned there exists no difference whatsoever between the henchmen of Auschwitz and these ‘benefactors of mankind’ – life is misused for special purposes in both cases. The problem is the growing disregard for spiritual values and their replacement by a crude but ‘scientific’ materialism, occasionally even called humanism: man (i.e. humans as trained by their experts) can solve all problems – they do not need any trust in and any assistance from other agencies. How can I take a person seriously who bemoans distant crimes but praises the criminals in his own neighbourhood? And how can I decide a case from afar seeing that reality is richer than even the most wonderful imagination.

 

Conclusion 

It is apparent, I suspect, that Feyerabend’s work is both polemic and completely against conventional assumptions many intellectuals take for granted. Indeed, the worth of his work lies precisely in his willingness to take such a hard stance against pervasive ideologies that are seldom identified and rarely opposed openly.

If there is a flaw in Feyerabend’s approach it is not with his philosophy, per se, but in its application. Is it possible for the transformation of science and society to proceed at a ‘grass roots’ level, from the everyday citizen? It is possible, but doubtful. We have handed over tremendous political and academic influence to intellectuals (who, for instance, can affect political decisions without themselves being elected as representatives), and they will not give up their power lightly. Opposing this state of affairs by attacking the philosophies which are used to prop up the status quo will likely fail because people with strong belief systems are rarely convinced by contrary argument. 

What perhaps is needed are people to come to the imaginary negotiating tables with the intent of building bridges. This is what I attempt in my life. It is a thankless task – opponents of religion insist that those with religious belief systems cannot be reasoned with, while opponents of science insist that those with materialist belief systems cannot be reasoned with. I dispute both propositions, although I cannot deny it seems harder to reason with the latter (whose faith is often more absolute) than the former (for whom doubt is a more common experience). Indeed, in my own philosophical investigations, I have thus far been attacked only by the latter, and never by the former, but I do not claim from this trivial sample that blame is attributable to one party and not the other.

Feyerabend draws a line in the sand, and stockpiles enough philosophical ammunition to arm potential revolutionaries willing to tackle the difficult problem of engaging an ‘enemy’ who does not appear to recognise their own culpability, and who seem determined to enforce their solutions on other people against their will. I would prefer to find ways to avoid the conflict entirely, but to do so may require inestimable patience in the face of people with intractably absolute belief systems. I suspect I lack Feyerabend’s pugnacious confidence, but I am certainly grateful to have access to his body of work.

I welcome discussion, but please remember this is a summation of a book: if you wish to fully understand, usefully critique or meaningfully oppose Feyerabend’s views, you should read the book first and not assume my synopsis is anything other than a brief introduction to his work. Or to put it another way: Don’t shoot the messenger! My best wishes to you all!

Emotions Revealed

What is an emotion? How many different emotions are there? Are all emotions universal? The journey towards understanding, whether the knowledge of science or the wisdom of philosophy, is as much about the refinement of the language as it is about experiments and treatises. In the context of emotions, there is still much work to be done in building a coherent framework of terms thanks in part to the generous scope the word ‘emotion’ has acquired. Paul Ekman’s work is a substantial and invaluable step towards achieving this goal.

Ekman’s Emotions Revealed (subtitled ‘Understanding Faces and Feelings’) is the second book that I have read as a direct consequence of Nicole Lazzaro’s GDC talks. This, in many respects, is the underpinning of Nicole’s Four Keys model, which collects patterns of emotions collated from direct observation of players with their favorite games. Despite my love of Nicole’s work, I was rather underwhelmed with Cziksentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience which, after presenting a great thesis in the first chapter, spent the rest of its time tediously repeating the same information in different contexts. Ekman’s work is of a far greater pedigree.

I will catalogue the emotions Ekman uses in his (still incomplete) taxonomy of emotions in the footnotes below (for my own future reference). In essence, the book works its way through sets of related emotions examining the key work by other researchers in the field, before moving on to discuss the specific signs that allow emotions to be spotted in other people.

This is the aspect of the book which is most outstanding. Ekman has analysed all the muscles in the face, and identified how these muscles react when different emotions are experienced. He provides a series of facial pictures (some composed digitally) which demonstrate the signs and signals of each emotion in turn. This is astonishing work, like nothing else I have seen in the field, and will doubtless ensure Ekman’s work is remembered for a long time to come.

Not to be underestimated in assessing the importance of this book is the manner in which it completely yet politely destroys the assumption that there are no universal signals to emotions. It recognises that emotional behaviours and triggers vary from culture to culture, but firmly and surely identifies common responses that hold true around the world. Cross-cultural studies are immensely difficult to execute, and Ekman must be soundly lauded for his work in this area.

Ekman’s observes in passing that emotions can override drives which some psychologists have claimed are the most powerful fundamental motives – hunger, sex and the will to survive. This is a significant point, although vastly outside the scope of the book to explore fully. He also observes that when under the influence of an emotion individuals become temporarily incapable of accessing information inconsistent with their current emotional state. The recognition of this refractory state can be a valuable aid to anyone struggling to reach a more balanced emotional state.

Emotions Revealed is not the ultimate scientific reference book on emotions that it could have been, simply because so much of the research in the field is still vastly incomplete. It is nonetheless the most exhaustive and carefully observed guide to emotions that has been seen so far, and is written with the goal of improving people’s understanding of their emotional states which in itself is a worthy goal. Few scientific books combine a self-help perspective with such erudite work. When the ultimate reference book on emotion is finally written, many years down the line, Ekman will be substantially referenced, and warmly remembered.

 

Definitions

Emotion: Ekman’s definition of emotion is at the back of the book, and is too complex to reproduce in full. In short: an emotion consists of [1] a set of sensations experienced [2] briefly (longer experiences Ekman considers moods) [3] about something that matters to the person experiencing it. [4] Emotions happen without the experience being chosen consciously; [5] a subconscious appraisal process triggers the emotion. [6] While an emotion is being experienced there is a refractory period during which information inconsistent with the emotional state cannot be accessed. [7] People become consciously aware of an emotion once it has begun. [8] There are universal emotional themes that reflect our evolutionary past, and culturally learned variations which reflect our individual experiences. [9] The desire to experience or not experience an emotion motivates much of our behaviour, and [10] a clear, rapid and universal signal informs others of how an emotional person is feeling.

Mood: if an emotion lasts for hours, Ekman considers this a mood, not an emotion. He deploys separate terms for moods than for emotions.

Emotions

Non-enjoyable emotions:

1. Sadness and Agony
Sadness: dysphoria, helplessness, hopelessness
 Agony: intense and painful version of sadness; elements of protest
2. Anger
  range of states from annoyance, through frustration to rage
3. Surprise and Fear
 Surprise: short lived response to the unexpected
 Fear: retreat from the threat of harm; physical or psychological
4. Disgust and Contempt
 Disgust: feeling of aversion, repulsion
 Contempt: disdain; experienced towards people or their actions

Similar emotions are grouped together. Separate terms are used to indicate that there is a different sign for display, and differences in the triggering states. Disgust and contempt, for instance, seem related, but have different facial expressions and radically different triggering states. They appear to be two separate emotions.

Enjoyable emotions:

1-5. Sensory pleasures
 Visual pleasure
 Tactile pleasre
 Olfactory pleasure
 Auditory pleasure
 Gustatory pleasure
6. Amusement
 from slight amusement, through to intense amusement with laughter and tears
7. Contentment
 the feeling that there is nothing more that need be done
8. Excitement
 response to novelty or challenge
9. Relief
 felt immediately after a strong emotion subsides
10. Wonderment
 feeling of being overwhelmed by the improbable and incomprehensible
11. Ecstasy (or Bliss)
 intense self-transcendent rapture
12. Fiero
 triumph over adversity, commonly seen in sporting victories
13. Naches
 pride in the accomplishment of a child or student (or of a parent or tutor)
14. Elevation
 uplifting feeling in response to unexpected kindness and compassion
15. Gratitude
 appreciation for an altruistic gift that provides benefit
16. Shadenfreude
 delight in the suffering of enemies (in the context of play, of our friends)

Regrettably, the bulk of the book is concerned with the non-enjoyable emotions, and only a single chapter is devoted to these sixteen emotions. There is clearly much research still to be done.

Emotions not covered by this book:

1. Guilt (no clear signal)
2. Shame (no clear signal)
3. Embarrassment (no clear signal – blushing cannot be observed in dark-skinned people)
4. Envy (no clear signal) 

Not covered, and not considered emotions:

5. Jealousy (Ekman does not consider this to be an emotion, but an emotional scene or plot; it is expressible in terms of the other emotions)
6. Love (Ekman does not consider parental or romantic love to be an emotion on the following grounds: emotions can be very brief, but love endures) 

Emotions Revealed: Understanding Faces and Feelings is published by Phoenix, ISBN 0-75381-765-9.

A Theory of Fun for Game Design

With a title such as A Theory of Fun for Game Design, one cannot help but suspect strange tensions at work in Raph Koster's book. 'Fun' and 'theory' sit together somewhat uncomfortably, each shuffling their feet as if uncertain they have come to the right place. And yet, after relaxing, perhaps sharing a few drinks and anecdotes, suddenly it seems that the two are getting along famously - although they never quite manage to speak quite the same language. Such is the schizophrenic joy of A Theory of Fun - it combines a methodical approach with a playful freedom from excessive seriousness resulting in a book unlike any other on the subject of games.

The first thing one notices about the book is it's unsusual structure, as it has text on the verso pages, and (mostly) cartoons on the recto pages. For the most part, the annotated cartoons provide a superlight version of the main content of the book, while generously complete notes (collected as an appendix) provide more detailed annotations where appropriate. The result is a book that can be read in three ways - focussing on the cartoons and using the text for more details, focussing on the text and using the cartoons for illustration, and using the text and the notes in concert for a more scholarly approach.

Koster's view is that fun is another word for learning. However, in order to support this view, the author becomes forced into excluding any aspect of the word 'fun' that does not fit with his model. Koster is completely upfront about this - he suggests that taking a wider view of fun "renders the word meaningless", and therefore focuses only on a specific definition of fun as "the act of mastering a problem mentally". Since this is not how the rest of the world uses the word 'fun', I personally feel he would have done better to coin a different phrase rather than co-opting fun into a context that does not fit with how the word is conventionally used (this betrays my adherence to Wittgenstein's thinking on language yet again).

Still, since this linguistic sleight of hand is performed honestly and openly, there is not really a problem. However, I'm going to use the term Kfun (for 'Koster fun') to refer to the subset of fun discussed in the book in an effort to disambiguate the language.

The author explores kfun in a thorough and detailed fashion, looking at what games are good at teaching, differences in individual ability (solely through the perspective of intelligence and learning styles because of the focus on kfun), problems that result, and coming round ultimately to looking at issues of representation, ethics and ultimately the cultural role games may aspire towards.  Because of the brisk pace, some issues are not examined in much detail, but conversely the book covers a vast multitude of topics making it an excellent primer on the subject of games.

Again, because of the volume of material covered, there are inevitable errors and ommisions. These vary from the trivial to the debatable.

An example of the former (trivial errors): Koster claims that Centipede is not really that different from Galaxian. But the attack waves in Galaxian are static, and nothing the player does affects them, whereas in Centipede, shooting the Centipede leaves mushrooms which alter the attack patterns in a dynamic and controllable fashion, resulting in a much harder game to master. (The obvious rebuttal to this sort of minutiae is "who gives a damn", of course).

An example of the latter (debatable errors): Koster claims "From a strict evolutionary point of view, cheating is a winning strategy." There is no reference to this in the notes, so I assume this is just his opionion - I believe he is in error. Although ecologies can support a certain amount of 'cheating', this does not equate to cheating being a winning strategy. Cuckoos lay eggs in other bird's nests (a form of cheating) - but this does not allow cuckoos to out perform other bird species - if there were only cuckoos, they would be royally screwed as brood parasites must inevitably be in the minority. Furthermore, it is widely accepted that in a social context the most successful categories are Tit for Tat and Tit for Two Tat - which outperform every cheating strategy. Koster's claim that "Duelists who shoot first while their opponents are pacing off are far more likely to reproduce" is flawed: four people attend a formal duel, the two duelists plus two seconds. It is hard to devise a cheating strategy for a formal duel that will allow the cheat to reintegrate into their society and breed.

There are also points in which I believe he misrepresents other people's theories. For instance, Koster equates Lazarro's Hard Fun with Csikszentmihalyi's flow in an inaccurate manner. I believe Koster might have been at the same Lazarro GDC presentation as I was - in which she inadvertently mentioned flow and provided an impromptu explanation while talking about Hard Fun. But this was not because flow refers only to Hard Fun. However, since Lazarro still hasn't written a book (I hope she will address this soon!) we only have her paper on the subject to refer to. Besides, Koster's conclusion that fun isn't flow is broadly accurate and his conclusion that flow isn't kfun is completely accurate, so in some respects it is not a problem. 

However, these sort of issues are the result of the wide reach of the book which covers so much it is inevitable that a few imperfections creep in. These small and often insignificant cracks are more than compensated for by both a wealth of useful information, and super cute alligator cartoons.

The book does not really provide the theory of fun that some may feel is promised in the title - but then, I don't believe it is a coincidence that Koster chose to call it 'A Theory of Fun' and not 'The Theory of Fun'. Koster presents a theory of kfun, and he explores it thoroughly. It leads him to some conclusions that I find hard to agree with, because in accepting the value of the fun of learning (kfun) he rules out to some extent having fun just for the sake of it which I believe may be premature.

None of this actually matters, because at it's heart this isn't a book about a theory of kfun at all (although this is the central device by which it progresses). A Theory of Fun for Game Design is a highly personal and empassioned defence of the value of games and of the games industry. The book is framed in the context of a discussion between Koster and his grandfather, who asked if Raph was proud of what he did, and throughout the book the presence of Koster's children can also be felt. There is an intimacy to this aspect of the book which I feel is its greatest strength.

I believe there are two basic battles going on right now - one is for the defence of the games industry against those who would muzzle it or inhibit its growth (and this is where Koster ebulliently leaps to games' defence) and one is for the industry to expand its reach to meet the needs of a wider audience (which is where Koster's co-worker Sheri Grainer Ray has staunchly positioned herself). I personally feel more driven to fight on the second front, but I have great respect for those who have chosen to take to the field of the first.

Erudite, passionate and accessible, A Theory of Fun for Game Design is a unique and engaging book which suffers from a certain schizophrenia as to whether it is talking to the layman or the professional but somehow manages to make this confusion work to its advantage. It is essential reading for anyone interested in games, and an ardent defence of the value of games which is both apposite and timely.

A Theory of Fun for Game Design is published by Paraglyph Press, ISBN 1-932111-97-2.