We’re barely more than a day away right now from our interview with Frithjof, which he says he’s “thrilled” about, and I’m certainly looking forward to as well, though I can picture any number of things going less than ideally as I introduce these two known elements (Frithjof on the one hand and Seth/Wes/Dylan on the other) to each other.
For me, this period of preparation has been not only a chance to systematically treat this topic (work) that has occupied so much of my thoughts and experiences over the last twenty years since I learned about New Work, but it was an opportunity to bore more explicitly into some aspects of my own philosophical foundations. Frithjof’s class was the first philosophy course I took in college: as a sophomore (having not decided as a freshman that I needed to concern myself with reading Descartes and such) taking (through the dubious permissiveness granted by the University of Michigan honors program) this very upper-level course (a number of my fellows there were grad students) reading Hegel’s Phenomenology and Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego and such.
Despite my not being at all qualified at the time to take the course (I had never before written a philosophy paper and came out of the course with a B-.), this for the first time in college struck me as work in line with what I was actually thinking. I wasn’t learning history and methods of thinking in order to become a better philosopher; I was actually there philosophizing myself, reading these figures that did not strike me as archaic, as tainted by history (e.g. as I felt and still to some extent feel that Descartes and Kant are tainted by their cultures’ overall religiosity).
It’s no secret that a lot of the idiosyncrasies in our interpretations of the figures we read on PEL has been driven (and was moreso in our earliest episodes) by the lessons we took away (and were by the time we podcasted only half remembered) from the courses we took on these figures. A disproportionate portion of my ready-made picture came from Bergmann, and I’ve found as we went that some parts of this picture were clearer and received more post-Bergmann seasoning/processing/reconsideration than others.
Some of the key elements from Bergmann that you’ve heard out of my mouth on past podcasts are quite relevant to the current discussion of New Work:
1. People are NOT (contra Hobbes and most cynical people today) selfish. People don’t perform some calculation before acting re. what’s in their interest or what gives them the most pleasure. We’re drawn to do things for all sorts of stupid reasons, as when (Bergmann’s example) people ran off in droves to fight religious wars (like the wars between Catholicism and Protestantism: “over whether Jesus is actually in the piece of bread during communion or not.”). In the current context, Bergmann describes this as the “poverty of desire.”
2. Why aren’t we selfish in this way? Because we don’t have “selves,” strictly speaking, to start with; because the self is an achievement. Yes, I distinguish my body from your body, and my pain from your pain, but none of that is enough to have a defined “self interest.” On the contrary, the sense of what we “identify with” in the sense that we will defend it as if we are defending home turf is very fluid, and we are vulnerable to being sucked into stupid causes. How do we get a self? That’s now been the topic of several of our podcasts, including the ones on Hegel’s Phenomenology (the master and slave), Sartre, Buber, Lacan, and it’s come up on several other occasions. (See my recent long post contrasting Bergmann with Ayn Rand, who does have some of the right account on this issue but fails to break sufficiently from the Enlightenment picture exemplified by #1 above.)
3. Bergmann’s consequent view of freedom is one we’ve covered by considering Kant and others. He lays it out in his book On Being Free
All the above is review, and the purpose of this post is to call attention to two essays posted on Bergmann’s website that formulate some parts of Bergmann’s phenomenology-derived philosophy–parts which I’ve likewise tried to spout about in some prior episodes but perhaps less successfully, or at least with less specific memory of what Bergmann said about them, so reading these two essays for the first time in full over the last couple of days has been eye-opening.
“The Experience of Values” was written in 1983 and according to Bergmann’s wiki page is “used in universities across the world.” Its principal claim is that the fact/value distinction is bogus (well, not entirely without use, but not the metaphysical centrality we take it for), or more precisely rooted in a bogus epistemology which imagines that we perceive only objective properties like shapes and sizes and maybe colors and then impose judgments that those same things are “dangerous” or “merry” or “dreadful” or whatnot. So, like Pirsig and Heidegger and others, he’s trying to get rid of the subjective/objective distinction. His account is driven by phenomenology, i.e. our experience of valuing (from p. 5 of the PDF):
What we notice is the stark and unqualified “givenness” of these qualities. They present themselves and they confront us. If we set aside all explanatory frameworks and assumptions, even those that are only hazy shadows and habits, and make the effort to see clearly nothing but the actual brute experience of them (and that is at least a part of what Husserl meant by his “return to the facts”) then we are struck by the simple “thereness” of them. We look and we see that this gesture is clumsy while that one is graceful. We listen and we hear the sadness of a little tune. In all of this we are spectators and the qualities do not act on us, do not even offer themselves to us, but they simply are in a solid and assertive independence.
For example (from p. 7):
Take a situation that is very that is very threatening. Imagine a tree falling down in your direction. Does it really make sense to believe that we do not perceive the danger directly but that the “neutral” tree causes a sensation in us and that the whole response of our body is produced by it? But if not, then why should the experience of being charmed or tempted be metaphysically so different from that of terror? For that matter, what of other organisms? Are we to suppose that they too respond largely to their own sensations? If so, would this assumption not conflict with everything we know about awareness in the lower forms of life? Moreover, is this not in any case an inherently strange view of organisms? Is it not a needlessly complex theory of how organisms interact with their environment? Still further, what of Gestalt Psychology, or of Piaget’s contention that infants perceive (in his terminology) “affective qualities” before they have either a concept of self, or of their own body?
…In these situations there is often no sensation inside us. It may sound strange, but if one wanted to describe these experiences correctly one would have to say that it is the cigarette itself… that has the quality of “being-tempting.” And the same is true for the falling, threatening tree, for a leaf that is luxurious, for a vulnerable face, or a voice that is revolting… They are of one piece with the “given” and are encountered as integral with it.
This should all sound very familiar to anyone familiar with the language of Sartre. He connects this idea that first we perceive a value-neutral world and then some “I” behind the scenes judges that world to add a value to it with the general epistemic picture of classical empiricism where we are delivered up some raw sensations and then assemble them into an image that may or may not reflect reality. This leads to many of the perennial problems of epistemology, and Bergmann thinks that the phenomenologists starting with Hegel through Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre (he could have mentioned Heidegger but regards him as a hack; recall that his folks were from Germany, and according to Robert Solomon, Bergmann’s student, Bergmann shared the inability of many in that generation to in any way forgive Heidegger’s Nazi bullshit) already solved this through a picture of knowledge whereby our primary relation to the world is not “consciousness,” is not the intellect, that “knowledge” in the primary case of familiarity with the world is not a matter of cognizing anything, which would involve introspection upon our own sensations of “raw data” but simply of being in touch with the world.
This epistemic aspect is more explicitly spelled out in the second of Bergmann’s papers that I wanted to call your attention to: “Epistemology and Social Science,” which he wrote some time in the 80s but never tried to get published. Recently it resurfaced and he was severely scolded by his colleagues for not putting this thing out, so now it’s out as a Kindle book
Listeners to our Hegel’s Phenomenology episodes might recall my first name-drop of Bergmann, where I tried to describe the diagram that he drew on the board to describe this new, non-Cartesian model of knowledge, that cuts off the thing-in-itself and the Cartesian subject to present a picture of knowledge as simple openness to the world, with no necessary self-conscious component (i.e. a Subject) involved. I was excited to see that very scrawl in this essay:
So the camera-looking box is the organism, and yes, of course it’s using its physiology (sense organs, nerves, brain) to sense the outside, but the result is not a two-step where there’s first a sense-data “given” which we in any sense experience (even subconsciously) which is then processed to add value judgments. So the position he’s giving this (“Model B”) in a simplifying contrast to is one (“Model A”) that sounds much like Dennett’s description of the “Cartesian Theater,” which Bergmann depicts as:
…in which the senses take in information and perform some magic on it to somehow create a mental image, i.e. to create consciousness.
The essay leads off by comparing these two models of perception and claiming that the simpler model is better motivated by what we actually know about brain physiology and sidesteps a lot of problems that many philosophers think of as insoluble.
Hegel thought that this picture [model A] of oneself as on the other side of the brain involves an experience analogous to that of the insane. For he thought the most characteristic element of insanity was the sense of aloneness, the suspicion that other people do not experience my world. On this model, this isolation and this privacy become part of the human condition.
On the new model,
The first step postulates that the process ends in the brain. For the moment we simply deny that the whole second half of the sequence envisioned by the first model actually occurs… We deny that the brain process is still metamorphized into an image, and that it is this image that the Subject perceives.
…In the second place, we no longer think of isolated and microscopic events in the brain as “by themselves” generating perception. …How could a string of molecules generate the picture of the forest that is all around me? By reversing this and by maintaining that the process of perception, however it finally may have to be understood, involves in any case larger parts of the organism–not only regions of the brain, but also sensory organs and perhaps more–one at the very least regains a certain amount of “space” in which the explanation has room to occur.
…In the first model these organs create mental images. In the alternative second model they create no “objects” at all. Instead, they endow the organism with a capacity… The neurological apparatus… “opens” the organism toward the world; it equips it with the possibility of having “access to it… the organism becomes exposed, and vulnerable to the external world: consciousness is a “wound.”
…The act of perception is no longer interpreted on the analogy of a reproduction, but is now conceived as a reaching out and grasping that the organism performs… it addresses the external object, and it is this object, and not an image of it, that is seen.
In the essay, this division of models is actually just introductory material to argue for Bergmann’s critique of “social science;” he doesn’t think that psychology and sociology and such are really susceptible to scientific treatment in the sense of physics at all. (And yes, relevant to New Work, this critique would extend to economics.)
The upshot of his argument is that in our being-in-the-world that this Model B of knowledge amounts to, even before the advent of mentality we have a lot of “knowledge” of the things that are important to us, like other people. This “wisdom of the body” (to use Nietzsche’s term) is actually extremely subtle and detailed, and when a science then comes in and tries to found itself only on strictly certain foundations, on pure “observations,” then it’s acting like we get knowledge according to Model A, and it effectively ignores the many things that we already know pre-scientifically. A scientific physics can be effective because physics deals with the truly abstract: regularities underlying everything. We don’t experience things in the abstract, so we have no pre-scientific opinions on this and welcome the new formulation. For social science, Bergmann thinks impossible to both attain the rigor of physics, which requires extreme abstraction, and to exceed the insight that we already have non-scientifically about ourselves and societies and the like. He critiques Levi-Strauss’s structuralism (the very essay we covered in our episode on structuralism) as hopelessly simplistic yet still not rigorously scientific. So while there are certainly ways to evaluate and improve upon our pre-scientific notions like those of economics, “science” a la physics does not provide an adequate model for doing this; it’s really a whole different animal. Likewise, science is thus only one small part of knowledge, one edifice carefully constructed, that has neither a monopoly on legitimacy nor on the tools of self-criticism. (Compare this, when our Popper episode comes out soon, to Popper’s take on non-science as still interesting and evaluable in terms of how elegantly it solves problems.)
To return to “The Experience of Values,” Bergmann’s approach to ethics is along the lines of the non-scientific as described above: we experience values all the damn time, and those base experiences are what we can then create moral rules upon, which can then in turn be used to critique some of our base intuitions re. specific instances. Moral rules can be rules of thumb only, necessary because we can’t stop and deeply reflect on every decision, but to be thrown out when they conflict with a new primary experience. Bergmann compares this to art (and this position is very similar to Santayana’s): we recognize that while we can come up with certain generalizations about what makes for a good piece of art, a good artist will violate these regularly, and it’s the rule that needs to be adjusted to account for his successful experiment, not the other way around. Brought into the moral realm, this is what is meant by Nietzsche’s talk of creating values. So on this model, there’s no real danger of nihilism, because values are ever pulling at you. Even if you are “unprincipled,” i.e. you never create those “rules of thumb,” that doesn’t mean you don’t have values. Morality is not in need of any foundation, because (just as scientific observations for Popper!) it involves the self-correcting interaction between these primary experiences and then attempts to make them into a coherent world-view, which includes (needs!) the input of other people, so if you and I disagree about a moral intuition in a specific case, that’s not the end of the matter. As MacIntyre pointed out, the top-down approach to morality, where we look for ever more fundamental principles, has been a failure: folks from Kant to the utilitarians and beyond failed to find a fundamental, grounding principles for morality, leaving disagreeing parties at an impasse about which fundamental moral rule to start with. Bergmann wants to make it clear that he’s not proposing instead a million little impasses over individual concrete moral judgments (as is arguably the case with ethical intuitionism). When two people disagree about a concrete value attribution, the case is much more, again, like two people who disagree about an interpretation of a work of art: there’s much positive work one can do to ferret out where the difference lies, whether one person is just missing something the other is seeing, or focusing on a different aspect of the phenomenon, or what.
All this, taken together, I think works to explain the differences in perspective between Bergmann and, say, your typical Adam Smith-inspired economist. People are complex, and their every association can produce unpredictable results, so you can’t just put their aggregate behavior into a model and think you can predict much of anything. Given our evolving experience of values and slow discovery of self, we certainly can’t predict that people will on the average work to maximize their utility or productivity or “happiness” (a problematically ambiguous notion).
Bergmann would therefore (I think) call most economic models overly simplistic to the point of actively false, and argues for predictions like the job apocalypse with techniques more like those of a historian or a sci-fi author. Specifically, to repeat the argument given in the topic announcement, it just “makes sense” to anyone paying attention that jobs just can’t keep shifting sectors forever, as they shifted from farming to factory work over to service work, and now service work is being automated away just as factory work was. I do feel like I need to learn much more about the economic models that will claim, “oh, no, the economy is an ecosystem that always yields up enough jobs to meet demand over the long run!” but this essay on social science by Bergmann gives me a little more confidence in my initial assessment that such abstract models are just so much ungrounded hocus pocus.
-Mark Linsenmayer
starting with newborn infants what we call ego-istic/self-ish drives/behaviors seem to precede, even in some sense to generate, what we might think of as a developed/mature, “self”, the struggle as I see it is to try and sublimate this, as Derrida called it, narcissism(s) without end.
for the reading list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interpersonal_World_of_the_Infant
that said yes the abstractions/calculations miss the actual on the ground complexities (in ways that sound to me much like the mischaracterizations of human-beings by analytic philosophers) and in our age of computerized trading/modeling are not just bad maps of the terrain but willful distortions, there are no “laws” of “markets” but only accumulations/interactions of manipulations by particular interests/parties.
http://www.cresc.ac.uk/publications/deep-stall-the-euro-zone-crisis-banking-reform-and-politics
The problem with this morality as art theory is that people tend to value the moral theories that benefit their self interest. An interpretive discussion about morality is not anything like a respectful disagreement about art but is more like what is currently being played out in the political landscape as an acrimonious contest to acquire the moral high ground in an effort to control the government apparatus and force the losers to live by the moral philosophy of the winners.
The purpose of acquiring an objective morality is to draw people away from the moral theories that benefit their self interest and convince them to follow the theories that reduce conflict and promote the greatest good. If the fact value dichotomy prevents this then we should accept that it does and move on from that point not just assume away all conflict as if we are living in some congenial societal art show.
If you buy the greater picture here, then no, people tend to value the moral theories that they’ve been sold as a kid, not the ones that “benefit their self-interest.” However, I get your point, e.g. Nietzsche thinks all philosophy is a rationalization for things we believe with less savory motives, and a Marxist would say specifically that the morality someone embraces is that which is in their class interest. So poor people favor charity toward the poor while the rich favor a hands-off-my-stuff, rights-based approach.
I don’t think the difference in tone necessitates a difference in epistemic or metaphysical status (between moral vs. aesthetic judgments), especially if you take Bergmann’s advice to give more weight to the concrete than abstract moral principles. So while the rich and poor might advocate different principles in the way I described above, if you show them an actual situation of a homeless elderly person, you’re not going to see as much of a difference in reaction, unless the rich person’s “principles” have really mind-fucked him enough that he can’t even perceive that suffering as what it is. (This is what makes “A Christmas Carol” work.)
That said, if you look at the end of Bergmann’s essay, he does take a pretty hard-line existentialist position about “shoulds,” i.e. moral imperatives:
“…There is no external sanction [found in experience], that no court at all sits in judgment over our life. Everything we touch shines with a multiplicity of values, and everything we do moves in their flow. To breathe is an act of differentiation–but that is all. The qualities that our actions realize are the end. We do not place them one by one into a swaying scale, they are like pebbles over which a river flows… Values may be objective, and of course there can be rules, and yet living may still be like a silent walk.”
So he doesn’t want to say that ethics is a human creation, which would be again like saying that there’s this objective, value-free world that we add ethics to, but the effect is much the same; if there are “objective rules” they are discovered/built (stable ambivalence alert!) through social consideration. So we determine, e.g. basic human rights, through an ongoing dialogue, where we observe cases of suffering and say “nobody should have to go through that!”
I quote: “Concepts like ‘equality’ or ‘justice’ or ‘human rights’ would… not be regarded as firm first principles but would… be understood to rest on judgments and perceptions that are more specific. The concept of equality, for instance, arises on this account when some particular forms of degradation or suffering are experienced as so ghastly that a society decides that no one should be exposed to them. The basis of the concept is thus a compassion that lays down certain… minima below which it resolves not to let any human being fall. This reverses the usual direction, where first a seemingly complete and sweeping equality is proclaimed, which then, on second thought… is limited and curtailed until no one has much confidence in the remainder (from the equality of property and even brotherhood, down to a mere equality before the law).”
…That’s a particularly good section of the article (pages 26-27), if you want to go read more.
Well said Mark. Bergman, by taking a phenomenological position, avoids the subject-object binary dualism of the ought which Nietzsche disdained in Geneology of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil. That allows for the human phenomenological (not ideological) establishment of values.
Beware the transcendental ideologue, or the reductionistic empiricist. Yes we are selfish (even in our alturism), which has value, and needs to be backed up honestly by the will to value, each and every one of us.
As Ian said, “If the fact value dichotomy prevents this [greatest good] then we should accept that it does and move on from that point not just assume away all conflict as if we are living in some congenial societal art show.”
Empty heads turned toward the world:
“The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematical only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awareness of himself or of others as private subjectivities, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, without attempting to link them to each other, nor our words, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words.” Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, 1962.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TveUtpRQzXM
“The Philosophical Baby” – Dr Alison Gopnik
Powerful concept–babies, in their openness approach life with theories and probabilities from the start rather than with innate given modules of knowledge/learning, backed up with developmental psychological experiments.
The 100 years war was not a religious conflict at all, but one over territory between two Catholic nations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Years'_War
True, Mr. Wallerstein, but I think the basic point stands. Think of all those who volunteered to fight in WWI, for example.
Yes, Bergmann’s reference is to the 30 years war (something Hegel specifically complained about); the rest was my sloppy exuberance.
I never claimed that people don’t volunteer with lofty motives to get slaughtered nor did I claim that people are basically guided by economic self-interest.
However, now that I think about it, it’s interesting that Hobbes, whose work is a reaction to the English Civil War, a war that could be framed as a religious war (Anglican Royalist vs. Puritan Commoners), saw human beings as selfish, as Mark correctly points out.
That is, Hobbes who was a direct witness of a war fought for so-called lofty principles saw or imagined that he saw that our “real” motives are egoistic.
I’m excited to listen to this podcast and send you all good wishes! Similarly, I too have thought about the topic and subjects throughout this blog. And, since finishing the read “How Much is Enough: Money and the Goof Life,” I’m curious where Bergmann’s thinking is similar and verges from Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky. (Sorry to name drop.)
They all agree the workweek needs shortened. Re. “New Work” RS and ES conclude, “Despite their attractions, these work-sharing schemes are not affordable to many lower-paid workers, who need their income from full-time work. These workers would have to be put in a position in which they could afford to work less. It is in this context that the idea of a basic income, independent of any obligation to work, becomes appealing.” Their framework is through the lens of non-coercive paternalism instead of non-paternalism, which many contemporary philosophers frame on attempting to remain in neutrality when determining the truth of basic goods/values. They also (as mentioned throughout these blogs) look at the ancient meaning of eudaimonia (English word happiness) and its evolution in western economic theories.
I second Tammy’s exuberance. And coincidentally I also just finished the Skidelskys “How Much is Enough.” There’s even a passing reference to Bergmann in there. For those interested in this topic it’s worth a read.
For myself, I’m very interested in a personal on-the-ground way. We are “thrown into” these lives, and therefore this jobs-system. What options do we have as individuals (particularly if we are supporting families) to opt out of this system?
“We are “thrown into” these lives, and therefore this jobs-system. What options do we have as individuals (particularly if we are supporting families) to opt out of this system?”
That’s it right there, the way you phrased your question asking “what option[s]”, implying there is but a singular option “this system?”
Do you see that? It’s as if (the way you phrased your question) options are an illusion if the system is set (fixed). But in reading the multitude of blogs re this topic and the social function of roles, a person has within a given society, its life draining, in my opinion.
Anyway, to answer your question (with families in mind) I think a paradigm shift in one system would shift all systems. With that said, if the average life expectancy has increased, and knowing what we do about human growth and development, why would we need to target children in middle school to pick a work-path? Well, we would do this if the thinking were framed on the tradition work-family life education model based on the Industrial Revolution model.
However, this is not the culture today’s children are emerged in, that being, technology driven for outcomes in an information economy. My knowledge is very basic, looking into how changing economic systems within a community and larger society have been able to remain stable while transitioning through economic changes.
The model used is horizontal, but even so, that doesn’t necessarily mean inequality within a given community’s members have not been maximized. If I understand what I am reading, inequality has increased within its members. So, multicultural or pluralism could give an appearance of all things being equal, but an appearance doesn’t equate realism in a given situation for individuals with families to opt out of anything.
What it does do (in my case as I see it) is work toward making changes for generations long after I’m gone. I think, for myself anyway, that’s just the reality of the work/life/family systems within the economic systems—micro/macro framing. Anyway, I agree with Bergmann that you know when you are doing what you love and work is life giving and not life draining. That’s not to say, there are not times throughout one’s life one doesn’t have to do things, learn new things that one doesn’t enjoy, is challenging and hard work.
I’m glad you enjoyed “How Much is Enough: Money and the Good Life.” I was thrilled when I read their citing Juliet Schor’s work, I think in chapter 7. It’s a good read that I’ll have to read a couple more times. They share similar thinking with Bergmann, only reading the first 50 pages of Bergmann’s, “Neue Arbeit, Neue Kultur.”
Hell, I don’t know if I even know what I’m talking about, I make things too complex! I have no idea if I can change the way I think and it is funny when for example my Chemistry 101 lab instructor brings this to my attention (I’m making things way complex)! It is good, a nice thing, and the simple things in life.
I can see how my question could be read in the manner you did….although I certainly didn’t mean to give a hopeless sense of having no real choices. I actually meant, as someone supporting a family, that I’m actively engaged in finding ways to exist and make meaningful choices within the larger socio-economic environment. (For example, intentionally working less hours to spend time with my family and pursue creative endeavors)
I’m so drawn to this topic for the very same reason I’m drawn to existentialist thinkers…the questions of how to make choices in my life given all the multiple contexts I find myself in. It’s refreshing to see others looking at the larger view, like Bergmann, the Skidelskys…and fellow travelers such as these here partially examined folks…
Thanks! Any references to Aristotle in his work? Aristotle said that the first thing the ruler must control is the marketplace. Unfortunately the marketplace IS the ruler at the moment.
Really anticipating the podcast covering this as well as any future podcasts focusing on these topics. The holistic trend of these future podcasts is especially important I believe. Keep it up Mark and crew, this is very important work.
Hey Mark,
I don’t know how often you respond to older posts, but hopefully you can take some time to address a few questions I have about Bergmann’s “experience of values” idea,” which I have a few strong feelings about.
I was kind-of amazed at what you wrote about his thought, and I felt compelled to read through the essay (Experience of Values). I didn’t get through the whole thing, but I read enough to confirm that I understood your summary.
Let’s just say I had to read a lot of he wrote twice. Not because I didn’t comprehend what was being said, but because I was so shocked that Bergmann believes these things. I still feel a bit of cognitive dissonance: on one hand, Bergmann is a world-renown philosopher and a really smart guy, but on the other hand, I feel very strongly that he is wrong, even though I have about zero experience with academic philosophy.
I don’t even know where to begin, but I’ll try.
I’ll just say that that idea that we have direct access to some kind of objective value is insane. The most basic, and obvious, example I can give is the common disagreement I have with my buddy about rap music. He’ll play me a track, and tell me how “chill” it is, how “smooth” it is. But I don’t perceive any of these things. I think it’s lame, repetitive, and nonsensical (lyrically). Who is right? According to Bergmann, values exist in the world, independently of my brain, such as the tree “being-terrifying” or the cigarette “being-tempting.” So what’s happening with this piece of music? Is it, simultaneously, “being-chill,” “being-smooth,” “being-lame,” “being-repetitive,” and “being-nonsensical?”
The next obvious example has to do with physical attractiveness. I’m sure you’ve been in a situation where you find a particular woman pretty but somebody else doesn’t. Is this women both “being-pretty” and “not-being-pretty” simultaneously? If Bergmann is correct, then people can simultaneously occupy two or more contradictory positions, kind of like an electron that is at once both positive and negative. To me, this doesn’t seem reasonable.
And what about drugs? Let’s say I hate marshmallows. I think they’re gross. According to Bergmann, the marshmallows contain, outside of my subjectivity, my “I,” a state of “being-gross.” But, what if I smoke a joint and find that no, marshmallows are actually deliciously addictive. Do they now contain the value “being-deliciously-addictive” and the value “being-gross” at the same time? Or has the new perception replaced the old one? Is the transformation “public,” as Bergmann says, like the oppressive silence in a board-room (meaning that the people around me now consider marshmellows to be deliciously addictive)?
You could argue that I’m now perceiving an aspect of the marshmallows that was always there, but hidden from me up until smoking the joint. But doesn’t the fact that I needed to alter my brain chemistry to access this aspect indicate that that the brain does indeed play a huge role in making value judgments?
The most powerful argument I have against Bergmann’s analysis is based on my own experience: a few weeks ago, I was walking across the campus late, around 9:30 p.m. I live in B.C., so the campus is surrounded by a lot of heavily wooded parkland. I was walking through this clearing when, from the corner of my eye, I noticed a cougar stalking me across the grass. In that moment I knew I was about to die at the hands of a violent, predatory cat. The cougar was terrifying. But, then I saw it wasn’t a cougar: it was a female deer, which is about the same size and colour as a cougar. In less than a second, the terrifying cougar turned into a harmless deer. It was all a scary mirage, yes, but in that initial moment, I knew I was about to die.
I find this experience impossible to interpret with Bergmann’s theory. If there is no neutral world, but a world where values are public, where values are properties of the object (like colour or taste), then where was the terror I felt at the cougar? The cougar wasn’t even there, so how could the terror be “out there?” Was the terror contained within the deer alongside it’s harmlessness? I don’t think this is likely. I think it’s more reasonable to say that the perception of the terror was completely within my experience, and not part of anything public. Same goes for the perception of the deer’s harmlessness.
My sense organs delivered the image of a large, tan, mobile object which, because of the low-light, was ambiguous (a sort-of natural Rorshach Test). My brain, faced with this ambiguous stimuli, had to make a decision: after all, I did not perceive the large, tan, mobile object merely as a large, tan, moving object; nor did I perceive it as a shapeless mass. No, my brain compared the visual perception to the category of cougar, and then I became consciously aware of there being a cougar. Then, I associated the presence of the cougar with the possibility of getting ripped-apart and killed, which CAUSED a feeling of primal fear. But then I turned my head and saw that it was just a doe, which has no violent association, so the fear, which was only in my head, went away.
I think Bergmann’s forgetting the lighting-quick speed with which the brain processes information. Say you are watching a graceful dancer and then all of a sudden she trips and makes a clumsy move; you might feel that the perception of the dancer falling and the feeling that it is clumsy (the judgement) are simultaneous; you might say that there was no time for a judgement to be made. But there was: The brain can process information in less-than a second: the light hits your eye-ball, travels through the optic-nerve, the image of the dancer is processed, and the clumsy gesture is then compared to other clumsy gestures. All of this can happen in less than a second. As an aside: what if this was the first dance recital you’ve ever been to? Does a five-year-old recognize the misstep as clumsy, or does she need to be told that it was a mistake?
I feel that Bergmann’s notion ignores the multiplicity of different judgements can be made about concrete objects. It fails to explain why I think pictures of the holocaust are tragic but a neo-Nazi skinhead thinks the image is a triumph. We all have unique experience which we bring to bear on our perceptions, our sense-data. Take his example of the tree-falling in my direction. He takes it for granted that this would be terrifying for me. What if I was suicidal? If that were the case, I might welcome the tree bearing down on my head.
One possible counter-argument to this would be: if you’re mentally-ill or disturbed, then you won’t perceive the world “as-it-is.” You won’t have access to the “public values” all the normies see as they are, just right there in front of your eyes. But this seems like a cop-out to me. It would not seem very different from Ayn Rand saying “if you don’t understand this argument, it’s because you’re not thinking clearly. You’re a moocher.”
I hope my post doesn’t seem to vitriolic. I enjoyed reading through your post and Bergmann’s essay, but I just can swallow the argument.
Short answer from my phone for now: “pretty” is not granular enough. If I perceive beauty and you don’t get it, it’s not that there’s nothing there to get. See our Santayana ep. Likewise the rap song IS repetitious, but the guy who gets it is focusing on some other aspects which in turn lets us reinterpret the repetition positively.
Important clarification: whether values or anything else is “in the world” is a different issue than whether the brain is involved. His entire point is that we conflate “in my brain” (all experience involves the brain) and “in my mind,” where we take mind to be some element in experience. Per our Sartre episode, experience is almost totally of the outer world, not of the mind/of the self.
Bergmann points out the experienced difference between the cheeriness of a piece of music (in the world) and the cheer that I may or not feel when I hear it.
We haven’t ever had a real treatment of this view as an epistemology on the podcast. The Merleau-Ponty ep came closest. A text in this vein I’d like us to cover is William James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism.
More later…
always interested in rad-empiricisms, Alva Noe’s Out of Our Heads is a nice update:
Per Popper, why assume that one stage of perception/source of knowledge is infallible?
The move to “we must first perceive then assemble in our minds” is driven by the intuition that there must be some early stage (like sense data) which gets real knowledge and then we screw it up when we cognize that. But there is no such stage in our experience: objects are given to us whole, identified and with color and (for Bergmann/Sartre) affect… And we can be wrong about them.
The two layer approach does have the advantage of saying where error comes from. To try to give something comparable here: I think of Bergmann’s view as a species of aspectualism: perception gives us some aspect of the real world. If I see only the front of something, I’m missing out on aspects of it that may be important: I think it’s a sphere but it’s not really.
Some work needs to go into describing your deer case in these terms, but I’m not up for it just now…
( I posted this earlier, it’s not showing up for some reason. Was it deleted?)
“His entire point is that we conflate “in my brain” (all experience involves the brain) and “in my mind,” where we take mind to be some element in experience.”
If I understand him, he means to say that we don’t experience the tree in front of us as the mental-image of a tree (a cognitive model, located in the mind, which has been neurologically assembled from sense data), but just as a tree. In fact, we don’t experience it AS anything, we merely see a tree. It’s immediate, it’s there. Undeniable and brute – there is no need to reflect on a mental-image.
He also puts it this way:
“We listen and we hear the sadness of a little tune. In all of this we are spectators and the qualities do not act on us, do not even offer themselves to us, but they simply are in a solid and assertive independence.”
Let me try to interpret this in terms of my experience with the cougar/deer:
I saw a cougar and I responded to a cougar simultaneously. I did not cognize, I did not reflect upon a sense-impression. It wasn’t in my mind. The cougar had the value of “being terrifying” – a value which existed in the world, that had a “solid and assertive independence.”
As per Model B, the object and the value entered directly into my consciousness. No processing, no reassembling, no after-the-fact judgement (as if I evaluated this mental-image of the cougar, that I took to be a mental image, as a critic would a film, or a guy thinking about a stuffed-cougar in a museum).
But, then I turned my head slightly and recognized the cougar was actually a deer. The cougar was in my head, and now, seeing the deer and feeling relief, I then, finally, reflect upon my sense-impression and make a value judgement. It was just a hallucination, I had no reason to be terrified, etc.
Isn’t this an argument in favour of the “classical empiricist” model? There was ambiguous sense-data (it’s dark, the deer is similar to a cougar in appearance), which hit my eye-ball, went into the brain, which was then processed as a cougar approaching me across the field. I did not experience an “I” experiencing terror, but the terror was all-consuming nonetheless: it filled my consciousness like water filling a cup; however, this terror was based on a misreading of the world: a perception/judgement was made in my brain (whether or not it was “I” or something else that made it); this was proved to be false on closer inspection, and so was replaced with a new perception/judgement. Moreover, that ambiguous, tan, mobile object was neutral: I responded it to it with terror or relief based on our accurately it was cognized.
I would also argue that if I was brainwashed to think deer are incredibly threatening, I would have experienced terror when seeing it was a deer. According to Bergmann, there would be no need to reflect on the cognized image of a deer and then make a critical evaluation – no, the terror would be there, with a “solid and assertive independence.” But if that’s true, then would not everybody also be open to that quality of the deer, the “being-terrifying?” But why would they if they were not brainwashed the same is me? I think it’s more reasonable to say that we learn that deer are not to be feared and that this informs the way we experience them.
Basically, I think that life IS like walking through a museum. We do receive sense-data, and then judge that sense-data; these things happen separately, one after the other. It’s just that perceptual processing is lighting-quick; But If I take time to reflect, then I can see that I was not looking at the thing-itself, but just a cognitive model of the thing. I agree that we don’t experience the “I” having the experience.
I bet I’m screwing this up again. I’m gonna listen to the Sarte episode and see what you guys say.
Noah stated: ” I was not looking at the thing-itself, but just a cognitive model of the thing. I agree that we don’t experience the “I” having the experience.”
Noah, you are expressing a view of reality which is increasingly being expressed by embodied cognition as reflected in:
The Self Illusion–Bruce Hood
Out of Our Heads–Alva Noe (as dmf referrenced)
The Ego Tunnel–Thomas Metzinger (see the Not For School group on Being No One by Metzinger, the more philosophical version of Ego Tunnel)
If your thinking is truly unmediated by academic philosophy, then you are dangerous and should have a great future in philosophy.
Bergman’s position is much more in line with Merleau-Ponty in which we have a primordial sense of reality, an already always have been given indeterminant perception of the world. The perception is indeterminant in the sense of our point of view always being limited to the perceiver, but real in being immediately given through organismic experienceing. We are thrown into this world with the built in readiness to optimize our perception.
If I see a beautiful woman walking in front of me with long hair, move quickly to see her face, and realize that it is a man when looking from the front, I have two distinct experiences of the same object, wholly different. It is my readiness to perceive, make determinant my perception based on an indeterminant point of view (I cannot see from every perspective, i.e.,indeterminant), and as I see from different perspectives, my perception becomes more determinant from the additional point of view. I am not not perceiving what is there, though it is indeterminant and based on point of view, man vs. woman, cougar vs. deer.
“If your thinking is truly unmediated by academic philosophy, then you are dangerous and should have a great future in philosophy.”
When I said I have no experience with “academic philosophy,” what I should really have said was that I’ve never taken a philosophy class at college, university, or anywhere. I’ve listened to almost every episode of PEL, and few more than twice, so I’ve absorbed a lot of the terms and concepts that way. Also, I’ve taken a few psychology courses / read a few books on neuroscience and learning, which often cover the relationship between perception and cognition, etc.
Noah is about to realize that a fear-sensing, shape-shifting cougar goes back to being frightening. I am joking/being serious here (stable ambivalence alert!) In Dylan’s voice: you could simply be wrong. Or think you have caught your error yet still be wrong. When these discussions become abstract I worry the conclusions don’t directly apply to actual experience where no such final certainty is attainable. I have a point to make here but can’t fully articulate it… Maybe I have pointed to it though?
Solipsistically replying to my own half-baked comment with a hopefully fully-baked one: Using Peirce’s pragmatist maxim http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/ Noah believed/thought he was being stalked by a cougar which naturally led to his bodily action, the fear response. That was the “truth” at that moment. Then he wasn’t afraid, because it was only a deer… wait, then he thought of the shape-shifting cougar and was afraid again….ad infinitum, no ultimate resolution is possible. Truth with a capital T turns to truths-of-the-moment, “true in so far forth, true instrumentally” (Charles Sanders Peirce 1907).
(Am I on topic yet? This is hard. You people are so smart. I don’t care though, I’m having fun.)