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Already this summer I’ve read a dozen or so books, most of them more or less academic. One of the books I read this weekend was Hilary Putnam’s (2004) Ethics Without Ontology.

The book consists of six lectures: four on “ethics without ontology” and two on “enlightenment and pragmatism.” Given my various research interests, I found the most profound and interesting parts of the book to be in essays 1, 4, and 5.

Essay 1: “Ethics Without Metaphysics.” This essay sets up Putnam’s next three essays.  On p. 24 he brings in Levinas: The foundation of ethics is my immediate recognition, when confronted with a suffering fellow human being, that I have an obligation to do something. No me, no ethics. No other, no ethics.  Thus, we can say that ethics is both personal and relational. To not feel the obligation is to not be ethical.

On p. 28, building on Dewey, he introduces the concept of “practical problems.” He interprets Dewey: Solving practical problems is the concern of ethics.

From here he turns to the issue of “controversiality” (pp 29-32). Solutions to practical problems are controversial — unless they are put into practice and succeed to the satisfaction of all those involved. In other words, problems cannot be solved in principle, only in practice, and even then, the solutions may “fail.” Indeed, even when a practical problem is successfully solved, there is still controversy as to whether the successful solution can be generalized to the next problem that seems similar. Even the “similarity” between problems is typically controversial!

Essay 4: “Ontology: An Obituary.” On p. 74 Putnam reprises quite quickly the “collapse of the fact/value dichotomy.” Valuings do not contrast with descriptions. There is an overlap between the class of valuings and the class of descriptions. As with solutions to practical problems (which are always ethical), ethical claims (i.e., valuings) are frequently controversial. But so are questions of fact (p. 75). In short, factual, descriptive and ethical valuings are controversial.

Some ethical questions are such that agreement is unlikely until such time as it can be demonstrated that we agree (p. 76). [Note the performative quality to ethical controversies.] And even in the case of success — i.e., cases where the problem is solved for now — questions may arise as to whether the same thing would work again the next time, or in the next case , etc.

If we try something in connection with a social problem and it works well, meaning to the satisfaction of those involved, those who object to such a solution in another situation are unlikely to concede that it will work again (pp. 76-77). In short, it is impossible to “verify” that something is the right thing to do, even when the success criteria are agreed upon, unless you have actually done it, and it has worked to everyone’s satisfaction. But even then, questions may remain about its ongoing applicability. This is a general feature of practical problems, that is to say, a general feature of ethical problems.

Essay 5: “The Three Enlightenments.” Lengthy quote from Dewey on the “common good” (p. 97). In short, the common good is only possible when it involves those whose benefits are intended. Again, more interpretation of Dewey as positing a kind of participatory democracy as integral to resolving social problems (pp. 99-100).

Although not invoked, recall Levinas’ ethics as implicating a me-other relationality. From this Putnam concludes that contra to Kant, Hobbes, etc., there can be no morality prior to sociality (p. 101). That is to say, moral beings do not confront the social world. Rather social beings confront the moral world, or perhaps, moral worlds. Although Putnam has supposedly done away with ontology, clearly he is saying there is a primacy of sociality over ethicality. But if that is the case, if I am social before I am ethical, then there are bound to be ethical lapses in social life. May capacity for ethics grows out of my social life. The ethical response is a response to the confrontation of the other.

Over the weekend I finally had a chance to try out my Kindle 2.  Although I have still not found a satisfactory way to convert PDFs of academic journal articles into readable Kindle files, I am very pleased with the formating of books available through ManyBooks.net.  And while most of the content on ManyBooks comes directly from Project Gutenberg, one important difference is the option to download .AZW files, which is Kindle’s native format.  

So far I’ve downloaded over 50 books from ManyBooks — all for free – ranging from the complete works of Williams Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe to the Declaration of Independence and the 2007 CIA World Factbook. ManyBooks also offers a selection of copyrighted titles that are licensed through some flavor of open content license.  For example, I downloaded Eric S. Raymond’s (1996) The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, and The Cluetrain Manifesto. Of course, it is doubtful I’ll be reading most of these titles anytime soon.  But with 1.4 GB of storage, they are now at my fingertips.

Of more immediate interest to me are about a dozen books by scholars such as Henri Bergson, William James, Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, and so forth. In fact, yesterday I cruised through the first third of Pragmatism, a series of seven lectures delivered by William James at the Lowell Institute in Boston and Columbia University in New York, between November 1906 and January 1907. And it is here that I began to appreciate the power of open content, in particular, the power of Kindle + Project Gutenberg and ManyBooks + Google Books. 

In Pragmatism, James (1907: 46) credits C. S. Peirce’s 1878 article in Popular Science Monthly as the first to introduce pragmatism into philosophy. Curious about what Peirce had to say, I first went to Google.  Dissatisfied with the results, I tried Google Books. After a few minutes of searching, I found Popular Science Monthly Volume 12 November 1877 to April 1878. As it turns out, during this 6 month period Peirce published a series of 4 different articles, including “How to make our ideas clear,” the paper cited by James.

Through Google Books, I downloaded the entire volume (about 30MB).  Then using Acrobat Professional, I extracted each of the 4 articles as separate files, ran OCR on them, added these PDFs to my collection of research on the philosophy of pragmatism, and created citations for all 4 in EndNote. All this without ever setting foot in the library. Long live open content.

Citations:
James, W. 1907. Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Accessed from http://books.google.com/books?id=7cIZAAAAYAAJ.

Peirce, C. S. 1878. Illustrations of the logic of science. Second paper: How to make our ideas clear. In E. L. Youmans & W. J. Youmans (Eds.), Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (November 1877 to April 1878): 286-302. New York: Appleton. Accessed from http://books.google.com/books?id=ZKMVAAAAYAAJ.

In tracing the concepts of institution and taken for granted in Husserl’s work, especially The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, I was struck by the fact that Husserl seems to clearly describe a concept we might now label as the moment of inversion (Latour & Woolgar, 1986).

Although moment of inversion is not a phrase Husserl uses, the concept is clearly Husserlian.  Crisis speaks repeatedly of the “art of measurement” and its role in “externalization,” a process through which the sensible qualities of an object are externalized and substructed, i.e., put on the surface and made to cover up, while the original senses are pushed under or buried. The result is an inversion through which idealities, quantities and symbols become an index to realities, qualities and senses.  A world of formulas replaces the world of forms.

We can even suggest a preliminary definition of the moment of inversion as: “The surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable - our everyday lifeworld” (Husserl, 1970: 48-49).

Citation: Husserl, E. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

As it relates to memory, Edmund Husserl’s (1970/1954) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology differentiates between retention and recollection.

Husserl argues that “The world exists as… a spatiotemporal world in which each thing has its bodily extension and duration… its position in universal time and space… Perception is related only to the present.  But this present is always meant as having an endless past behind it and an open future before it… If we consider perception abstractly, by itself, we find its intentional accomplishment to be presentation, making something present… But in this presence, as that of an extended and enduring object, lies a continuity of what I am still conscious of, what has flowed away and is no longer intuited at all, a continuity of retentions, and in the other direction, a continuity of protentions… Yet this is not, like memory in the usual sense of intuitive recollection, a phenomenon which openly, so to speak, plays a part in object and world apperception” (p. 160).

For example, to understand the experience of music, we have to understand retentions and protentions.  Without retention of the just-played-notes and protention of the almost-played-notes, Husserl argues there would be no music, only a sequence of notes unrelated to one another.  Thus the phenomenology of music suggests that the present moment is not a single moment, but a continuum of the moment along with its retentions and protentions, without which perception would be unable to make something present.

In contrast with retention and protention, which make things present, recollection brings the past (i.e., a present which has passed) forward as an original intuition, that is, as an original experience.  In doing so, recollection gives intentional meaning to the past, even though perception itself (i.e., the flowing-static present) lacks such meaning.  Similarly, expectation is an anticipatory recollection, an intentional modification of perception towards the future as a “present-to-come” (p. 169).  In both cases, Husserl sees recollection as a rerecognition.  Recollection is an a-perception, that is, not a perception.  Thus, recollection is not the memory of a perception, but something else.

Importantly, perception gives us “only the temporal mode of the present” (p. 168).  In turn, “the present points to its horizons, the temporal modes of past and future” (p. 168).  While perceptions are the “first prefigurations of temporalization,” these “remain in the background” (pp. 168-169).  It is recollection (and expectation) that “represents the beginnings of new dimensions of temporalization, or of time and its time content” (p. 169).  These temporal dimensions are quite apart from the temporalization which gives to each entity its spatiotemporal presence.

Citation: Husserl, E. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

This week’s PHIL 557 readings started with Husserl’s “Phenomenology,” an article first published in Encyclopedia Britannica (1927).  The edition I read was from The Essential Husserl. 

I followed this reading with an excerpt from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and Deleuze’s chapter on “Foldings, or the Inside of Thought” from Foucault.  This latter reading considers Foucault’s confrontation of Heidegger and phenomenology.  Some passages of note:

‘There is’ light, and ‘there is’ language.  All intentionality collapses in the gap that opens up between these two monads, or in the ‘non-relation’ between seeing and speaking.  This is Foucault’s major achievement: the conversion of phenomenology into epistemology. For seeing and speaking means knowing [savoir]… Everything is knowledge… [T]here is nothing beneath or prior to knowledge.  But knowledge is irreducibly double, since it involves speaking and seeing, language and light, which is the reason there is no intentionality (p. 109).

In truth, one thing haunts Foucault — thought.  The question: ‘What does thinking signify?  What do we call thinking’ is the arrow first fired by Heidegger and then again by Foucault.  He writes a history, but a history of thought as such.  To think means to experiment and to problematize.  Knowledge, power and the self are the triple root of a problematization of thought…  Thinking is neither innate nor acquired.  It is not the innate exercise of a faculty, but neither is it a learning process constituted in the external world (pp. 116-117).

To think means to be embedded in the present-time stratum that serves as a limit: what can I see and what can I say today?  But this involves thinking of the past as it is condensed in the inside, in the relation to oneself…  Thought thinks its own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the present), and be able finally to ‘think otherwise’ (the future) (p. 119).

The world is thus knowledge…the articulable and the visible on each stratum, the two irreducible forms of knowledge, Light and Language, two vast environments of exteriority where visibilities and statements are respectively deposited (pp. 120-121).