a little about symposium

One question raised on class yesterday is quite interesting, that is, how to relate our ordinary life with those erotic practices in ancient Greece? Normally we don’t die for the loved as what is described in the Greek mythologies. Nor we really believe that women and men were originally combined together and then separated by Zeus. Even it is hard for me to believe in ordinary sense that we engage into love relationship is to be immortal. If people fall in love and become obsessed with each other so that they are willing to die for the other any time anywhere, they are normally viewed as crazy, insane.

Most of time I doubt the possibility of being both standing at the top of the mountain and understanding the ideas of ordinary people. Philosophers, like those who are in deepest love relationships, are beyond understanding. Only those who are in the same position with them can understand each other. But that may be too pessimistic. Actually philosophy does help we ordinary people understand some transcendental domain in the world. The truth and value of such domain is not as real as what we can normally experience in daily life, but conversely, much more real than our daily life. The analogy of watching movie or telling story might be helpful for us to understand that. We all know movies are “not true”, for they are stories and scenes created by people who desires to gain our sympathy, or money. However we watch movie in a way sometimes more seriously than we treat our daily life. I believe it is because we can see something more fundamental in pictures and colors and fictional dialogues in the movie. Maybe that is the meaning of art, which sometimes is remote from our life and seems illusory but always makes feel something ineffable. Therefore it seems to me that we should figure out some way to see the limitation of our ordinary life. We would have to appeal to story, movie, fiction, sacrificial relationship etc, to better understand the meaning of life. We might never have the chance to die for people we love, nor to successfully contemplate the form of that beauty itself, but at least we know there are people and philosophical activities promoting human knowledge of that.

Truth and truths

In the last post I wrote about my understanding of the originality of morality, endorsing Humean distinction between fact and value. I said that I disagree with the philosophers who makes the objectivity of morality tethered to the repudiation of distinction between fact and value. These philosophers, claiming that objectivity of morality comes from the possiblity for a mere fatucal statement to entail value judgment insintrically, might not be doing jobs on the right track, for I think in the job of depicting the fact there can be already mixture of something beyond fact.

Last week I read something by John Searle. (The Construction of Social Reality, 1990: 14) With an example of heart, he argues that even in biolgoy there is no factual statement as just factual. To claim “a heart’s normal function is to pump blood” is based on such evaluative judgment derived from the following syllogism: (1) anything impinges positively on survival is the function of the subject; (2) it is a fact that the heart pumping blood effectively is benefical to survival; (3)therefore the heart functions to pump blood. If we change “survival” into another standard as “making sound”, then the function of heart is “to beat” which is obviously anther bare fact about the heart. Thus Searle rightly advocates that “Functions, in short, are never intrinsic but are always observer relative. We are blinded to this fact by the practice, especially in biology, of talking about functions as if they were intrinsic to nature.” (14)

But normally we are afraid of such conclusion, for we are afraid of being relative. In biology there might be less disputes about the dominant value of survival and reproduction of certain species, but in human affairs there might be too many disputes about how I should live, about what should I believe and not to believe, or about why I should be generous instead of not to strangers outside our community. While one can stand along the same line with Rorty who advocates the existance of truth, rather than Truth with a capital T, it is not easy to believe so in each and every aspect of life. When the need of toleration is going hand in hand with the acknowledgment of diversity, the question of justification of each different kinds of so called truth remains equally urgent, and people might become worried about the limitation of tolerance, and even the justification of tolerance.

It is a common sense that human beings not only share some basic and universal features but also have their specialities. Deciding when and how to justify either of them needs wisdom. But what is wisdom if its legitimation and truth cannot be justified? It is an empirical domain and I don't think it is where philosophors should be. Philosophers are not used to tell you how to decide between the conflicting values, but they can only testify and examine your way in which you reach your conclusion.

Back to Searle, we do “discover” functions in nature, he says, “only within a set of prior assignments of value” (including purposes, teleology, and other functions). (1990: 14) Philosophy is unable to help people to have faith in the goodness or in God. If philosophy should has its aim to set goals for life, to decide meaning for life, it is not because it is philosophy and it has that capacity, but because we value philosophy as such. I think philosophy is only a tool, but invaluable tool. As a tool, philosophy has its limits. Everything has its limits. Helping people to realize it, however, is philosophy’s invaluable job which might be peculiar only to philosophy.

And back to the problem of Truth and truths, philosophers are unable to tell you what is truth, but only show you by their efforts that truth is worth seeking. One might think that such conclusion says nothing, but only palys a game of word, which I agree partly, but once one is looking at Socrates, one has to admit of something worth entertaining in it. The person who believes in god’s calling to sacrifice himself in the pursuit of truth, never successfully achieve any conclusion.

Some Thoughts About Morality

Recently I have been caught by the question of Fact/Value Distinction. It seems to me that human beings are moral animals is just a truism, but the real problem here is the matter of justification. How do you know that? How do you know that human beings are different from animals, even thought animals which have high intelligence such as dolphins? MacIntyre claims in his book, Dependent Rational Animals, that even though dolphins are to a great extent similar to human beings in terms of their abilities to communicate with their fellow dolphins, to learn from their human trainers, and to have the feeling of happiness when they are rewarded by successfully fininishing the tasks, human beings are different from animals in an essential way that they can establish and develop such virtues as giving and receiving.

However, what makes me feel unsatisfied is that I don't see any difference between dolphins and human beings, if the sense of giving and receiving, the ability to learn and communicate with others, and the phenomenon of feeling happy or sorrow of human beings are only in a quantitative way superior to those of dolphin. Either dolphins are moral beings as human beings, or human beings are non-moral beings as intelligent dolphins. If not so, at least one reason is needed to show that where the sense of morality comes from to transit animals that are mere animals without sense of morality into the human animals knowing eating their fellow animals are vicious. It might be helpful here to remind people of the question raised by Hume that what makes the facts, that a young tree eats his mother tree for the sake of living and the other fact that a young man eats his mother, morally different, for the same reason for living? What makes cannibalism a moral issue?

My point of view is based on the Humean credo of the distinction between fact and value. Moral judgment is the result of human projection. But there are many moral philosophers objecting to such understanding, for they argue that morality has a realistic foundation, independent of human projections, on which we are able to have a solid and basic moral judgment concerning the vice of killing, lying, cannibalism etc. These philosophers strongly repudiate such interpretation of morality as emotivism which they belive is going to destroy the objectivity of the domain of morality. On the part of the objectivity of morality I agree with these philosophers, but I doubt their belief in the relationship between the moral objectivity and the denial of distinction between fact and value.

It is factually true that human beings have such and such features, emotions, and rational capacities, but it is a mystery that the same fact of cannibalism means differently between humans and trees. If one answers that because human beings are moral animals while trees are not, one can be further asked for a justification: why human beins are moral animals or how do you know that? I imagine one response for him:

He might claim that because cannibalism is intrinsically vicious and human beings know that, But I　can further challenge him by asking how do you know human beings know rightly about the badness of cannibalism? Of course most sane people know that canniblism should be forbidded as vicious, but what matters here is the problem of why. Unless one ends up being a Moore who raises both of his hands as two proofs for the external world, I can keep asking the question: what if all human beings’ knowing some facts as intrinsically morally wrong turns out out to be wrong?

Repudiating my question as insanely skeptical is unfair, because I am not aiming at destroying whatever conclusion offered by anyone, but only curious about the reason and hope that he can give me a more explicit and convincing explanation which is not just an assertion as "self-obvious".

Also, trying to prevent me from investigating by appealing to God, which seems better than by ending up claiming intrinsic goodness as self-explanatory, is not as convincing as he believes to be. However, I can see no better way. Of course there are other ways such as claiming the objectivity of rationality, or the objectivity of human passions such as the sense of sympathy, but they are all liable to be challenged by the question of “HOW do you know that is not ILLUSORY?” It drives me crazy.

Personally speaking, I believe that value becomes value because it is valued as value. Even in the fact that human beings are moral animals we can find something not merely facutal. More precisely, morality becomes morality because it is moralized. But the same question can always emerge: how do you know that?

I just know it．I just believe it. No better way.