Category Archives: philosophy

what shape is a field of vision?

At an idle moment recently, I was wondering what shape my field of vision has. A quick Google search took me to Alexander Duane’s and Ernst Fuchs’s 1899 textbook of ophthalmology, which is online. I am sure there is much more recent work–both empirical and conceptual–but I didn’t explore it. Instead, I began to speculate that this is a fairly complicated question.

My first responses were in terms of two-dimensional spaces–for instance, I thought that perhaps my field of vision was an oval with a perturbation around my nose. It’s oval rather than round because I have two eyes, and each has a separate field like the one pictured here. Putting them together creates an oval. So if you wanted to represent what I can see, you would take a wide-angle photo from my vantage point and cut out a roughly oval shape.

But my retinas are three-dimensional, as is the world they see. So should we say that my field of vision is a section of an ovoid with some irregularities created by my nose, eyebrows, and hair? Even that that answer seems oversimplified, since my eyeballs are capable of focusing at different depths (and even rolling around, although that might be forbidden in a test of one’s field of vision); and the world itself is not pasted on the inside of an oval–it extends into the distance. If we said that the shape of my field of vision was roughly ovoid, how big would that ovoid be? The night sky that is sometimes part of it is awfully far away. And I haven’t even mentioned that we see moving things and bright colors more easily than stable, dull things. By now, it’s beginning to sound as if my field of vision has no shape. But surely that can’t be right; my vision has limits and moves as I change my orientation. We’ve begun talking about the world, not what I see of it.

By the way, it is interesting how easily we accept a photograph as a representation of vision, even though it is flat and rectangular, whereas our field of vision is–at the very least–irregular and vaguely bordered.

Wittgenstein seems to want us to dispense with the goal of analogizing inner experience to something else, as if everyday experience required some explanation on terms other than its own:

    And above all do not say ‘After all my visual impression isn’t the drawing; it is this–which I can’t shew to anyone.’–Of course it is not the drawing, but neither is it anything else of the same category, which I carry within myself. … If you put the ‘organization’ of a visual impression on a level with colours and shapes, you are proceeding from the idea of the visual impression as an inner object. Of course this makes this object into a chimera; a queerly shifting construction. For the similarity to a picture is now impaired. — Philosophical Investigations, translated by Anscombe, IIxi.

For Wittgenstein, I take it, a field of vision has no shape, and we only feel that that’s strange because we are in the grip of a model of vision as inner photography. It’s actually something else entirely. And yet I keep returning to my initial thought that what I see is an oval with my nose intruding from the bottom.

a new book on the way

Palgrave Macmillan has offered me a contract to publish my “Dante book” (which needs an actual title–and I’m not sure what that should be). I have been working on the manuscript for 14 years, and it has gone through many profound structural changes as my thoughts have evolved and as I’ve assimilated useful criticism. It is great to think that the project will be done and between covers within months.

Here is the beginning of the introduction:

    This is a book about ethics or morality and fiction. Ethics encompasses what is right or good, what we ought to do and think, and how laws and institutions should be organized. I argue that we should often make ethical judgments and decisions by describing reality in the form of true narratives. Fictional stories provide excellent opportunities to deliberate about situations and issues that also occur in real life, and should be read, in part, as ethical statements. I argue that when the moral judgments supported by a good story conflict with general principles, we ought to follow the story and amend or suspend our principles, rather than the reverse. What makes a story “good” for this purpose is not its conformity to correct moral principles, but its merits as a narrative—for instance, its perceptiveness and coherence and its avoidance of cliché, sentimentality, and euphemism.

    The relationship between stories and moral principles is connected to other issues that I also explore: the proper role of emotion and reason in ethics; the scope of ethical judgments (i.e., how widely or in how many different contexts a given judgment ought to apply); cultural diversity and what that means for morality; partiality, or whether it is appropriate to favor people whom one knows; what kinds of context are relevant to the interpretation of literary texts; and the value of fictional versus true narratives.

This is a book of humanistic scholarship: specifically, literary criticism and moral philosophy. Those are my roots, even though I spend almost all my time on quantitative social science or policy analysis. My day job is to study and promote “civic engagement” or “active citizenship”; and it has proved useful to study those topics empirically. (Hence CIRCLE.) I don’t think either phrase appears in this book manuscript. But there is a deep connection in my mind, which I hope to make explicit in a later project.

The thesis of my “Dante book” is that an indispensable technique for moral judgment is the description of concrete, particular situations in narratives. I argue that no set of principles, no procedure, no algorithm for weighing values, and no empirical data could ever replace this process of description. It is an art and a skill; some people practice it better than others, and it can be taught. But it is not the special province of any credentialed experts, such as lawyers, economists, or moral philosophers. It cannot be replaced–even in a distant utopia–by rules or systems.

In my “Dante book,” I draw some conclusions about the purposes and methods of the humanities. (In fact, it has been suggested that I entitle the volume, Dante’s Moral Reasoning: Reforming the Humanities.) In my other work, I follow the implications beyond the academy into the domain of politics. We cannot tell what is right and good unless active, engaged citizens discuss concrete cases. They will only be motivated to discuss and to inform their conversations with experience if they have practical roles in self-government. That is the fundamental connection between my two main interests: moral judgment and civic engagement.

critical thinking about “critical thinking”

Here are three interestingly complementary comments. The first is from the moderate-conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks:

    A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

    The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

Continue reading →

the politics of negative capability

Zadie Smith’s article “Speaking in Tongues” (The New York Review, Feb 26) combines several of the fixations of this blog–literature as an alternative to moral philosophy, deliberation, Shakespeare, and Barack Obama–and makes me think that my own most fundamental and pervasive commitment is “negative capability.” That is Keat’s phrase, quoted thus by Zadie Smith:

    At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Other critics have noted Shakespeare’s remarkable ability not to speak on his own behalf, from his own perspective, or in support of his own positions. Coleridge called this skill “myriad-mindedness,” and Matthew Arnold said that Shakespeare was “free from our questions.” Hazlitt said that the “striking peculiarity of [Shakespeare’s] mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds–so that it contained a universe of feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men.” Keats aspired to have the same “poetical Character” as Shakespeare. Borrowing closely from Hazlitt, Keats said that his own type of poetic imagination “has no self–it is every thing and nothing–It has no character. … It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion poet.” When we read philosophical prose, we encounter explicit opinions that reflect the author’s thinking. But, said Keats, although “it is a wretched thing to express … it is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature [i.e., my identity].”

In Shakespeare’s case, it helps, of course, that he left no recorded statements about anything other than his own business arrangements: no letters like Keats’ beautiful ones, no Nobel Prize speech to explain his views, no interviews with Charlie Rose. All we have is his representation of the speech of thousands of other people.

Stephen Greenblatt, in a book that Smith quotes, attributes Shakespeare’s negative capability to his childhood during the wrenching English Reformation. Under Queen Mary, you could be burned for Protestantism. Under her sister Queen Elizabeth, you could have your viscera cut out and burned before your living eyes for Catholicism. It is likely that Shakespeare’s father was both: he helped whitewash Catholic frescoes and yet kept Catholic texts hidden in his attic. This could have been simple subterfuge, but it’s equally likely that he was torn and unsure. His “identical nature” was mixed. Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare learned to avoid taking any positions himself and instead created fictional worlds full of Iagos and Imogens and Falstaffs and Prince Harrys.

What does this have to do with Barack Obama? As far as I know, he is the first American president who can write convincing dialog (in Dreams from My Father). He understands and expresses other perspectives as well as his own. And he has wrestled all his life with a mixed identity.

Smith is a very acute reader of Obama:

    We now know that Obama spoke of Main Street in Iowa and of sweet potato pie in Northwest Philly, and it could be argued that he succeeded because he so rarely misspoke, carefully tailoring his intonations to suit the sensibility of his listeners. Sometimes he did this within one speech, within one line: ‘We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.’ Awesome God comes to you straight from the pews of a Georgia church; poking around feels more at home at a kitchen table in South Bend, Indiana. The balance was perfect, cunningly counterpoised and never accidental.

The challenge for Obama is that he doesn’t write fiction (although Smith remarks that he “displays an enviable facility for dialogue”), but instead holds political office. Generally, we want our politicians to say exactly what they think. To write lines for someone else to say, with which you do not agree, is an important example of “irony.” We tend not to like ironic leaders. Socrates’ “famous irony” was held against him at his trial. Achilles exclaims, “I hate like the gates of hell the man who says one thing with his tongue and another in his heart.” That is a good description of any novelist–and also of Odysseus, Achilles’ wily opposite, who dons costumes and feigns love. Generally, people with the personality of Odysseus, when they run for office, at least pretend to resemble the straightforward Achilles.

But what if you are not too sure that you are right (to paraphrase Learned Hand’s definition of a liberal)? What if you see things from several perspectives, and–more importantly–love the fact that these many perspectives exist and interact? What if your fundamental cause is not the attainment of any single outcome but the vibrant juxtaposition of many voices, voices that also sound in your own mind?

In that case, you can be a citizen or a political leader whose fundamental commitments include freedom of expression, diversity, and dialogue or deliberation. Of course, these commitments won’t tell you what to do about failing banks or Afghanistan. Negative capability isn’t sufficient for politics. (Even Shakespeare must have made decisions and expressed strong personal opinions when he successfully managed his theatrical company). But in our time, when the major ideologies are hollow, problems are complex, cultural conflict is omnipresent and dangerous, and relationships have fractured, a strong dose of non-cynical irony is just what we need.

consolation of mortality

I just finished Jonathan Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened Of, which is the memoir of a novelist who fears death. I read it because the quotations in reviews were very funny; because, as a fellow chronophobiac, I hoped that some wisdom and solace might be mixed in with the humor; and because I knew the author’s brother Jonathan at Oxford around 1990 and wanted to understand more about this philosopher who “often wears a kind of eighteenth-century costume designed for him by his younger daughter: knee breeches, stockings, buckle shoes on the lower half; brocade waistcoat, stock, long hair tied in a bow on the upper.” (This is Julian’s description. I would add that the effect is less foppish that you’d think. The wearer resembles a plain-spun, serious Man of the Enlightenment much more than a dandy.)

Anyway, it’s a good book and certainly amusing. But Barnes treats the most powerful consolation of morality very subtly–if he recognizes it at all. I mean the consolation of the first person plural. I will die, but we will live on. We think in both the singular and plural and probably began the former first, when we stared at our parents. Language, thought, culture, desire–everything that matters is both individual and profoundly social.

“After I die, other people will go about their ordinary lives, laughing, singing, complaining about trifles, never mourning or even missing me.” That is the solipsist’s jealous lament. But the mood changes as soon as the grammar shifts. “Even though I must pass, our ordinary life will continue in all its richness and pleasure.”

What we count as the “we” is flexible–it can range from a dyad of lovers to the whole human race. No such “we” is guaranteed immortality. It depresses Jonathan Barnes that humanity must someday vanish along with our solar system (and we may finish ourselves off a lot faster than that). But no large collectivity of human beings is doomed to a fixed life span. We can outlive you and me, and you and I can help to make that happen. This is a consolation available to all human beings, whatever they may believe about souls and afterlives. But it is not, I think, much of a comfort to Jonathan Barnes.