“The Sickness Unto Death” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong)

In this book, an accompaniment to “The Concept of Anxiety”, Kierkegaard is trying to define despair and sin Christianly, against psychological, ethical, pagan, Socratic, and speculative-philosophical accounts. The book is by Kierkegaard, but published under the pseudonym, Anti-Climacus. The book’s central claim is that despair is not merely unhappiness or psychological distress, but a sickness in the self’s relation to itself and to the power that established it. “The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian’s superiority over the natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian’s blessedness…. Consequently, to be able to despair is an infinite advantage, and yet to be in despair is not only the worst misfortune and misery—no, it is ruination…. Every actual moment of despair is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is bringing it upon himself. It is always the present tense…. In every actual moment of despair the person in despair bears all the past as a present in possibility. The reason for this is that to despair is a qualification of spirit and relates to the eternal in man…. Every moment he is in despair he is bringing his despair upon himself. For despair is not attributable to the misrelation but to the relation that relates itself to itself…. This concept, the sickness unto death, must, however, be understood in a particular way. Literally it means a sickness of which the end and the result are death…. In that sense, despair cannot be called the sickness unto death. Christianly understood, death itself is a passing into life. Thus, from a Christian point of view, no earthly, physical sickness is the sickness unto death…. If there is to be any question of a sickness unto death in the strictest sense, it must be a sickness of which the end is death and death is the end. This is precisely what despair is…. To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.”

Kierkegaard then radicalizes despair: it is not limited to the miserable or obviously broken person, but includes every form of life that avoids becoming conscious of itself as spirit before God. Even aesthetic brilliance, ethical achievement, or absorption into state, nation, or universality can still be despair if the self does not transparently rest in God. “Every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something—every such existence, whatever it achieves, be it most amazing, whatever it explains, be it the whole of existence, however intensively it enjoys life esthetically—every such existence is nevertheless despair. That is what the ancient Church Fathers meant when they said that the virtues of the pagans were glittering vices: they meant that the heart of paganism was despair, that paganism was not conscious before God as spirit.”

One lower form of despair is immediacy, where the person has not yet become inward enough to possess a self in any serious sense. Such a person identifies the self with external conditions and imagines salvation as becoming someone else, as if changing the self were like changing clothes. “Immediacy actually has no self, it does not know itself; thus it cannot recognize itself and therefore generally ends in fantasy. When immediacy despairs, it does not even have enough self to wish or dream that it had become that which it has not become. The man of immediacy helps himself in another way: he wishes to be someone else…. Imagine a self (and next to God there is nothing as eternal as a self), and then imagine that it suddenly occurs to a self that it might become someone other—than itself. And yet one in despair this way, whose sole desire is this most lunatic of lunatic metamorphoses, is infatuated with the illusion that this change can be accomplished as easily as one changes clothes. The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities.”

Kierkegaard’s more intense form of despair is defiance: not despairingly wanting to get rid of oneself, but despairingly willing to be oneself apart from God. This is more spiritually developed and therefore more dangerous; it is close to faith because it uses the eternal, but it misuses the eternal by refusing surrender, consolation, and the possibility that “for God everything is possible.” He continues, “First comes despair over the earthly or over something earthly, then despair of the eternal, over oneself. Then comes defiance, which is really despair through the aid of the eternal, the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself. But just because it is despair through the aid of the eternal, in a certain sense it is very close to the truth; and just because it lies very close to the truth, it is infinitely far away. The despair that is the thoroughfare to faith comes also through the aid of the eternal; through the aid of the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself…. In order in despair to will to be oneself, there must be consciousness of an infinite self. This infinite self, however, is really only the most abstract form, the most abstract possibility of the self…. The form of despair that despairs over the earthly or something earthly was understood basically to be—and it also manifests itself as being—despair of the eternal, that is, an unwillingness to be comforted by and healed by the eternal, an overestimation of the things of this world to the extent that the eternal can be no consolation. But this is also a form of the despair, to be unwilling to hope in the possibility that an earthly need, a temporal cross, can come to an end. The despairing person who in despair wills to be himself is unwilling to do that. He has convinced himself that this thorn in the flesh* gnaws so deeply that he cannot abstract himself from it (whether this is actually the case or his passion makes it so to him*), and therefore he might as well accept it forever, so to speak. He is offended by it, or, more correctly, he takes it as an occasion to be offended at all existence…. Hope in the possibility of help, especially by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible.”

Kierkegaard’s account of sin turns on the difference between ignorance and will. Socrates can explain wrongdoing as a failure of understanding, but Christianity goes further: sin is not merely failing to know the good, but willing against the good, even when one understands it. “Socrates would say: If this happens, it just shows that a person such as this still has not understood what is right. This means that the Greek mind does not have the courage to declare that a person knowingly does wrong, knows what is right and does the wrong; so it manages by saying: If a person does what is wrong, he has not understood what is right…. Absolutely right. And no human being can come further than that; no man of himself and by himself can declare what sin is, precisely because he is in sin…. That is why Christianity begins in another way: man has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right…. Socrates actually gives no explanation at all of the distinction: not being able to understand and not willing to understand…. Socrates explains that he who does not do what is right has not understood it, either; but Christianity goes a little further back and says that it is because he is unwilling to understand it, and this again because he does not will what is right. And in the next place it teaches that a person does what is wrong (essentially defiance) even though he understands what is right, or he refrains from doing what is right even though he understands it; in short, the Christian teaching about sin is nothing but offensiveness toward man, charge upon charge, it is the suit that the divine as the prosecutor ventures to bring against man…. To comprehend is the range of man’s relation to the human, but to believe is man’s relation to the divine…. Therefore, interpreted Christianly, sin has its roots in willing, not in knowing, and this corruption of willing affects the individual’s consciousness…. Sin is—after being taught by a revelation from God what sin is—before God in despair not to will to be oneself or in despair to will to be oneself.”

Because sin concerns the self before God, Kierkegaard denies that it can be mastered by speculative comprehension. Christianity requires faith, not because it is intellectually lazy, but because faith preserves the qualitative gulf between God and man that speculative thought is always tempted to smooth over. “I steadfastly hold to the Christian teaching that sin is a position—yet not as if it could be comprehended, but as a paradox that must be believed…. Whether one will believe or not must be left to faith…. So let others admire and praise him who pretends to be able to comprehend Christianity. I consider it an outright ethical task, perhaps requiring not a little self-denial in these very speculative times, when all “the others” are busy comprehending, to admit that one is neither able nor obliged to comprehend it…. Let us never forget that Socrates’ ignorance was a kind of fear and worship of God, that his ignorance was the Greek version of the Jewish saying: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…. Christianity teaches that everything essentially Christian depends solely upon faith; therefore it wants to be precisely a Socratic, God-fearing ignorance, which by means of ignorance guards faith against speculation, keeping watch so that the gulf of qualitative difference between God and man may be maintained as it is in the paradox and faith.”

Furthermore, Kierkegaard describes an even deeper intensification: despairing over one’s sin. Here the sinner does not merely sin, but encloses himself within sin, treating repentance and grace as impossible, meaningless, or even hostile. "Sin is despair; the intensification is the new sin of despairing over one’s sin…. We are not talking about particular sins here; the state of sin is the sin, and this is intensified in a new consciousness…. To despair over one’s sin indicates that sin has become or wants to be internally consistent. It wants nothing to do with the good…. It insists on listening only to itself, on having dealings only with itself; it closes itself up within itself, indeed, locks itself inside one more inclosure, and protects itself against every attack or pursuit by the good by despairing over sin. It is aware of having burned the bridge behind it and of thereby being inaccessible to the good and of the good being inaccessible to it, so that if in a weak moment it should itself will the good, that would still be impossible. Sin itself is severance from the good, but despair over sin is the second severance. This, of course, squeezes the uttermost demonic powers out of sin, gives it the profane toughness or perverseness that must consistently regard everything called repentance and grace not only as empty and meaningless but also as its enemy.”

Finally, Kierkegaard opposes the ethical and Christian category of the single individual to speculative abstraction. Sin may be universal, but it is never merely a universal idea; it becomes actual only in the individual sinner, standing before God. “The ethical does not abstract from actuality but immerses itself in actuality and operates mainly with the help of that speculatively disregarded and scorned category: individuality. Sin is a qualification of the single individual; it is irresponsibility and new sin to pretend as if it were nothing to be an individual sinner—when one himself is this individual sinner…. The earnestness of sin is its actuality in the single individual, be it you or I…. The dialectic of sin is diametrically contrary to that of speculation. Christianity begins here—with the teaching about sin, and thereby with the single individual…. Sin, however common it is to all, does not gather men together in a common idea, into an association, into a partnership (“no more than the multitude of the dead out in the cemetery form some kind of society”); instead, it splits men up into single individuals and holds each individual fast as a sinner…. If “the single individual” is to feel in kinship with God (and this is what Christianity teaches), then he also senses the full weight of it in fear and trembling, and he must discover—as if it were not an ancient discovery—the possibility of offense…. Being a human being is not like being an animal, for which the specimen is always less than the species. Man is distinguished from other animal species not only by the superiorities that are generally mentioned but is also qualitatively distinguished by the fact that the individual, the single individual, is more than the species. This qualification is in turn dialectical and signifies that the single individual is a sinner, but then again that it is a perfection to be the single individual.”

“The Concept of Anxiety” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Reidar Thomte)

Kierkegaard’s subject is not anxiety in the ordinary clinical sense, but anxiety as the peculiar mood of freedom confronting possibility. He begins from original sin and innocence, but quickly turns the discussion into a psychology of spirit: innocence is not moral purity already conscious of itself, but ignorance, and anxiety first appears as the unsettling presence of possibility before anything definite has been chosen. “The strongest, indeed, the most positive expression the Protestant Church uses for the presence of hereditary sin in man is precisely that he is born with concupiscentia…. All men begotten in a natural way are born with sin, i.e., without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence.… Innocence is ignorance…. In this state there is peace and repose, but there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety…. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety…. The concept of anxiety is almost never treated in psychology. Therefore, I must point out that it is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility…. Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy. One easily sees, I think, that this is a psychological determination in a sense entirely different from the concupiscentia [inordinate desire] of which we spoke…. The anxiety that is posited in innocence is in the first place no guilt, and in the second place it is no troublesome burden, no suffering that cannot be brought into harmony with the blessedness of innocence…. This anxiety belongs so essentially to the child that he cannot do without it. Though it causes him anxiety, it captivates him by its pleasing anxiousness [Beængstelse]. In all cultures where the childlike is preserved as the dreaming of the spirit, this anxiety is found. The more profound the anxiety, the more profound the culture.”

For Kierkegaard, anxiety is the atmosphere around the qualitative leap into sin. Psychology can describe the dizziness of freedom before the leap, but it cannot explain the leap itself; once freedom has fallen, guilt appears retrospectively as if everything has changed. “Anxiety means two things: the anxiety in which the individual posits sin by the qualitative leap, and the anxiety that entered in and enters in with sin, and that also, accordingly, enters quantitatively into the world every time and individual posits sin…. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become…. In anxiety there is the selfish infinity of possibility, which does not tempt like a choice but ensnaringly disquiets [ængster] with its sweet anxiousness [Beængstelse]…. In each subsequent individual, anxiety is more reflective. This may be expressed by saying that the nothing that is the object of anxiety becomes, as it were, more and more a something.”

Kierkegaard then ties anxiety to time. The “moment” is not merely an instant in sequence, but the point at which eternity touches temporality; this matters because Adam’s fall is not simply a past event but a structure repeated in every subsequent individual. “Christianity, that which made all things new, is the fullness of time, but the fullness of time is the moment as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past.” One of Kierkegaard’s central balancing acts is to preserve both inheritance and individual responsibility: every person begins “like Adam,” yet every person also sins only through his own qualitative leap. “Let us now consider Adam and also remember that every subsequent individual begins in the very same way, within the quantitative difference that is the consequence of the relationship of generation and the historical relationship. Thus the moment is there for Adam as well as for every subsequent individual…. The relation of freedom to guilt is anxiety, because freedom and guilt are still only possibilities.”

In Kierkegaard, unfreedom is not merely the absence of possibility; it is often a distorted relation to possibility, freedom, inwardness, and spirit. Superstition and unbelief are unfree because they evade or falsify the individual’s relation to freedom. “Both superstition and unbelief are forms of unfreedom. In superstition, objectivity is conceded to be a power—like that of Medusa’s head—which can petrify subjectivity, and unfreedom does not will that the spell be broken. Mockery is the highest and apparently the freest expression of unbelief. However, what mockery lacks is precisely certitude, and therefore it mocks. Yet how many a mocker’s existence, if only we could look into it, would recall the anxiety in which the demonic calls out: τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί [What have I to do with you]?”

For Kierkegaard, inwardness is a bellwether concept. The question is not whether one can produce an abstract proof of God, but whether the thought of God’s existence is allowed to become inwardly present for the individual’s freedom.“The thought of God’s existence [Tilværelse], when it is posited as such for the individual’s freedom, has an omnipresence that for the prudent individuality has something embarrassing about it, even though he does not wish to do anything evil. To live in a beautiful and intimate companionship with this conception truly requires inwardness, and it is a much greater feat than that of being a model husband. How depressed such an individuality may feel when he hears a naive and simple man talk about the existence of God. The demonstration of the existence of God is something with which one learnedly and metaphysically occupies oneself only on occasion, but the thought of God forces itself upon a man on every occasion. What is it that such an individuality lacks? Inwardness.”

As the book develops, the demonic appears as anxious evasion: the refusal to face eternity, freedom, guilt, and possibility directly. But Kierkegaard’s final twist is that anxiety is not merely a danger; rightly undergone, it becomes educative, because it strips away finite evasions and teaches the individual the weight of possibility. “Men are not willing to think eternity earnestly but are anxious about it, and anxiety can contrive a hundred evasions. And this is precisely the demonic…. I will say that this is an adventure that every human being must go through—to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate…. The more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man—yet not in the sense usually understood, in which anxiety is about something external, about something outside a person, but in the sense that he himself produces the anxiety…. Only in this sense can the words be understood when it is said of Christ that he was anxious unto death…. Anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness…. Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility, and only he who is educated by possibility is educated according to his infinitude…. In possibility all things are equally possible, and whoever has truly been brought up by possibility has grasped the terrible as well as the joyful…. When he has thoroughly learned that every anxiety about which he was anxious came upon him in the next moment—he will give actuality another explanation, he will praise actuality, and even when it rests heavily upon him, he will remember that it nevertheless is far, far lighter than possibility was…. In order that an individual may thus be educated absolutely and infinitely by the possibility, he must be honest toward possibility and have faith…. When the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will discover all the finitudes, but it will idealize them in the form of infinity and in anxiety overwhelm the individual until he again overcomes them.”

Finally, Kierkegaard affirms the role of faith and reiterates its role in the concept of the infinite. Faith is the qualitative leap that comes when the self, having been brought through possibility to the absolute, rests in the absolute. Faith is anticipating eternity in time — and what anxiety has done is empty the self of every finite anchor so that this resting becomes possible. Anxiety becomes saving only through faith: it educates the self in possibility, reveals guilt more radically than any external court could, and brings the individual to rest not in self-management but in providence and atonement. Anxiety is therefore ambiguous: it is neither guilt itself nor mere innocence, neither fear of a definite object nor freedom already actualized, but the trembling middle state in which possibility presses upon spirit. “With the help of faith, anxiety brings up the individuality to rest in providence. So it is also in relation to guilt, which is the second thing anxiety discovers. Whoever learns to know his guilt only from the finite is lost in the finite, and finitely the question of whether a man is guilty cannot be determined except in an external, juridical, and most imperfect sense…. From finitude one can learn much, but not how to be anxious, except in a very mediocre and depraved sense. On the other hand, whoever has truly learned how to be anxious will dance when the anxieties of finitude strike up the music and when the apprentices of finitude lose their minds and courage…. Therefore he who in relation to guilt is educated by anxiety will rest only in the Atonement.”

"The Experience Machine" by Andy Clark

Along with Karl Friston, Clark has been on the forefront of the effort to understand the human mind via the concept of predictive processing. This is a pop-neuroscience book intended to detail this concept to the layman. He begins with levels of processing, “However complex or high-level the predictions, it is prediction errors that must then carry the news, signaling differences from the expected and thereby keeping us in touch with a changing and sometimes surprising world…. Human brains seem to benefit from intelligent prediction strategies of just that kind, and they do so in an especially powerful way, thanks to the use of multiple “levels of processing.” In these multilevel contexts, simple predictions are nested under less simple, more abstract ones…. In this kind of multilevel arrangement all that flows forward (from the sensory edges ever deeper into the brain) is news—deviations from what is expected. This is efficient. Valuable bandwidth is not used sending well-predicted stuff upward…. Systems like that are wonderfully frugal in their use of the incoming stream of information. Instead of trying to deal with everything from scratch they effectively sift and filter the incoming data by highlighting only what was unexpected. This is the nugget of truth in the notion that human brains hallucinate reality. It means that the world we experience is to some degree the world we predict. Perception itself, far from being a simple window onto the world, is permeated from the get-go by our own predictions and expectations. It is permeated not simply in the sense that our own ideas and biases impact how we later judge things to be, but in some deeper, more primal, sense…. What we might think of as simple or “raw” sensory evidence is itself never experienced. Instead, experience always and everywhere reflects those rich webs of prior knowledge and here-and-now expectation…. Since all human experience is constructed from mixtures of expectation, attention, and sensory stimulation, it will never be possible to experience either the world or your own body “as it really is.” Indeed, it rapidly becomes unclear what this could even mean.”

Action is just as important as perception in the framework of predictive processing. “Ordinary daily actions (according to predictive processing) are caused by predictions of bodily sensation. They are caused, more precisely, by predictions of the flow of bodily sensations that would occur if that very action were to be performed…. Successful action involves a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy…. By making prediction the common root of both perception and action, predictive processing (active inference) reveals a hidden unity in the workings of the mind. Action and perception form a single whole, jointly orchestrated by the drive to eliminate errors in prediction…. Actions come about because we mentally represent the completed effects of the action…. This is sometimes said to reverse a commonsense notion of causality, since instead of the action causing the effect, it is the representation of the effect (the completed action) that causes the action itself to unfold…. This became known as the “ideomotor theory of action,” since the idea (or mental image) of the completed motor action is what brings the actual movements about…. By launching a cascade of sensory predictions, and then rendering them true by means of action (thus eliminating the resulting prediction errors), the brain creates the desired movements…. The deep unity (under predictive processing) of perception and action should now be apparent. There are two different, but equally effective, ways to minimize prediction errors during our encounters with the world. The first is by using prediction errors to help us discover the best guess about how things are out there in the world. But the second is to act so as to make the world fit some of our predictions.”

Clark references Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on the role of perception and interpreting the signals of the interoceptive system in creating emotions. “The central idea is that a single kind of process combines inner and outer sources of information, generating a context-reflecting amalgam that is experienced as emotion…. The very same bodily information can thus feel very different according to how we represent the larger context in which the bodily signals arise…. According to interoceptive predictive processing, feelings and emotions are what result when we integrate basic information about bodily states and general arousal with higher-level predictions of their most probable causes…. Emotions and feelings reflect a process that combines interoceptive (inward-looking), proprioceptive (action-guiding), and exteroceptive (outward-looking) information with model-based predictions of all those signals as they are occurring…. The winning predictions will be the ones that best “make sense” of that large and varied body of information.”

Precision-weighting is integral to the system of predictive processing. “The most successful predictive model always sculpts the way the brain deals with the incoming signals. It alters the response of neurons at multiple cortical levels, amplifying and dampening them (courtesy of all that variable precision-weighting) in ways that reflect the brain’s best guess at the structure of the objects out there in the world…. Precision-weighted prediction (usually) serves our purposes by highlighting some things at the expense of others.”

Our personal histories shape our predictive models. Clark argues that perception is neither passive reception nor free fantasy, but a controlled hallucination continuously corrected by prediction error. “The most basic way that we actively construct our world is by selective sampling. We move our body and aim our gaze in ways that reflect what we expect to encounter…. Humans with different individual histories, will harvest different sets of stimulations from the very same world. But as we selectively harvest those simulations, our brains impose structure a second time, processing the sensory information in ways that amplify and dampen, extracting meaningful structure that itself reflects our own prior experience…. We cannot help but base our current waves of prediction on our own native tendencies and particular life histories. Where those predictions vary, so does human experience.”

Clark returns to the role of actions in shaping and creating our world models. Predictive processing thus becomes, for Clark, not merely a neuroscience theory but a general framework dissolving sharp distinctions between perception and action, mind and world, organism and environment. “Practical actions and epistemic actions are determined in exactly the same way, as the predictive brain makes counterfactual predictions about what kinds of futures will result if certain actions are launched. Actions are then chosen that deliver preferred outcomes directly (when possible) or else that probe and sample the environment to bring forth more information, reducing key uncertainties, and making the desired outcome more likely in the future…. Any predictive processing agent able to minimize error relative to future goals will discover both epistemic and practical actions, and how to mix them together. In all such scenarios, all the brain does is select the actions that best minimize future prediction error relative to goals.”

David Chalmers and Clark came up with the idea of the extended mind to describe the scaffolding outside the body that becomes enmeshed with the human mind, creating one seamless entity, “Extended minds arise because predictive brains are naturally expert at exploiting opportunities to use information-gathering action loops to help them achieve their goals…. Our constructed worlds can sometimes take over, transform, and augment functions once carried out by our brains…. I continue to believe that as the resulting weave between brain, body, and external resources tightens, it becomes less and less productive to think of mind as something locked neatly behind the barriers of skin and skull…. Brains are prediction machines that invoke external resources as easily (and for the same reasons) as they engage practical actions and activate different aspects of they dinner circuitry…. This creates a circular causal web in which mind is—at the very least—constantly porous to body and world.”

Finally, Clark returns to the importance of weighting in building world models, “Variable precision-weighting is the single most powerful tool in the predictive processing toolkit…. In the brain, precision-weighting alters patterns of post-synaptic influence (the strength of the signals passed on after the synapse “fires”). This means that specific signals can be selected for enhanced impact. The signals selected for this special treatment will be ones that are expected to be both reliable and important for the task at hand…. Precision variations of this kind underpin both conscious and automatic deployments of attention…. The brain learns how and when to vary its precision estimations as part and parcel of the process by which it acquires the generative models themselves. Those models and associated estimations of precision are learned by repeated exposure to flows of sensory information in the context of trying to act in the world.”

“After Virtue” by Alasdair MacIntyre

MacIntyre tries to give a historical account of the human virtues. He begins with the problems of modernity and its emphasis on rationality and the individual, “The bifurcation of the contemporary social world into a realm of the organizational in which ends are taken to be given and are not available for rational scrutiny and a realm of the personal in which judgment and debate about values are central factors, but in which no rational social resolution of issues is available finds its internalization, its inner representation in the relation of the individual self to the roles and characters of social life…. Thus the society in which we live is one in which bureaucracy and individualism are partners as well as antagonists. And it is in the cultural climate of this bureaucratic individualism that the emotivist self is naturally at home.”

For MacIntyre, the Enlightenment project got waylaid when it rejected the Aristotelian concept of human telos, “If my thesis is correct, Kant was right; morality did in the eighteenth century, as a matter of historical fact, presuppose something very like the teleological scheme of God, freedom and happiness as the final crown of virtue which Kant propounds. Detach morality from that framework and you will no longer have morality…. Moral arguments within the classical, Aristotelian tradition—whether in its Greek or its medieval versions—involve at least one central functional concept, the concept of man understood as having an essential nature and an essential purpose or function…. For according to that tradition to be a man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose: member of a family, citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God. It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that man ceases to be a functional concept…. Once the notion of essential human purposes or functions disappears from morality, it begins to appear implausible to treat moral judgments as factual statements.”

According to MacIntyre, modernity got further offtrack when it tried to separate the concepts of facts and truth from the concept of values, “The notion of ‘fact’ with respect to human beings is thus transformed in the transition from the Aristotelian to the mechanist view. On the former view human action, because it is to be explained teleologically, not only can, but must be, characterized with reference to the hierarchy of goods which provide the ends of human action. On the latter view human action not only can, but must be, characterized without any reference to such goods. On the former view the facts about human action include the facts about what is valuable to human beings (and not just the facts about what they think to be valuable); on the latter view there are no facts about what is valuable. ‘Fact’ becomes value-free…. If the deontological character of moral judgments is the ghost of conceptions of divine law which are quite alien to the metaphysics of modernity and if the teleological character is similarly the ghost of conceptions of human nature and activity which are equally not at home in the modern world, we should expect the problems of understanding and of assigning an intelligible status to moral judgments both continually to arise and as continually to prove inhospitable to philosophical solutions.”

Teleology provides the framework within which human actions, lives, and virtues can be evaluated as ordered or disordered with respect to human goods, “If a human life is understood as a progress through harms and dangers, moral and physical, which someone may encounter and overcome in better and worse ways and with a greater or lesser measure of success, the virtues will find their place as those qualities the possession and exercise of which generally tend to success in this enterprise and the vices likewise as qualities which likewise tend to failure.”

MacIntyre’s diagnosis is that modern moral discourse consists of fragments of older moral languages detached from the forms of life that made them intelligible. This explains the interminability of modern moral disagreement: rival parties appeal to concepts such as rights, utility, autonomy, equality, desert, or duty, but these concepts derive from different traditions and cannot be adjudicated by a neutral rational standard. Emotivism is therefore not merely a philosophical doctrine; it is embodied socially in the figures of the manager, therapist, and aesthete, and politically in the alliance between bureaucratic expertise and individual preference.

For MacIntyre, Aristotle’s virtue ethics provide the indispensable starting point for recovering the intelligibility of morality after the failures of the Enlightenment project, “Human beings, like the members of all other species, have a specific nature; and that nature is such that they have certain aims and goals, such that they move by nature towards a specific telos. The good is defined in terms of their specific characteristics. Hence Aristotle’s ethics, expounded as he expounds it, presupposes his metaphysical biology. Aristotle thus sets himself the task of giving an account of the good which is at once local and particular—located in and partially defined by the characteristics of the polis—and yet also cosmic and universal…. Aristotle has cogent arguments against identifying that good with money, with honor or with pleasure. He gives to it the name of eudaimonia…. It is the state of being well and doing well in being well, of a man’s being well-favored himself and in relation to the divine…. The virtues are precisely those qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve eudaimonia and the lack of which will frustrate his movement toward that telos…. For what constitutes the good for man is a complete human life lived at its best, and the exercise of the virtues is a necessary and central part of such a life…. Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues. Moral education is an ‘éducation sentimentale’…. The educated moral agent must of course know what he is doing when he judges or acts virtuously. Thus he does what is virtuous because it is virtuous.”

MacIntyre returns yet again to the telos of man, “The impersonal unchanging divinity of which Aristotle speaks, the metaphysical contemplation of which furnishes man with his specific and ultimate telos, can itself take no interest in the merely human, let alone in the dilemmatic; it is nothing other than thought timelessly thinking itself and conscious of nothing but itself…. Since such contemplation is the ultimate human telos, the essential final and completing ingredient in the life of the man who is eudaimôn, there is a certain tension between Aristotle’s view of man as essentially political and his view of man as essentially metaphysical…. Correspondingly a city founded on justice and friendship can only be the best kind of city if it enables its citizens to enjoy the life of metaphysical contemplation.”

MacIntyre believes the concept of practice is central to recovering an intelligible account of goods and excellences, “A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. It is to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice…. Thus the standards are not themselves immune from criticism, but nonetheless we cannot be initiated into a practice without accepting the authority of the best standards realized so far…. A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods…. Every practice requires a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationships to those other people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practices.”

MacIntyre distinguishes internal goods from external goods. Internal goods are excellences achievable only through participation in a practice; external goods are money, status, power, and prestige. Practices need institutions to survive, but institutions characteristically pursue external goods and therefore threaten to corrupt the practices they sustain. The virtues are necessary to preserve practices against this corruption.

Besides a practice, MacIntyre considers the unity of a narrative life and the the embedding of goods and virtues within a tradition to be necessary for the proper return to virtue ethics. The culminating concept is tradition. A tradition is not inert inheritance but an historically extended argument about the goods internal to practices and the good of a whole human life. MacIntyre’s alternative to Enlightenment universalism is not irrationalism but tradition-constituted rational inquiry. This is why the final opposition is Nietzsche or Aristotle: either morality after the Enlightenment is exposed as disguised will, or the Aristotelian tradition can be recovered as a rationally defensible alternative.

MacIntyre treats Aristotle as the indispensable starting point for recovering the intelligibility of the virtues, not as a complete solution. Aristotle’s account must be revised by the later tradition, especially by the ideas of narrative quest, practices, dependence, historical tradition, and a less biologically fixed conception of human telos, “The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest…. The only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest…. Without some at least partly determinate conception of the final telos there could not be any beginning to a quest. Some conception of the good for man is required…. It is in looking for a conception of the good which will enable us to order other goods, for a conception of the good which will enable us to extend our understanding of the purpose and content of the virtues, for a conception of the good which will enable us to understand the place of integrity and constancy in life, that we initially define the kind of life which is a quest for the good…. A quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge…. The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good. The catalogue of the virtues will therefore include the virtues required to sustain the kind of households and the kind of political communities in which men and women can seek for the good together…. The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.” MacIntyre argues that modern moral discourse is a fragmentary survival of older teleological and theological schemes; that emotivism is its characteristic social form; and that morality can become intelligible again only through practices, internal goods, narrative unity, and historically extended traditions of rational inquiry, with Aristotle as the necessary but incomplete starting point.

“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. IV” by Solvej Balle (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

This fourth volume by Balle continues with Tara Selter being stuck in the eighteenth of November. But now she is very much not alone. At their villa in Bremen, those who met there eventually settled into a routine of formal meetings where various topics would be submitted and then debated, “This morning there were twenty-nine of us around the table. We had got hold of more chairs, and the rest of us perched on the sills of the bay windows overlooking the garden, in the gray light from the sky. There was no end to the possible topics of discussion, no end to the suggestions for our decision-making procedures and agendas, no end to the digressions and additions and ideas that branched out in all directions…. It turned into a meeting about the names of things, about the words for the peculiarities of the eighteenth of November, about the chances of ever finding terms that truly fit, about precision and the spaciousness of language.”

Tara continued with her explanation,“Someone proposed we name the world we came from—the life we had lived before the eighteenth, TOL, for example, The Other Life. Gita suggested DAL, Das andere Leben, but Henry didn't like that…. One of the Val Benoît residents suggested that we call time before the eighteenth La Vie Avant and the time after La Vie Maintenant; that way we could talk about LaViA and LaViM. This led us back to the difference between acronyms and syllabic abbreviations, until Gita's group pointed out that we also needed to address time after the eighteenth, La Vie Après, but that too would be LaViA, introducing unnecessary confusion—unless, of course, we could expect these two to be the same: that the world we return to after our life in the eighteenth would be exactly as before. Then they could share a name…. There are those who refer to us as loopers and the others as noopers, and some speak of repeaters or returners, but that raises the question: Who are the repeaters really? Isn't the difference simply that we know we are repeating the eighteenth while the others believe everything is normal? But we see them going about their business, again and again. So who is the repetition?"

Finally, the group decided it would put on a special conference with the aim of making a more systematic exploration of their situation, “Many pointed out that our explorations lacked a theoretical foundation, that attempting to build hypotheses or explanations would be futile without a thorough understanding of past theories of time—from the pre-Socratic period to the twenty-first century. Should our foundation not be in place before we start indulging in fantasies? Others, however, believed it was precisely the temporal theories of the past that had fallen short, that the prevailing conception of time itself was fundamentally flawed.”

“The Matter With Things Volume 2: What Then is True?” By Iain McGilchrist

The second volume of McGilchrist’s magnum opus focuses on philosophy more than neurobiology. He is still concerned with the left and right hemisphere split of the brain, but he goes into much greater detail discussing objective truth, morality, consciousness, the nature of the self, human values, and what makes life worth living. He begins by discussing reality, subjectivity, language and concepts, and the map and the territory, “The left hemisphere thinks reality is what it itself puts together, because that is all it knows – the theoretical construct in which it lives. For it, theory trumps life. If it therefore decrees that a state of affairs shall be a certain way, then reality will, it believes, bend to the decree. Since the left hemisphere uses language to label, this often involves a belief that changing the label will change the reality…. That there is no one fixed reality, and truth is not single or fully certain, does not mean that reality has been mysteriously abolished. That there is no one view that encompasses all truth about the world, does not mean that truth is made up, and can be whatever we want it to be.” He continues by discussing how the brain processes new experiences, “There is a reliable difference between the hemispheres in terms of their handling of fresh experience. They have shown that new experience of any kind – whether it be of real-life objects, sounds, skills or imaginary constructs – engages the right hemisphere. As soon as it starts to become familiar or routine, the right hemisphere is less engaged and eventually the ‘information’ becomes the concern of the left hemisphere only…. New experience tends to come from the periphery of the field of attention, and that is the province of the right hemisphere – which is, after all, on the lookout for whatever unexpected is happening, at the moment that it happens; whereas the left hemisphere is concentrating on what is already identified as of interest, known and familiar, and at the centre of the attentional field.” He also discusses uniqueness, “Uniqueness presents particular problems for the left hemisphere’s tool, language. Uniqueness brings everyday language to a standstill. Anything truly unique cannot be expressed in such language, which is why whatever is profound, personal, or sacred, if it is to be expressed in words, can be so expressed only in poetry…. Reductionist thinking, more typical of the left hemisphere, to which uniqueness is opaque, holds that all can be accounted for by breaking things down to further, and yet further, entities. Uniqueness, however, halts analysis: it is a standing rebuke to our ever-ready categories.”

One’s own conception of the nature of the self is an area where the hemispheric split plays a role, “The self as conceived by the left hemisphere, should be – and is – an entity that is relatively static, separate, fixed, yet fragmentary, a succession of moments, goal-oriented, with its needs at any moment perceived as essentially competitive (since others may similarly target the same resources), determinate, consciously wilful, circumscribed in the breadth and depth of what it sees, at ease with the familiar, certain and explicit, but less so with all that is fluid, ambiguous, and implicit, and unaware of the limitations of its own knowledge. The self as conceived by the right hemisphere should be – and is – more akin to a process than a thing, essentially fluid and less determinate, nonetheless forming a unique whole over time, aware that it is fundamentally inseparable from all else that exists, open to others and to experience, more concerned with co-operation than competition, less consciously wilful, more engaged in what one might call ‘active passivity’ (an open attendant disposition, in which one is ready to respond to what emerges), seeing the greater picture in space and time, and aware of the extent of its ignorance…. In other words, the self as intrinsically inseparable from the world in which it stands in relation to others, the social and empathic self, and the continuous sense of self, with ‘depth’ of existence over time, is more dependent on the right hemisphere; whereas the objectified self, the external self, and the self as an expression of will, is generally more dependent on the left hemisphere.”

McGilchrist discusses how the nature of time is essential to the human conception of reality, “Conceptualising time immediately puts one on the outside of the experience, rather than being within it, the standpoint alone from which it can be understood…. Time is no thing…. Time is adverbial, if it is anything that grammar recognises; an aspect of being (itself a verbal noun, or gerund) or of Dasein (also a gerund). Time is not separate from events or experience…. It is itself an aspect of experience…. Reality is what we experience – ever moving, changing, and continuous. Things, however, are secondary, static, products of perception which supervene on ‘from above’, not support ‘from beneath’, that field of flow.” The nature of reality is embodied and the human body is a creature always in motion, “Motion is at the core of every aspect of our experience, and of our ability to make sense of it, in a way of which we are normally unaware, because our analytic intellect cannot deal with it…. Mind and body are inseparably connected.” Conversely, “Analytic thought and language tend to immobilise the world…. The idea that perception is altered by, and may even be secondary to, activity is familiar from the Gestalt theory of perception, according to which we are co-operatively constructing the aspects of the world that we see…. Perception is an active, not a passive process – or better, it is a profoundly interactive process…. Movement is as foundational as space and time. Each requires the other. Space is the potential for something to move within it; time is the potential for something to change within it. Both become actualised in flow…. Analysis, the forte of the left hemisphere, ultimately yields stasis…. Analysis wants measurement, and measurement begins the process of immobilisation and fragmentation. Yet it is never quite equal to what it measures…. Motion can, of course, never be reached by aggregation of static elements.”

Relatedly, McGilchrist takes on the concepts of space, matter, form, and time and how each relate to lived reality. “Space and time are not containers in which we live, but aspects of being…. Time speaks profoundly to the human condition in a way that space, however fundamental it might be, simply does not. Time is relentless, like another being’s will, where space is pliable and may be fashioned, though not without limits, to our own. Time is emotive; space is bland…. Despite this, space has the means to be generative: it is the potential for motion, and gives rise to form, which is what we see, precipitated out of potential, in space…. While time shows us that aspect of reality which is always incomplete, space shows us that aspect of reality which has been achieved…. Forms are usually evidenced in matter, and matter in forms: no-one has seen matter without form…. I can see imaginary or abstract forms, with the mind’s eye, or in certain states of mind with the bodily eye. But matter is inconceivable without form…. The forms that are found in Nature are the result of motion, and embodied movement, not stasis; similarly, movements found in Nature enact forms, not structures.” He continues, “40 years of efforts to simulate the Standard Model on a computer have so far failed. To perform such a simulation, one must first take equations expressed in terms of continuous quantities and find a discrete formulation that is compatible with the bits of information in which computers trade…. If reality is such that our knowledge is intrinsically, not accidentally, incomplete; if it is intrinsically, not accidentally, uncertain; if it is intrinsically inexpressible in everyday language, requiring exceptional, non-denotative, highly metaphoric, ‘poetic’ use of language to get beyond the limits of language; if we must deal not with facts but with connexions; if entities are never wholly separable from other entities; if the process of a knower coming to know is interactive or reverberative, each changing the other – not distanced, inert and owing nothing to the presence, and possibly the nature, of the one who comes to know; and if any attempt to model it reduces what is continuous and moving, to what is static and discrete – if all of this is true, it is clear which hemisphere will be better suited to discerning it.”

McGilchrist next takes a deep dive into the nature of consciousness, “When I use the word ‘consciousness’, I refer very broadly to all that we might call ‘the experiential’. This covers all the activities that go on, for each of us, as we say, unconsciously and preconsciously, as well as consciously; but could not go on without what is conventionally referred to as subjectivity, or inwardness…. I discriminate, reason, make judgments, find things beautiful, solve problems, imagine possibilities, weigh possible outcomes, take decisions, exercise acquired skills, fall in love, and struggle to balance competing desires and moral values all the time without being reflexively aware of it. Note that these are not just calculations, but rely on my whole embodied being, my experience, my history, my memory, my feelings, my thoughts, my personality, even – dare I say it? – my soul: ‘psyche’ in the broadest sense…. Even Descartes derived the ego from experience, not experience from an ego. What can more conservatively be claimed is that something about me – in the ‘field of me’ – permits these particular activities: and that something is what, in the broad definition, I am calling my consciousness…. I would say that matter appears to be an element within consciousness that provides the necessary resistance for creation; and with that, inevitably, for individuality to arise. All individual beings, including ourselves, bring forms into being and cause them to persist: each of us is not, ultimately, any one conformation in matter, but, Ship of Theseus-like, the conformation itself, the morphogenetic field, which requires matter in order to be brought into being, but, once existent, persists while matter comes and goes within it…. The conclusion we should draw is – not that all that we can encounter are representations of something we cannot know – but the precise opposite: that we do actually deal with reality and know it, just with an aspect of it that we partly call forth ourselves by our approach. The fact that we play a part in its being what it is does not make it unreal…. Things, it seems, emerge from our descriptions of experience: they do not constitute it. Whether a thing enters our world or not depends on the scale at which it is seen, or sought…. It may be objected that, whether we see something or not, it still exists. But what that tells us is that a ‘thing’ is a category within our thought…. If Nietzsche was right in saying that ‘A thing = its qualities’, and qualities change unrecognisably with scale, so do things come and go from experience depending on how they are observed. As the perspective shifts so do the Gestalten.” McGilchrist concludes, “If matter is a product of primal consciousness, and is the creative element of resistance within it which causes ‘things’ – becomings and processes – to be precipitated out as differentiated entities in space and time, this requires no further purpose than itself. It is the never-ending coming into being of the cosmos, in which the primal consciousness comes to understand itself…. I believe that what exists is a locally differentiated, but ultimately single, field of potentiality, which is constantly actualising itself. Thus all is one, and all is many. Each differentiation is, however, also a Gestalt that is complete in itself – a new whole, not a fragment…. There is no reason to dub our full experience of the world an illusion, while ascribing to the very partial mathematical description of the world the reality. I also believe internalism is a mistake, and that consciousness is located not inside us, but in a non-spatial ‘betweenness’ created by our attention and the object of our attention. It is, therefore, always a partial revelation – and partly, also, a creation of the act of experiencing – but our part in it does not negate its reality: that is reality…. I do not claim to know what experience is any more than anyone else, except that it is the condition on which I know anything at all. And yet we all understand it directly. It is what we know (kennen) better than anything at all, and yet know (wissen) least of all about. It is therefore difficult to discuss, since neither language nor reason are well adapted to it. Language is already at a remove from direct experience.”

McGilchrist stumps for moral realism, “The main claim is that value, whether it is truth, goodness or beauty, is not, as our culture has come to regard it, an ‘add-on’, a human invention, some sort of extra that is not intrinsic to the nature of the cosmos, but is, rather, itself constitutive of the cosmos and is discovered by, and disclosed in, the encounter of life…. I think truth matters more than utility, because I see truth as an ultimate value, irreducible to anything else: that is part of my view of the cosmos as pregnant with meaning, soliciting our allegiance, rather than a place where it is good enough to get by with comfortable lies. For me, values are part of its very fabric, not optional adornments…. Truth is a moral value, like beauty, and goodness…. Values are not just validated by the outcomes they achieve: they are inseparable from our deepest emotional experience.” He next tackles human purpose, “Whatever creative energy underwrites the unfolding of the phenomenal universe is continually active and involved in that universe; that the future is tended towards, but not closely determined; rather it is open, evolving, self-fulfilling. This means that it seems ‘purposeless’ to some; richly ‘purposeful’ to others. To me, a universe with tendencies towards beauty, complexity, and the rich unfolding of uniqueness is already teleological…. Though purpose may be more or less apparent at different levels, the process of life cannot, in reality, be broken down in this way…. Living beings equally shape and are shaped by a world that is coming into being alongside them in a reciprocal, and reciprocally paced, process, not negotiating a path across its already pre-formed surface…. Interdependence means not just interaction, but mutual constitution.” Finally, he takes a stab at the nature of the sacred, “God, truth, and infinity are all processes, not things; comings into being, not entities that are already fixed. All three seem to me, however, like rivers, to combine stability with flux. ‘All things flow’; but ‘by changing, a thing remains the same’. Ultimately, Being and Becoming are aspects of the same thing…. Becoming is even more fundamental than Being.”

Finally, McGilchrist describes what is ailing modernity, “We are now in the grip of an obsession with human power and the subjugation of nature, at bottom of which lies our infatuation with technology: the power to manipulate. We have subordinated ends to means. We emphasise self at the expense of others, our rights rather than our duties, what we have rather than who we are, the material rather than the spiritual, and vaunt the reach of the unaided human intellect. In such a world God is a nuisance…. When our society generally held with religion, we might indeed have committed many of the same wrongs; but power-seeking, selfishness, self-promotion, narcissism and entitlement, neglect of duty, dishonesty, ruthlessness, greed, and lust were never condoned or actively and openly encouraged – even admired – in the way they sometimes are now. In other words, we have lost all shame.” He concludes, “The deep truths about reality are likely to appear initially paradoxical. What look like things – with inevitable suggestions of stasis, certainty and fixity – are processes; and all such thing-like processes are interdependent with others, bringing one another into being. Everything is changed by context…. There is absolutely no reason to believe matter to be ontologically prior to consciousness.”