“Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger (translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

This is highly dense stuff. Each page was a struggle for me to read. And not just because the book was written by a Nazi. Nonetheless, there were more than a few valuable nuggets sprinkled throughout which rewarded careful parsing. More importantly, the overall framework gave a new sense of seeing the subjective Self as embedded within a world in which it is forced to live. The most important concept for Heidegger is Dasein. “There is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly. It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its Being, this Being is disclosed to it. Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being…. Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence—in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.” Further along in his introduction he continues, “Dasein is in such a way as to be something which understands something like Being…. It does so with time as its standpoint. Time must be brought to light—and genuinely conceived—as the horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it…. The fact remains that time, in the sense of ‘being [sein] in time’, functions as a criterion for distinguishing realms of Being.”

Heidegger next defines what he means by phenomenology. Hegel is always implicit in this analytical dive, eventually coming to the fore in Heidegger ’s final pages. “Thus the term ‘phenomenology’ expresses a maxim which can be formulated as ‘To the things themselves!’ It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated; it is opposed to those pseudo-questions which parade themselves as ‘problems’, often for generations at a time.” Next, Heidegger defines philosophy, “Ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others. These terms characterize philosophy itself with regard to its objects and its way of treating that object. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein.”

Moving forward, we have to define the ‘world’ (or not), as according to Heidegger. “Neither the ontical depiction of entities within-the-world nor the ontological Interpretation of their Being is such as to reach the phenomenon of the ‘world.’ In both of these ways of access to ‘Objective Being’, the ‘world’ has already been ‘presupposed’, and indeed in various ways.” Moving in the world we are bound to encounter others. “The Others, moreover, are not definite Others. On the contrary, any Other can represent them. What is decisive is just that inconspicuous domination by others which has already been taken over unawares from Dasein as Being-with. One belongs to the Others oneself and enhances their power. ‘The Others’ whom one thus designates in order to cover up the fact of one’s belonging to them essentially oneself, are those who proximally and for the most part ‘are there’ in everyday Being-with-one-another. The ‘who’ is not this one, not that one, not oneself [man selbst], not some people [einige], and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the “they” [das Man]…. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of ‘the Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more…. Being-with-one-another concerns itself as such with averageness, which is an existential characteristic of the “they”…. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the “leveling down” [Einebnung] of all possibilities of Being.”

Heidegger moves back to the purpose of authentic Being and care. “Cognition [for the ancient Greeks] was conceived in terms of the ‘desire to see’…. The care for seeing is essential to man’s Being…. Being is that which shows itself in the pure perception which belongs to beholding, and only by such seeing does Being get discovered. Primordial and genuine truth lies in pure beholding.” However, inauthentic Being happens to the fallen Dasein. “Dasein has… fallen away [abgefallen] from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the ‘world’. “Fallenness” into the ‘world’ means an absorption in Being-with-one-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity…. “Inauthenticity” does not mean anything like Being-no-longer-in-the-world, but amounts rather to a quite distinctive kind of Being-in-the-world—the kind which is completely fascinated by the ‘world’ and by the Dasein-with of Others in the “they”…. In falling, Dasein itself as factical Being-in-the-world, is something from which it has already fallen away. And it has not fallen into some entity which it comes upon for the first time in the course of its Being, or even one which it has not come upon at all; it has fallen in the world, which itself belongs to its Being. Falling is a definite existential characteristic of Dasein itself…. Falling Being-in-the-world is not only tempting and tranquilizing; it is at the same time alienating…. This alienation drives it into a kind of Being which borders on the most exaggerated ‘self-dissection’, tempting itself with possibilities of explanation…. This alienation closes off from Dasein its authenticity and possibility…. Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness…. This downward plunge into and within the groundlessness of the inauthentic Being of the “they”, has a kind of motion which constantly tears the understanding away from the projecting of authentic possibilities.”

Heidegger next gets into Dasein and its possibilities. “In every case Dasein exists for the sake of itself. ‘As long as it is’, right to its end, it comports itself towards its potentiality-for-Being…. The ‘ahead-of-itself’, as an item in the structure of care, tells us unambiguously that in Dasein there is always something still outstanding, which, as a potentiality-for-Being for Dasein itself, has not yet become ‘actual’. It is essential to the basic constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still to be settled [eine standige Unabgeschlossenheit].” These possibilities lead inextricably towards death. “Death, as the end of Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost possibility—non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped. Death is, as Dasein’s end, in the Being of this entity towards its end…. When we say that Dasein is factically dying, we are saying at the same time that in its Being-towards-death Dasein has always decided itself in one way or another. Our everyday falling evasion in the face of death is an inauthentic Being-towards-death. But inauthenticity is based on the possibility of authenticity. Inauthenticity characterizes a kind of Being into which Dasein can divert itself and has for the most part always diverted itself; but Dasein does not necessarily and constantly have to divert itself into this kind of Being…. Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualized’, nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be. It is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything, of every way of existing…. Anticipation turns out to be the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being—that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence…. Here it can become manifest to Dasein that in this distinctive possibility of its own self, it has been wrenched away from the “they”. This means that in anticipation any Dasein can have wrenched itself away from the “they” already…. All Being-alongside the things with which we concern ourselves, and all Being-with Others, will fail us when our ownmost potentiality-for-Being is the issue. Dasein can be authentically itself only if it makes this possible for itself of its own accord…. Dasein is authentically itself only to the extent that, as concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it projects itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for-Being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self…. When, by anticipation, one becomes free for one’s own death, one is liberated from one’s lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped.”

Heidegger moves on to conscience and the call that we all must deal with as Dasein moves through the possibilities towards death. “Conscience gives us ‘something’ to understand; it discloses. By characterizing this phenomenon formally in this way, we find ourselves enjoined to take it back into the disclosedness of Dasein. This disclosedness, as a basic state of that entity which we ourselves are, is constituted by state-of-mind, understanding, falling, and discourse…. The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self…. The call discourses in the uncanny mode of keeping silent. And it does this only because, in calling the one to whom the appeal is made, it does not call him into the public idle talk of the “they”, but calls him back from this into the reticence of his existent potentiality-for-Being…. The call of conscience, existentially understood, makes known for the first time what we have hitherto merely contended: that uncanniness pursues Dasein and is a threat to the lostness in which it has forgotten itself.”

Heidegger looks at resoluteness and guilt as integral parts of authentic Dasein. “We have characterized resoluteness as a way of reticently projecting oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, and exacting anxiety of oneself. Being-guilty belongs to Dasein’s Being, and signifies the null Being-the-basis of a nullity. The ‘Guilty!’ which belongs to the Being of Dasein is something that can be neither augmented nor diminished…. The existential way of taking over this ‘guilt’ in resoluteness, in its disclosure of Dasein, has become so transparent that Being-guilty is understood as something constant…. By “resoluteness” we mean “letting oneself be called forth to one’s ownmost Being-guilty”…. Being-guilty is not just an abiding property of something constantly present-at-hand, but the existential possibility of being authentically or inauthentically guilty.”

Here Heidegger returns to the nature of Being and care. “The entity which in every case we ourselves are, is ontologically that which is farthest. The reason for this lies in care itself. Our Being alongside the things with which we concern ourselves most closely in the ‘world’—a Being which is falling—guides the everyday way in which Dasein is interpreted, and covers up ontically Dasein’s authentic Being, so that the ontology which is directed towards this entity is denied an appropriate basis…. The laying-bare of Dasein’s primordial Being must rather be wrested from Dasein by following the opposite course from that taken by the falling ontico-ontological tendency of interpretation…. Existential analysis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing violence [Gewaltsamkeit], whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquilized obviousness.”

Heidegger concludes with some words on the nature of science. “The existential conception understands science as a way of existence and thus a mode of Being-in-the-world, which discovers or discloses either entities or Being…. The meaning of Being and the ‘connection’ between Being and truth have been clarified in terms of the temporality of existence…. The explicit suggestion that scientific behaviour as a way of Being-in-the-world, is not just a ‘purely intellectual activity’, may seem petty and superfluous. If only it were not plain from this triviality that it is by no means patent where the ontological boundary between ‘theoretical’ and ‘atheoretical’ behaviour really runs!” He continues, “When the basic concepts of that understanding of Being by which we are guided have been worked out, the clues of its methods, the structure of its way of conceiving things, the possibility of truth and certainty which belongs to it, the ways in which things get grounded or proved, the mode in which it is binding for us, and the way it is communicated—all these will be Determined. The totality of these items constitutes the full existential conception of science…. Science has its source in authentic existence.”

Heidegger circles back on some themes, but now with the emphasis on temporality and historicality. He begins, “All our efforts in the existential analytic serve the aim of finding a possibility of answering the question of the meaning of Being in general…. Our analysis of the authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole has revealed that in care is rooted an equiprimordial connectedness of death, guilt, and conscience…. But death is only the ‘end’ of Dasein; and, taken formally, it is just one of the ends by which Dasein’s totality is closed round. The other ‘end’, however, is the ‘beginning’, the ‘birth’. Only that entity which is ‘between’ birth and death presents the whole which we have been seeking…. Dasein has been our theme only in the way in which it exists ‘facing forward’, as it were, leaving ‘behind it’ all that has been…. The ‘connectedness of life’, in which Dasein somehow maintains itself constantly, is precisely what we have overlooked in our analysis of Being-a-whole.” It is birth that we must circle back to in completing the analysis of the whole of Dasein. “Understood existentially, birth is not and never is something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand; and death is just as far from having the kind of Being of something still outstanding, not yet present-at-hand but coming along. Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of Being-towards-death. As long as Dasein factically exists, both the ‘ends’ and their ‘between’ are, and they are in the only way which is possible on the basis of Dasein’s Being as care…. As care, Dasein is the ‘between’.”

Finally, we come explicitly to the nature of Dasein and Time. “When Dasein talks of time’s passing away, it understands, in the end, more of time than it wants to admit; that is to say, the temporality in which world-time temporalizes itself has not been completely closed off, no matter how much it may get covered up…. The awaiting of inauthentic existence—the awaiting which forgets as it makes present—is the condition for the possibility of the ordinary experience of time’s passing-away…. In the kind of talk which emphasizes time’s passing away, the finite futurity of Dasein’s temporality is publicly reflected…. In the ordinary interpretation, the stream of time is defined as an irreversible succession. Why cannot time be reversed? Especially if one looks exclusively at the stream of “nows”…. The ordinary way of characterizing time as an endless, irreversible sequence of “nows” which passes away, arises from the temporality of falling Dasein.”

“Milkman” by Anna Burns

This novel is set in northern Ireland during the Troubles. The presence of violence is ever-lurking in the air. It is narrated by an eighteen year-old girl, living in renouncer-controlled territory, who is a bit of an outsider in her tight-knit community. While in the past her eccentric behavior had kept her out of neighborhood scrutiny, her world comes crashing down when she gains the wrong man’s attention. “Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century. I suppose now, looking back, this milkman knew all of that as well.”

The unnamed mob plays as much of a role in the novel as any character. The neighborhood always had eyes on everyone. Everyone had to be careful what they revealed in public. Preference falsification was the communal norm. “Everybody read minds—had to, otherwise things got complicated. Just as most people here chose not to say what they meant in order to protect themselves, they could also, at certain moments when they knew their mind was being read, learn to present their topmost mental level to those who were reading it whilst in the undergrowth of their consciousness, inform themselves privately of what their true thinking was about.”

Life in the neighborhood was consumed by the violence. And the violence was caused by the occupation and the border. “You couldn’t just die here, couldn’t have an ordinary death here, not anymore, not of natural causes, not by accident such as falling out a window, especially not after all the other violent deaths taking place in this district now. It had to be political, he said. Had to be about the border, meaning comprehensible.” The community had its own language, its own norms, and its own justice. “‘Mark our words,’ said people, and again this all made sense within the context of out intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district.” The narrator is as much trapped by the encroachment of the judgmental mob, as by her actual pursuer. “I was being sick because of Milkman stalking me, Milkman tracking me, Milkman knowing everything about me, biding his time, closing in on me, and because of the perniciousness of the secrecy, gawking and gossip that existed in this place.” In a place where gossip often got spun into truth, one would often have to lie to the entire world for fear of just who was listening in. “In a district that thrived on suspicion, supposition and imprecision, where everything was so back-to-front it was impossible to tell a story properly, or not tell it but just remain quiet, nothing could get said here or not said but it was turned into gospel.”

“Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Power” by Cheryl Misak

Ramsey was more than a polymath, he excelled in every field that he pursued. In fact, he made groundbreaking advancements in pure math, mathematical logic, foundations of math, probability theory, decision theory, philosophy, and economics. He also contributed to applied math, ethics, and psychology. Misak’s biography details his academic contributions, his personal relationships with Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Keynes, Sraffa, and other Cambridge luminaries, as well as his open marriage to Lettice and his eccentric friendships with the rest of the Bloomsbury set.

Ramsey was universally respected by his academic peers. G.E. Moore recalls teaching him as an undergrad at Trinity College, “In the early twenties, F.P. Ramsey attended at least one course of my lectures. I had soon come to feel of him, as of Wittgenstein, that he was very much cleverer than I was, and consequently I felt distinctly nervous in lecturing before him: I was afraid that he would see some gross absurdity in things which I said, of which I was quite unconscious.” This from the man who Bertrand Russell considered the greatest philosopher at Cambridge. Ramsey’s classmate (and later a colleague as a Fellow at King’s College) R.B. Braithwaite remembered, “By his second year he was accepted as the arbiter of good reasoning on every abstract subject: for eight years, if an abstruse point arose in philosophy, psychology, logic, economics, the question was ‘What does Frank Ramsey think of it?’ At conferences of philosophers, at the High Table or at undergraduate parties, his opinion on the value or relevance of an argument carried a peculiar and decisive authority.”

Ramsey began his professional career as a Fellow at King’s College by taking on Russell, the recognized preeminent mind in formal logic at Cambridge. “Ramsey found ‘important defects’ in Principia. Most important was the ‘failure’ of Russell’s Theory of Types to overcome the difficulties generated by the paradoxes…. Ramsey began ‘The Foundation of Mathematics’, by agreeing with the logicians that mathematics is a part of logic…. Against the formalist view of Hilbert, he said that mathematics does not consist of ‘meaningless formulae to be manipulated according to certain arbitrary rules’…. Against the intuitionists Brouwer and Weyl, he asserted that in restricting themselves to what can in principle be constructed by human mathematicians, they give up ‘many of the most fruitful methods of modern analysis, for no reason, as it seems to me, except that the methods fail to conform to their private prejudices’…. He thought the first part of Russell’s Theory of Types was fine. It asserted that to apply a predicate to the wrong type of subject does not produce a falsehood—rather, it produces something that is literally nonsense.” However, Ramsey found an error in “the introduction of the axiom of reducibility, which asserts that for any predicate of a higher order there is a predicate of a lower order which applies to the same set of subjects. But, as Ramsey noted (following something Wittgenstein said in the Tractatus), this is a genuine proposition, set out in words, ‘whose truth or falsity is a matter of brute fact, not of logic’. This so-called axiom ‘is certainly not self-evident, and there is no reason whatever to suppose it true’…. Russell had introduced an axiom that was not a tautology, in order to save the theory from contradiction. But in doing so, he had abandoned the project of building a self-evidently true theory…. Paradoxes belonging to the second category ‘contain some reference to thought, language, or symbolism’, hence are ‘due not to faulty logic or mathematics, but to faulty ideas concerning thought and language’…. For contradictions of a purely mathematical nature, such as paradoxes that arise by considering classes that are members of themselves, Ramsey held that Russell’s Theory of Types would suffice. But Russell’s theory doesn’t work for the second category of paradoxes, which involve ‘meaning’ or ‘ambiguities of language’.” In an important move, “Ramsey argued that mathematical truths, like logical truths, are tautologies in Wittgenstein’s sense.”

Ramsey would next defend his philosophic worldview that included personal feelings and ethics as in some ways objective. Again, his jumping off point would be Russell, while also taking on Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well. “Ramsey returned, as promised, to Russell’s ‘What I believe’. He says that if he were to write such a Weltanschauung (a world-view) he would call it ‘What I Feel’…. Wittgenstein’s position in the Tractatus was that the world of the happy person is simply a different world to that of the sad person, with no discussion possible as to the merits of either world.” Ramsey argued, “Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does…. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.” This argument of Ramsey’s relied on his position on beliefs. Misak notes, “This view of the objectivity of questions about the meaning of life, and ethical questions more generally, is perfectly in line with Ramsey’s view on beliefs arrived at by inductive inference…. His point in ‘On There Being No Discussible Subject’ is that our fundamental attitudes toward life can be debated, justified, and criticized according to whether they promote or hinder human flourishing.”

Ramsey’s next seminal paper, ‘Universals’, was on the nature of particulars and universals. “Ramsey sets out and expands upon a position he discerned in Wittgenstein’s work: that we cannot solve the question of universals and particulars by doing a priori metaphysics…. Wittgenstein was confused and conflicted on the issue of the structure of logical form. Was it subject-predicate in nature? Did it have to bottom out in particular, actually existing things?” Ramsey contended, “The whole theory of particulars and universals is due to mistaking for a fundamental characteristic of reality what is merely a characteristic of language.” Misak expands, “Our language uses subject-predicate constructions, but we mustn’t be misled by that accidental fact into thinking that the entities in the world must be of two distinct types: particulars and universals. We cannot read an ontology (the nature of the world) off our language…. [In Principia,] Russell grounds the distinction of universals and particulars not on an objective but on a subjective property—the mathematician’s purposes…. Philosophers might well have other purposes.” Ramsey concluded, in agreement with Wittgenstein, “The truth is that we know and can know nothing whatever about the forms of atomic propositions.”

Ramsey was a moderate utilitarian. At the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, the meeting’s minutes attest, Ramsey “maintained that degrees of belief were to be measured by reference to willingness to bet, and that the laws of probability were laws of consistency in partial belief, and so a generalization of formal logic. Mr. Ramsey also asserted that induction, like memory, could not be justified by formal logic or formal probability.” Ramsey thought that he had solved a major problem for utilitarians with his “general psychological theory” when he stated, “We act in the way we think most likely to realize the objects of our desire, so that a person’s actions are completely determined by his desires and opinions…. We seek things which we want, which may be our own or other people's pleasure, or anything else whatever, and our actions are such as we think most likely to realize these goods.” There are no such things as full beliefs and full desires, partial beliefs, based on our own probabilities, are the best we can hope to do. Colin Howson expounds on Ramsey’s subjective Bayesianism, “The novelty of Ramsey’s…. approach lay in regarding probabilities simply as measures of agents’ degrees of belief subject to what appears to be a rather weak consistency requirement…. [This was] a powerful new epistemology called Bayesian epistemology…. [in which] in fairly general circumstances agents with different initial, or prior, probability functions will, with enough new information, find their updated probabilities converging; in this way, it is claimed objectivity is realized as an emergent property of consistent subjective assignments.” Nils-Eric Sahlin chimes in on Ramsey’s Probability Theory, “Ramsey showed that people’s beliefs and desires can be measured with a betting method, and that given some principles of rational behaviour (e.g. that preferences are transitive) a measure of our ‘degrees of belief’ will satisfy the laws of probability. He gave us the theory of subjective probability; was the first to state the Dutch book theorem; laid the foundations of modern utility theory and decision theory; had a proof of the value of collecting evidence; took higher order probabilities seriously; and, in a derivation of ‘the rule of succession’, he introduced the notion of ‘exchangeability’. Ramsey’s theory is about as complete as any such theory can be…. Ramsey’s use of preferences among bets to quantify value differences requires the states defining the bets to be value-neutral…. Ramsey is using utilities to scale probabilities.”

Ramsey evolved into a pragmatist, who avoided reaching for claims of scientism. He stated, “The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and wooliness, is scholasticism, the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category.” He became attracted to the pragmatist tradition founded by the American C.S. Peirce, which Ramsey described thusly, “We have… to consider the human mind and what is the most we can ask of it. The human mind works essentially according to general rules or habits…. We can therefore state the problem of the ideal as ‘What habits… would it be best for the human mind to have?’” He continues, “This is a kind of pragmatism: we judge mental habits by whether they work, i.e. whether the opinions they lead to are for the most part true, or more often true than those which alternative habits would lead to…. We are all convinced by inductive arguments, and our conviction is reasonable because the world is so constituted that inductive arguments lead on the whole to true opinions…. Induction is such a useful habit, and so to adopt it is reasonable. All that philosophy can do is analyse it, determine the degree of its utility, and find on what characteristics of nature it depends. An indispensable means for investigating these problems is induction itself, without which we should be helpless. In this circle lies nothing vicious.” Therefore, induction and memory become the “ultimate sources of knowledge.”

As his time at King’s wore on, Ramsey grew more disillusioned with his responsibilities teaching math. Misak recounts, “His work in pure mathematics was quite literally an aside. He had to prove a theorem on the way to solving a fragment of the Entscheidungsproblem in ‘On a Problem in Formal Logic’. So he stepped away from the core of his argument and proved it, in eight pages. Those eight pages are Ramsey Theory, and they are the sum total of his publications in pure mathematics. What an astounding ratio of pages to importance.”

Ramsey also paid minimal effort to economics, despite his vast contributions. His two most important papers were on optimal taxation, ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Taxation’ and the optimal savings rate for a society, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Savings’. Misak recounts, “Decades later in Cambridge, if economists employed an optimization model, they were said to be ‘doing a Ramsey’. In France the expression was ‘à la Ramsey’. When the Economic Journal celebrated its 125th anniversary with a special edition in 2015, both of Ramsey’s papers were included. That is, looking back over a century and a quarter, one of the world’s best journals of economics decided that two of its thirteen most important papers were written by Frank Ramsey when he was twenty-five years old…. Both initiated ‘entirely new fields’.” As usual, Ramsey was concerned with figuring out what was best out of what was possible, not pie in the sky speculations. Paul Samuelson would later comment that Ramsey provided “an analysis that still remains about the only substantive contribution to the theory of the second best (a subject better titled the ‘theory of the feasible fist best’).” Keynes’ obituary perhaps sums up Ramsey’s contributions to economics the best, “When he did descend from his accustomed stony heights, he still lived without effort in a rarer atmosphere than most economists care to breathe, and handled the technical apparatus of our science with the easy grace of one accustomed to something far more difficult.”

Upon Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge from Austria, he was Ramsey’s most frequent sparring partner, with whom he argued almost daily for the last year of his life. They again parsed the Tractatus line by line, with Ramsey slowly pulling Wittgenstein away and towards a pragmatism of sorts. (Years before, as an undergraduate, Ramsey had translated the English edition of the Tractatus and was the only man Wittgenstein felt truly understood the work—a distinction he did not bestow on either Moore or Russell.) Ramsey claimed, “Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must be clear our thoughts and so our actions, Otherwise it is mere chatter. or else it is a disposition we have to check… i.e. the chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense. And again we must then take seriously that it is nonsense, and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense!” He further ribs Wittgenstein by adding, “What we can’t say, we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.” (Wittgenstein would, famously, unconsciously whistle whole operas while he was lost in his thoughts.) Ramsey was objecting to the solipsism of Wittgenstein who stated, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ramsey argued that we have to look at facts as also human and not abstract them away from human understanding. “We are forced to look not only at the objects we are talking about, but at our own mental states.” Furthermore, “We cannot really picture the world as disconnected selves; the selves we know are in the world. What we can’t do we can’t do and it’s no good trying. Philosophy comes from not understanding the logic of our language; but the logic of our language is not what Wittgenstein thought. The pictures we make to ourselves are not pictures of facts.” Philosophy had a subjective side that it neglected at its own peril.

At the end of his life, Ramsey was working on the fundamental nature of truth. He asserted that true beliefs were mental states with “affirmative or assertive character.” A true belief had “the felt quality… characteristic of assertion as opposed to doubt or inquiry… [and the] effects on subsequent thought and conduct.” He claimed, “A belief is true if it is a belief that p, and p.” This statement “is merely a truism, but there is no platitude so obvious that eminent philosophers have not denied it.” He continued that it was impossible to understand “truth or falsity of thoughts without considering the effects they have on our acting either directly or indirectly through dispositional beliefs.” General claims were not superfluous. “Apart from their value in simplifying our thought, they form an essential part of our mind. That we think explicitly in general terms is at the root of all praise and blame and much discussion.” Laws, rules, and general truths are needed to assess singular statements. An open generalization “expresses an inference we are at any time prepared to make, not a belief of the primary sort.” Belief can be evaluated in terms of whether it fits with experience—whether it is reliable. Beliefs “form the system with which the speaker meets the future.” Misak sums it up, “If you and I meet the future with different systems, then we disagree—we assume that the future will be compatible with one of our systems but not the other. Our beliefs are not subjective…. Knowledge… is what enables us to reliably act in the future, consolidating all our various kinds of belief. It is to be thought of in terms of good habits with which to meet the future…. We get reliability, or we increase the weight of our probabilities, by experimenting and measuring success. Probability and experimentation are at the very heart of knowledge.”

“The Eighth Life” by Nino Haratischvili (translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin)

This is a modern epic that weaves over a hundred years of Georgian history through the tale of six generations of a family. The novel unfolds as a series of eight overlapping family biographies, as told by Niza to her adolescent niece, Brilka. “Carpets are woven from stories. So we have to preserve and take care of them. Even if this one has spent years packed away somewhere for moths to feast on, it must now come to life again and tell us its stories. I’m sure we’re woven in there, too, even if we never suspected it.” The family comes from the poor Georgian nobility, who managed to maintain an aura of respectability even as the winds of fortune changed in their homeland. “And so for me, my life begins right there, in the year 1900, in that bitterly cold winter when Stasia came into the world. I was born then, too, just as you were, Brilka. My childhood didn’t start in 1974 — no, it began much earlier, it reaches much deeper. My childhood, when I thought myself free and happy, because I was so sure of Stasia’s love, is these stories. Where they begin, I begin. All these places, towns, houses, people — they are all part of my childhood. The Revolution as much as the War, the dead as much as the living. All these people, lives, places burned themselves so firmly into my brain, they were so present there, that I began to live with them. I still needed Stasia if I wanted to wander around in these times, to pass through them, dive into them. But soon, I hoped, I would be capable of telling the stories myself, telling them anew, completing them.”

The paterfamilias was a chocolatier who learned his secrets in Budapest before the Great War. “Like all members of the Georgian elite, my great-great-grandfather was afraid of the proletariat. He was happy to make charitable donations to them, but he still liked to keep them at arm’s length whenever possible.” By the time of Niza’s grandfather, Kostya, the family had become safely integrated into the Communist system that ruled their homeland from Moscow. Kostya had distinguished himself in the navy during the siege of Leningrad, before joining the dreaded Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD. Like so many other survivors of the war years, though, it was like he was walking through the rest of his life partially dead. “Kostya Jashi understood what it was to lose. He had lost. He was fatally wounded, but his death throes would last a lifetime. For this war was not a war against enemies; it was a war he had waged against the people he loved.” There is an air of melancholy and deep heartbreak that is thick throughout the entire novel. “I owe these lines to a century that cheated and deceived everyone, all those who hoped. I owe these lines to an enduring betrayal that settled over my family like a curse. I owe these lines to my sister, whom I could never forgive for flying away that night without wings; to my grandfather, whose heart my sister tore out; to my great-grandmother, who danced a pas de deux with me at the age of eighty-three; to my mother, who went off in search of God … I owe these lines to Miro, who infected me with love as if it were poison, I owe these lines to my father, whom I never really got to know; I owe these lines to a chocolate-maker and a White-Red Lieutenant; to a prison cell; to an operating table in the middle of a classroom; to a book I would not have written if…” As Niza recounts her family’s stories she must come to terms with the fact that all of her relatives had their own distinct notions of their own history. “There were countless versions of the truth, and as soon as you put them in your mouth they distorted themselves, crumbled like stale bread, leaving only an insipid taste on the tongue.”

“Sources of the Self” by Charles Taylor

With Derek Parfit’s recent passing, Taylor might well be considered today’s greatest living philosopher. In his most famous book, Taylor traces how the changing conceptions of the Self have shaped modern notions of morality. In modernity, human welfare (and the conception of the “good life”) has come to be concerned not with the extraordinary, but with the ordinary life. “This sense of the importance of the everyday in human life, along with its corollary about the importance of suffering, colours our whole understanding of what it is truly to respect human life and integrity. Along with the central place given to autonomy, it defines a version of this demand which is peculiar to our civilization, the modern West…. There is a peculiarly modern sense of what respect involves, which gives a salient place to freedom and self-control, places a high priority on avoiding suffering, and sees productive activity and family life as central to our well-being.” For Taylor, as opposed to consequentialists like the utilitarians, life must be qualitatively, not just quantitatively, measured and judged. “I have been arguing that in order to make minimal sense in our lives, in order to have an identity, we need an orientation to the good, which means some sense of qualitative discrimination, of the incomparably higher. Now we see that this sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story. But this is to state another basic condition of making sense of ourselves, that we grasp our lives in a narrative…. In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going.” Taylor makes the argument that some goods are not rank-able, they are qualitatively incomparable. “The modern naturalist-utilitarian hostility to ‘higher’ goods and defence of ordinary, sensuous happiness emerge from what I have been calling the affirmation of ordinary life, which in early modern times brought about a similar repudiation of supposedly ‘higher’ modes of activity in favour of the everyday existence of marriage and the calling. The original form of this affirmation was theological, and it involved a positive vision of ordinary life as hallowed by God.”

Modern man changed the conception of the Self and its relation to the world it inhabits. “Our visions of the good are tied up with our understandings of the self…. We have a sense of who we are through our sense of where we stand to the good…. Being a self is inseparable from existing in a space of moral issues, to do with identity and how one ought to be. It is being able to find one’s standpoint in this space, being able to occupy, to be a perspective in it.” With modernity grew the idea that each Self was actually in control of their own individual life. “If we follow the theme of self-control through the vicissitudes of our Western tradition, we find a very profound transmutation, all the way from the hegemony of reason as vision of cosmic order to the notion of a punctual disengaged subject exercising instrumental control. And this, I would argue, helps to explain why we think of ourselves as ‘selves’ today…. The modern ideal of disengagement requires a reflexive stance. We have to turn inward and become aware of our own activity and of the processes which form us. We have to take charge of constructing our own representation of the world…. Disengagement demands that we stop simply living in the body or within our traditions or habits and, by making them objects for us, subject them to radical scrutiny and remaking. Of course the great classical moralists also call on us to stop living in unreflecting habit and usage. But their reflection turns us towards an objective order. Modern disengagement by contrast calls us to a separation from ourselves through self-objectification. This is an operation which can only be carried out in the first-person perspective.”

The modern conception of the Self began with the Enlightenment thinkers. “Enlightenment naturalism didn’t only have an effect on our conceptions of cosmic time; it also generated its own forms of personal and historical narration…. These notions of reason and nature define a certain perfection for human beings, where the full exercise of self-responsible reason yields the fullest clarity about their own nature and its significance.” Kant’s morality gave primacy to a Self governed only by reason and focused on humanism. “This is a more radical definition of freedom, which rebels against nature as what is merely given, and demands that we find freedom in a life whose normative shape is somehow generated by rational activity…. Kant explicitly insists that morality can’t be founded in nature or in anything outside the human rational will…. And, like Descartes, at the centre of his moral view is a conception of human dignity. Rational beings have a unique dignity. They stand out against the background of nature…. Everything else in nature, in other words, conforms to laws blindly. Only rational creatures conform to laws that they themselves formulate. This is something incomparably higher…. The moral person may lead the same external life as the non-moral one, but it is inwardly transformed by a different spirit.” Reason rules.

Taylor nexts deals with one facet of the counter-Enlightenment, Romanticism. “If our access to nature is through an inner voice or impulse, then we can only fully know this nature through articulating what we find within us. This connects to another crucial feature of this new philosophy of nature, the idea that its realization in each of us is also a form of expression…. Leibniz was an important source of expressivism. His notion of a monad already effected the connection between the Aristotelian idea of nature and a subject-like particular. The monad was a proto-self. Expressivism was the basis for a new and fuller individuation…. Just the notion of individual difference is, of course, not new. Nothing is more evident or more banal. What is new is the idea that this really makes a difference to how we’re called on to live.” A major critique of Enlightenment utilitarianism was its unapologetic instrumentalism, in which competing moral claims might be impossible to reconcile. “One of the great objections against Enlightenment disengagement was that it created barriers and divisions: between humans and nature; and perhaps grievously, within humans themselves; and then also, as a further consequence, between human and human. This last seems to follow both because of the atomist affinities of naturalism and because the purely instrumental stance to things allows for no deeper unity in society than that of sharing common instruments.” For the Romantics, nature wasn’t something to be conquered; nature was all-consuming life itself. “The Romantics developed an expressive view of nature, sometimes seen as a great current of life running through everything, and emerging also in the impulses we feel within.”

Modern man has had to reconcile the competing notions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. “The result for us has been a split-screen vision of nature. On one side is the vast universe which scientific discovery continually reveals, huge and in some ways baffling, stretching far beyond our imaginative powers in both the gigantic and the minuscule; indifferent to us and strangely other, though full of unexpected beauty and inspiring awe. On the other side is the nature whose impulse we feel within, with which we can feel ourselves out of alignment and with which we can aspire to be in attunement.” However, with regards to notions of the Self, these two dispositions share much in common too. “The ideals of disengaged reason and of Romantic fulfillment both rely in different ways on a notion of the unitary self. The first requires a tight centre of control which dominates experience and is capable of constructing the orders of reason by which we can direct thought and life. The second sees the originally divided self come to unity in the alignment of sensibility and reason. Now to the extent that both of these come to be seen as facets of a world and an outlook whose claims to embrace everything we want to escape, to the degree we adopt a post-Schopenhauerian vision of inner nature, the liberation of experience can seem to require that we step outside the circle of the single, unitary identity, and that we open ourselves to the flux which moves beyond the scope of control or integration.”

Modernity has become attached to the Whig theory of history, where morality is progressing ever-forward towards a better (and more rational) future. There is a certain inevitability to it all. “The very picture of history as moral progress, as a ‘going beyond’ our forebears, which underlies our own sense of superiority, is very much a Victorian idea…. Our history since 1800 has been the slow spreading outward and downward of the new modes of thought and sensibility to new nations and classes, with the transfer in each case involving some kind of adapting transformation of the ideas themselves…. The Enlightenment has bequeathed to us… a moral imperative to reduce suffering… the significance of ordinary life and the ideal of universal benevolence…. What is universal in the modern world is the centrality of freedom as a good…. These ideas of freedom and dignity, in association with the promotion of ordinary life, have steadily eroded hierarchy and promoted equality.”

Taylor concludes by reminding us of his division of the “moral sources into three large domains: the original theistic grounding for these standards; a second one that centres on a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms; and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism or in one of the modernist successor visions.” Prevailing morals are inescapably linked to current notions of Selfhood. “What I hope emerges from this lengthy account of the growth of the modern identity is how all-pervasive it is, how much it envelops us, and how deeply we are implicated in it: in a sense of self defined by the powers of disengaged reason as well as of the creative imagination, in the characteristically modern understandings of freedom and dignity and rights, in the ideals of self-fulfillment and expression, and in the demands of universal benevolence and justice.” Taylor’s own normative idea of morality is one that engenders the ‘best life’ based on higher ideals. Morality is not transactional, subjective, or concerned only with negative rights. “Prudence constantly advises us to scale down our hopes and circumscribe our vision. But we deceive ourselves if we pretend that nothing is denied thereby of our humanity.”